Josh Cabrita’s Top Picks
An unconventional biopic on the elusive author David Foster Wallace is the best film of the summer. The End of the Tour is a poignant and funny head-scratcher that forces the audience to engage with how media can shape multi-faceted people into one-dimensional images and archetypes. Oftentimes, biopics are merely hagiography, but this is a film that constantly challenges our perceptions. James Ponsoldt, who directed The Spectacular Now, one of my favorite coming-of-age films in recent years, has made a layered film with a remarkably dramatic performance from Jason Segel. A post-modern “bromance” with two intellectuals who almost never stop yapping about consumerism and television may seem plodding, but The End of the Tour is a trip I wish never came to a close.
If Me and Earl and the Dying Girl were a person, I would wrap my arms around him and squeeze as hard as I could. Based on my first viewing, this was one of the most affecting and lovely films I’ve ever seen. It’s funny, sad, moving, and profound. That it also subverts almost every expectation while reinventing tropes you’ve seen a million times makes it that much more unpredictable and moving. Greg, an awkward high school senior who interacts in the safety of his empty social cocoon, befriends a girl with leukemia. He closely resembles attributes I see in myself: awkwardness, unattractiveness, complete ineptitude in interactions with girls but also possesses a head-over-heels love with cinema.
- The Tribe
Over the course of 130 minutes, no word is spoken and no sign is translated. We are left to interpret every interaction, every gesture, and every expression without the help of narration. A boy comes to a new boarding school for the deaf and is confronted by the bullies and ring-leaders who run the school’s distribution of drugs and prostitution. As the nameless entrant (we know none of the characters’ names) begins to get involved in the routine of the criminal ring, which appears to be led by a principal and carpentry teacher, he forms a sexual relationship with one of the prostitutes. This is a film with no words that will leave you speechless.
Throughout this melodramatic story about a holocaust survivor, Christian Petzold is crafting a disturbing perspective of Germany. In terms of its morality, sovereignty, and infrastructure, the country is collapsing. Thieves, beggars, and rapists creepily lurk in the shadows of the city that has bombed ruins around every corner. The streets are overrun by American soldiers, a foreshadowing of the economic influence and imperialism that would come in future decades. Every allegorical element of post-war Germany is disturbingly bleak. The film, which seems to be designed to address the mainstream and art-house spectator, is thoroughly dramatic but also thought-provokingly allegorical.
In Indonesia from 1965-1966, union members, farmers, and intellectuals were all branded communists and subject to execution. In that short span, close to one million people were killed, and the perpetrators have ruled the country ever since. Joshua Oppenheimer’s genre-defying debut, The Act of Killing, which is one of this decade’s finest films, chronicled some of the odious gangsters directly involved in the genocide as they bragged and recreated their killings on film. The Look of Silence has a significantly smaller scope–we follow one man’s search as he learns about his brother’s murder by interviewing those involved with the killing–but it is almost as powerful.
Runners Up: Bang Bang Baby, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Diary Of A Teenage Girl, Irrational Man, Inside Out
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