It has indeed been another strange year for filmgoers. Releases began trickling back to theaters in early spring, but the spigot still hasn't been fully opened. Which has left many summer would-be blockbusters left alone on a little island with a glaring spotlight on them -- generally, it hasn't been such a good look.
Still, as always, there are reasons for optimism, not the least of which are the exciting prospects of a particularly robust crop of films at last month's Cannes -- and for at least one such luminary, Leos Carax' "Annette," we won't have to wait long: It's set for an Aug. 20 streaming release date -- and what is shaping up to be equally enthralling programs at the Toronto International Film Festival, Venice, and the New York Film Festival.
Until then, we still enjoyed some worthy releases over the first seven months of the year. Here are the 10 best of what I've seen so far in the calendar year (streaming info and/or release dates provided when possible), in alphabetical order, along with some of my immediate reaction to seeing them.
"Cryptozoo": How does one describe Dash Shaw's spirited, hand-drawn tale? The halting animation takes some getting used to, but the script, concerning a collection of captured mythical creatures, is richly satisfying. "Shaw, a graphic novelist by trade, has crafted a wondrous bounty of visual delights here, from the kaleidoscope-like color swirls and juxtapositions, to the rendering of the creatures themselves. He has also collected an impressive array of vocal talent to bring voice to his script, which works like something out of a Wes Anderson picture. It took years to bring it to the screen, but what he has produced is absolutely worth it." (In theaters Aug. 20)
"Flee": Jonas Poher Rasmussen's animated documentary is an extraordinary first-person account of one man's harrowing immigrant survivor's tale. Amin's family's attempt to escape from war-torn Afghanistan to the safety of western Europe is pockmarked by many agonizing failed starts, and steps-backward, to the point where the only way Amin can finally get to Copenhagen is by lying that the rest of his family is dead. "Rasmussen's genuine friendship with Amin adds a warm sheen of empathy to the proceedings, even in the ways not everything makes perfect sense. You get the understanding that Amin, having long buried his extremely difficult past journeys, is hesitating, even now, to fully unburden himself all at once, as if he has to take the time to reconcile all the different versions of his own story he's had to live with, to make sense of it all." (Nov. 5)
"The Green Knight": David Lowery's mesmerizing adaptation of the 14th-century poem of Arthurian legend is a deliriously sumptuous -- if, at times, impenetrable -- rendering of an early "Hero's Journey" that is a delight as long as you're willing to work with it. "There's a smokey sort of claustrophobia to the visuals, as DP Andrew Droz Palermo, lays on the filters, and often closes down the camera focal length to push everything beyond the primary form into a slurry background, all of which evokes the idea of early German Expressionist films, where the sets were peculiarly theatrical and intensely alienating." (In theaters now)
"The Killing of Two Lovers": The masterful filmmaking belies the meager indie budget in Robert Machoian's drama, about a husband estranged from his wife, desperate to bring his family back together, at almost any cost. "Machoian's tightly wound narrative, and the precise cinematography of Oscar Ignacio Jimenez, gives the film an effectively claustrophobic feel. In a later scene, as David races his truck alongside his rival in another attempt to shoot him, the camera is so fixed and tight on him inside the car's cabin, it's difficult to ascertain anything of what's going on outside his own mania. Rather than estranging the viewer, however, these exacting machinations draw us further into David's point of view." (Amazon Prime)
"The Lost Leonardo": Andreas Koefoed's fascinating doc follows the near-farcical travails of a single, recently discovered painting, "Salvator Mundi," found in New Orleans in the mid-aughts, which may or may not have been rendered by one Leonardo da Vinci. "Along the way, the painting was displayed at the National Museum in London, decried by art critics as a fraud, hailed by Christie's (the auction house who sold the painting) as the "male Mona Lisa" and the last opportunity to privately own one of the most rare pieces of object d'art in world history, and locked away in a vault somewhere unknown. It's a twisted, complex story of greed, corruption, financial malfeasance and incredible hubris, all of which suggest the extreme depravity of the art world and the manner in which the wealthy take hold of our earthly treasures and hoard them for themselves." (Aug. 13)
"Moffie": An extraordinary film from Oliver Hermanus concerning a young gay man (Kai Luke Brummer) conscripted into the South African army in the early '80s, when the country was still under apartheid. Hermanus shows remarkable, poignant restraint in his storytelling, allowing viewers to come to their own devastating conclusions. "It's quite the aesthetic package, with its gorgeous cinematography from cinematographer Jamie Ramsay and a lyric, elliptical style ... that brings to mind Claire Denis' masterful "Beau Travail," also concerned with the conflation of military maneuvers and repressed homoeroticism, but Hermanus' protagonists are much more deeply plagued by their political environment. By the end, it's pretty clear that under a thuggish, brutal system like apartheid, complicity might spare your body, but it will most certainly come at the expense of your soul." (Hulu)
"Saint Maud": A horror film whose single most terrifying image is literally the last thing we see, Rose Glass' sterling debut gives us a young, pious protagonist, and slowly, subtly peels back the layers to reveal the dissonance between her understanding of the world and reality. "It isn't a horror movie in the traditional sense. There aren't any jump scares to speak of, or monsters lurking in the darkness, just past our periphery. The terrors that Glass' film forces us to confront are instead of the psychological variety, and couldn't be more timely in an era half-obsessed with group-think misinformation and rising belief in outrageous conspiracy theories: If the Trump era brought us anything it was a discordancy from any concept of objective truth." (Paramount+)
"Summer of Soul (... Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)": The irrepressible Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson has gone and made the best music doc of the year, unearthing once-buried footage of a summer of concerts performed in Harlem's Mount Morris Park in 1969, the same year a vastly more celebrated music festival was happening a few hundred miles to the north in upstate New York. Grooving to vintage performances from artists such as B.B. King, a young Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight, Sly and the Family Stone, and Nina Simone, "Thompson's directorial debut doesn't just present the artists' performances .... He also works to put the shows into the cultural context of the time, when a rare mixture of political outrage, multicultural strength, and a dawning of the Black Pride movement created a fulcrum for Harlem and Black people all over the world. Hippies got the press, and much of the mainstream media coverage, but Thompson makes a strong case as to how the same repressive forces that led to the explosion of the counterculture movement among white college students and young people also affected the rise of rebellion and tide-shifting in communities of color." (Hulu)
"The White Tiger": Sometimes, we can misjudge a film's packaging and assume the worst, to our detriment. The "poster" for this brilliant film from Ramin Bahrani's, an adaptation of the acclaimed novel by Aravind Adiga, makes it look like a wacky, precious comedy. Reader, it is anything but. Instead, it's a screed against the caste system in India, a sort of "Crime and Punishment" for its young protagonist, Balram (Adarsh Gourav), forced to live a servant's life until he finally can't take it anymore. "It's a powerful idea, masterfully executed by Bahrani, whose precision and compelling mise en scene help forge Balram's journey from an individual's arc into an indictment of an entire social order, like a single drop of rain hurtling into a vast and raging ocean of class suppression and wealth imbalance. The greatest trick the wealthy ever pulled off, it would seem, is to convince the vast majority of their countrymen and women that their lot is so inescapable, they must not even attempt to subvert the system in order to better themselves." (Netflix)
"Users'': Natalia Almada's visual essay, about human greed, consumption, and their effect on the world around us is so intoxicatingly alluring to look at, so beguiling in its imagery and visual symmetry, you can't help but become immersed in her concept. "There is so much stuff, so many things, from shipping crates to solar panels, all slipping past the lens of DP Bennett Cerf's cameras, so as to become something akin to a sort of visual intervention: You can see it, the film is telling us, you know very well how this is going to end. Almada doesn't provide answers, or even firm conclusions, exactly. These are the things she is wrestling with in her own conscience, the horrific implications of otherwise deeply pleasing symmetric images. The film is a stunning ode to our demise." (no release date set)