As usual, as a caveat, I’ll start with a list of movies I wish I had the opportunity to see, but haven’t yet.
The Housemaid, The Secret Agent, Train Dreams, Die My Love, Hedda, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, It Was Just an Accident, Urchin, A House of Dynamite, Good Boy, Twinless, Splitsville, Marshmallow, Hamnet, Marty Supreme, No Other Choice, Is This Thing On?, Eternity, Dust Bunny, Exit 8 (the last two were heavily marketed where I am, but never got a release). There might be others I just didn’t remember when writing this, but this is probably enough.
My intuition was that the year was not good, but looking at what I have seen this year, it turns out that actually it was pretty hard to cut this down to just ten. Apparently, it was a good year. At the same time, thus far there hasn’t been a movie that I’ve seen that has left me a human wreck or amazed or going back to it multiple times. At least not one that was released this year. So, I guess for me the year was good, but not great. The local maximum wasn’t very high.
Some notes: My original shortlist had a movie from Finland, Sweden and Denmark, but I cut them all. What remained was two (2) movies from Norway. I would say that’s unusual, but I think there’s been some very good movies from there in recent times (like The Worst Person in the World and Innocents). Other countries featured: Spain, UK, Australia, USA. Kind of boring. Maybe I should have waited until I have the opportunity to see some more movies.
The list, in no particular order…
Bugonia
Lanthimos is at it again. Actually, I wasn’t a huge fan of this movie, but even a relatively weak Lanthimos is still great overall.
Two men kidnap the billionaire CEO of some kind of a wellness company. They chose her, because they believe she is an alien and now they need to figure out how to save humanity from her and her people. Well, if she is an alien.
Not nearly as weird as some of Lanthimos’ other works, but definitely weird enough. I don’t know if the ending is really satisfying, but that happens. Way too often, actually. Still, the journey is in itself very interesting.
Affeksjonsverdi or Sentimental Value
An absent father is trying to get back into the lives of his daughters, but the daughters are quite resistant to all of it.
The way people talk about this movie, this seems to be a very strong Oscars contender for this season. It has a lot going for it. The biggest block of Oscar voters are actors and this is definitely a movie which hinges on the performances and they are great. Also, the father is a movie director and movies with themes around entertainment industry often do well. (See, Shakespeare in Love, The Artist, Green Book, Birdman, even CODA in a way, La La Land… no, wait…)
It’s kind of a cliche to call some inanimate object a character in the movie, but here they really work to do just that with the house in which much of the movie happens. The first part of the movie is fully dedicated to it.
Weapons
I have only seen this once, so I can’t really say how much rewatchability there is, but on a first watch the mystery and how it was set up was great, but the movie isn’t really even about that. It’s much more about grieving and coming to terms with loss. It just happens to be framed in this supernatural scenario.
My favorite character is actually a little off the theme. He is just an addict trying to do his thing very desperately and gets entwined in things he didn’t want to.
Sinners
Another potential big winner at Oscars.
Basically just a lesson on black culture in the American south. I have to say I didn’t love the last act as much as the first two. It felt like a whole other movie crammed into 40 minutes or so. There’s probably themes there I don’t fully understand, so not liking that part might just be my inability to read it.
Bring Her Back
From the brothers who made Talk to Me a couple of years back. This is similarly dark. I love how the magic in the movie is presented. The villain is trying to recreate a spell she found on an old Russian VHS tape. That’s a nice detail. How did she get the tape? Who knows and it doesn’t really matter.
Sorry, Baby
A very good debut movie. It feels like a great take on the complexities of emotions in a difficult situation. At the same time, it is dryly funny in a way I love. Like, life is never just simple. There are things going on outside of the immediate problem and sometimes they are funny even if the problem at hand isn’t.
Black Bag
This is kind of a modern version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. There’s some high-tech things and there’s this feeling that every character needs to be very restrained about how they approach things and what they talk about. Yet, some just can’t, or they have this outrageous personality just to hide their true intentions or maybe they are just planning on hiding something in the future.
Together
The trailer kind of lies about the movie through deceptive editing, but fine… It happens a lot.
A relationship is on the rocks after a couple moves to the countryside from the city. There’s complications here because they don’t both feel the same way. However, something happens and the two of them find themselves to be drawn together physically by a mysterious force and it’s hard to do anything about it.
Den stygge stesøsteren or The Ugly Stepsister
Cinderella but from the point of view of one of the stepsisters. It is horrific in so many ways that it’s just great. It goes into body horror territory as the stepsister tries to make herself beautiful.
It does have a great storybook feel but that is largely just the stepsister’s imagination.
Sirât
The movie is explained in the beginning, but based on what I have read from various critics, many people just don’t notice it.
It’s about listening to techno in the desert, but here’s the thing: if you are familiar with techno just through movies, you kind of miss the the part of the genre where it’s more about getting into a trance-like state. That’s why they used to call it trance back in the 90s. However, the movie kind of changes it’s themes twice. It’s not the same movie when it gets to the end… but again, we were told this in the beginning.