“Parasite”
The winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes film festival, Bong Joon Ho’s dark farce (pictured) revolves around a close-knit but struggling family which lies and cheats its way into a well-off household. To mention any more plot details would be to risk spoiling the year’s most jaw-dropping twist. Suffice it to say that, as well as being a lacerating social satire, “Parasite” is amazingly good fun.
Inspired by “Moby Dick” and other Herman Melville writings, Robert Eggers’s black-and-white fever dream is half flatshare sitcom, half gothic-horror ordeal. Robert Pattinson stars as a novice lighthouse-keeper who is stuck on a remote storm-battered island with Willem Dafoe’s maddeningly tyrannical old-timer. Vindictive seagulls and supernatural entities gather, but hell is other people. Visionary, unique and intense enough to bring on seasickness.
“Atlantics” (“Atlantique”)
Mati Diop’s spellbinding debut begins with a young woman (Mame Bineta Sane) being pushed into marrying a wealthy playboy in Dakar while her soulmate (Ibrahima Traore) labours at a construction site for eternally deferred wages. For a while, “Atlantics” seems to be a powerful social-realist drama about legalised slavery in Senegal, but a magical twist makes it altogether more intriguing.
A hallucinatory cocktail of “Lord of the Flies” and “Apocalypse Now”, Alejandro Landes’s “Monos” takes its name from a ragtag group of teenage guerilla soldiers, stationed on a spectacular Colombian mountaintop. Their daily routines consists of arcane rituals and bursts of savage violence, and when they drag an American hostage down to a rainforest, things become even stranger. As extravagantly surreal as a fairy-tale, but as believable as any documentary.
“By the Grace of God” (“Grâce à Dieu”)
François Ozon dramatises a true story of clerical child abuse in Lyon, telling the story not from the perspective of a reporter or a detective, for a change, but from that of the campaigning victims themselves. “By the Grace of God” is gripping, rigorous and sympathetic. However enraging it may be to see the church closing ranks around a sexual predator, Mr Ozon’s message is that speaking out about such crimes is always good for the soul.
“The Street”
Zed Nelson's intimate documentary records the gentrification of Hoxton Street in London over the past four years, as hipster coffee shops and galleries crowd out pubs and launderettes, and they in turn are overshadowed by corporate offices and luxury skyscrapers. If a state-of-the-nation novel took in austerity, immigration, Brexit and the Grenfell Tower fire, it could not have more distinctive characters, richer storylines, more exasperating conflicts or more tragicomic ironies.
Martin Scorsese reunites with Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, the stars of “Goodfellas” and “Casino”, for another virtuosic gangster saga. Ranging over six decades of American crime and politics—with a running time of three-and-a-half hours—“The Irishman” features Mr De Niro as a stolid hitman and Mr Pesci as a merciless Mafia kingpin, while Al Pacino joins the party as Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters president. Mr Scorsese retains all of his usual flair, but he adds a strain of melancholy.
“Apollo 11”
Just in time for the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, Todd Douglas Miller’s immersive documentary chronicles the Apollo 11 mission using a wealth of crisp, candid, previously unseen footage shot in Mission Control, onboard the rocket and on the lunar surface. There are no voiceovers or retrospective interviews. Instead, the proceedings unfold in the present tense, astonishing the viewer anew with their breathtaking scale and the matter-of-fact composure of the three astronauts.
Jordan Peele follows the Oscar-nominated “Get Out” with an even more chilling satirical horror movie. In “Us”, a middle-class family is menaced by doppelgängers who may represent their own darker impulses, or America’s homeless, or both. Lupita Nyong’o delivers not one but two of the year’s most riveting performances in a film which begins as a fraught home-invasion thriller and builds into a bold science-fiction epic. It’s funny, too.
Waad Al-Kateab and her husband were working in a hospital in Aleppo when the city was bombarded by Syrian government forces. Her humbling and harrowing documentary, compiled from the videos she shot at the time, takes the viewer as close to the nerve-shredding trauma of life during wartime as any film ever has, although the appalling carnage is punctuated by love, laughter, singing and dancing.
A bestselling author (Christopher Plummer) is found dead in his mansion; his grasping relatives (Jamie Lee Curtis, Chris Evans, Don Johnson) are on the premises; a flamboyant detective (Daniel Craig) is baffled. One of the rare murder-mystery films not to be adapted from an old Agatha Christie or Arthur Conan Doyle story, Rian Johnson’s star-studded country-house whodunnit is a delicious and supremely satisfying feast of twists, jokes and comments on the entitlement of the 1%.
“La Belle Epoque”
Nicolas Bedos’s ingenious high-concept farce stars Daniel Auteuil as a grouchy Parisian newspaper cartoonist who pays a theatre company to recreate the bar where he met his wife in 1974. As he is pulled back and forth between the past and the present, his virtual time-travel may recall “Midnight in Paris” and “The Truman Show”, but the deftness with which Mr Bedos juggles his throng of lovably flawed characters makes “La Belle Epoque” dizzyingly entertaining in its own right.
“Hitsville”
This authorised documentary is nothing but a rose-tinted promotional video for Motown, the pioneering Detroit record company, and its founder Berry Gordy. That doesn’t stop it being a delight. As perfectly crafted and as catchy as a classic Motown single, it’s an inspiring and affectionate tale of collaboration and competition, pragmatic business decisions and happy accidents, black power and interracial friendship. Sunshine on a cloudy day.
Towards the end of the second world war, a German boy (Roman Griffin Davis) is such a fan of Hitler that his imaginary friend is the Führer himself—or a goofy version of the Führer played by the film’s writer-director, Taika Waititi (“Thor: Ragnarok”, “What We Do In The Shadows”). A colourful, feel-good, family-friendly comedy, “Jojo Rabbit” nonetheless has a serious point to make about the essential stupidity of extremist dogma.
Noah Baumbach (“The Squid and the Whale”) examines how love can turn into furious hatred in his wrenchingly painful comedy drama about a bohemian couple’s divorce and custody battle. The moral of “Marriage Story” is that lawyers can turn amicable exes into mortal enemies—but that could be what they need. Both Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver will be Oscar-nominated for their heartbreaking lead performances.