- The Immigrant
Now that my annual countdown of favorite films of the year has been published, I should note two glaring omissions from the list. James Gray’s The Immigrant and Claude Lanzmann’s Last of the Unjust received their first Chicago runs this spring, but they both premiered at the 2013 Chicago International Film Festival, which makes them, per our rules, ineligible for inclusion this year. Nevertheless they towered over nearly everything else I saw in 2014.
- National Gallery Frederick Wiseman’s study of the National Gallery in London isn’t about art so much as the nature of perception. Which of the two radically different interpretations we hear of Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors is “correct”? When Wiseman shows us the painstaking restorations of classic paintings, is he recording a communion between the past and present, a futile attempt to arrest the passage of time, or an act of creation in itself? As usual, America’s greatest documentarian offers no concrete answers, making us look harder at movies than we usually do and decide for ourselves.
- National Gallery
- Exhibition It took me a few viewings of this quietly unnerving British art film before I could start to get a handle on what writer-director Joanna Hogg was up to, and even now I’m not entirely sure. It’s never clear whether the artist couple (played by musician Viv Albertine and real-life artist Liam Gillick) are undergoing a crisis or whether they’ve always been passive-aggressive kooks. The rigorous framing and sound design might recall a good number of European art filmmakers, but Hogg uses them to puzzling ends that are distinctly her own, presenting human beings as though they were an alien race.
- Exhibition
- The Homesman Tommy Lee Jones’s second theatrical film as director—an eccentric and angry tale of abject failure on the American frontier—confirms the promise of his first, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005). I hope we don’t have to wait another decade before he directs again.
- Camille Claudel 1915
- Level Five Chris Marker’s 1997 fiction-documentary hybrid (one of the key works of this major filmmaker’s late period) finally got distributed in the U.S. this year. A fictional computer programmer tries to design an interactive online game in which players “re-create” the Battle of Okinawa by retrieving historical materials from a decentralized virtual library, then ordering events down to the last detail. As she discovers more and more details of the atrocities that accompanied the battle, she tries to rewrite the course of history, only to find that the program has acquired a will of its own. The movie is prescient in its musings on how the Internet effects the way we think, and Marker’s free-associative editing still feels fresh.
- Only Lovers Left Alive
