Best Undistributed Films of 2017

The Nothing Factory is a serious look at the role of work today, in particular for those sifting through the wreckage of capitalism. The presence of a shadowy character on the fringes—a kind of labor theorist or crisis-chasing agitator—allows for some pointed Marxist musings, and the three-hour running time contains manifold surprises and pleasures, notably a few bursts of self-reflexive song-and-dance and the loveliest of nods to Straub-Huillet’s Sicilia!. "

As a comedic canvas, A Gentle Creature reliably surprises, bringing its own special energy to a Russian tradition of grotesque social panoramas (à la Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God or Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s 4)… Loznitsa concludes with a vision of Russia sleeping through waking catastrophe and encountering only more nightmares, revealing that the film hasn’t just been skating by on horrors; the pain is real. "

Streetscapes [Dialogue] reenacts six days of psychoanalysis that Emigholz underwent in Uruguay; Emigholz’s onscreen surrogate (John Erdman) diligently walks a trauma specialist (Argentinean experimental filmmaker Jonathan Perel) through a lifetime’s worth of musings, melancholies, anecdotes, and aesthetic reflections . . . The talk is so dense with insights—into both Emigholz’s art and, to borrow a phrase from his onetime intellectual hero Adorno, the damaged life—and it comes at you so fast, you’ll be convinced you could benefit from further treatment. "

Instead of distancing the viewer from the drama, the film’s bifurcated structure and Massadian’s casually radical approach to time—the narrative is more than once breached by unexpected conflations of music and memory—yield a strikingly tangible sense of accumulated experience, forming a beautifully symmetrical whole. "

Over the course of fewer than 20 black-and-white 16mm shots, some brief and others up to 10 minutes long, Tonsler Park shows a series of African-American volunteers at the park’s polling center as they hand out ballots and work the room during the 2016 presidential election… Matters the movie can’t help evoking—the history of voter suppression and racial segregation in the South, the park’s own history, and the outcome of the election itself—keep ceding priority for the viewer to the movements of these workers on a shift. "

Yet Wang Bing is after something completely different: following a long series of fairly harrowing, extended static shots of the woman, her mouth frequently agape, her lips stretched back from her teeth, as she stares vacantly in our general direction (is she aware of the camera?), the filmmaker goes into different territory, somehow more and less tangible than a portrait of dying. "

Narimane Mari’s approach to cinema is straightforward yet ingenious: we cannot speak of the past without speaking about memory. And memory, for Mari, is an active intervention, an opportunity not just to recall the facts and events but also to reshape them. This dialectic is in play in Mari’s Le Fort des Fous (“Madmen’s Fort”), a meditation on Algeria’s violent colonialist past and on today’s generalized, global strife. "

Illian Metev’s 3/4 (Three Quarters) hinges on the absence of a partner and the rewards of perseverance…Working with cinematographer Julian Atanassov and acting as his own editor, Metev confidently arranges this modest narrative around inventive compositions and the suggestive use of offscreen space. "

A very tough new film from Barbet Schroeder [and] the third and final installment in what the director is now calling his Trilogy of Evil, beginning all the way back in 1974 with Idi Amin Dada. The Venerable W is a fascinating portrait of Ashin Wirathu, a nationally renowned Buddhist monk in Myanmar who gently preaches incendiary rhetoric against the ‘Rohingya’ Muslim minority and has unarguably incited slaughter. Schroeder and his brilliant editor Nelly Quettier (who has cut the majority of Claire Denis’s films and the majority of Leos Carax’s) build their damning portrait one gradation at a time. "