Story Time

To find the year's best films, it was best to look outside the $10 billion boys club.

by Cindy Fuchs

For the first time this year, U.S. domestic movie revenues topped $10 billion. Much of the U.S. output was loud and aimed at young male consumers. But some filmmakers were doing something else. Many of them were women, and some of their films found distribution. The best-known is Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, winner of several critics' association awards. Part stunning action movie, part political critique, the film features affecting performances by Jeremy Renner and Anthony Mackie as two U.S. soldiers who disarm explosive devices in Iraq. It looks not only at the hurt they endure, collect and inflict, but also how they come to be men in pain, by definition.

Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker's How to Fold a Flag revisits the soldiers featured in their 2004 documentary, Gunner Palace, with an eye to how they are coping with war's aftermath. Whether cage-fighting or running for office, angry or insistently idealistic, the men all seek to express what they've experienced.

Agnès Varda's The Beaches of Agnès (Les Plages d'Agnès) parses the past in another way. Looking back at her own experience as an artist, partner and mother, she's beset by memories that, she says, "swarm around me like confused flies." A provocative recollection of her life in and as cinema, her memoir is lovely and allusive.

Terence Davies' Of Time and the City reshapes his childhood in Liverpool by evoking a theater stage with curtains. The gesture announces its own artifice and underlines the forms of art that have shaped his self-understanding. These influences include the movies he loved as a child, as well as Catholic rituals and architecture now inscribed on his very soul.

October Country, directed by Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher, is a lovely, lyrical meditation on family ghosts, the implacable effects of the past on the present. It uses mid-autumn's stark poetry to suggest the family's haunting by ghosts, from wartime traumas and domestic abuses.

In the wonderfully deliberate 24 City, Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke looks at another sort of family fabric, in the form of histories recalled over three generations of workers in a state-owned factory, now closing to make room for an apartment complex in Chengdu. Combining interviews with reenacted scenes and readings, the movie illustrates the overlapping of real life and narrative.

Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's Sugar also considers the effects of loss and longing. A fiction film focused on a real-life dilemma — the exploitation of Dominican players by Major League Baseball — the film stars newcomer Algenis Pérez Soto as the titular pitcher. Discovered at home, his move to the States means everything to his family. Sugar rethinks the costs of success, the daily negotiations and minor-seeming repressions that reshape the lives of talented athletes.

Two other films look at familial crises more closely. So Yong Kim's Treeless Mountain shows how two small girls cope with their mother's absence. The 7-year-old, played by Hee Yeon Kim, is a complex and fascinating individual, not the object of adult fantasy or nostalgia.

Clair Denis' 35 Shots of Rum (35 Rhums) centers on a beguiling father-daughter relationship. Gorgeously played by Alex Descas and Mati Diop, they are starting to seek connections elsewhere. Yet they also hang onto one another, their choices rarely clear even to themselves, even as the movie delicately indicates their emotional and moral connections.

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Two more documentaries reveal the harrowing work of doctors in the midst of global catastrophes. Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders, directed by Mark Hopkins, looks at the efforts of Médecins Sans Frontières. The film doesn't smooth over what goes wrong and leaves unresolved the stories of its doctor subjects. Such messy narrative structure exemplifies the disorder and difficulty of each day.

Similarly, Fabrizio Lazzaretti and Paolo Santolini's beautifully made, honestly astonishing Back Home, Tomorrow (Domani Torno a Casa) alternates between two stories of children in need of care. Each is framed by the work of the Italian aid organization, Emergency. While the children's struggles are surely compelling in themselves, the documentary's immersion in their perspectives is inspired. Inventive and wise, the movie grants insight into troubles that no child should have to endure.

(c_fuchs@citypaper.net)