Tim Wong picks the best of the year.
TREME (HBO/Warner Bros). In a year crammed full of great television (Downton Abbey, The Killing, etc), David Simon’s successor to The Wire is most worthy of being singled out. Its music-centric ethnography of post-Katrina New Orleans, with an eye towards the spirit and resilience of the city’s residents, proved especially poignant in the wake of Christchurch’s own determination to rebuild from disaster.
MEEK’S CUTOFF (Madman). Everything but a western, Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to Wendy and Lucy renounces genre to render the story of American settlers traversing the Oregon Trail in multiple dimensions. No less than an art film, a women’s picture, an existential road movie and a political allegory, it is one of the year’s best.
CARLOS THE JACKAL (Madman). The crimes of Ilich “The Jackal” Ramírez Sánchez – who was recently called back to trial in Paris – make for one helluva movie, or three, if you’re as accomplished as French director Olivier Assayas. Less terrorist mastermind than blowhard revolutionary, the Jackal is played as a narcissistic rockstar by the uncanny Édgar Ramírez.
JANE EYRE (Shock). Of the countless Brontë adaptations, this 1943 version is by far the most gothic, drenched in cascades of shadow and fog as if it were a Victorian film noir. Beautifully restored and supplemented, it boasts a smouldering Orson Welles as Rochester, a tempestuous Bernard Herrmann score and a young pre-stardom Elizabeth Taylor.
DOGTOOTH (Madman). Yorgos Lanthimos’s shockingly good film is blunt but brilliant cinema, and also devastatingly funny, suitable for those with sick tastes and admirers of artful extremism. Warning: it’s a comedy about incest and forced captivity, halfway between Wes Anderson and Michael Haneke.
COSMOS (DV1/Southbound). Those dumbfounded by Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life should turn back the clock to this memorable PBS series, a strictly scientific yet awe-inspiring investigation of the miracles and mysteries inherent in nature, humankind and beyond. Hosted with lucid, toothy enthusiasm by astronomer Carl Sagan.
THE THICK OF IT (BBC/Roadshow). Some world-class swearing sharpens the edge of this serrated TV satire of British policymaking and spin doctoring, the basis for 2009 film In the Loop. Complacent Kiwi politicians could learn a thing or two from its close-to-the-bone depiction of ministerial buffoonery.
LA DANSE: THE PARIS OPERA BALLET (Madman). A great documentary by a great documentarian about the greatness (and tenuousness) of high-art institutions. The ballet isn’t half bad, either. Frustratingly, it’s the only Frederick Wiseman film on DVD outside the US.
THE FAMOUS FIVE (Reel/ Roadshow). At last! The complete, long-lost TV serial of Enid Blyton’s beloved children’s novels – last broadcast in the 1980s and as rare as hens’ teeth ever since – available for the first time anywhere on DVD.
A CANTERBURY TALE (Madman). The strangest entry in the Powell/Pressburger canon (The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus) and – at the risk of overstating it – the most soulful and ineffably beautiful film ever made. Originally released in 1944, it blends sleuth story with spiritual pilgrimage across wartime English countryside to beguiling effect.