Most of my favorite films to have premiered in Chicago in 2019 played here before September, which is when I began my career as a special education teacher. Since then I’ve slowed down on my intake of new movies, but what I saw in the first eight months of the year provided me with much to admire. I’m especially grateful for the brief run, in May, of László Nemes’s Sunset at the Landmark Century and AMC River East. Sunset is one of the most innovative and invigorating films I’ve seen, and I can’t imagine that anything else this year could have topped it. Nemes’s artful approach to history—a rich aesthetic that brings together exacting camera movements, long takes, detailed mise-en-scene, and emotionally charged closeups—renders the past scary and immediate as few other movies have. This perspective also makes a perfect fit for the film’s subject matter, Hungary’s societal breakdown in the period leading up to World War I. Nemes’s fusion of form and content makes Sunset an instructive masterpiece, providing insights into our own period of societal breakdown through means distinctive to its creative medium.
Tie: Belmonte and The Moneychanger Sometimes I think that international film culture doesn’t deserve Federico Veiroj, the endlessly creative Uruguayan director of A Useful Life and The Apostate. With these two features, Veiroj confirmed his position as one of the most imaginative filmmakers working today. Belmonte, a dreamlike account of a middle-aged painter that played at the Chicago Latino Film Festival in April, found new things to say about divorce and artistic frustration in practically every scene, employing a subtle visual language to convey the hero’s complex internal life. The comic docudrama The Moneychanger, which played at the Chicago International Film Festival in October, was no less inspired in its compositions and montage, and it advanced a wry sense of morality in its ironic account of a corrupt banker who thrived under Uruguay’s era of dictatorship.
Tie: Hotel by the River and Grass Hong Sang-soo was the most reliable auteur of the decade, delivering at least one witty, probing examination of romance and the creative process every year between 2010 and 2018. These two black-and-white features (which played at the Gene Siskel Film Center in the spring) were exquisite examples of his mastery; each explored the human condition in a manner witty, precise, and concise. At this point it feels as though Hong can create a lovely composition or reach psychological insights offhandedly—the films successfully translate his carefree filmmaking process into narrative form. But despite their breezy surface tone, they’re suffused with a deep melancholy that makes them linger in the mind.
