Rushes: The Best of 2023, Sight & Sound's 101 Hidden Gems, Edward Yang Retrospective

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NEWS

Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella, 2022).

• Absurdly early as it may seem, the Best of 2023 lists are starting to arrive. The New York Times published top tens by Manohla Dargis and Alissa Wilkinson (only her third published piece as the Times’s newest movie critic after an illustrious run at Vox), Vulture shared lists from Bilge Ebiri and Allison Willmore, and Richard Brody unveiled his impossible-to-hem-in roundup at the New Yorker (we’ll return to his list in the Readings section). There are some consensus picks—among them, Killers of the Flower Moon, Oppenheimer, Showing Up, and Passages—but there’s an exciting sprawl overall. Meanwhile, Cahiers du Cinéma shared their top ten; Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen was their delightful, well-deserved sleeper choice for film of the year (for more on this entrancing film, revisit Leonardo Goi’s interview with Citarella). But the “list of the year” award has to go to Sight and Sound, who’ve compiled 101 Hidden Gems: a list of films that received exactly one vote in the Greatest Films of All Time poll, with capsules by artists and filmmakers advocating for each choice. Lose yourself in those “one-vote wonders” here.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• About Dry Grasses, the latest film by Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan, has a trailer ahead of its US release on February 23 next year. Another novelistic, dialogue-driven epic from Ceylan (The Wild Pear Tree, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia), the film focuses on a troubled art teacher (Deniz Celiloğlu), his interactions with a pupil (Ece Bağcı) he favors and is accused of being inappropriate towards, and a teacher (Merve Dizdar) with whom he forges a friendship. The film premiered at Cannes earlier this year, where Dizdar won the festival’s Best Actress prize.

RECOMMENDED READING

Still Film (James N. Kienitz Wilkins, 2023).

• The first part of In Media Res's ongoing series "Critique and the Moving Image" is online, with articles by Nico Baumbach, Sulgi Lie, Chang-Min Yu, and Genevieve Yue. “Criticism, in both its vernacular and academic forms, is a way of issuing a pronouncement,” writes Yue in her short piece on James N. Kienitz Wilkins’s newest work Still Film (2023), which contemplates our relationship to moving images through publicity stills. “Even when the writing professes to be open-ended, there is something to the form of inscription that shuttles a film along its institutional trajectory, into the newspaper, the footnote, the archive.” 
• “A lot happens to Jack Flowers—he falls in love, finds a kindred spirit (platonic), fulfills his dream of running a brothel, runs afoul of local gangsters, goes into business with the U.S. military, witnesses the death of a friend, and gets roped in to a smear operation by the CIA—but the film’s tone and pacing belie its density of event.” Liam Sherwin-Murray writes enthusiastically for the Paris Review on Saint Jack (1979), “Peter Bogdanovich’s Vietnam movie as well as his Casablanca.” 
• “We weren’t just placating ourselves with pop culture nostalgia but remembering and missing other ways of living, modeled by our own families or others.” Observing a post-pandemic turn towards the archive, A.E. Hunt speaks to several archival producers working on documentary film and television about their work for BlackStar’s Seen journal, seeing how the producers are “meeting pressures to open and expand archives as corporate collections vie to control, shape, and monetize them.”
• “Neither fiction nor documentary, The Zone of Interest and Occupied City are essays, each in its own way attesting to the apparent ease with which humans can deprive others of even their basic humanity and exploring the dialectical relationship between banality and evil.” For the Nation, J. Hoberman compares two Holocaust-focused films by Jonathan Glazer and Steve McQueen, which differently examine “the combination of merciless slaughter and bureaucratic banality” that was inherent to the Nazi project.
• “It’s impossible to will a revolution, or any sort of innovation, into being.” Richard Brody precedes his New Yorker best of 2023 list with a clear-eyed and insightful summary of the year in cinema, examining the state of filmmaking of all sorts of scales and styles, from that film with the box office takings that has “blown far beyond the billion-dollar mark” to the sort of “ultra-low-budget, do-it-yourself filmmaking” that he sees as being “in need of revitalization.” 

RECOMMENDED EVENTS

The Suicide (Todd Haynes, 1978).

• New York, through December 30: Alongside a significant retrospective of Todd Haynes’s films, which includes screenings of both early works and recent projects, the Museum of the Moving Image are also hosting an exhibition dedicated to the director, “Reflected Forms,” and have published a book, Todd Haynes: Rapturous Process. Drawn from the director’s archives, the exhibition includes sketches, paintings, and notes by Haynes, plus the “image books” he compiles for each of his films to collect preparatory materials and sources of inspiration. The Museum recently honored Haynes at their annual winter gala on December 4.
• New York, December 22, 2023 through January 4, 2024: Film at Lincoln Center presents a “comprehensive” retrospective of the films of “one of cinema’s most celebrated and deeply missed surveyors of the human condition,” Edward Yang. The centerpiece is the world premiere of a 4K restoration of Mahjong (1996), but also of interest is The Winter of 1905 (Yu Wei-cheng, 1982), a film starring Tsui Hark that Yang wrote the screenplay for, and In Our Time (1982), an anthology film containing a segment directed by Yang. Intriguingly, the latter film will also screen with nine minutes of footage from The Wind, an animated martial arts movie that Yang was working on prior to his death in 2007.

RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK

• December is here, so we’re kicking off our own end-of-year coverage with our Cinephile Gift Guide, a lovingly curated selection of books, Blu-rays, home goods, and more. It’s sure to surprise and delight the cinephiles in your life. For more end-of-year features, check back on Fridays throughout December and early January.
• Christopher Small writes about the restoration of Julio Bracho’s “now-shimmeringly gorgeous” Llévame en tus brazos (1954), an undersung classic of popular Mexican cinema. Small speaks to the team who salvaged the film from a partly decayed negative, preparing the melodrama for its majestic 2023 revival at the GranRex in Locarno.
• “[Matt] Damon has a curiously attenuated quality that has followed him throughout his career. [...] He has know-it-all cheekiness and charisma, but he can flatten himself into the background.” Continuing our series of features on great performers, Christina Newland writes of the deceiving everyman aura of Matt Damon, a slippery quality that’s only deepened as he’s aged from wunderkind to Dad-Cinema mainstay.

EXTRAS

• One of the heartbreaking aspects of putting together a gift guide is that many wonderful items will be announced after we publish. Case in point, one of Brooklyn’s most beloved cinemas, Light Industry, has a new t-shirt for sale; designed by Sam Ashby, it features an early line drawing by Jean Cocteau. Orders ship on December 15, and all proceeds go toward supporting Light Industry’s programming.