Happy New Year! As we settle into 2024, here are my favourite film discoveries of the previous year.
Sneakers (1992) Martin Bishop (Robert Redford) is a criminal for hire with a twist: law-abiding companies hire him to expose the chinks in their armour. When he and his crew grow suspicious about their latest assignment, they uncover a conspiracy they’ll have to scramble to thwart. Beloved by hackers as one of the most accurate depictions of their profession ever put on screen, Phil Alden Robinson’s heist film is witty, imaginative, impeccably cast—the multigenerational ensemble includes Sidney Poitier, Dan Aykroyd, David Strathairn and River Phoenix—and just plain old fun. When they say they don’t make ’em like this anymore, they mean films like Sneakers.
Surviving Desire (1991) My introduction to the singular world of writer-director Hal Hartley. Lovelorn English literature professor Jude (Martin Donovan, wonderfully arch yet earnest) pines for one of his students. To his delight, she reciprocates his feelings, but their romance doesn’t go quite as planned. I was largely baffled the first time I watched Surviving Desire. The film is so outré it’s nigh unclassifiable and the humour so cockeyed I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be laughing let alone when. Still, I felt compelled to watch it again.
Thank goodness. Hartley’s characters have no idea of the surrealism of their behaviour or environment, which makes for delightful, dizzying viewing. (Jude, angrily, to a friend on a most trying morning: “Listen, pal. You can’t waltz in here, use my toaster and start spouting universal truth without qualification!”). Just when you think the film has peaked, a dance sequence pops out of nowhere, tossed beautifully off the cuff. The Criterion Channel’s Hartley retrospective included all the films he and Donovan have made together. I watched every single one.
The Wedding Banquet (1993) Gao Wai-Tung (Winston Chao), a Taiwanese immigrant, lives in New York with his partner Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein). Wai-Tung is gay but hasn’t come out to his parents, partly on the principle that what they don’t know can’t hurt them. When their demands that he marry and start a family become impossible to ignore, he decides to wed Wei-Wei (May Chin), who needs a green card, and hopes this will placate them. Naturally, things go awry. Ang Lee’s witty, thoughtful film works both as a romantic comedy and as a sharply observed study of the immigrant experience, the generation gap and the tangled bonds that make up a life.
Police Story 3: Supercop (1992) In the early nineties, someone had the idea to pair Michelle Yeoh and Jackie Chan in a film and treat them as equals. The result was Police Story 3: Supercop, for which much thanks. The villain is memorably unhinged, the action is dazzling (especially the finale) and the jokes actually land. The stunts in the police training ground and dangling off a helicopter prove Chan is Buster Keaton’s true heir.
The Day After Trinity (1981) A haunting portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the experiment that changed the world. Paul Frees’ deceptively simple narration takes you by the hand and leads you through Oppenheimer’s path to the bomb: his dazzling intellect, his natural aloofness giving way to an interest in worldly matters, the rise of Nazism and, at last, Pearl Harbor. One scientist interviewed for the film puts it best: Oppenheimer sold his soul in exchange for unimaginable resources, but didn’t conceive of the consequences. He had to live with them. And so do we.
The Comfort of Strangers (1990) Few screen couples have ever glowed with beauty like Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson do in Paul Schrader’s thriller. They play Colin and Mary, an English couple on holiday in Venice who fall in with a wealthy older man and his wife (Christopher Walken and Helen Mirren). Or should that be fall prey to? Adapted by Harold Pinter from a book by Ian McEwan, The Comfort of Strangers is the cinematic equivalent of drowning in amber. It isn’t quite satisfying; it’s too elliptical to be enigmatic. But it lingered in my mind for days and refused to be forgotten.
Phantom Lady (1944) The plot is absurdly high concept: a man is accused of killing his wife and his only alibi is a mystery woman no one can find and whom he can only identify by the hat she was wearing when they met. A noir classic as preposterous as it is stylish, Phantom Lady makes for an exhilarating ride. I need to see more of Franchot Tone.
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