A Year of Troubled Dreaming
The Film Snob names his favorite films of the past year. It was a good year for movies, if your viewing is not confined to Hollywood films. Many of the best reflected the unease of our times. Here is my annual “favorites” list: as I’ve explained before, I do this a couple of months later than most film critics because the quality pictures from late in the previous year take longer to get to my neck of the woods than to LA, New York, or Chicago. I also need to say that some films, especially those in languages other than English, may take from a year to a year and a half to be available for viewing here in the States. So there are more than a few films on my list that are technically dated from 2022, or even ‘21. The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer) is really in a class by itself. Ostensibly about a happy German family—mother, father, and five children—living in a prosperous home with servants, a flower garden, and swimming pool, we soon discover that the father is Rudolf Höss, a high-ranking Nazi officer, and their home is located right next to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, of which he is the commandant. The idea is as simple and as chilling as that, yet Glazer keeps building on this premise to ever greater heights. It’s not just that the everyday interactions and minor struggles of this family convey a grotesque absurdity in the light of what we, the audience, know. It’s that we experience a kind of existential terror through the movie’s depiction of people treating as ordinary that which should freeze the soul of anyone with a conscience. We are forced to implicate ourselves in the normalizing of the unthinkable. The Zone of Interest is one of the most profound meditations on evil ever filmed. A New Old Play (Qiu Jiongjiong) is a masterful epic telling the story of a fictional Chinese opera troupe which covers the tragic and tumultuous history of China from the 1920s through the’70s. The style features the brilliant artificiality of the theater, with its masks, costumes and painted sets, alongside extensive tracking shots that places the viewer in the midst of the symbolic procession of the long and eventful life of a famous clown. A framing device shows this old man being confronted after his death by two spirits of the underworld, who accompany him to the afterlife while he reminisces about the many phases of his career. The film takes a darkly skeptical point of view about Chinese politics and its upheavals, the title signaling how the underlying conditions of social oppression are unchanged despite the superficial claims of revolution. Alcarràs (Carla Simón) is an exquisitely composed film telling of an extended family of peach farmers in the Catalonia region of Spain. They are about to lose the farm to an owner that wants to convert the land for industrial use, and in this difficult process we experience the family from the point of view of each of its members, from the parents, uncles and aunts to the teenage children and little kids. Simón’s supple and versatile style brings this little vanishing world to rich and engaging life. Alcarràs translates our bond to the land we live on into beautiful, heart-rending poetry. Unrest (Cyril Schäublin) clarifies the history of modern political struggle by taking us to an earlier, more fundamental period. In 1877, in a village in Switzerland, the owners of a clock and watch factory are trying to create the quickest and most streamlined production of watches they can by regimenting their workers’ every task, while the workers meanwhile organize an anarchist commune. It’s a film of ironic tranquility, in which the industrial and workers’ revolutions calmly work against each other’s interests. With detached humor and compassion, Unrest beautifully portrays the origins of our current d...
An episode of the Flicks with The Film Snob podcast, hosted by Chris Dashiell, titled "A Year of Troubled Dreaming" was published on February 21, 2024 and runs 3 minutes.
February 21, 2024 ·3m · Flicks with The Film Snob
Summary
The Film Snob names his favorite films of the past year. It was a good year for movies, if your viewing is not confined to Hollywood films. Many of the best reflected the unease of our times. Here is my annual “favorites” list: as I’ve explained before, I do this a couple of months later than most film critics because the quality pictures from late in the previous year take longer to get to my neck of the woods than to LA, New York, or Chicago. I also need to say that some films, especially those in languages other than English, may take from a year to a year and a half to be available for viewing here in the States. So there are more than a few films on my list that are technically dated from 2022, or even ‘21. The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer) is really in a class by itself. Ostensibly about a happy German family—mother, father, and five children—living in a prosperous home with servants, a flower garden, and swimming pool, we soon discover that the father is Rudolf Höss, a high-ranking Nazi officer, and their home is located right next to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, of which he is the commandant. The idea is as simple and as chilling as that, yet Glazer keeps building on this premise to ever greater heights. It’s not just that the everyday interactions and minor struggles of this family convey a grotesque absurdity in the light of what we, the audience, know. It’s that we experience a kind of existential terror through the movie’s depiction of people treating as ordinary that which should freeze the soul of anyone with a conscience. We are forced to implicate ourselves in the normalizing of the unthinkable. The Zone of Interest is one of the most profound meditations on evil ever filmed. A New Old Play (Qiu Jiongjiong) is a masterful epic telling the story of a fictional Chinese opera troupe which covers the tragic and tumultuous history of China from the 1920s through the’70s. The style features the brilliant artificiality of the theater, with its masks, costumes and painted sets, alongside extensive tracking shots that places the viewer in the midst of the symbolic procession of the long and eventful life of a famous clown. A framing device shows this old man being confronted after his death by two spirits of the underworld, who accompany him to the afterlife while he reminisces about the many phases of his career. The film takes a darkly skeptical point of view about Chinese politics and its upheavals, the title signaling how the underlying conditions of social oppression are unchanged despite the superficial claims of revolution. Alcarràs (Carla Simón) is an exquisitely composed film telling of an extended family of peach farmers in the Catalonia region of Spain. They are about to lose the farm to an owner that wants to convert the land for industrial use, and in this difficult process we experience the family from the point of view of each of its members, from the parents, uncles and aunts to the teenage children and little kids. Simón’s supple and versatile style brings this little vanishing world to rich and engaging life. Alcarràs translates our bond to the land we live on into beautiful, heart-rending poetry. Unrest (Cyril Schäublin) clarifies the history of modern political struggle by taking us to an earlier, more fundamental period. In 1877, in a village in Switzerland, the owners of a clock and watch factory are trying to create the quickest and most streamlined production of watches they can by regimenting their workers’ every task, while the workers meanwhile organize an anarchist commune. It’s a film of ironic tranquility, in which the industrial and workers’ revolutions calmly work against each other’s interests. With detached humor and compassion, Unrest beautifully portrays the origins of our current d...
Episode Description
The Film Snob names his favorite films of the past year.
It was a good year for movies, if your viewing is not confined to Hollywood films. Many of the best reflected the unease of our times.
Here is my annual “favorites” list: as I’ve explained before, I do this a couple of months later than most film critics because the quality pictures from late in the previous year take longer to get to my neck of the woods than to LA, New York, or Chicago. I also need to say that some films, especially those in languages other than English, may take from a year to a year and a half to be available for viewing here in the States. So there are more than a few films on my list that are technically dated from 2022, or even ‘21.
The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer) is really in a class by itself. Ostensibly about a happy German family—mother, father, and five children—living in a prosperous home with servants, a flower garden, and swimming pool, we soon discover that the father is Rudolf Höss, a high-ranking Nazi officer, and their home is located right next to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, of which he is the commandant. The idea is as simple and as chilling as that, yet Glazer keeps building on this premise to ever greater heights. It’s not just that the everyday interactions and minor struggles of this family convey a grotesque absurdity in the light of what we, the audience, know. It’s that we experience a kind of existential terror through the movie’s depiction of people treating as ordinary that which should freeze the soul of anyone with a conscience. We are forced to implicate ourselves in the normalizing of the unthinkable. The Zone of Interest is one of the most profound meditations on evil ever filmed.
A New Old Play (Qiu Jiongjiong) is a masterful epic telling the story of a fictional Chinese opera troupe which covers the tragic and tumultuous history of China from the 1920s through the’70s. The style features the brilliant artificiality of the theater, with its masks, costumes and painted sets, alongside extensive tracking shots that places the viewer in the midst of the symbolic procession of the long and eventful life of a famous clown. A framing device shows this old man being confronted after his death by two spirits of the underworld, who accompany him to the afterlife while he reminisces about the many phases of his career. The film takes a darkly skeptical point of view about Chinese politics and its upheavals, the title signaling how the underlying conditions of social oppression are unchanged despite the superficial claims of revolution.
Alcarràs (Carla Simón) is an exquisitely composed film telling of an extended family of peach farmers in the Catalonia region of Spain. They are about to lose the farm to an owner that wants to convert the land for industrial use, and in this difficult process we experience the family from the point of view of each of its members, from the parents, uncles and aunts to the teenage children and little kids. Simón’s supple and versatile style brings this little vanishing world to rich and engaging life. Alcarràs translates our bond to the land we live on into beautiful, heart-rending poetry.
Unrest (Cyril Schäublin) clarifies the history of modern political struggle by taking us to an earlier, more fundamental period. In 1877, in a village in Switzerland, the owners of a clock and watch factory are trying to create the quickest and most streamlined production of watches they can by regimenting their workers’ every task, while the workers meanwhile organize an anarchist commune. It’s a film of ironic tranquility, in which the industrial and workers’ revolutions calmly work against each other’s interests. With detached humor and compassion, Unrest beautifully portrays the origins of our current d...