Auteurist Trap

I started to work on a list of favorite film writing of 2018, books like Ben Fritz's The Big Picture, Jane Giles' Scala Cinema 1978-1993 and Lee Gambin's Nope, Nothing Wrong Here: The Making Of Cujo, as well as essays like Alexandra Heller-Nicholas' Ladykillers: An A-Z of Women’s Horror Filmmaking, Nick Pinkerton's Le Cinéma du Glut, Eric Allen Hatch's Why I Am Hopeful and K. Austin Collins' What Do We Want From Critics In The Morality Wars?. And maybe I'll eventually put together a longer post devoted to film writing, but it certainly won't be this week.

My favorite film discussion podcast episodes of 2018 would include:

Daughters Of Darkness – Episode 27: Sex Without Shame: TheTelephone Book (1971) and Elle (2016)

I Blame Dennis Hopper – Allan Arkush

The Projection Booth - Episode 393: Roommates (1981)

The Film Comment Podcast - Reckoning With Misogyny

The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast - 9/7/18 Joshua John Miller

Pure Cinema Podcast 28A and 28B – Carpenter!

Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast - #212 Peter Fonda

The Movies That Made Me – Keith Gordon

Voices & Visions – Keith Gordon & Underrated Films From The 90s

The Rialto Report – Jamie Gillis in 1976

Bill Gunn’s Personal Problems was made in 1980 and had been shown previously as part of film festivals and retrospectives like Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York, 1968 – 1986 (an astonishing series programmed by Jake Perlin and Michelle Materre), yet it never received a proper theatrical run until 2018. If pressed to pick a favorite film for the year, it would be Personal Problems. But if that’s too much of a cheat, then I’d say Frederick Wiseman’s Monrovia, Indiana.

As far as what’s on my list of favorite films this year, I included a few titles 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 2018. 2017 festival titles Bad Genius (which appears to have gone straight to Netflix in the U.S.), Let The Corpses Tan, Let The Sunshine In, Thoroughbreds and Zama were all on last year’s list, or I’d include them this year.

In alphabetical order:

Angels Wear White (Vivian Qu)

Araby (João Dumans and Affonso Uchoa)

Asako I & II (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi)

Blue My Mind (Lisa Brühlmann)

Border (Ali Abbasi)

A Bread Factory, Part One and A Bread Factory, Part Two (Patrick Wang)

Burning (Lee Chang-dong)

Custody (Xavier Legrand)

The Day After (Hong Sang-Soo)

Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? (Travis Wilkerson)

Eighth Grade (Bo Burnham)

The Endless (Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead)

The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos)

First Reformed (Paul Schrader)

Game Night (John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein)

Good Manners (Marco Dutra, Juliana Rojas)

Hale County This Morning, This Evening (RaMell Ross)

Happy as Lazzaro (Alice Rohrwacher)

Holiday (Isabella Eklöf)

The House That Jack Built (Lars Von Trier)

I Am Not a Witch (Rungano Nyoni)

If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins)

Keep An Eye Out (Quentin Dupieux)

Leave No Trace (Debra Granik)

Long Day's Journey Into Night (Gi Ban)

Lover For A Day (Philippe Garrel)

Madeline's Madeline (Josephine Decker)

Minding The Gap (Bing Liu)

Monrovia, Indiana (Frederick Wiseman)

Montparnasse Bienvenüe, aka Jeune femme (Léonor Serraille)

Non-Fiction (Olivier Assayas)

On Body And Soul (Ildikó Enyedi)

The Other Side Of The Wind (Orson Welles)

Personal Problems (Bill Gunn; made in 1980, theatrically released in 2018)

The Rider (Chloé Zhao)

Shirkers (Sandi Tan)

Shoplifters (Hirokazu Kore-eda)

Upgrade (Leigh Whannell)

Werewolf (Ashley McKenzie)

What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire? (Roberto Minervini)

Favorite Blu-Rays

Images (Arrow Video)

My Twentieth Century (Second Run)

The Last House On The Left (Arrow Video)

De Niro & De Palma: The Early Films (Arrow Video)

The Reincarnation Of Peter Proud (Kino Lorber)

Modern Romance (Indicator)

William Castle at Columbia Vol. 1 & 2 (Indicator)

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema (The Criterion Collection)

Dietrich & Von Sternberg In Hollywood (The Criterion Collection)

Little Murders (Indicator)

Blue Collar (Indicator)

Night Of The Demon (Indicator)

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (Kino Lorber)

Daisies (Second Run)

Liquid Sky (Vinegar Syndrome)

Female Trouble (The Criterion Collection)

Scalpel (Arrow Video)

Derek Jarman Volume One: 1972 -1986 (BFI)

The Color Of Pomegranates (Second Run)

A Matter Of Life And Death (The Criterion Collection)

Honorable Mentions include: Maniac (Blue Underground), Five Tall Tales: Budd Boetticher & Randolph Scott at Columbia (Indicator), Death Smiles On A Murderer (Arrow Video), Night Of The Living Dead (The Criterion Collection), Light Sleeper (Umbrella Entertainment), My Man Godfrey (The Criterion Collection), The City Of The Living Dead (Arrow Video), The Hired Hand (Arrow Video), The Exorcist II: The Heretic (Shout Factory), The Magnificent Ambersons (The Criterion Collection), Early Hou Hsiao-Hsien: Three Films 1980-1983 (Eureka/Masters Of Cinema), Basket Case (Arrow Video), The Tree Of Life (The Criterion Collection) and Intimate Lighting (Second Run).

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)