Jim Jarmusch started out as kind of an eccentric indie filmmaker, but over a career spanning 45 years, he’s become a legendary eccentric indie filmmaker. His latest movie is called Father Mother Sister Brother. It’s an anthology film, three short stories on a similar theme, put together to make one movie. This is a work of a mature artist—it’s about adult children and their parents. It’s composed largely of talking, but most of the humor and significance lie in what is not said. “Father,” the first story, begins with an adult brother and sister, played by Adam Driver and Mayim…

Chris Dashiell celebrates his favorite films from last year. At the end of a year, film critics start putting out “Top 10” lists or “Top 20,” or whatever. They’re fun to do—going over all the movies you saw in a year and making a list of your favorites is fun. And for people really into films, they’re fun to read as well. But it still gets taken the wrong way, especially since the lists are often framed as “The Best Films of the Year.” Even a very busy movie reviewer can’t see everything, so the claim that a list is…

Jia Jhangke uses footage spanning twenty years to present this portrait of the incredible changes that have taken place in China. Jia Jhangke is, to my mind, the greatest living director in mainland China. His latest work, Caught by the Tides, actually seems to be a completely new kind of creation. We begin in 2001, with candid footage of mostly middle aged women nostalgically sharing and singing traditional songs with each other, including some from Shanxi opera, in a large and plain-looking room. They are former opera singers having a twenty year reunion. The use of songs as a way…

A man seeking refuge in a coastal city of 1977 Brazil doesn’t know that two men have been hired to kill him, in this brilliant portrait of life under dictatorship. The Secret Agent is the name of a new film by Brazilian writer and director Kleber Mendonça Filho. Right from the start with the title, we have ambiguity. It’s not a spy movie—no one is engaged in espionage. Rather, it’s presenting the experience that is prompted by the idea of a secret agent: always be on your guard, danger lurks around the corner, conceal who you are. In historical terms,…

Considered a failure upon its release in 1984, David Lynch’s version of Frank Herbert’s novel already displays the bold absurdism that the director would take further in his later films. I told someone the other day that I had seen all of the films by David Lynch. But later I realized that I’d forgotten Dune, from 1984, the one widely considered a failure. The completist in me decided I had to watch it. I’ve grown to like Lynch’s work, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise that I enjoyed Dune as well—but somehow it was. Lynch took his chance to…

Grigoriy Kozintsev’s epic version of Hamlet presents the tragedy through stark visual means. Many Russian artists have loved and celebrated Shakespeare. Grigoriy Kozintsev, one of the great directors of Soviet cinema, was among them. I had seen his King Lear, from 1971, and was impressed. But I recently watched his masterwork from 1964, seven years earlier: Hamlet. This time I’m more than just impressed. I think it’s one of the greatest Shakespeare films. The first thing that struck me about this epic treatment of Hamlet was the castle, a massive, awe-inspiring medieval hulk looming over the story like a dark…

The story of a search for the body of a Vietnamese soldier killed during the war is set against the difficult lives of two young men working in a coal mine. Việt and Nam, the second feature film from Vietnamese director Trương Minh Quý, begins with two young men working in a coal mine. The conditions are wretched, their bodies are black with coal, and—as we soon discover—they love each other. Much of the introductory section patiently lets us get to know these two in the customary darkness of their work environment. On a rare break, we see them eating…

Joachim Trier’s drama about two daughters confronted with the father who abandoned them uses acting as a symbol of the ways adult children navigate their families. The premise of Sentimental Value, the new movie by Norwegian director Joachim Trier, has a classic simplicity, similar to some of Ingmar Bergman’s films about families. Two sisters cope with their difficult father when he returns to the scene after the death of their mother. The challenge of dramatizing such dynamics is to make it fresh, to explore new angles of an age-old situation. Trier, and his regular co-screenwriter Eskil Vogt have done that,…

Jafar Panahi’s film about revenge and responsibility tells of a group of people who think they have found the man who tortured them in prison, but won’t take action until they’re certain about his identity. A film style that is deceptively simple with a profound effect—this is a rare and wonderful thing. Iranian director Jafar Panahi has a style like that, and never more than his recent film, winner of the Golden Palm at Cannes, called It Was Just an Accident. The title is from the opening sequence: a man is driving his wife and young daughter home from an…

A detective investigating a series of murders in rural China is confronted with his own instability. “Self-aware cinema” is a nickname, that I just made up, to describe a kind of film that uses its style, genre, and characters to symbolize meanings that go beyond and even subvert the movie’s linear narrative. Well, that definition proves how hard it is to speak clearly about this kind of film. The idea isn’t new, but now it’s become sharper and more prevalent. An interesting recent example is Only the River Flows, from Chinese director Wei Shujun. The story takes place in a…