Netflix
Film: Barry (2016, US) directed by Vikram Gandhi – out 16 December
Produced by Netflix, this is a pretty enjoyable but not-excellent telemovie: a Great Politician Origin Story about a few months of Barack Obama’s life as a newcomer finding his way in New York in 1981.
Although Barry recycles many familiar conventions of the biopic, it’s fascinating for the nascent political fable it tells. Made before Trump’s ascent, Barry shows how Obama’s mythologisation is occurring before he has even left the Oval Office.
The film’s thesis is that Obama’s in-between status as a man with a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas is what makes him truly American; a man searching for a sense of belonging in the very idea of Americanism, and therefore an ideal candidate for uniting a torn nation. Nostalgia for the Obama years has already begun, and they’re not even over.
Film: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014, US) directed by Ana Lily Amirpour – out now
Made in the US by a debut Iranian director, this is a Persian-language vampire film with a feminist edge. The premise is a great one: a centuries-old female vampire lurks in the shadows of the streets, avenging men’s sexual and violent crimes against women. Until she falls in love.
Shot in black and white and unabashedly indie rather than horror in its sensibility, the film uses the vampire genre to make a political statement about justice and the fear that many women feel just making their way through the world. The concept and characters don’t fully blossom to their potential, but it’s fun and unlike anything I’ve seen in a while, which I think comes down to the fact that it is one of the few cinema stories made by a young woman.
• Honourable mentions: Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life (TV, out now), Matilda (film, 21 December), Black Hawk Down (film, 28 December).
Stan
Film: We are the Best (2013, Sweden) directed by Lukas Moodysson – out now
So many coming-of-age stories follow a troupe of teen boy protagonists — the most recent being Netflix’s Stranger Things. But what a revelation a gender switch makes. Writer-director Lukas Moodysson may be a mid-40s dude, but his empathetic portrait of the intense dynamics of teen girls’ friendships is near telepathic.
Two androgynous outcasts, Bobo, introverted and inscrutable, and Klara, reckless and prone to calling her disputants “fascists”, convince a classically-trained Christian guitar player to join their punk band. Set in Sweden in the 1980s, it may sound like serious European arthouse, but it’s really just a joy to take in, and treats the hearts and minds of youth with dignity and realness.
In ethos, it all boils down to one of the trio’s beloved song lyrics: “What will you become? Keep on, keep on, be yourself, be a rebel!”
Film: What We Do in the Shadows (2014, New Zealand) directed by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi – out now
A comedy that is actually funny? On its release, Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw even called it the best comedy of the year:
A group of vampires share a house in Wellington, squabbling about the washing up and facing off with a rival gang of werewolves, à la Twilight. The rigour with which their hideous and crepuscular world is imagined, combined with the continuous flow of top-quality gags, makes this a treat from first to last. After a while, I was embarrassed at myself for giggling so much.
Film: Melancholia (2011, Denmark, Sweden, France, Germany) directed by Lars von Trier – out 8 December
Like all art, film functions at a gut level: you either get it or you don’t. Upon its release, many just didn’t get Danish master-pessimist Lars von Trier’s masterpiece, in which a rogue planet called Melancholia threatens to wipe out Earth. It’s a disaster film from an art-house perspective: more about how you respond to the manifestation of your worst fears than the CGI spectacle of aliens landing or comets colliding.
It’s also a drama about family, but I saw it as a hallucinatory film of great beauty and empathy about the anticipatory grief of climate change, political chaos and the expression of those things through a great cinematic portrait of the experience of depression.
The film’s two sisters, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and Justine (Kirsten Dunst), react to the prospect of their annihilation completely differently: as a clinical depressive, Justine has expected the worst her whole life and prepares to meet her fate with steady, calm acceptance. There are many images from this film that will stay with you, not the least of which are the final moments, when everything comes together and falls apart at once.
Film: Sleeping with Other People (2015, US) directed by Leslye Headland – out 29 December
Why are romantic comedies so rarely romantic or comedic? Written and directed by Leslye Headland, this film is the anomaly that proves how enjoyable the genre can be when it embraces the absurdity inherent in human behaviour – particularly around dating and sex.
Like all great romcoms, it has a plot that can be whittled down to one line: two commitment-phobes who are emotionally avoidant but sexually compatible spark a friends-with-benefits situation that allows them to grow a friendship, expand as individuals and sow the seeds for something more. With witty dialogue and a sex-positive attitude, Sleeping With Other People is unusually smart, and surprising for the believable emotional arcs.
• Honourable mentions: Peep Show seasons 1-9 (TV, out now), Taxi Tehran (film, 2 December), Haemoo (film, 19 December)
Dendy Direct
Film: Sing Street (2016, Ireland), directed by John Carney – out now
I have a theory that you can sense when filmmakers still remember what it felt like to be a teenager. Like We are the Best!, Sing Street is made by that kind of filmmaker.
It’s an Irish comedic drama about an ingenious dork who invents a “futurist” band as an excuse to hang out with a cool older girl across the road. The band turns out to be awesome, and the film locates that teen outsider vibe so accurately, it made me recall my own bleak experience of unacceptable haircuts and daily head-to-toe Kmart outfits.
Despite its themes of the tyranny of high school and the grimness of working-class life in 1980s Dublin, Sing Street is tuned into that youthful vivacity. It’s the type of film that blends an indie ethos and a big commercial audience sensibility, with the band’s video clips thrown together with a Michel Gondry-like DIY joyousness. It’s funny, clever, sweet, sometimes bittersweet stuff, approaching the hopes and longing of youth from the prism of maturity.
Film: Chasing Asylum (2016, Australia) directed by Eva Orner – out 6 December
A talking-heads documentary or a real-life horror movie? Oscar-winning Australian filmmaker Eva Orner begins Chasing Asylum on the high seas on the helm of rickety boat, being smashed by grey waves from every angle. The fear is palpable. From there, Orner gets a series of hidden cameras into the offshore detention centres usually protected from journalistic interrogation, and persuades former staffers to blow the whistle.
Orner’s innovation is that she uses the conventions of a horror film to show us what we thought we knew: we creep around hallways, see shadowy silhouettes of refugees cross doorways and eventually come upon messages of sorrow written in blood on the walls. Chasing Asylum doesn’t offer a solution to this moral mess, but as evidence of a catastrophic human rights failure, it undoubtedly succeeds.
• Honourable mentions: Westworld season 1 (TV, 6 December), Sully (film, 14 December)
ABC iView
TV: The Checkout, series 3 (2016, Australia) – out now, updated weekly
A show about consumer affairs sounds so deeply unsexy. But in the nimble hands of young Sydney comedians and the production minds of the Chaser guys, this clever format satirises the manipulations of this country’s insane retail market. After all, retail in Australia is so diabolically monopolised by Coles and Woolworths that 23 cents out of every single dollar we spend ends up in their pockets.
The Checkout is a skit comedy show (really, a public service) about how that kind of big-picture stuff affects our daily expenditure and decisions. It reveals the evils of pricing tricks, gendered marketing and false advertising to defamiliarise the absurd daily manipulations we’ve become resigned to as we blankly scan our groceries at DIY supermarket checkouts. In particular, Kirsten Drysdale and Zoe Norton Lodge’s sections on the conflicting “advice” of women’s magazines for “busy mums” is a dark pleasure. Extortionate Australia needs this show.
TV: Please Like Me, series 4 (2016, Australia) by Josh Thomas – out now, updated weekly
A big yes to the new series of this sitcom by Josh Thomas, a brilliant, neurotic comedian. To me, Please Like Me is the closest thing to reality on television: it’s about the awkward life flailings of a generation of people like me who study things like media arts, are in constant quarter-life-crisis and will be life-long renters.
The women on the show have hair under their arms! The gay guys are genuine characters who actually have sex with each other rather than being Camp Best Friend stereotypes! It’s a bittersweet program – Woody Allen without the misanthropy – and as Thomas perfects the sitcom form, season four might just be enough to dignify this critically under-appreciated format in Australia.
• Honourable mentions: Rosehaven (TV, out now), Citizenfour (film, 4 December), Girl Asleep (film, 11 December).
SBS On Demand
TV: Midnight Sun (2016, France/Sweden) directed by Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein – first two episodes out now, the rest to follow throughout December
New French-Swedish series Midnight Sun’s opening scene is as striking as anything I’ve seen this year. A murderer has tied his victim to a helicopter blade; the speed of the rotations beheads him as the camera pulls up overhead the chopper. “Is the head missing?” asks a detective? “Not completely, we found the teeth.”
But Midnight Sun doesn’t play violence for kicks; it’s more of a psychological thriller. Gothic in tone, like Top of the Lake and The Kettering Incident, it uses an elaborate crime to explore a general sense of being lost in society – that strange, sad Western malaise of today (one character’s interactions with a cab driver: “Where to?”, “I don’t know.”). The unpeopled vistas of a mining town in the Swedish Arctic circle where the sun never sets is the perfect setting for such a crime theme (“The place is completely lost,” says an investigator). Engaging storytelling from the new wave of Scandi-noir.
Film: Goodnight and Good Luck (USA, 2005) directed by George Clooney – out now
Now is a great time to revisit this portrait of valiant journalist Edward R Murrow during the McCarthyist 1950s, given the fog of fear and paranoia that has risen with the election of Donald Trump. A precursor to Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies and Clint Eastwood’s Sully, this film is an instructive example of how US filmmakers tell their national myths, expressing what critic Luke Goodsell wonderfully calls “a certain brand of anxious American idealism.”
George Clooney, in the role of director, presents a riveting story of idealism and intellectual defiance, fierce with feeling and undercut with sentimental nationalist politics. Its optimism and disciplined storytelling means it holds up today, but viewing it now almost disproves its worldview of a historical arc that bends naturally toward justice: it retrospectively shows that McCarthyism isn’t specifically about Joe McCarthy and the House of UnAmerican Activities, but a culture of unjustified accusations of treason, which has all but strengthened of late.
