Many of the movies that ranked among my favorites this year were things that, for one practical reason or another, I didn’t get a chance to review at length when they came out. I’ve rectified that with new pieces you can access below, along with my ten runners-up and a year-end list from Ben Sachs. —J.R. Jones
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2. Rambleras One of the most inspiring trends today is the rise of a new, distinctly female-centered art cinema all over Latin and South America. This casually profound comedy from Uruguay (which screened in May at the Chicago Latino Film Festival) not only exemplifies the trend, it feels universal and timeless like few other recent movies. Three women of different ages, all lower-middle-class and desperately lonely, befriend each other and slowly take control of their lives. Writer-director Daniela Speranza presents the ”little” story as though it were the stuff of an MGM musical, decking every frame with eye-popping color and staging balletic camera movements. (This is a movie that would have made Jacques Demy proud.) Speranza spent ten years refining the script as she struggled to get the movie financed, and her effort shows: even the simplest gestures hint at years of experience, and the gentle surface tone, rather than distracting from the sense of disappointment, conveys a hard-won acceptance of human foibles.
- Jimmy P. The first American feature by French filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin (Kings and Queen, A Christmas Tale) is, among other things, a bracing experiment in form. Fittingly its subject is a psychoanalytic experiment that the U.S. military sponsored in the years after World War II, wherein a veteran’s hospital hired a French-Hungarian ethnographer to treat a Blackfoot Indian who suffered brain trauma in the war and had been wrestling with unspecified psychological issues for some time before that. Instead of packaging the events in a familiar dramatic narrative, Desplechin (who wrote the script with Julie Peyr and Kent Jones) adopts the structure of a case study. The movie doesn’t build to any one point; rather it burrows deeper into the characters, inspiring us to marvel at the complexity of the human mind as well as the unique historic circumstances that brought these people together. What develops between Jimmy Picard and Georges Devereux isn’t friendship exactly, but a deep professional sympathy between two painfully shy men. As played by Benicio del Toro and Mathieu Amalric—both excellent, and in very different ways—it’s one of the most thoughtful depictions of male camaraderie I’ve seen in a film.
The Chicago Film Archives preserves midwest history one reel at a timehttp://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/chicago-film-archives-cfa-decade-benefit/Content?oid=15789845
