Top-10-film lists are strange creatures. Everybody makes one, and most look the same. They end up, for the most part, not as critical surveys of the “year in film,” whatever that means, but as consensus-building ballots. This happens for a number of reasons. First, major studios tilt their release schedule to the end of the year, leading some people to believe that whatever appears in theaters in November and December is better than everything that came before. Second, for many critics and reviewers, “everything that came before” is the small number of films that received distribution — and, in certain cases, a particular kind of distribution —as opposed to just festival screenings, soon to be forgotten.Then there is the question of what “a year in film” or even just “film” means anymore. Everyday we are surrounded by all kinds of moving images — on our computer screen, out in the real world — and it seems narrow-minded, I would go so far as to say reactionary, to include in a top-10 list only those that have a narrative, run somewhere between 80 and 180 minutes in length, and are financed and distributed by major corporations. Where are the video-art pieces, the Vines, the YouTube clips, the advertisements, the television, sports?And last but not least, why only 10?I don’t have answers to all these questions, and I don’t propose the list below as a corrective. But I do refuse to take part in the back-patting exercise that these lists tend to be. Yes, “Carol” was great, we all know that, it’s on every list. So there is no benefit, for you or for me, to having it here as well. Instead, I’ve confined myself to “underappreciated” films. How I’ve delimited this rather vague category takes some explanation. I started by putting down everything I loved this year, which includes way more than 10 “films,” and then removed any items, like the aforementioned “Carol,” that I found on other lists that have appeared. My final roster includes a number of works that did not receive an “official” release or that were screened as part of a repertory program. If I saw it this year and thought it deserved to be on this list, on this list is where it ended up.Enough with the hemming and hawing — below, in simple list form, are 18 “underappreciated films” from 2015.“Out 1” (1971)Jacques RivetteScreened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, November 2015“Stinking Heaven”Nathan Silver“Entertainment”Rick Alverson“No Home Movie”Chantal AkermanScreened at the New York Film Festival, October 2015“Don’t Blink: Robert Frank”Laura IsraelScreened at the New York Film Festival, October 2015“Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton”Guy MaddinScreened at the New York Film Festival, October 2015“Horse Money”Pedro Costa“Ant-Man”Peyton Reed“Streetwise” (1984)Martin BellWatched at home following the death of photographer Mary Ellen Mark“Two Shots Fired”Martín RejtmanGolden State Warriors24-win streak, October–December 2015“Saint Laurent”Bertrand Bonello“Jauja”Lisandro Alonso“That/Cela/Dat” (1999)Michael SnowJack Shainman Gallery, March 2015“Birds of September”Sarah FrancisScreened as part of “Art of the Real” at Film Society of Lincoln Center, April 2015“My Friend Victoria”Jean-Paul CiveyracScreened as part of “Rendez-Vous with French Cinema” at Film Society of Lincoln Center, March 2015“From Deep”Brett KashmereScreened at Union Docs, January 2015“Bitter Lake”Adam CurtisWatched on BBC, January 2015
↧