Hundreds of movies are released theatrically in New York every year, but some of the best films we saw in 2008 never screened outside of festivals. Here's a highly subjective list of ten great unreleased films I saw at the four festivals I was lucky enough to attended this year -- Berlin, the Hamptons, New York, and Tribeca. Let's hope they'll make it to a theater near you soon.
1. United Red Army
Wakamatsu Koji's United Red Army nearly eclipses that other revolutionary epic of 2008, Steven Soderbergh's Che, in ambition, scale, and narrative force. The first hour of this 190-minute dramatization of the history of Japan's radical movement passes in documentary-style, filling the audience in on how the United Red Army formed out of various splinter groups of extremist students. The film then follows the group's core to a mountain hideout, where they slowly begin to turn on each other in a shocking series of events that makes Battle Royale look like Pokemon. A double feature of Che and United Red Army would make for a harrowing (and time-devouring) line-up, combining my two favorite movie-going experiences of 2008.
2. Black Ice
Jealousy and treachery run deep in this gripping thriller from Finland, directed by Petri Kotwica. When the wife of an architect (Outi Mäenpää) discovers her husband is sleeping with a karate teacher, she invents a false identity to befriend the young woman. Black Ice is set for a U.S. remake, but I'm not sure how Hollywood could possibly improve it.
3. Tony Manero
Pablo Larrain's wicked Tony Manero, named for John Travolta's character in Saturday Night Fever, was the critics' darling at this year's NYFF. The story of Raúl (Alfredo Castro) and his troupe of dancers eager to put on a disco show in a local taverna could have played like another "art-conquers-all" fairy tale like Billy Elliot and all the rest, but before the fearsome backdrop of Pinochet's Chile, Raúl's single-minded determination to wear that white suit and dance on lit glass tiles becomes infected with violence and seemingly bottomless despair. By turns hilarious and harrowing, Tony Manero is full of shocking surprises and potent characterizations.
4. Let It Rain
The latest collaboration by director/writer/actress Agnès Jaoui and co-writer/actor Jean-Pierre Bacri (Look At Me, The Taste of Others) is another perfectly calibrated exploration of family, love, feminism, class, and race, this time set in the French countryside outside of Paris. Affecting, insightful, and hilarious.
5. Julia
Erick Zonca's (The Dreamlife of Angles) first film in nearly a decade is as uncompromising as it is unpredictable. In the title role, Tilda Swinton fearlessly portrays an irredeemably selfish lost soul and raging alcoholic who kidnaps a child. No matter how truly awful she behaves -- guzzling vodka while she's trying to pull off the "double cross of a lifetime," tying the kidnapped boy (Aiden Gould) to radiators -- Swinton made it impossible for me to look away. The narrative takes wild turns and plows forward into unsuspected territory, even if it means crashing through the border fence into Mexico.
6. Sparrow
In a departure from his usual gun-heavy gangster fare, the new film from the master of Hong Kong action Johnny To follows a quartet of pickpockets who are contacted by a mysterious woman. Sparrow is scored with playful, allusion-rich music that makes it feel like a lost movie from the early 1960s, and To's customary fluid direction and editing can turn the simple exchange of a cigarette from lip to lip into a rousing scene. The film climaxes in a breathtaking set piece when two gangs of pickpockets face off under a sea of umbrellas in the rain, holding razor blades in their mouths. With a light touch and playful beauty, Sparrow reaches pure moments of cinematic bliss.
7. Quiet Chaos
Melancholic but lively, Quiet Chaos is a sweet crowd pleaser that earns its emotions. After Pietro (Nino Moretti) finds his wife Laura dead in their garden with a broken bowl of cantaloupe next to her body, he neglects his job and focuses completely on his ten-year-old daughter Claudia (Blu Di Martino). He spends his days in a park outside her school, waiting for her to wave to him from the window during breaks. Quiet Chaos gets the ingredients just right without ever overplaying its hand -- and there's a Roman Polanski cameo.
8. My Mother, My Bride, and I
Yet another surprising cross-cultural love story from Europe, this time bridging Bavaria and Romania. Erwin Kobarek (Matthias Brandt) picks Irina (Maria Popistasu), a sexy Romanian bride, out of a catalog, but his mother (Monica Bleibtreu) disapproves. Directed by Hans Steinbichler.
9. Megane
Naoko Ogigami's Megane (Glasses) is a droll and touching story about Taeko (Mikako Ichikawa), a Tokyo woman dressed in black and white on a sparsely populated island where everybody is indeed wearing glasses. With understated humor, the meticulously framed film observes how Taeko learns to adapt to an almost surreal set of rules that govern the otherwise empty inn where she is staying. Days are taken up with knitting and the consumption of food, which is lovingly shot and detailed: fish, eggs, barbecue, slow-cooking beans, shaved ice, pickled plums, lobster, beer. Without apparent conflict and traditional drama, Megane is nonetheless full of pleasures, laughs, sensory delights, and an unexpected profundity that sneaks up on you.
10. Werther
This punk rock adaptation of Goethe’s classic is either a pretentious disaster or wildly romantic triumph -- and possibly both. As young Werther's object d'amour, luminous Hannah Herzsprung is out of this world.
