From an electo-punk mermaid musical to an under-appreciated trek through the Amazon, the year has thrown up a number of films that didn’t receive the audience they deserved

Uncertain

Given the documentary’s evolution in recent times from niche arthouse prospect to the thing everyone watches about five of every weekend on Netflix, it seems deeply odd that this fine film from director duo Ewan McNicol and Anna Sandilands garnered so little attention.

For one, its account of life on the margins in a tiny city situated between Texas and Louisiana seems particularly resonant at a time when there’s such focus on Trump’s ‘forgotten man’. But this wasn’t gawk-at-the-rednecks poverty porn: its subjects, the ex-con hunting a notorious hog, the young alcoholic desperate to escape his home town, are funny and thoughtful and resistant to whatever stereotypes you might throw at them. It also made a very strong case for being the year’s most lovely doc to look at, with its almost painterly panning shots of swamps and bayous. GM

The Lost City of Z

If a tree falls in an unpopulated (but exquisitely shot) forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? James Gray’s ravishing historical quest drama proves it does: it’s a rousing, resounding film scaled and styled like a monumental event, and even if mass audiences didn’t show up to see it land, it’s still echoing with me nearly a year later.

You can feel the presence of David Lean and Werner Herzog in the sturdy bones of this epic, led by a never-better Charlie Hunnam as the doomed English explorer Percy Fawcett, his dreams of uncovering El Dorado cherished as dearly by the film as they are by its wayward hero. It’s no spoiler to say they never come true, which makes Gray’s film a uniquely broken valentine: it’s somehow a grand, transporting, heart-swelling ode to failure, and if it’s not surprising that the masses didn’t show up for that proposition, we should treasure it just the same. GL

Graduation



The Romanian new wave of the late 2000s – which got off to a blistering start with the abortion drama 4 Months. 3 Weeks and 2 Days in 2007 – never quite coalesced into a major cinematic movement, but its central focus, 4 Weeks’ director Cristian Mungiu, has been steadily making films since, analysing the struggles and backsliding of his home country after its emergence from the detritus of Soviet-style dictatorship. Graduation is his third film since, and though perhaps not as spectacularly gruesome as 4 Weeks, or as claustrophobic as its follow-up Beyond the Hills, it chronicles the shabby compromises of post-communist Europe with superb clarity.

Adrian Titieni plays Romeo Aldea, a middle-aged doctor with a difficult home life: his relationship with his wife has collapsed, and his 18-year-old daughter is proving truculent as she prepares for the exams that might secure her a place at a university in London, and a ticket out. Then, out of nowhere, a crisis: the daughter (played by The White Ribbon’s Maria Dragus) suffers a sex assault, and is as a result far too traumatised to sit the examination. So Aldea begins the rounds, backscratching and favour-pulling, trying to get his daughter waved through, and over a hurdle she would have undoubtedly cleared anyway.

Titieni is great in the role, like a large, frightened insect in a specimen bottle, scuttling from place to place trying to keep chaos at bay. Mungiu films it all with unsentimental harshness: his is as bleak a vision as they come. This s a film about a corrupt social organism, where the corruption is measured in guilt, and which perpetuates itself despite the self-hate it triggers. Graduation is both simple and complex at the same time: a rare feat, and film well worth seeking out because of it. AP

The Lure

Movie-musical lovers in search of something in every way the opposite of La La Land would do well to direct their attentions to Poland. That’s where Agnieszka Smoczyńska pulled off this bracingly original genre-bender, an electro-punk cover version of Hans Christian Andersen’s original Little Mermaid with a jagged feminist bite.

A pair of comely mermaids land gigs at a local burlesque joint and catch the eyes of some local suitors, but differences of species test what they’re willing to sacrifice for love. The musical numbers are of particular note, an antidote to the the sanitized and overproduced spectacles coughed up every couple of years in Hollywood. Standout performance “Abracadabra” is raw and sexy and sleazy, a worthy successor to ‘Cabaret.’ Stars Marta Mazurek and Michalina Olszańska aren’t the most extensively trained dancers or singers, but their performance has an emphatic, livewire quality missing from many modern efforts. CB

My Cousin Rachel

If this were a just world, and 2017 has proved that it most definitely is not, then Rachel Weisz’s name would be frequently heard throughout this year’s awards season. Her performance in Roger Michell’s curiously ignored My Cousin Rachel, the second adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s 1951 novel, is one of her best: a compelling, fiery take on a spell-bindingly unknowable literary femme fatale, disarming and enigmatic, charming and bewitching.

The film around her isn’t quite so finely constructed (the direction is a tad stuffy at times) but the script keeps du Maurier’s curious cauldron of toxic masculinity and gender performance boiling over nicely throughout. Revealing its secrets would be a disservice to the many, many people who missed it (it didn’t even make $3m at the US box office) but it’s not as simple as the overwrought gothic melodrama it was sold as, instead providing a spiky and surprisingly contemporary dissection of relationships. BL

Dawson City: Frozen Time

On the one hand, Bill Morrison’s Dawson City: Frozen Time has had tremendous success for a found footage documentary. The story about a lost cache of early film reels buried in the Klondike played festivals from South Korea to Kosovo, and had an extended run in Los Angeles. But everyone interested in history and cinema (and the history of cinema) must make an effort to see this.

Morrison’s background in the avant-garde lends adds a hazy “old, weird” patina to the forgotten, abandoned archive, told in large part with images from the materials themselves. The decaying stock and Alex Somers’ hypnotic score adds to the eerie storytelling ouroboros. There’s wonder and melancholy in every indescribable sequence, a window into the past made strangely clearer by its corrosion. Everything about this marvelous artifact is inadvertent, as if this is part of our history we weren’t meant to see. JH

Inversion

Inversion may take on a theme that has become familiar in recent Iranian cinema, but like the smog that gives it its title, this understated film sinks deep beneath the skin.

The chemical fog choking Tehran is used as a metaphor for the stranglehold on women’s rights – and how that pervades into private life, family dynamics and romance. This isn’t a film about oppression or anger, though, but resilience. Inversion refers both to the meteorological phenomenon that traps the pollution low and close to the city streets, and the small rebellions enacted by three generations of women. Sahar Dolatshahi exudes a charismatic confidence in the lead as Niloofar, a businesswoman fighting to save her independence, hoping for love and savouring her happiness. Since I saw Inversion in the spring, I keep thinking about Niloofar, where she went next, and the music she heard as she travelled. PH

Nobody’s Watching

There has been no shortage of films tackling migration this year. Even so, this account of one man’s personal journey manages to bring something fresh to the theme. Julia Solomonoff’s acutely perceptive, achingly sad character study deals in downgraded dreams and the brutal realities of trying to make it as an artist. Nico (an extraordinary performance from Guillermo Pfening) comes not from desperation but a place of privilege. In Argentina, he’s an actor in a popular soap, mobbed by fans on the street. He left this life for New York and a role in an indie film which seems increasingly unlikely to happen.

Having outstayed his visa, Nico is caught between two identities: the charming soap star, and a faceless member of the invisible underclass of undocumented immigrants struggling to make ends meet. The film captures New York at its most alluring and unforgiving; the lightness of touch, effortlessly credible characters and sense of place evokes the work of Ira Sachs. WI

Suntan

Argyris Papadimitropoulos is a Greek film-maker whose work stands a little outside the histrionic black-comic absurdism of contemporaries like Yorgos Lanthimos. But he deserves to be as well-known, and his Suntan is a superb realist study of male midlife breakdown. It is about someone who could be described as the EasyJet Gustav von Aschenbach.

Makis Papadimitrou is excellent as Kostis, the plump, bald, middle-aged doctor who takes a job as a GP on a Greek holiday island. Poor, lonely Kostis one day has to attend to a gorgeous young woman who has fallen off her quad bike: Anna (Elli Tringou). She capriciously takes a shine to Kostis and invites him to come to the beach and hang out – and inevitably, Kostis embarrasses himself by falling deeply in love with her. Humiliation and worse is in store. It is superbly acted and directed and shot with great scenes, and Kostis’s agony is unbearable. PB