Towards a natural language of cinema: Island (Steven Eastwood, UK, 2017)

Blogpost, British cinema, Documentary, Film reviews, Uncategorized

Steven Eastwood’s Island is a documentary about death and dying. It is set on the UK’s Isle of Wight, where we follow four main people, Alan, Jamie, Roy and Mary, as they suffer from terminal diseases.

The film is sensitive and beautiful, although surely it may not be for everyone given its subject matter and different people’s experiences of/with death and/or their attitudes towards it.

It is not that one can really give spoilers for a film that is about death and dying; the inevitable is bound to happen. And yet, I shall be discussing the last images of this film later on in this blog, so be warned that it does reveal in some respects how the film ends.

However, I would like to start with the opening image, which is of a ferry emerging from fog as it heads towards the Isle of Wight. For, what I wish to suggest in this blog is that cinema can offer us a natural language, not in the popular sense that everyone can more or less understand it, but in the sense that the world (nature) possesses a kind of language that is there for us to decipher if we so choose to. In this way, not only can cinema help paradoxically connect us to the natural world, but it can show us not just metaphors of the world, but a sense of its natural language. That is, cinema can be a system not just for symbols and meaning, but for a sort of folk or natural wisdom.

In order to take our first steps in this direction, let us consider the opening image. Fog is of course an indicator of mystery, and thus the arrival of the unknown, while the ferry signifies transition as one passes over the sea from one location to the next. Meanwhile, the sea itself suggests a realm that is more or less alien to the human. Yes, we can swim and we have invented submarines, but on the whole the depth of the ocean remains hard for humans to fathom. In this sense, the ocean represents a sort of alien presence, something along the surface of which we can drift, but down into which we cannot descend without often dying.

From its opening image, then, Island suggests the arrival of the unknown, almost invisible because shrouded in fog, and yet which is here perhaps to transport us into a new dimension.

We might say that the film therefore deals in metaphors, or at the very least that it offers us a specifically human perspective on matters (since fog is not necessarily mysterious to fog itself, just as the depths of the ocean are not alien to giant squids; that is, the meaning of fog is different to different species). Nonetheless, the film invites us to connect with the world presented in these images, and to read fog, the sea and a ferry not just in a literal sense, but in terms of what they mean… what they say to us about our own relationship with the world.

There is a discussion of fairies and then angels in the film. As the French philosopher Michel Serres might suggest, angels are evidence of and provide scope for us to perceive hidden dimensions within our world. It is not that we see cherubs with halos as per classical religious iconography. Rather, every encounter that we have and which allows us to see the world anew is in effect an encounter with an angel; marvelling over a gust of wind, overwhelmed by the kindness of strangers, seeing an animal up close. In other words, angels open up new angles of the world, showing us hidden dimensions that lie within plain sight, and yet which often we do not see. To see an otherwise hidden dimension, then, is not suddenly to find secret realities in the sense of popular science fiction film. Rather, it is to realise how limited my vision is of reality when I do not notice animals for what they are, when I do not consider the importance of the wind and when I do not expect strangers to be kind. To be reminded of those things reveals to us the limited nature of our own vision, allowing us to see reality with fresh eyes, renewing us thanks to this encounter with the alien angel that takes us out of our fixed selves and in the process reminds us precisely that we are not fixed, but always changing. In this sense, an encounter with an angel is to experience time, to be in what Alan in the film describes as the now – rather than perceiving reality only in terms of what we want to get out of it (projecting the future on to the present) or in terms of how we have seen it in the past (projecting the past on to the present). To be in the presence of angels is to feel presence.

These hidden dimensions, then, are not hidden from the world; they are simply hidden from us owing to the limitations of our vision, limitations that are not just biological but also shaped by culture. These dimensions are, like the character of Nothing in Boris ‘s In Praise of Nothing (Serbia/Croatia/France, 2017), which also is in cinemas at present and which makes for an interesting companion to Island, around us at all times.

Death itself, then, is also an alien and mysterious other that we typically do not see, and yet which is perhaps always only ever with us. Indeed, if time is change, or becoming, then that which is at any given moment in time must die, and that which was not comes into existence, or is born. Death is everywhere and everywhen – and Island helps us to understand that.

For, humanity may fetishise the dry land of life, but it is only an island surrounded by death. But more than this, as the road leads directly into the sea without a clear cut-off point between the two, so does life lead into death and vice versa.

Indeed, as John Donne famously said, no man is an island. Humans are all porous, consistently excreting liquids and gases via their major orifices and through their very skin. Humans try to close themselves off in many ways – including via the way in which they cocoon themselves away from death. And yet they never succeed, since humans are always being opened up.

To become an island, to separate life from death, to shut oneself off from others is to be closed. To be open, though, is to have open eyes, an open mouth, to cry, to scream, in short to feel and thus to live, to be alive. To be alive is to be open to death. And to live is to be open to others in terms of both giving and receiving, to be an angel to all those around us just as all those around us can be angels to us.

The Greeks described the highest form of love as ἀγάπη, or ‘agape,’ and which consisted of charity: to be open to or to be an angel to others in the form of giving. As Alan dies, his mouth also lies agape; he is open, including being open to death.

More than this. As Alan dies we hear director Steven Eastwood begin to snore as he has fallen asleep in the room with Alan. It is oddly as if as Alan lies agape and breathes his last, Eastwood’s mouth itself falls open and he begins to receive Alan’s breath – as if the latter were an angel opening up Eastwood and the viewer of Island to new dimensions, to seeing that death is normal and everywhere and not a strange, alien object that we relegate to another dimension.

Remarkably, as Alan dies a nurse enters the room and stands in front of the camera, thereby making the film’s frame turn black. Alan’s open mouth has already been a black hole, a void, an impenetrable presence within the film’s frame – and now the whole frame goes black.

The nurse says that Alan is dead – before curiously saying that another breath may yet be drawn. The boundary between life and death is perhaps, like the human, itself porous. And darkness is not what lies beyond the frame or which cinema destroys by shining a light on to it; rather, darkness is within the frame.

Even if only by chance, then Island allows us to see the darkness that is not just there at night (and which through electric lighting we try to relegate and banish from our world, meaning that we cannot see the stars), but which perhaps also is always with us, like the void that is Alan’s open mouth.

That Eastwood sleeps – and perhaps dreams at this moment – also suggests the presence of an alien presence – not just in the sense that we might all be dreaming our lives away, but in the sense that sleep allows the brain unconsciously to store memories and so on, with dream perhaps consciously registering some of this process. As humans who bodies run more or less entirely unconsciously, we have hidden dimensions within ourselves that we do not know, which are alien to us, and yet which dream – in all of dreams’ senselessness – can reveal to us (notably Alan also discusses dreams in the film).

Owls appear at various points in the film. Steven Eastwood suggested that they have no metaphorical function within the film. But not only are they quite literally winged creatures within the film, but they also bear other qualities that bespeak a kind of natural affinity with death which means that humans will perhaps ‘naturally’ become curious about them as death becomes us.

It is not simply that owls are supposedly wise creatures. But owls also are associated with the night and seeing (in) the dark. More than this, the owl in various languages is considered to have an onomatopoeic root (‘owl’ is supposed to be not far from the bird’s call), with that root being a kind of harder ‘boo’ sound in various languages (Greek βύᾱς, Latin būbō, Spanish buhó, French hibou). In other words, as per the idea of shouting ‘boo!’ at someone or the concept of a sonic boom, the owl signals the sudden irruption of a hidden dimension within the world – with owls belonging to the order of strigiformes, with this term itself being derived from στρίγξ, or ‘strinx,’ meaning a screecher (as well as from the Latin strix, meaning a furrow, a channel or a groove, as if the owl clawed out new dimensions in old dimensions). As the Giant (Carel Struycken) says to Agent Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) in Twin Peaks (David Lynch, USA, 1990), ‘the owls are not what they seem.’

In some senses, Island is a film about more or less unseen women preparing men for death. That is, the primarily women nurses on the Isle of Wight are angels helping men.

In this way, these angels who are open to death help to make men open to death – since it is the world of men that is the world most often closed off from death. The world of closure – man as separate from nature, man as separate from each other, man as wanting to expel darkness and death from existence in order to preserve itself forever rather than to become or to change – is thus also the world of patriarchy and capitalism. The nurses represent a different world, an open and caring world (that nonetheless increasingly in the UK is under attack as healthcare becomes increasingly privatised).

The film ends with shots of a television screen in which a documentary shows soil pushing forward fresh flowers, before the film cuts to Mary, before then ending.

Without necessarily even wanting to, then, Island suggests that with death comes rebirth and that this process is a female one. That openness to becoming is thus a more female process than it is a masculine one, even if men in death are helped by women to become open to what faces them.

(Notably, Mary had not died by the time that filming for Island had stopped.)

Thinking back to the owl, then, Island strictly (strix-ly) channels the reality that surrounds it. In this groove, we see a world in which the boundary between life and death becomes blurred, and in which a female perspective might help us to see through the patriarchal world of division and closure.

A couple of further thoughts remain.

Firstly, cotton plays a key role in the film as we see pyjamas, sheets and various other articles made of cotton covering much of the frame at various points.

What is more, we might reflect upon how if openness is in some senses a more ethical way of being with the world (being open to it, rather than shutting oneself off from it), then the film frame is always closed – a rectangular boundary separating what is in the frame from what is not in it. The frame of the cinematic image in some senses means that film only ever deals with metaphor.

Unless, that is, one breaks the frame – for example when Eastwood shares a cigarette with Alan, his hands coming into frame to hold it for him, or when we hear his voice. And of course when other figures come into frame, and when the participants in Eastwood’s documentary (perhaps including the owls) look directly at the camera and/or acknowledge the presence of their microphones.

What is more, the sheer duration of a good number of the shots – long, slow takes, with the film having only 140 or so shots in its 90-minute running time – also suggests a kind of out of the frame. Or at least an attempt to allow events to unfold at their own pace and not at that of the filmmaker. That is, reality determines the film rather than the film attempting to determine reality. By being open to this, the film does not simply offer us metaphors, but it allows the world to reveal itself and for us in some senses better to understand that world, since we see new and yet real dimensions within it, and thus come better to understand our relationship with it. If this is one of the major powers of cinema, then cinema can only do this by trying to get over or around the natural limit that is its frame – and to get us to think beyond the frame, just as Island wants us to see not just what is behind the fog, but the fog itself, and as it wants us to see not what the darkness conceals, but the darkness itself. A film that does this must be self-reflective or self-conscious, and this is truly the case with Island.

A final two thoughts.

Firstly, Isla is the name of Jamie’s daughter, whom we see singing songs from Frozen (Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, USA, 2013). One wonders whether Isla, as a female representative of the future, is also a key aspect of the demonstrating that no man is an island, even if men try to make rocks and islands of themselves (as per ‘I Am A Rock’ by Simon and Garfunkel).

Steven Eastwood (centre, with his name projected on to his head), talks with Island producer Elhum Shakerifar (left) and Chris Harris of Picturehouse Central (right) as Jamie Gunnell looks back from the screen at a preview showing of Island on 10 September 2018.

Secondly, in response to a question at a Q&A screening of Island at the Picturehouse Central on Monday 10 September 2018 and in which a viewer asked why the film did not give intertitles during or at the end explaining to audiences not just who the people in the film are, but what happened to them , Eastwood remarked that he did not consider markers regarding names, dates and so on as being important to his project. Indeed, dates do not, it would seem, help us to understand a life.

And yet, there is a set of dates that is given in the film right at the end of its credits – those of the late filmmaker Stuart Croft to whom Island is dedicated. Not in the film, one wonders nonetheless to what extent dates are an attempt for us to make sense of the alien nature of death when we have not had a chance to confront it (let us say, to grieve). When we are open to and live through death (when in some senses we expect it), then we can reach a state of presence and of time wherein we do not need dates at all. We can escape from death as a sudden and terrifying boom, instead looking it in the eye, normalising it and finding that mere numbers do no justice to death nor to the life with which it is entangled.

Tomorrow Never Knows (Adam Sekuler, USA, 2017)

American cinema, BFI Flare, Blogpost, Documentary, Uncategorized

After last year watching and loving a version of his Work in Progress (USA, ongoing), I was particularly glad to see Adam Sekuler’s latest and remarkable film, Tomorrow Never Knows, at Flare, the LGBTQ+ film festival run through the British Film Institute (BFI).

Like Steven Eastwood’s equally profound Island (UK, 2018), which is set to enjoy a theatrical release in the UK in the next couple of months, Tomorrow Never Knowsis a documentary that looks at death, specifically here the build-up to the passing of Shar Jones, a transsexual living in Colorado with her partner, Cynthia Vitale.

Shar has Alzheimer’s and wishes to take her own life, but this is not legal—certainly not with assistance. And so, Shar prepares to die in the only legal way possible, which is by no longer eating and drinking, i.e. by starving herself to death.

Shar is a Buddhist who is interested in the passage of time, as is made clear by her love the Beatles song, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’ from which the film takes its title and the lyrics to which we hear Shar repeating/singing several times.

In particular, we might note that the song includes the line ‘it is becoming.’ That is, we live in a universe that is not static, but which always is changing. We cannot control the flow of time, and so perhaps one thing we might do is to accept it.

What is interesting about this interest in the flow of time is the tension that the film sets up both thematically and formally.

Thematically, the fllm invites the viewer to consider how death itself is a form of becoming; it is a passage of our bodies (if not a spirit) into another non-living realm, and in which—at the very least—our bodies are dispersed into the universe.

However, so also is Alzheimer’s a cerebral deterioriation that also involves, in some senses, the dissolution of the self into multiple selves—with some memories at certain points in time and few to no memories at other points in time.

There is no intention here to make light of the disease and the devastating effects that it has its sufferers and those around them.

Nonetheless, while death becomes Shar, she does this in particular by attempting to remove Alzheimer’s from her life—refusing what we might call a passive becoming (the disease) for an active becoming (choosing to die).

Paradoxically, this happens via Shar also refusing both to eat and to drink. In other words, in order to be open to death and in order to close out Alzheimer’s, Shar has to close off her body.

These thematic paradoxes extend to the film’s form/style, as I can explain by making reference to something Sekuler said in the Q&A session after the Flare screening that I attended.

Sekuler spoke of some moments featuring Shar that he had shot, and which we remarkable, but which he did not include in the film because he did not get a clean enough recording.

It is not strictly Sekuler’s aesthetic choices that I wish to question. But I use this anecdote as a way of showing how Sekuler is something of a formalistfilmmaker. That is, he aims for and very often achieves spare shots, in which there is little if any camera movement.

In other words, his style searches deliberately for a certain aesthetic, one that is, like Shar’s body as it progresses from life to death via starvation, one that seeks to shut out the outside and to demonstrate control, in particular through static long takes.

But as the human cannot fully close off the outside, and as the Buddhist might seek becoming, nor can Sekuler close off the outside from his film.

Indeed, in some senses Sekuler cannot make the movie that he might ideally want to because of the very reality that consistently invades his film.

Because Shar and Cynthia’s home is quite small, Sekuler cannot achieve distance, the frame is often cluttered, and in greater close-up, with people leaving and entering the frame a lot. Sound regularly must come from offscreen, and, in the form of traffic and other noises passing by their home, there is nothing that Sekuler can do about this.

Likewise even the light that streams in through Shar’s window.

The effect of these interruptions, though, is remarkable. For, as we see a man dying, we also hear the unstoppable nature of the world outside. The world of Shar seems to be one increasingly defined by containers, including her home and the coffin in which she will be buried, and in some senses, too, both her body and her disease are containers.

And yet these cannot be shut off from the world; the becoming cannot stop. The outside always come in.

The philosophical ramifications of Sekuler’s style hopefully here become clear: it is as if Sekuler is striving to stop the outside from coming in by making a technically flawless and aesthetically beautiful film… and yet he cannot achieve this, meaning that in some senses his film is an exercise in failure… just as every human life, as a result of its mortality, is an exercise in failing to stop death—even if one aid its advent through various measures like those taken by Shar (willed starvation).

A couple more things.

Firstly, some of the more remarkable moments of Tomorrow Never Knowsinvolve the outside and a loss of control from both Sekuler and his subjects. For example, when on a hike, we see Cynthia fall over, before Shar also needs to catch her breath.

Sekuler wants to do his static frame, but really cannot. He wants to keep his distance to film aesthetically pleasing shots, but cannot. The couple want to carry on as if unobserved, perhaps, but neither can nor do, as they talk to Adam, who in turn talks back, a voice entering the frame from offscreen.

In its imperfections, I would suggest that Tomorrow Never Knows shows most life, perhaps even most cinema, even if its struggle with the outside and its struggle for aesthetic control (its struggle to control death?) is equally a sign of life and cinema. But in both cases: cinema is not total control, but an absence of it…

But in this sense, cinema is not unlike Shar: she cannot control her disease—and this is just a fact of life. But she can control her death. So we reach another paradox: to be alive is to choose to die.

Sekuler shows us Shar’s dead body several times—at the start and then at various other points in the film. By starting with her corpse, Shar thereafter is reanimated, as if cinema could bring the dead back to life.

Cinema is thus a record of a world now dead, and it is both beautiful and haunting later to see images of Shar dancing in the countryside, a bridge (the bridge between life and death?) in the distance background.

But in contradicting death (Shar is brought back to life), Tomorrow Never Knows only reaffirms its inevitability—as a classical tragedy will depict its dead protagonists before the action unfolds: we know how this is going to end, with a key ingredient of tragedy being that one cannot escape one’s fate (and is perhaps hubristic to believe that it is possible).

Cinema is becoming, Life is becoming. Death is coming, if not becoming from the perspective of the self (which ends with death). But cinema also makes death becoming as it creates memories—an absence of becoming in that it creates something enduring. But even memories are, like cinema, fragile—as Alzheimer’s makes exceptionally clear.

The beauty of life and the beauty of cinema alike, then, lies perhaps in the shared but inevitably flawed attempt to exert control, to stave off the inevitable, to outlive it, both to become with it and not to become at all. To try to create in the face of destruction is perhaps to show spirit, to show that we have a spirit, a spirit that dances across the screen, before once more fading into nothingness.

As an addendum, I might say that while I will struggle to find time to write about it, Jason Barker’s A Deal with the Universe (UK, 2018) was also a highlight at Flare with its tale of attempts at transexual pregnancy.

Meanwhile, I would also like to give a big shout out to Siân Williams, who managed to have not one but four shorts feature in the UK Film Industry online section/selection at Flare. These included Montage of the Mind (UK, 2017), Bedside Surgeon (UK, 2017), DJ Pygmalion (UK, 2017) and Girl Under You (UK, 2017).

A Review of Cinema in 2017

Blogpost, Film reviews, Uncategorized

In an essay for Frames Cinema Journal, I once suggested that Sean Baker’s Tangerine (USA, 2015) was as important as, if not more important than, Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs (UK/USA, 2015). My reasoning was that in its use of the iPhone to make a film about transsexual sex workers in Los Angeles, Tangerine did something more interesting both thematically and formally than Boyle’s fantastically smart biopic enshrining the Great Man behind Apple.

In a year that ends with Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Rian Johnson, USA, 2017) marching rapidly and in very little time towards being the highest grossing movie to be released in 2017 (with much of its gross yet to come in 2018), it would seem that in The Florida Project (USA, 2017), Sean Baker has again made a timely film that offers a critical corrective to the mainstream.

For, as Tangerine uses the iPhone to open up new vistas not offered by the conservative Steve Jobs, so does The Florida Project give us insight into America’s underside, as it tells the story of kids living in motels not far from Orlando, of course the home of Disney World.

Indeed, Baker’s film ends with a fantasy escape by two of its child protagonists (Brooklynn Kimberly Prince and Valeria Cotto) away from the police and care workers who will separate one of them from her mother and towards Disney World, which the kids approach as the film cuts to black and ends.

In this image, Baker surely acknowledges the power of Disney in offering escape from and perhaps solace for real world problems, such as negligent parents, poverty and so on. But Baker also reminds us that what we see in The Florida Project is the kind of reality that rarely features in Disney films… and even if it does, it is one from which escape is typically completed rather than left suspended in mid-flight, as here.

In this sense, The Florida Project challenges the approaching monopoly of Disney on the realm of audiovisual entertainment by reminding us that cinema need not be the colonisation of the imagination via escapism, but that it can find beauty in all manner of things, including six-year old kids spitting on a car, trashing an abandoned house and more.

Indeed, The Florida Project is regularly reminiscent of François Truffaut’s classic The 400 Blows (France, 1959), even if Baker’s protagonists are significantly younger than was Jean-Pierre Léaud when he starred in Truffaut’s French New Wave flagship. And as Truffaut breathed new life into cinema by showing the life of children and their refusal to conform to papa and papa’s old-fashioned cinema, so might Baker also breathe new life into cinema by showing the life of children and their refusal to buy into the fake plastic world of toys and the toyification of life.

My stupid Disney conspiracy theory
But if The Florida Project is going to achieve a rejuvenation of cinema, it certainly has its work cut out. For, if we look at the list below of the highest grossing movies of 2017, we see that half of them are Disney movies, with Universal managing two on the list, and then one apiece for Sony, United Entertainment and Warner Bros (with the Sony property, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Jon Watts, USA, 2017, being a Marvel adaptation, meaning that this franchise might at some point return to Marvel Studios and thus to Disney, as happened recently with X-Men after the acquisition by Disney of Fox).

1	Beauty and the Beast	Disney	$1,263,521,126
2	The Fate of the Furious	Universal	$1,235,761,498
3	Star Wars: The Last Jedi	Disney	$1,056,389,228
4	Despicable Me 3	Universal	$1,033,508,147
5	Spider-Man: Homecoming	Sony Pictures	$880,166,924
6	Wolf Warrior 2	United Entertainment	$870,325,439
7	Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2	Disney	$863,732,512
8	Thor: Ragnarok	Disney	$848,084,810
9	Wonder Woman	Warner Bros.	$821,847,012
10	Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales	Disney	$794,861,794

Now owning Fox, Marvel, the Star Wars universe, Pixar and of course its own back catalogue (Beauty and the Beast, Bill Condon, USA, 2017, is a remake of a 1991 animation), Disney’s stranglehold on contemporary cinema looks set to increase – not least because there can be endless spin-offs and spinouts and reboots and what have you of the Marvel and the Star Wars universes, exploring the everyday life of ewoks on Endor in a bid to get us watching only Disney and to Disneyfy the planet.

It is noteworthy that as per 2016, the highest grossing films are all sequels or remakes or part of a franchise and that basically all of them feature talking animals and/or flying humans. Some of these might have female, foreign and/or quasi-indie directors (Patty Jenkins, Taika Waititi, James Gunn, Rian Johnson), but they nonetheless all peddle fantasy, violence and escapism, as well as an emphasis on hyper-mobility and speed.

Soon after the invention of the lantern, writes Wolfgang Schivelbusch, light was weaponised, in the sense that it was used as a tool for policing behaviour, while also being used to blind enemies while the wielder of the light remains in darkness. In the era of the atomic bomb, the weaponisation of light becomes clear. And it becomes clearer still in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, when light speed is used to tear apart the destroyers of the Empire (or whatever it is now called).

Cinema also uses light in order to attract/distract attention, and thus in some senses is equally a mechanism of control and thus is put to military use. Some of the highest grossing movies gesture towards being politically progressive (postcolonial elements in Thor: Ragnarok and feminist elements in Wonder Woman), but one wonders that they reflect how cinema through its weaponised light is really the militarisation of all aspects of contemporary life, including political engagement (the militarisation of the postcolonial and woman, as opposed to militant postcolonialism and feminism).

But this mention of Wonder Woman allows me to get to my silly Disney conspiracy theory mentioned above. As Warner Bros owns the DC comic adaptations and as Disney owns Marvel, the studios are like the comic book publishers in competition with each other.

With the exception of Wonder Woman, though, all new Warner Bros films get critically panned, while all Disney films get praised to the heavens – perhaps especially the thoroughly mediocre Last Jedi. The opposition is made most clear when we look at how Captain America: Civil War (Anthony and Joe Russo, USA/Germany, 2016) was celebrated while Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Zack Snyder, USA, 2016) was derided, even though the two are basically the same film (one superhero mistakes another superhero for his enemy, when in fact they could work better together). Justice League (Zack Snyder, USA/UK/Canada, 2017) also received a critical drubbing, even though this viewer thought that it distinctly bore the hallmarks of Joss Whedon, the film’s writer and who does no wrong when he is writing scripts for Disney (e.g. Whedon’s Avengers movies).

Dissing Warner Bros films and praising Disney films – even though to this viewer they are all as good/bad as each other – leads me to this thought: no one knows what a good film is – and it is debatable that the criticisms of the Warners films truly dents their commercial appeal, since even if they are not as high on the list as the Disney films, they still make good money. But the perception of what a good film is becomes as stage-managed as cinema itself.

In other words, I sometimes wonder that somewhere behind the scenes, Disney is simply employing bots to tweet negative reviews of Warner Bros films in order to diminish their standing, while tweeting rave reviews of Disney films in order to improve their rating. Faced with the pressure of having to conform with what the kidz on the internets are saying (even though these accounts are as real as the influential accounts set up by the Russians during the recent American elections), flesh world critics end up agreeing with these perceptions (Warners bad, Disney good) in order to continue to look like they know what people like and thus to attract a wider readership. And so what is really going on is a hidden battle for ratings that in turn may or may not help takings played out across the digital media landscape.

I wish just to emphasise that this is a dumb conspiracy theory and not true. But part of me would not be too surprised if parts of it were true. It is cheap and easy to set up fake accounts and also easy to gain good reviews by paying off genuine online influencers. We know that the practice of buying good reviews has been long-standing in print journalism (just look at the Metro newspaper in London, and you will often see a three-star blockbuster given a full-page spread as Film of the Week, while a four-star documentary gets maybe half a paragraph on the next page – even though by definition the four-star film should be Film of the Week over the three-star film). So it would even be surprising if this did not happen to some extent in the twittersphere.

Performances of 2017
Having mentioned Wonder Woman, I might also suggest that Una mujer fantástica/A Fantastic Woman (Sebastián Lelio, Chile/Germany/Spain/USA, 2017) was paradoxically a much more empowered film, even if it is a film about a transexual, and thus someone whom certain people might claim is not therefore a ‘real’ woman. (Although given that she is immortal and that her body achieves blows that far surpass her shape and bone structure, I would find any claims that Wonder Woman as played by Gal Gadot is a ‘real woman’ highly curious, too.) In the year of Weinstein and so on, I would not want to suggest that it is a man (Lelio) who has made a more progressively feminist film than a woman (Jenkins). But since the films bear similar titles, it becomes hard not to compare them, and Una mujer fantástica is much more in alignment with my personal sensibilities than Wonder Woman – although I was sad to miss and hope soon to catch Mrs Marston and the Wonder Women (Angela Robinson, USA, 2017), which may well be the best of the three.

In starring Rebecca Hall, Mrs Marston and the Wonder Women reminds me of her turn in Christine (Antonio Campos, UK/USA, 2016), which I saw in 2017, and which likely remains an easy winner for the best performance that I saw in a film this year. Daniela Vega’s performance in Una mujer fantástica follows.

And then other standout performances would for me include the afore-mentioned Brooklynn Kimberly Prince in The Florida Project, Michelle Williams in Manchester by the Sea (who in a fraction of the time made me want to watch the film about her character and not Casey Affleck’s character), Mahershala Ali in Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, USA, 2016), Pyotr Skvortsov in The Student (Kirill Serebrennikov, Russia, 2016), Ruth Negga in Loving (Jeff Nichols, UK/USA, 2016), Sonia Braga in Aquarius (Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil/France, 2016), Ethymis Papadimitriou in Suntan (Argyris Papadimitropoulos, Greece/Germany, 2016), Ellie Kendrick in The Levelling (Hope Dickson Leach, UK, 2016), Jack Lowden in England is Mine (Mark Gill, UK, 2017), Nuno Lopes in São Jorge (Marco Martins, Portugal/France, 2016), Colin Farrell in The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos, UK/Ireland/USA, 2017) and Timothée Chalamet in Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, Italy/France/Brazil/USA, 2017).

I want also to say how much I enjoyed specifically seeing Ewen Bremner return and evolve the character of Spud in the otherwise somewhat mediocre T2: Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, UK, 2017), while I continue to harbour soft spots for Keanu Reeves (in John Wick 2, Chad Stahelski, USA/Hong Kong, 2017), Dwayne Johnson (in Baywatch, Seth Gordon, UK/China/USA, 2017) and Tom Cruise (in American Made, Doug Liman, USA, 2017).

Finally, what with Assassin’s Creed (Justin Kurzel, USA/France/UK/Hong Kong/Taiwan/Malta, 2017), The Snowman (Tomas Alfredson, UK/USA/Sweden, 2017), Song to Song (Terrence Malick, USA, 2017) and, to a lesser extent, Alien: Covenant (Ridley Scott, USA/UK, 2017), it would appear that Michael Fassbender continues to choose complete codswallop. Were it not for his remarkable turn in the equally remarkable Trespass Against Us (Adam Smith, UK, 2016), I’d be worried about chalking Fassbender up as a lost cause. (Trespass Against Us also featured good turns from the ever-reliable Brendan Gleeson, while Barry Keoghan also got about between this film, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan, UK/Netherlands/France/USA, 2017.)

Movie watching in 2017
Listed at the bottom of this blog are 387 films that I saw in 2017. The absolute vast majority of these are films that I saw for the first time.

That said, while normally I do not list the relatively significant number of films that I watch not for the first time, be that because of teaching or research (the total likely would be around 450 if these were included), a couple are listed below – and for slightly different reasons (maybe because I gave a talk about a specific film and so seeing it was tied to a specific event, which is the case with Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese, USA, 1990; or maybe because I went to the cinema to watch the film before realising that I had seen it before, which is the case with All This Panic, Jenny Gage, USA, 2016; or maybe because I am still not sure whether I have seen the film before or not, which is the case for The Patience Stone (Atiq Rahimi, Afghanistan/France/Germany/UK, 2012), which seemed familiar throughout, but I just cannot remember when I first saw it if indeed I had seen it before).

Typically I do not include short films on my end of year list, but I have in fact begun to list short films quite regularly, especially when they are work by ‘artist filmmakers’ and whose œuvre gets showcased on MUBI (e.g. Jay Rosenblatt).

Anyway, of these 387 films, I saw 183 at the cinema, with a further 150 online – mainly on MUBI, although I was beginning for my sins to watch an increasing number of films on Amazon’s rental and buying service. I had rented but did not quite find time to see a few films that I really wanted to watch in 2017, but which I shall now have to watch in 2018, including Marjorie Prime (Michael Almereyda, USA, 2017) and I Am Not a Witch (Rungano Nyoni, UK/France/Germany, 2017).

In addition to these two main sources of film viewing, I saw 34 films on DVD, 18 on an aeroplane and two on television, while I also include on the list Homecoming, Richard Mosse’s video installation at the Barbican, both because much of it was quite remarkable audiovisual work, and because it really is worth seeing if you have not and get the chance.

Clearly, therefore, I have not seen all of the films released in 2017, and thus am not in a particularly strong position of authority to make pronouncements about the best films of the year, etc.

Nonetheless, I shall describe below a few more of my experiences before highlighting the five films that really stood out for me this year, as well as some thoughts on end of year film lists in general.

Particularly pleasurable this year was to see various of the films by Philippine slow cinema auteur Lav Diaz. Thanks to a series of screenings up at the University of Westminster’s campus in Harrow, combined with a season of his films on MUBI, I was able to sit through some c40 hours of Diaz’s work – leaving me I think with a tick against every feature film that he has made.

Following his death in 2016, it was also a great pleasure to be able to see various films by the late Julio García Espinosa at Birkbeck, University of London, where Professor Michael Chanan curated a retrospective of JGE’s work, including the brilliant Son o no son (Cuba, 1980).

MUBI also offered introductions to various other filmmakers whose work I am glad to have come to know, including Sergei Loznitsa, Pia Marais and Oliver Laxe. MUBI also provided an entry into a whole slew of films by El Pampero Cine, a group of filmmakers including Mariano Llinás, Alejo Moguillansky, Verónica Llinás and Laura Citarella, who make very intelligent work out in the Argentine countryside.

A remarkable film that I saw on MUBI, but which would not be in my films of the year because it is too old is Até ver a luz/After the Night (Basil da Cunha, Switzerland, 2013), which together with the above-mentioned São Jorge shows real depth to contemporary Portuguese cinema, beyond the likes of Miguel Gomes, Pedro Costa and João Pedro Rodrigues.

MUBI also allowed me to further my knowledge of the work of Raoul Ruiz (four films), while YouTube provided me with an opportunity to see four films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (and which I really should have seen beforehand). Furthermore, the double bill of Pere Portabella’s Informe general sobre unas cuestiones de interés para una proyección pública (Spain, 1977) and Informe general II: el nou rapte d’Europa/General Report II: The New Abduction of Europe (Spain, 2015) also felt very timely as a result of Brexit and the recent unrest in Catalonia.

With regard to online film viewing, I am also glad to have encountered the work of Fabrizio Federico, whose Pregnant (UK, 2015) is one of the most remarkable punk and experimental films that I have seen.

The year also started very well with regard to experimental cinema, as in the same week I saw 55 Years on the Infinite Plain by Tony Conrad at Tate Modern, before then also seeing La région centrale (Michael Snow, Canada, 1971) at the Serpentine Gallery. I also got to see some audiovisual work live by Phill Niblock at Tate Modern also relatively early on in 2017.

Before I go on to discuss the films that I thought were strong, I was in particular sad to miss a couple of films, especially Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami (Sophie Fiennes, Ireland/UK, 2017) and God’s Own Country (Francis Lee, UK, 2017), which I suspect would have joined The Levelling, Trespass Against Us and England is Mine as strong British movies of 2017, with three of these notably taking place outside of the cities and instead in the countryside. I also wanted very much to watch Bar Bahar/In Between (Maysaloun Hamoud, Israel/France, 2016).

Films of the Year
So, in addition to various of the films mentioned above (perhaps especially The Florida Project, Una mujer fantástica, The Levelling, Moonlight and Aquarius), I’d add these films as pretty good and thus as proxime accessunt to a relatively arbitrary bar, but the measure of which is a film that makes me rethink my understanding of something, including life, the universe and cinema itself.

These films include: Get Out (Jordan Peele, Japan/USA, 2017), Neruda (Pablo Larraín, Chile/Argentina/France/Spain/USA, 2016), Grave/Raw (Julia Ducournau, France/Belgium/Italy, 2016), Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt, USA, 2016), Twentieth Century Women (Mike Mills, USA, 2016), Cameraperson (Kirsten Johnson, USA, 2016), The Fits (Anna Rose Holmer, USA, 2015), Prevenge (Alice Lowe, UK, 2016), Homo sapiens (Niklaus Geyrhalter, Switzerland/Germany/Austria, 2016), Miss Sloane (John Madden, France/USA, 2016), Kedi (Ceyda Torun, Turkey/USA, 2016), City of Ghosts (Matthew Heineman, USA, 2017), Step (Amanda Lipitz, USA, 2017), A Ghost Story (David Lowery, USA, 2017), Logan Lucky (Steven Soderbergh, USA, 2017), Brawl in Cell Block 99 (S. Craig Zahler, USA, 2017), Patti Cake$ (Geremy Jasper, USA, 2017) and El auge humano/The Human Surge (Eduardo Williams, Argentina/Brazil/Portugal, 2016).

The latter of these films came closest to being on the list of five below.

That said, the list below is not five because of any reason other than that these films really did kind of ‘blow me away,’ in the sense mentioned above of making me rethink the world/life/the universe. I personally don’t see the point of naming 10 films or 20 or any number for the sake of it. To do so is arbitrary and it leads to adding in and ruling out movies for very imprecise reasons – albeit that these can have real effects (with regard to my own filmmaking, the number of screenings that my films get relates very directly to the number of mentions that they have in various different media; getting a friend even to Tweet or mention one of my films in a blog seems like the biggest task in the world, in that rarely will anyone do me that favour [perhaps because they think that my films are rubbish]; that said, where normally I list my own films in my annual round-up, since technically I have seen them… this year I have not, though I could mention The Benefit of Doubt, UK, 2017, Circle/Line, UK, 2017, Sculptures of London, UK, 2017, and #randomaccessmemory, UK, 2017, all of which I completed this year).

Thinking about end of year lists also makes me think that 1 January is a weird date to start the year. That is, from a UK perspective, why start it 10 days after a solstice and seven days after a major religious festival (Christmas)? Why not start the year on the solstice, such that the year aligns with the sun? (But, then, whose solstice? But, then again, why this solstice?)

Either way, the entire thing seems irrational and so to mark an irrational transition with a list seems… irrational, even if organisationally sensible, I guess.

What also seems irrational is that any year will be better or worse than another.

But finally I’d just like to say that if my list is of films that really opened my mind, then in some senses that list runs the risk of only getting smaller as I get older, experience more and come across fewer novel approaches to the world… This does not necessarily follow (why is there not just an endless stream of new visions from different people and people who become different by virtue of themselves changing?), but it is a risk.

What I want to suggest, though, is that when one sees a film and says ‘yeah, that’s fine,’ but someone else sees that film and goes ‘wow, that blew me away,’ then one simultaneously wonders what they have or have not experienced and one wonders what one must have missed in order for them to find that film so good that you only found fine.

The same can happen with end of year lists, then, but on a grander scale, as one wonders how many films other people must have seen and/or how closely they or I watched the ones that did or did not make it on to their lists such that they get or got named there.

When the lists themselves become predictable (like the selection of films at Cannes, for example), then the films on the list – as well as lists more generally – can looked tired, formulaic, uninspired and uninspiring.

These five films, though, really did inspire me in my thinking, and so I include them not for the purposes of choosing films that are more obscure than thou, but to see if they also can inspire other people – who might otherwise look at me and ask what it is that I have experienced to like these films most from 2017.

This… together with a sense of increasingly liking only films that try to break cinema as I find cinema technologically, industrially, aesthetically and institutionally a problematic medium, and which at times therefore I think should be disbanded…

Here goes:-

Island (Steven Eastwood, UK, 2017)
An incredible documentary about people dying at a hospital on the Isle of Wight. Philosophically very profound.

La región salvaje/The Untamed (Amat Escalante, Mexico/Denmark/France/Germany/Norway/Switzerland, 2016)
A brilliant study of life on Earth and perversion.

Félicité (Alain Gomis, France/Belgium/Senegal/Germany/Lebanon, 2017)
Gomis basically has no fear of making a raw film about life in contemporary Kinshasa.

Work in Progress (Adam Sekuler, USA, 2017)
Had I seen Homo sapiens before this, the two might have swapped places – but this one got there first, even though they are in various respects similar. Nonetheless a brilliant and contemplative documentary that looks at the role of work in the contemporary world.

Good Time (Josh and Ben Safdie, USA, 2017)
The film I feel most uneasy about including because others have included it widely on their lists. I am late to the Safdies (this was my first film by them), but this has much to commend it, including two great performances from Robert Pattinson and Benny Safdie.

As I look at all of these films, I am ashamed at the eurocentrism of my tastes, and in particular by the lack of films from Asia that I have seen/included this year.

But there we go. Hopefully I can do better in 2018.

‘Full’ List of Films Seen in 2017

Key:-
Film Title (Director’s Name)

No marker – seen in cinema
* = seen online (specifically streaming)
^ = seen on DVD or file
+ = seen on aeroplane
” = seen on television
> = seen in a gallery

When see you the entry surrounded by parentheses – as follows: (Film Title (Director’s Name)) – it means that I had already seen the film, or at least I think I may well have seen the film before.

Silence (Martin Scorsese)
A Letter to Elia (Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones)
Hud (Martin Ritt)*
Médecin de Campagne (Thomas Lilti)
Duelle (Jacques Rivette)^
55 Years on the Infinite Plain (Tony Conrad)
La région centrale (Michael Snow)
Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan)
(Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese))
La femme du boulanger (Marcel Pagnol)
Railroad Tigers (Ding Sheng)
La La Land (Damien Chazelle)
Dangal (Nitesh Tiwari)
Elegy to a Visitor from the Revolution (Lav Diaz)*
The Train Stop (Sergei Loznitsa)*
Assassin’s Creed (Justin Kurzel)
A Monster Calls (J.A. Bayona)
Le fils de Joseph (Eugène Green)*
Work In Progress (Adam Sekuler)*
America America (Elia Kazan)
The Big Country (William Wyler)
The Settlement (Sergei Loznitsa)*
Jackie (Pablo Larraín)
Lion (Garth Davis)
Split (M Night Shyamalan)
The Nights of Zayandeh-rood (Mohsen Makhmalbaf)
Eye in the Sky (Gavin Hood)*
10+4 (Mania Akbari)
Cairo Station (Youssef Chahine)^
Christine (Antonio Campos)
Cameraperson (Kirsten Johnson)
Triple Agent (Eric Rohmer)*
Victoria (Justine Triet)
T2: Trainspotting (Danny Boyle)
Buddies in India (Wang Baoqiang)
Chinese Roulette (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)*
Hacksaw Ridge (Mel Gibson)
Zero Day (Alex Gibney)*
Loving (Jeff Nichols)
Marguérite et Julien (Valérie Donzelli)*
Baraka (Ron Fricke)
Samsara (Ron Fricke)
(Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade))
Twentieth Century Women (Mike Mills)
(Heremakono (Abderrahmane Sissako)^)
Moka (Frédéric Mermoud)*
Portrait (Sergei Loznitsa)*
Death in the Land of Encantos (Lav Diaz)
Factory (Sergei Loznitsa)*
Zootropolis (Byron Howard, Rich Moore and Jared Bush)^
Ten Meter Tower (Maximilien Van Aertryck and Axel Danielson)*
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (Ang Lee)
Prevenge (Alice Lowe)
Tiya’s Dream (Abderrahmane Sissako)*
Lovetrue (Alma Har’el)
Fences (Denzel Washington)
Batang West Side (Lav Diaz)
Moonlight (Barry Jenkins)
A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery (Lav Diaz)
Ruined Heart: Another Love Story Between a Criminal and a Whore (Khavn de la Cruz)^
An Investigation on the Night that Won’t Forget (Lav Diaz)*
The Great Wall (Zhang Yimou)
Patriots Day (Peter Berg)
Hidden Figures (Theodore Melfi)
Blockade (Sergei Loznitsa)*
Logan (James Mangold)
Bunny Lake is Missing (Otto Preminger)*
Letter (Sergei Loznitsa)*
The Woman Who Left (Lav Diaz)
Trespass Against Us (Adam Smith)
Thumbsucker (Mike Mills)*
Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt)
The Fits (Anna Rose Holmer)*
Kong: Skull Island (Jordan Vogt-Roberts)
Le parc (Damien Manivel)*
Rostov-Luanda (Abderrahmane Sissako)^
(La vie sur terre (Abderrahmane Sissako)^)
The Student (Kirill Serebrennikov)
Elle (Paul Verhoeven)
Le jeu (Abderrahmane Sissako)*
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (Tim Burton)*
Le roi de l’évasion (Alain Guiraudie)*
Microbe et Gasoil (Michel Gondry)*
The Love Witch (Anna Biller)*
Domitilla (Zeb Ejiro)*
Sexto aniversario (Julio García Espinosa)^
Dancer (Steven Cantor)
Viceroy’s House (Gurinder Chadha)
Aventuras de Juan Quinquin (Julio García Espinosa)
Son o no son (Julia García Espinosa)
In memoriam (Paul Leduc)
Les aventures d’Arsène Lupin (Jacques Becker)
La región salvaje (Amat Escalante)
Get Out (Jordan Peele)
(All This Panic (Jenny Gage))
My Old Lady (Israel Horowitz)*
100 Mile Radius (Environment III) (Phill Niblock)
T H I R (aka Ten Hundred Inch Radii) (Environments IV) (Phill Niblock)
The Age of Shadows (Kim Jee-Woon)
Aquarius (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
Life (Daniel Espinosa)
The Lost City of Z (James Grey)
Ghost in the Shell (Rupert Sanders)
Filmfarsi (Ehsan Khoshbakht)
Lettre de Beyrouth (Jocelyne Saab)
Beyrouth, jamais plus (Jocelyne Saab)
Beyrouth, ma ville (Jocelyne Saab)
Free Fire (Ben Wheatley)
Viva (Anna Biller)*
Demain on déménage (Chantal Akerman)*
Grave (Julia Ducournau)
For Ellen (So Yong Kim)*
I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck)
The Merchant of Four Seasons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)*
Graduation (Cristian Mungiu)
Florentina Hubaldo CTE (Lav Diaz)*
Neruda (Pablo Larraín)
The Sense of an Ending (Ritesh Batra)
Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks)*
incoming (Richard Mosse)>
The Trip to Spain (Michael Winterbottom)”
Los colores de la montaña (Carlos César Arbeláez)
Los cuerpos dóciles (Diego Gachassin and Matías Scarvaci)
El futuro perfecto (Nele Wohlatz)
Na sua companhia (Marcelo Caetano)*
Beauty and the Beast (Bill Condon)
The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki (Juho Kuosmanen)
The Transfiguration (Michael O’Shea)
Their Finest (Lone Scherfig)
Clash (Mohamed Diab)
Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 (James Gunn)
Lady Macbeth (William Oldroyd)
Suntan (Argyris Papadimitropoulos)
Effi Briest (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)*
Young Love Lost (Xiang Guoqiang)
Mr Donkey (Liu Lu and Zhou Shen)
Nights and Weekends (Greta Gerwig and Joe Swanberg)*
Pleasure Love (Huang Yao)
Félicité (Alain Gomis)
The Road to Mandalay (Midi Z)
Re:Orientations (Richard Fung)
Fox and His Friends (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)*
Mindhorn (Sean Foley)
The Promise (Terry George)
Honor and Glory (Godfrey Ho)*
Homo Sapiens (Nikolaus Geyrhalter)
Atomic: Living in Dread and Promise (Mark Cousins)*
Harmonium (Koji Fukada)
The Levelling (Hope Dickson Leach)
Frantz (François Ozon)
(Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky))
The Queen of Katwe (Mira Nair)+
City of Tiny Lights (Pete Travis)+
Alien: Covenant (Ridley Scott)
Maman(s) (Maïmouna Ducouré)+
Dear Zindagi (Gauri Shinde)+
Homme au bain (Christophe Honoré)*
Baywatch (Seth Gordon)
The Other Side of Hope (Aki Kaurismäki)
The Red Turtle (Michaël Dudok de Wit)
Miss Sloane (John Madden)
Wonder Woman (Patty Jenkins)
A Century of Birthing (Lav Diaz)*
Les hautes solitudes (Philippe Garrel)*
Fahrenheit 451 (François Truffaut)^
The Mummy (Alex Kurtzman)
Tom of Finland (Dome Karukoski)
The Road Movie (Dimitrii Kalashnikov)
Island (Steven Eastwood)
El rey tuerto (Marc Crehuet)
Plato’s Phaedrus (dn rodowick)
Kedi (Ceyda Torun)
Les gouffres (Antoine Barriaud)*
Song to Song (Terrence Malick)
A Man Called Ove (Hannes Holm)
The Beguiled (Sofia Coppola)
Edith Walks (Andrew Kötting)*
Baby Driver (Edgar Wright)
Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan)
City of Ghosts (Matthew Heineman)
I Am Not Madame Bovary (Feng Xiaogang)
Una mujer fantástica (Sebastián Lelio)
Détour (Michel Gondry)*
Today (Reza Mirkarimi)
Portrait of Madame Yuki (Kenji Mizoguchi)
Kóblic (Sebastián Borensztein)
Voyage of Time (Terrence Malick)
Inversion (Behnam Behzadi)
Visages Villages (Agnès Varda & JR)
Anarchy in the UK (Jett Hollywood)*
Transformers: The Last Knight (Michael Bay)
The Big Sick (Michael Showalter)
War for the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves)
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (Luc Besson)
England is Mine (Mark Gill)
Pregnant (Fabrizio Federico)*
The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky)^
The ABCs of Death (Various directors)^
Atomic Blonde (David Leitch)
Step (Amanda Lipitz)
Maudie (Aisling Walsh)
A Ghost Story (David Lowery)
An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power (Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk)
Eldorado XXI (Salomé Lamas)*
The Italian (Andrei Kravchuk)^
Whisky (Pablo Stoll and Juan Pablo Rebella)^
From Greece (Peter Nestler)*
Arunoday (Partho Sen-Gupta)+
Crosscurrent (Chao Yang)+
Gbomo Gbomo Express (Walter ‘Waltbanger’ Taylaur)+
Vers Mathilde (Claire Denis)*
Rhine River (Peter Nestler)*
Death and Devil (Peter Nestler)*
The Event (Sergei Loznitsa)*
The Ferry (Attia Amin)+
Om Shanti Om (Farah Khan)+
Night Train to Lisbon (Bille August)+
Sisterhood (Tracy Choi)+
Nieve negra (Martín Hodara)+
Logan Lucky (Steven Soderbergh)
Detroit (Kathryn Bigelow)
Dilwale (Rohit Shetty)+
The Young Karl Marx (Raoul Peck)+
Kingsman: The Secret Service (Matthew Vaughn)+
The LEGO Batman Movie (Christian McKay)+
Balnearios (Mariano Llinás)*
Away With Me (Oliver Mason)*
Souvenirs d’un montreur de seins (Bertrand Mandico)*
Historias extraordinarias (Mariano Llinás)*
La impresión de una guerra (Camilo Restrepo)*
Underground Fragrance (Song Pengfei)*
Kontra Madiaga (Khavn de la Cruz)*
It (Andy Muschietti)
American Made (Doug Liman)
El auge del humano (Eduardo Williams)*
Description d’un combat (Chris Marker)*
Castro (Alejo Moguillansky)*
Vive la baleine (Mario Ruspoli and Chris Marker)*
Y a-t-il une vierge encore vivante? (Bertrand Mandico)*
El loro y el cisne (Alejo Moguillansky)*
Maelström (Denis Villeneuve)^
Dev.D (Anurag Kashyap)^
El escarabajo de oro (Alejo Moguillansky and Fia-Stina Sandlund)*
The Hitman’s Bodyguard (Patrick Hughes)
Volta à Terra (João Pedro Plácido)*
Soul Food Stories (Tonislav Hristov)
A Run for Money (Reha Erdem)*
Ostende (Laura Citarella)*
La mujer de los perros (Laura Citarella and Verónica Llinás)*
Notre Dame des Hormones (Bertrand Mandico)*
Miséricorde (Fulvio Bernasconi)*
Stronger (David Gordon Green)
Kingsman: The Golden Circle (Matthew Vaughn)
Yenish Sounds (Karoline Arn and Martina Rieder)*
Juana a los 12 (Martín Shanly)*
Damiana Kryygi (Alejandro Fernández Mouján)*
Depressive Cop (Bertrand Mandico)*
A Respectable Family (Massoud Bakshi)*
Regeneration (Raoul Walsh)*
Europe, She Loves (Jan Gassmann)*
La León (Santiago Otheguy)*
Flatliners (Niels Arden Oplev)
Pueblo en vilo (Patricio Guzmán)*
Victoria and Abdul (Stephen Frears)
La ville des pirates (Raúl Ruiz)*
Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down The White House (Peter Landesman)
Risk (Laura Poitras)^
Le bonheur (Agnès Varda)*
Point de fuite (Raúl Ruiz)*
The Foreigner (Martin Campbell)
Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve)
Agua fría de mar (Paz Fábrega)*
Blade Runner Black Out 2022 (Shinichiro Watanabe)*
Blade Runner 2036: Nexus Dawn (Luke Scott)*
Blade Runner 2048: Nowhere to Run (Luke Scott)*
The Law in these Parts (Ra’anan Alexandrowicz)^
Scialla! (Francesco Bruni)
Santouri – The Music Man (Dariush Mehrjui)^
Project X (Henrik Moltke and Laura Poitras)*
Le concours (Claire Simon)*
You Are All Captains (Oliver Laxe)*
Napolislam (Ernesto Pagano)
The State I Am In (Christian Petzold)*
Loving Vincent (Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman)
The Man Who Left His Will on Film (Nagisa Oshima)^
The Snowman (Tomas Alfredson)
Blessed Benefit (Mahmoud Al Massad)
Porcile (Pier Paolo Pasolini)^
Paraísos artificiales (Yulene Olaizola)*
The Great Wall (Tadhg O’Sullivan)*
A Simple Event (Sohrab Shahid-Saless)*
Trois vies et une seule mort (Raúl Ruiz)*
The Traveler (Abbas Kiarostami)^
mother! (Darren Aronofsky)
Human Flow (Ai Weiwei)
Geostorm (Dean Devlin)
Eva no duerme (Pablo Agüero)*
Naissance des pieuvres (Céline Sciamma)*
Ce jour-là (Raúl Ruiz)*
Into a Dream (Sion Sono)*
Burn! (Gillo Pontecorvo)^
N’oublie pas que tu vas mourir (Xavier Beauvois)*
El vendedor de orquídeas (Lorenzo Vigas)*
Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine (Bahman Farmanara)^
El mar (Agustí Villaronga)*
Brawl in Cell Block 99 (S. Craig Zahler)
La sirga (William Vega)*
Only the Brave (Joseph Kosinski)
Suburbicon (George Clooney)
Thor: Ragnarok (Taika Waititi)
Impolex (Alex Ross Perry)*
Spring (Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead)*
Kapò (Gillo Pontecorvo)^
No sucumbió la eternidad (Daniela Rea Gómez)*
At Ellen’s Age (Pia Marais)*
When Monaliza Smiled (Fadi Haddad)
Layla Fourie (Pia Marais)*
Informe general sobre unas cuestiones de interés para una proyección pública (Pere Portabella)*
General Report II: The New Abduction of Europe (Pere Portabella)*
Villegas (Gonzalo Tobal)*
Tem Gringo No Morro (Marjorie Niele and Bruno Graziano)*
The Void (Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski)*
Mafioso (Alberto Lattuada)
The Pornographers (Shohei Imamura)^
The Dresser (Peter Yates)*
White Ant (Chu Hsien-che)*
Restricted (Jay Rosenblatt)*
Murder on the Orient Express (Kenneth Branagh)
Justice League (Zack Snyder)
The Living Corpse (Khwaja Sarfaraz)^
Até ver a luz (Basil da Cunha)*
Las horas muertas (Aarón Fernández)*
Bye Bye Brazil (Carlos Diegues)^
Sérail (Eduardo De Gregorio)*
Worm (Jay Rosenblatt and Caveh Zahedi)*
Goodbye Solo (Ramin Bahrani)^
São Jorge (Marco Martins)*
Okja (Joon-ho Bong)*
Sight (Eran May-Raz and Daniel Lazo)*
Waves ’98 (Ely Dagher)*
La pesca (Pablo Alvarez-Mesa and Fernando López Escriva)*
Camp de Thiaroye (Ousmane Sembène and Thierno Faty Sow)^
Cidade Cinza (Guilherme Valiengo and Marcelo Mesquita)*
The Conspiracy (Christopher MacBride)*
Wonder (Stephen Chbosky)
Wonderstruck (Todd Haynes)
The Mountain Between Us (Hany Abu-Assad)
A Viagem de Yoani (Pepe Siffredi and Raphael Bottino)*
Good Time (Josh and Ben Safdie)
[The Silence (Mohsen Makhmalbaf)^]
Xenos (Mahdi Fleifel)
A Man Returned (Mahdi Fleifel)
A Drowning Man (Mahdi Fleifel)
La cuerda floja (Nuria Ibáñez)*
Sharp Tools (Nujoom Al-Ghanem)
Mary Shelley (Haifaa al-Mansour)
Under Electric Clouds (Aleksei German Jr)*
L’illusion comique (Mathieu Amalric)*
Into the Arms of Strangers (Mark Jonathan Harris)*
Sofía y el terco (Andrés Burgos)*
Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Jacques Rivette)^
Beats of the Antonov (hajooj kuka)*
Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Rian Johnson)
Nine Lives (The Eternal Moment of Now) (Jay Rosenblatt)*
[The Patience Stone (Atiq Rahimi)*?]
Prayer (Jay Rosenblatt)*
Coco (Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina)
I Used to be a Filmmaker (Jay Rosenblatt)*
Comet (Sam Esmail)^
Queen of Earth (Alex Ross Perry)*
Hanna (Joe Wright)*
Uncle Kent 2 (Todd Rohal)*
The Twilight (Mohammad Rasoulof)^
The Killing of a Sacred Dear (Yorgos Lanthimos)
The Sheik and I (Caveh Zahedi)*
Patti Cake$ (Geremy Jasper)+
The Other Land (Ali Idrees)+
Whitney: Can I Be Me (Nick Broomfield and Rudi Dolezal)*
Assistance mortelle (Raoul Peck)*
Heaven Knows What (Josh and Ben Safdie)*
Brave (Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman and Steve Purcell)^
John Wick: Chapter 2 (Chad Stahelski)”
The Disaster Artist (James Franco)
Death of Stalin (Armando Iannucci)
Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino)
The Florida Project (Sean Baker)
Happy End (Michael Haneke)
White Christmas (Michael Curtiz)