Auteurist Trap: December 2017

I’ve seen a few writers get themselves worked up over whether or not David Lynch’s return Twin Peaks this year was a work of cinema or television after Cahiers du cinema and Sight & Sound polls placed it at or near the top of their lists of the 2017’s best films. The years since Inland Empire had been filled with the sort limp for-hire projects (commercials, music videos, the concert film Duran Duran: Unstaged) that suggested Lynch was an artist content to coast on his legend, at least whenever he wasn’t proselytizing about transcendental meditation. So I had initially dreaded his returning to this material, fearing a lazy nostalgia fest that would score easy points off winking “damn fine coffee” and cherry pie references. To my happy surprise, Twin Peaks (aka Twin Peaks: The Return and Twin Peaks: Season 3) turned out to be the work of the year, however you categorize it, easily dwarfing everything else I saw in 2017, including the films listed below.

As far as what’s on my list this year, I included a few films I caught at festivals that have yet to be released in the U.S., as well as titles that had limited runs or went straight to streaming in 2017. 2016 festival titles Personal Shopper, A Quiet Passion, Despite The Night (which never opened in the U.S., but had a PAL DVD release in August via Matchbox Films) and I, Olga Hepnarova were all on last year’s list, or I’d include them this year.

In alphabetical order:

3FT Ball & Souls (Yoshio Kato)