Ben's 2016 in Cinema: Reflections and Favorites

Pass through the tunnel to enter the gallery...

Embers (dir. Claire Carré, USA/Poland) First seen in Late December 2015, at home in Los Angeles

In the year that everyone wanted to forget, Claire Carré released her directorial debut, a science fiction yarn about the aftermath of a global neurological epidemic that resulted in people losing their ability to remember. 



I first became aware of Embers late in 2015, in an email exchange with Carré and her co-writer/producer Charles Spano that started with a discussion around an article I had written about the TV show Rick and Morty. Soon enough, they offered me to see the film, and by the dim light of my laptop screen I pressed play and fell into a world where the present was the most powerful thing. Closing my 2015 with such a resonant, humanistic and philosophical work propelled me into January and Park City, where Embers got the spotlight at Slamdance. I was able to celebrate the film’s success with Claire and Charles in person and in the process solidified a friendship that would further take shape over the year. By August I was hosting a panel discussion with them and a group of other intrepid filmmakers about making independent science fiction films. 



So here’s the thing... no matter what corner of the movie sandbox you play in, it is very small. It may be seen as unprofessional of me to mention friendships with filmmakers in an article about my favorite films of the year, but I don’t get paid to do this, and, after all, this site has the word ‘Anarchy’ in its name. And anyway it all stemmed from watching a movie and resonating with it. It has been my experience over the years that when that happens, given the chance, you often connect with the people who made it, too. And that’s a beautiful thing. So with that, I thank Claire and Charles for helping me create some of 2016’s best memories.

Embers is currently available in the US on iTunes and Netflix

Driftwood (dir. Paul Taylor, USA) First seen in Late December 2015, at home in Los Angeles

Parallel lines to my encounter with Embers can be traced with Driftwood and its director Paul Taylor and producer/editor Alex Megaro. 



It, too, was in those waning days of 2015 that I first watched their film, a bizarre and absolutely stark take on playing house, which would feel like experimental theater if it wasn't so damn cinematic. Their work, a dialog-free, heavily sound designed inverted fairy tale, is domesticity distilled; with family roles deconstructed and reconstructed to their absurdly ugly and pristine root selves. It is man and it is woman as artifice, as mannequins on the stage of society, with nature as audience.



The film had its world premiere at Slamdance where it won the Grand Jury Prize. To watch Paul and Alex stumble through their excitement was gratifying for that part of me that believes in the power of weird, little DIY films. To further champion the film as a programmer at the Cucalorus Film Festival was a pleasure, and to bring it all back to Los Angeles, hosting a screening with the boys at the Arclight was the cherry on top. In the years where more experimental narrative work largely exists in the cluttered gutter of the marketplace, it is important to remember their frontier spirit and fortitude in creating something unique. Driftwood has all that in spades. 


Christine (dir. Antonio Campos, USA) January 23rd at the Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah, Library Theater

I am pretty good at hiding things. Or else I am pretty good at just not talking about them. These things in particular would be the most destructive parts of myself, shameful parts, the parts that do not understand why I am here, why I have any right to be here. I am pretty good at hiding these things. I never thought of it as a performance, but after having seen Antonio Campos’ third feature Christine, which is loosely based on the real events surrounding the 1974 on-air suicide of journalist Christine Chubbock, I began to reassess that.



From a superb script by Craig Shillowich, and played with such exacting precision by Rebecca Hall, in what is a career best for the thespian, Christine operates brilliantly on a multitude of levels, making for captivating slow burn cinema. One can consider it an intriguing deconstruction on the nature of performance itself; on the need to perform, to compartmentalize and control all facets of self with a force that belies the moment. This leads into a rich and nuanced look at depression, self-worth, and self-destruction. How do you be your best self? The most successful self? Correct your walk, your posture. Adjust again. Tell jokes. Be aggressive, but also be friendly. How do you hide from this deep sadness and hatred of self? Be more. Be on TV. Be better. 



Writing all this is a performance of sorts. But it is also an exultation and declaration of a fuller self, warts, woes, and all. Through a year where I’ve faced extreme physical and emotional pain, surgery, a great lack of work, and continued brushes with homelessness, my perspective on the darker parts of self has shifted ever so slightly, and ultimately doesn’t feel as dire as it used to. Remembering people like Christine Chubbock helps me find the kindness within myself for my self.




Dark Night (dir. Tim Sutton, USA) January 24th at the Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah, Library Theater

Dark Night was my cinematic bedrock of 2016. No matter where I turned to look, I saw some echo of the film shuddering in the bones of the homeless men and women on the streets of Downtown LA, in the carcasses of the gym rats encased behind their glass menageries off Wilshire, in the old folks huddled behind books at the library, in the surge of bodies that ran in fright from the Arclight when a fist-fight broke out during a screening and everyone thought “he has a gun!” 



Tim Sutton’s third feature is an elegiac work of expertly expressed cinematic artistry that looks at America as it is today, in the midst of a rising tide of isolationism and acute loneliness. Upon walking out of its world premiere at Sundance, I declared it to be the first great film of the year. And as that year went on, and Miami happened, and Trump happened, Sutton’s film felt not like a declaration of what was wrong with the country, but rather a meditation... a meditation for all the fractured, lost and bitter souls. A meditation for us all. Dark Night is a meaningful document of America at a seemingly seismic crossroads, and for that it remains the greatest non-documentary American film of 2016.

Cinelicious will release the film in the states early in 2017 in theaters and on VOD 


The Dreamed Path (dir. Angela Schanelec, Germany) August 23rd, at home in Los Angeles

When an opportunity comes along to write about one of your favorite filmmakers of all time, the wall of excitement and anxiety that surges up inside of you is quite potent. And then it settles, you get focused and you write.

The Dreamed Path, Angela Schanelec's first feature since 2010's Orly was a total (and undoubtedly the best) surprise for me in 2016. I first wrote about it during Toronto, but wasn't actually at the fest. Rich and profound in vision, the film flows with a beguiling ease, but is certainly not a lucid affair. Exposition is absent, with plotting is a mere shadow. While the narrative is all there, you need to pay close attention. Details can often be found in the framing of silences more so than the glacial tone of dialog.

The film works in two parts, each tale chronicling the deterioration of couples in their relationships, some 30 years apart. Like all of her work, from the coming-of-age journey Places in Cities to the arcane yet enveloping Marseille, Schanelec is very much interested in migration, modern borders and liminal spaces. The suggested inter-play of Germany, the U.K. and Greece in the first story creates a striking thread of histories when one considers how each of these countries has affected the European climate in recent years. Indeed, if the film is about people's inherent inability to connect, then it is also about union, not only between people, but between countries, and especially between one's faith and one's own body and senses.

The Dreamed Path is an austere masterwork, filled with powerful political nuance and somber insight into the human condition.

Toni Erdmann (dir. Maren Ade, Germany/Austria/Romania)September 23rd at Fantastic Fest, Austin, Texas, Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar

Hype is a dangerous thing in any form, and it's truly a beast to contend with during film festivals. People are eager for something fresh and exciting, profoundly moving and exceptional. Shortly after the lights dimmed inside the South Lamar on the second day of Fantastic Fest 2016, I knew Maren Ade's third feature was going to live up to the hype machine that had started at Cannes in May.

Indeed, Toni Erdmann is full of some of the greatest cinematic surprises and delights to be found in any film of 2016. We begin with a simple premise: an estranged father visits his adult daughter who works in Bucharest. When the trip ends abruptly, the father decides not to leave town and instead appears again as goofy alter ego Toni Erdmann, snaggle-toothed life coach to the wealthy.

While there is something to be said about the film's truly madcap and increasingly absurd multilingual clusterfucks - and they are perhaps the most potent and precise of any Palme d'Or nominee in years - those that know Ade's previous films (The Forest for the Trees, Everyone Else) should also expect a work that is achingly human and nuanced, working marvelously as both an intimate and awkward study of a father-daughter relationship and as an immersive look at late-phase capitalism in Europe. It is in the way Ade balances these potentially disparate tones where the true genius and mastery of the film lies. The results are an utterly profound delight.

Toni Erdmann is currently playing in the US in select theaters with further expansion in the weeks to come

Still Night, Still Light (Mes nuits feront écho) (Sophie Goyette, Canada/Mexico) October 18th at home in Los Angeles

One of the reasons we watch films is to see if we can unearth something of ourselves in others' work. In this way it is a search for kindred spirits across strange and distant lands that fall so close to home one might not even know that their seekers' heart is their own. Sophie Goyette's feature debut is one of those "kindred spirit" films.

Living in the shadow of great loss, a young Québecois woman travels to Mexico where she become a piano teacher for an affluent family. This is the first story in a mesmerizing work that slowly expands outward and inward simultaneously, working like a tapestry spread over the lapping waves of an ocean, slowly revealing two more stories... two more perspectives... two more echoes...

Still Night, Still Light is an austere meditation on grief, the musical brain and the power of intuition and memory. Goyette's storytelling craft and ingenuity transcends generations, cultures and language, and is nothing less than a complete and singular vision from a rising talent. Indeed, with one or two more films in check, Goyette could be in the same league as metaphysical minimalists like Carlos Reygadas and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. As such, I greatly anticipate further festival play in 2017 and beyond.

The Family (dir. Shumin Liu, China/Australia) November 13th at home in Los Angeles

The Family is nothing short of a revelatory debut and one of the greatest films on domestic life in contemporary China (or perhaps anywhere) to grace the silver screen.

Following an elderly couple as they visit their adult children across the vast and varied landscapes of 21s century China, Liu's gentle and simple approach to what acts as a family album in both landscapes and portraiture is heavily reminiscent of Ozu films, namely Tokyo Story, Edward Yang's Yi-Yi, as well Kiarostami's more ethnographic focused works like the the Koker trilogy and Winds Will Carry Us.

Perfectly encapsulating the changing tide of the country, its politics and its people, I am still reeling weeks later from Liu's monumental and singular vision. From the rich and nuanced performances of the non-actors, to the thematics and poetic motifs laced between the film's beguiling naturalism I can't help but be smitten. Indeed, the film is so soothing as to be wholly absorbing by even the seemingly simplest of domestic rituals like cooking. As such, this is one of the rare cinematic works that finds the holiness in the everyday.

I am very honored to be a part of the Slamdance programming team that will be premiering the film in the U.S. at the 2017 Slamdance Film Festival on January 22nd in Park City, Utah. Hopefully this means a proper release down the line. So yes, if any distributors happen upon this post, please take note

I am Not Your Negro (dir. Raoul Peck, France/USA) December 14th at Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, Los Angeles

While I am generally adverse to using hyperbole such as "the most important ", I feel fine in making the argument that James Baldwin is the most important American author of the 20th century.

Raoul Peck's documentary uses Baldwin's sketches for his unfinished book on Malcom X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers as the backbone for not only a soaring, passionate look into the mind of a great human, but a wonderfully layered look at Black America, White America, what America really is... a nation built on terror, hatred, genocide, oppression, cowardice, racism, consumerism and the idealistic fantasies we all float on via the air waves of the media.

Peck masterfully weaves archival news footage, Hollywood films, TV interviews, lectures, industrial films and photography to create a seamless motion picture of such captivating force and eloquence that I was often left weeping. As this is the tale of Black America that means it must also be an indictment of the media (quite often that means our beloved cinema as in cinema being a White force) and the power behind it, and as Baldwin says, "all over the world White doesn't mean white people. White means Power and Power means Chase-Manhattan Bank."

Samuel L. Jackson takes on the task of reading Baldwin's text and he doesn't just operate as a narrator, he is reading as Baldwin. This is a performance through and through, and one of his finest.

As a document of a country, as a portrait of a man, and of a people, the film weaves a complexity that becomes so stark as to be nothing less than astounding. And that is quite simply because it is all still 100% relevant. When Baldwin states that history is not the past, it is right now because it lives with us everyday, you better believe it.

I Am Not Your Negro releases in the US on February 3rd

Happy Hour (dir. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Japan) December 17th at home in Los Angeles

We begin with a sequence that feels like the ending of a film. A group of female friends in their late thirties travel up a mountain for a picnic. It unexpectedly rains, but they make the best of it, talking about future outings they may share together. As such, watching their lives unfold over the next five hours it may seem, to put their emotional journeys in purely cinematic terms, like a slow dissolve to black only until we realize that it has all been a very gradual fade in.

Indeed, the dynamics at play here are wholly transportive and totally moving. As a nuanced and astute study on the often myopic institution of marriage, the ebb and flow of love and the desire to be noticed, not to mention the primal power of touch, Happy Hour is perhaps unlike any other film I have seen in the past decade. Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi is meticulous and generous in his form; painting a varied yet steady psychic landscape that is both visible and invisible, charged and subdued. Anger is stark under the eyes of etiquette and guilt, while desire is contrasted with bitterness and resentment, so blown out as if to be totally crunched black.

But more than anything Happy Hour shows the resilience of female friendship in a way I don't think I've ever seen so thoroughly explored in film. The lead performances from Sachie Tanaka, Hazuki Kikuchi, Maiko Mihara and Rira Kawamira are note perfect and full of such astounding humanity that one is consistently emptied of emotion, if only because we must be ready and willing to fill ourselves up again. In this way it is a pleasure and an honor to get to know each of these women. To recognize them so completely in their power, resolve, camaraderie and fortitude is a gift.

As a humanist work on the changing tides of womanhood in Japan, and especially the feminine will of intuition, Happy Hour is for the ages.

Cameraperson (dir. Kirsten Johnson, USA) December 24th at Laemmle's Playhouse 7, Pasadena, California

During every film festival there is at least one title you plan to see, even get a ticket to see, and for a variety of reasons, you end up missing it. Cameraperson was the film that got away from me during Sundance 2016. When I finally caught up with the film one Saturday morning late in December, I felt grateful to have missed it when I did. For this is a film that plays much better outside the hustle and bustle of festival going.

In what is hands down the most effortless and consistently profound watch of the year, documentary cinematographer Kirsten Johnson (The Invisible War, Citizenfour) threads together raw and unused footage from her decades long career into a sumptuous soul-stirring memoir and visual essay. While we get a keen and nuanced sense of Johnson's process and artistry, with sketches of her family life, the film works as a cornucopia of narratives, a veritable symphony of humanity, and Johnson is the open embrace to receive it all with warmth and stark insight, weaving many lives through one life.

In this way, Cameraperson works astoundingly well as a meditation on crisis and conflict the world over, a chronicle of the perseverance found in and for everyday, a sweeping, all encompassing look at the lives of women everywhere, and perhaps most notably, a poem on mothers and their children.   Johnson and her editors masterfully connect stories, places and people, sometimes decades and thousands of miles apart, to help illustrate and build off of each other in emotionally resonate and metaphor rich ways. For what does the death of a newborn in Nigeria have to do with the anguish of a boxer in Brooklyn? Well, in the slipstream of life, of a life magnified, amplified and warmed by the lens, just about everything. As such we get s perfect sense of what has deeply mattered and shaped Johnson over the past 25 years. On the subject of cinema as an advocacy tool for human and civil rights, Cameraperson makes an extraordinary case for the power of the medium, and in doing so becomes an in-depth exploration of its ethics and the dangers inherent in its observational nature, while also revealing how the narrative form can be far more mercurial and flexible than we usually take it to be. 

In closing, this is one of those rare pieces of cinema, of total art as life, which you walk away from brimming with gratitude for sheer existence and the beguiling inter-connected tissue of the universe. Indeed, I feel I have a greater sense of humanity, the world, and perhaps even myself.

Cameraperson will get the Criterion Blu-ray treatment on February 17th

My Favorite Films of 2016: The Complete Ranked List

Or: 2016 may be the most bountiful year for cinema in my adult life

1. The Dreamed Path (Angela Schanelec, Germany)

2. Cameraperson (Kirsten Johnson, USA)

3. Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade, Germany/Austria/Romania)

4. Happy Hour (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Japan)

5. The Family (Shumin Liu, China/Australia)

6. Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra, Colombia) (pictured)

7. I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck, France/USA)

8. Dark Night (Tim Sutton, USA)

9. Louder Than Bombs (Joachim Trier, Norway/France/Denmark /USA)

10. The Untamed (Amat Escalante, Mexico/Denmark)

11. Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, USA)

12. O.J.: Made in America (Ezra Edelman, USA)

13. 20th Century Women (Mike Mills, USA)

14. Paterson (Jim Jarmusch, USA)

15. Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt, USA)

16. Still Night, Still Light (Mes nuits feront écho) (Sophie Goyette, Canada/Mexico)

17. The Girl with All the Gifts (Colm McCarthy, UK)

18. The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook, South Korea)

19. Christine (Antonio Campos, USA)

20. Tower (Keith Maitland, USA)

21. Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan, USA)

22. Swiss Army Man (Daniels, USA)

23. Embers (Claire Carré, USA/Poland)

24. Driftwood (Paul Taylor, USA)

25. I, Daniel Blake (Ken Loach, UK)

26. Raw (Julie Ducournau, France)

27. American Honey (Andrea Arnold, UK/USA)

28. The Salesman (Asghar Farhadi, Iran/France)

29. Operation Avalanche (Matt Johnson, Canada/USA)

30. Colossal (Nacho Vigalondo, Spain/Canada)

31. Things to Come (Mia Hansen-Løve, France)

32. Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, USA)

33. If There's a Hell Below (Nathan Williams, USA)

34. HyperNormalisation (Adarm Curtis, UK)

35. The Wailing (Na Hong-jin, South Korea)

36. Aloys (Tobias Nölle, Switzerland)

37. Cemetery of Splendour (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/UK)

38. Hunt for the Wilderpeople (Taika Waititi, New Zealand)

39. Neruda (Pablo Larrain, Chile)

40. Mad (Robert Putka, USA)

41. Evolution (Lucile Hadzihalilovic, France)

42. Hell or High Water (David Mackenzie, USA)

43. Everybody Wants Some!! (Richard Linklater, USA)

44. I, Olga Hepnarova (Petr Kazda, Tomás Weinreb, Czech Republic)

45. The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, UK)

46. The Childhood of a Leader (Brady Corbet, UK/France)

47. The Nice Guys (Shane Black, USA)

48. Spa Night (Andrew Ahn, USA)

49. All These Sleepless Night (Michal Marczak, Poland)

50. Kate Plays Christine (Robert Greene, USA)

51. The Demons (Philippe Lesage, Canada)

52. Collective: Unconscious (Various, USA)

53. Weiner (Josh Kriegman, Elyse Steinberg, USA)

54. Sing Street (John Carney, Ireland)

55. Excursions (Daniel Martinico, USA)

56. Kaili Blues (Gan Bi, China)

57. City of Gold (Laura Gabebrt, USA)

58. Wiener-Dog- (Todd Solondz, USA)

59. Actor Martinez (Mike Ott, Nathan Silver, USA)

60. Don't Think Twice (Mike BIrbiglia, USA)

61. Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

62. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (Akiva Schaffer, Jorma Taccone, USA)

63. Hunky Dory (Michael Curtis Johnson, USA)