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“Good is not real, but evil exists!” shouts the protagonist of Alexander Sokurov’s Faust (which recently played at the Music Box), but that line could have been uttered in quite a few other movies this year. The Act of Killing, Bastards, Heli, The Missing Picture, Narco Cultura, Pain & Gain, A Touch of Sin, 12 Years a Slave, and War Witch all center on acts of dehumanizing violence—evil, if you believe there’s such a thing. These movies are concerned not only with atrocities, but with the amoral mindset that allows people to carry them out. (This is also true of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, even though it doesn’t contain any murders.) They vary in the explicitness of their violence, but they seem unified in the mission to confront these subjects head-on. It was a more draining year than usual at the movies—I wonder how that affected concession sales.
Ben Sachs writes about moviegoing every Monday.
