It’s been almost two months since the last rankings update. In that time I posted my annual Top 100 Films of All-Time list and covered the 2015 Vancouver International Film Festival. On The George Sanders Show we did our annual Top Tens episode, covered the release of Johnnie To’s Office on location and recorded two podcasts in Canada. At Seattle Screen Scene we had extensive coverage of the festival as well, and before that I wrote about the Jackie Chan/John Cusack film Dragon Blade, M. Night Shyamalan’s welcome return The Visit, the bittersweet Chinese film Go Away, Mr. Tumor, Joe Swanberg’s  mediocre Digging for Fire, Korean action film Memories of the Sword and two terrific American romantic comedies, Noah Baumbach’s Mistress America and Peter Bogdanovich’s She’s Funny That Way.

These are the movies I’ve watched and rewatched over the last few weeks and where they place on my year-by-year rankings. Short comments or capsule reviews for them can be found over at letterboxd.

The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming) – 8, 1939
Voyage in Italy (Roberto Rossellini) – 3, 1954
The Lion in Winter (Anthony Harvey) – 3, 1968
Trouble in Mind (Alan Rudolph) – 10, 1985
The Civil War (Ken Burns) – 9, 1990

The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese) – 1, 1993
The Mirror (Jafar Panahi) – 7, 1997
The Soong Sisters (Mabel Cheung) – 16, 1997
The Transporter (Corey Yuen) – 33, 2002
Transporter 2 (Louis Leterrier) – 57, 2005

Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu) – 15, 2009
Weekend (Andrew Haigh) – 35, 2011
A Matter of Interpretation (Lee Kwangkuk) – 11, 2014
She’s Funny That Way (Peter Bogdanovich) – 19, 2014
Regarding Susan Sontag (Nancy D. Kates) – 77, 2014

Exodus: Gods and Kings (Ridley Scott) – 87, 2014
The Dream of Shahrazad (Francois Verster) – 98, 2014
Love is All (Kim Longinotto) – 108, 2014
The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-hsien) – 1, 2015
The Forbidden Room (Guy Maddin) – 3, 2015

88:88 (Isiah Medina) – 6, 2015
Mountains May Depart (Jia Zhangke) – 9, 2015
Arabian Nights Volume 2: The Desolate One (Miguel Gomes) – 10, 2015
The Thoughts That Once We Had (Thom Andersen) – 11, 2015
Li Wen at East Lake (Luo Li) – 12, 2015

Office (Johnnie To) – 13, 2015
Kaili Blues (Bi Gan) – 14, 2015
Taxi (Jafar Panahi) – 15, 2015
Murmur of the Hearts (Sylvia Chang) – 16, 2015
Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sangsoo) – 17, 2015

Port of Call (Philip Yung) – 19, 2015
The Visit (M. Night Shyamalan) – 20, 2015
Queen of Earth (Alex Ross Perry) – 21, 2015
A Tale of Three Cities (Mabel Cheung) – 22, 2015
45 Years (Andrew Haigh) – 23, 2015

Go Away, Mr. Tumor (Han Yan) – 24, 2015
My Golden Days (Arnaud Desplechin) – 26, 2015
The Pearl Button (Patricio Guzmán) – 27, 2015
Topophilia (Peter Bo Rappmund) – 29, 2015
Arabian Nights Volume 3: The Enchanted One (Miguel Gomes) – 32, 2015

The Treasure (Corneliu Porumboiu) – 33, 2015
Greed; Ghost Light (Kim Nakyung) – 34, 2015
The Exquisite Corpus (Peter Tscherkassky) – 35, 2015
Dead Slow Ahead (Mauro Herce) – 39, 2015
Mustang (Deniz Gamze Ergüven) – 44, 2015
Wondrous Boccaccio (The Taviani Brothers) – 45, 2015

Paradise (Sina Ataeian Dena) – 49, 2015
Digging for Fire (Joe Swanberg) – 50, 2015
Magicarena (Andrea Prandstraller & Niccolò Bruna) – 51, 2015
Memories of the Sword (Park Heung-shik) – 52, 2015
What Happened in Past Dragon Year (Sun Xun) – 53, 2015
It’s Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong (Emily Ting) – 57, 2015

Alice in Earnestland (Ahn Gooc-jin) – 58, 2015
Dragon Blade (Daniel Lee) – 59, 2015
Tandem (King Palisoc) – 61, 2015
The Transporter Refueled (Camille Delamarre) – 62, 2015
Argentina (Carlos Saura) – 63, 2015

I’ve been home from Vancouver for almost a week now, still suffering from the cold I catch there every year (something unhealthy about not eating properly, drinking copious amounts of caffeine and sharing breathing space with hundreds of other people ten hours a day for a week). Since my report on a few films from the First Four Days of the festival, we covered a number of movies on a second episode of The George Sanders Show, namely Right Now Wrong Then, The Assassin, Taxi, A Matter of Interpretation, Landfill Harmonic, The Dream of Shahrazad and Arabian Nights. Of the 29 features and 4 shorts I saw during my nine days in Vancouver, there are a few more standouts I want to mention.

Jia Zhangke’s Mountains May Depart is one of the more polarizing films of the year. It marks a radical shift in Jia’s formal technique, abandoning the long-shot/long-take aesthetic that has made him one of the preeminent examples of 21st Century Asian Minimalism. Instead, working with his longtime cinematographer, the artist Yu Lik-wai, Jia films in a conventional mainstream style: the camera moves, he edits within a scene and we get close-ups of the actors. This is in keeping with the broad melodrama of the story’s construction. A schematic story of a love triangle told in three different time periods, Mountains is the most baldly emotional movie Jia has yet made. His first use of close-ups reveals what we long-suspected but that the old long shots tended to obscure, namely that Zhao Tao is one of the great actors of her generation. Her performance here is nothing less than phenomenal. In the first story, set in 1999, she’s the pivot point of a love triangle with two men, one a poor coal miner, the other an aspiring capitalist. She ultimately chooses the rich man, which leads to the shattering heartbreaks of the second chapter, set in 2014, a story itself split in two halves, first about the miner (and his wife), then about Zhao and her now-estranged son, who is sent home to attend his grandfather’s funeral. The third story, set in 2025, follows the son, now emigrated to Australia where he has forgotten his Chinese past, the language, and even his mother. He connects with another Chinese immigrant, his much older teacher (played by Sylvia Chang), and the Oedipal nature of their relationship is no less subtle than the boy’s name (he was aspirationally christened “Dollar” by his ludicrous father).

This third section has come under fire (usually under the vaguely racist rubric of “Jia can’t direct in English”) for its obvious schematicism and the artificiality of Dong Zijian’s performance as Dollar. I suspect this is largely a category error, that we’re used to Jia making withdrawn, somewhat obscure films like Platform and Still Life, films whose equally schematic melodrama is hidden behind long takes and a lack of emotionally direct dialogue. The issues Jia is addresses are not new, no one has more obsessively followed the dislocations and disruptions of the Chinese family in the wake of the imperatives of modern capitalism than he has over the past 20 years. But as with his previous film, A Touch of Sin, a series of violent short stories loosely related to the Chinese action film tradition (though not really wuxia in particular), he’s now addressing those issues in a more conventionally generic mode. The mix of reality and surreality has long been a part of Jia’s work, from the flash animation and theme park environment of The World to the alien craft and bridge light romanticism of Still Life, resting uneasily alongside documentary footage of China’s changing landscapes (see also his actual documentaries 24 City and I Wish I Knew, which audaciously mix actorly performances into their real life accounts), it’s only now that the surrealism has overtaken an entire narrative. And there is no filmic form more surreal than the classical melodrama. And, if you’re paying attention to the world today and where it’s headed, it only seems logical that the absurd is the only true way to capture it. This is Jia’s lunatic masterpiece.

Sylvia Chang is terrific, as usual in Mountains May Depart, even better than she is in Johnnie To’s Office, which she co-adapted from her own play. But that’s not all she’s had for us in 2015, she also directed Murmur of the Hearts, like Mountains a family melodrama taking place across multiple time periods. It stars Isabella Leong, making a long-awaited return to the screen after several years in retirement following her marriage in 2008 (don’t miss her in Pang Ho-Cheung’s Isabella from 2006). She plays a young woman dating an aspiring boxer. The boxer has vision problems, and Isabella, an artist, is haunted by memories of her parents, who split up when she was a child, which also separated her from her brother. We also meet the brother, now a tour guide on the small island off the coast of Taiwan where they grew up. Chang deftly weaves together the characters’ present lives and memories of their parents with a splash of magic realism in the form of a mermaid and a quite fashionable ghost/bartender. It’s a more conventional art house movie than Mountains, in that it’s the kind of Taiwanese film that seems rather inexplicable for the first 40 minutes or so and, as everything becomes clear and all the various connections are resolved, becomes deeply moving as the story comes together with a satisfying click. It isn’t as meta-cinematic as the other Chang-directed films I’ve seen (the very good Tempting Heart and 20 30 40), but it’s warm and sweet and quite lovely, a nice flipside to the acidic Office.

Yet another Chinese film blurring the boundaries between past and present is Kaili Blues, from first-time director Bi Gan.  A middle aged man, a doctor, helps watch over his nephew while his brother, the boy’s father, gambles and gets himself in trouble. When he learns that his brother may have sold the boy in another town, he heads out to bring him home. But what he finds there is an inexplicable kind of temporal loop, chronicled in a breath-taking 40+ minute single-shot, as the man, his driver, the driver’s girlfriend, a local band, and various other characters wander around a river spanning village.  The doctor’s past, and that of his fellow doctor, now an elderly woman, seemingly come to life in the village, along with his nephew’s future. There’s no apparent rationale for the loop, it’s simply a world where the past, present and future exist together, an endless cycle repeating itself, or the infinite possibilities of an unknowable universe. It was the most satisfyingly confounding film of the festival and an audacious debut, one that in past years would have earned its director a Dragons & Tigers award.

Moving away from China but sticking with the experimental, I lastly want to mention a trio of films. Portuguese director Lois Patiño’s Night Without Distance is a semi-narrative short about smugglers waiting in the Galician borderland while cops lie in wait for them. Patiño films the whole thing in negative, but not black and white, rather mind-blowingly colored. Purples and yellows dominate the inverted landscape, with gorgeous drops of rain bursting from a stream, while the people stand still, haunting the otherworldly spaces. It’s a documentary vision of our Earth as filmed from the land of ghosts. I’ve never seen anything like it. Paired with it was Topophilia, by director Peter Bo Rappmund. Painstakingly assembled out of thousands of still images covering the length of the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline, it’s a fascinating rumination of the effect of technology on environment, and the way the two seem to meld together. With an eerily assaultive soundtrack largely built out of the sounds of the pipeline itself, the impact of the machinery on the natural world is undeniable, and yet, the natural world goes on all around it, taking no notice. Mauro Herce’s Dead Slow Ahead is another film about machinery, chronicling the life of a massive transport ship as it traverses the Mediterranean. Here gives us the kind of otherworldly closeups familiar from Leviathan, while putting more emphasis on the ways the ship technology dwarfs the humans that work within it. A long final section echoes with recordings of the workers as they call home, leaving messages, talking to distant wives, mothers, children, living ghosts in the machine.

Every year before heading over to the festival, I try to familiarize myself with some of the directors whose films are playing there that I haven’t yet seen. Last year I watched films by Pedro Costa, Lisandro Alonso, Imtiaz Ali and Heiward Mak, all of which I liked a lot and all of whom had films at VIFF I ended up enjoying a great deal. This year I haven’t been able to see as much as I would have liked. There was the discussion of Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective on The George Sanders Show I linked to a couple of days ago, but other than that there’s just these two movies, Jafar Panahi’s The Mirror and Andrew Haigh’s Weekend.

Panahi is mostly famous these days for continuing to smuggle films out of Iran despite having been officially banned from doing so in 2010. His This is Not a Film won wide-spread acclaim the following year, and his Closed Curtain was a film I was hoping to see at VIFF 2013 but for scheduling reasons didn’t make it. (I have hard luck with Iranian films in general at the festival, a number of interesting ones have played there over the years, but other than the two Abbas Kiarostami films Certified Copy and Like Someone in Love, I haven’t managed to get to a single one.) His new film is called Taxi (well, it’s called been retitled Jafar Panahi’s Taxi for North American release, apparently so people don’t confuse it with the 2004 Jimmy Fallon-Queen Latifah movie). My experience with Iranian cinema in general is woefully inadequate, I only caught up with Asghar Farhadi and A Separation earlier this year, for example, so rather than simply go with Panahi’s recent work, I decided to watch one of his earliest films, the 1997 feature The Mirror, which won the Locarno Film Festival that year.

It’s an idea for a film so simple in its provocation that I’d be surprised if it’d never been done before. There’s something elemental about it, like an idea that’s always been there in cinema but never quite been expressed so well or so effectively before (John Cage’s 4’33” came to mind). A young girl, six or seven years old, has to make her way home from school after her mom fails to pick her up on time. She doesn’t quite know the way, and maneuvers in and out of buses, cabs and crosswalks with the mostly ineffectual help of strangers. Along the way we see a cross-section of the city in its particular time and place (Teheran in the mid-90s), a kind of neo-realist city-symphony. But then, after 40 minutes, the girl looks at the camera and decides she doesn’t want to be in the movie anymore and storms off. The film stock abruptly shifts and we see Panahi and his crew debating what to do next, a pseudo-documentary of a film production in a panicked moment. They let her go, while leaving her microphone on and follow her home, surreptitiously filming the girl’s journey now in reverse as she in “real” life must accomplish the same tasks her character did in fiction.

It’s a nifty gimmick and anchored beautifully by the performance of Mina Mohammad Khani as the girl. But that’s just a MacGuffin for the film’s true interest, which is the portrait of Teheran in all its cacophony and chaos. A dozen little stories spin around the girl (the young couple separated by the enforced gender divide on the public bus; the man who just wants his poor relations to dress nicely at his daughter’s wedding) but mostly in the first half, the constructed narrative section. The people in the second half are more incoherent, their plotlines less clear, their characters not so cleanly delineated with cinematic shorthand. Some characters recur, including an old woman that throws a monkey wrench into even that distinction. We heard her talking in the narrative section, complaining about the lack of respect she gets from her children. When the girl meets her again in the second, she explains that she wasn’t acting in the earlier scenes, they just paid her to show up and she made up her lines out of her own life. Fiction, reality: it’s all the same. The important thing is to invest in traffic lights and make your kids memorize their home addresses.

From an inauspicious beginning as an assistant editor on Gladiator, British director Andrew Haigh burst on the scene with his 2011 romantic drama Weekend, about a brief but intense relationship between two men in Nottingham. Played by Tom Cullen and Chris New, the two bond over long naturalistic conversations about life, family, friends, sexual histories and the difficulties of being gay in a predominantly straight world. It’s firmly in the tradition of the romantic drama, with shades of Brief Encounter, Before Sunrise, Waterloo Bridge, Morocco and Lost in Translation (among others), a talky film about two people trying to figure out their place in the world and if that place has room for anyone else. As such it’s expertly done, but Haigh brings to it something special with a unique contrast of styles. The interiors, the dialogue and party scenes, are shot intimately, with a fuzzy off-handedness that is the signal for realism in contemporary cinema. We skip forward in time catching only glimpses of much longer conversations, many of which are mumbled or lost in a cacophony background (this is entirely realistic: I loved how in the party and bar scenes I couldn’t understand any of what anyone was saying, just like I can’t in such real-life situations).

This isn’t in itself remarkable, but what separates those scenes is. All the exterior shots are carefully framed, with long straight lines forming sharp corners and diagonals. These usually (but not always) function as pillow shots, popularized by Yasujiro Ozu as the institial spaces for contemplation between scenes of plot. As in Ozu, Haigh’s are precisely framed, but where in Ozu’s films they are brightly scored with jaunty music that often belies the serious dramatics at work in his characters lives, in Weekend the shots are oppressive and constricting, a constructed world of boundaries imposing public limits on the expression of the relationship possibilities that thrive behind apartment tower windows. My favorite are the three shots with the setup pictured above. In each shot, Cullen watches New walk away from his apartment. In each shot New is wearing a different colored jacket (yellow, black, red: the three colors are unified in the outfit New wears in his final scene). Each time, New hesitates a bit as he walks away, his motion, and Cullen’s shadow, depicting the emotional course of their relationship in minute gestures. If the film depicted of just these three shots, that would be enough to make it something special. Like with The Mirror, Weekend is at its heart a fairly simple cinematic and thematic idea, but one that is likewise all the more powerful for the purity of its expression. Haigh’s new film 45 Years won wide acclaim at the just-concluded Toronto Film Festival, I can’t wait to see it at VIFF.

I went to my first Vancouver International Film Festival in 2008 and have attended every year since but one (2011, when a kid was born two weeks before the festival started). As I look forward to this year’s edition, I thought it might be nice to take a look back at some of my favorite films from previous festivals. Here are my Top 50 VIFF Movies, which given the current exchange rate, yields 66 titles.