Top 20 Films of 2015

2015 was an odd year.

I caught ~60 releases, but still felt a bit tuned out this year. Perhaps it’s just December, a month where I’m always consumed with regret and shame over all the films I missed. I’m only half kidding.

Still, I’ve put together a top 20, and jotted down some of my thoughts on the year. I’ll do the countdown first, and then the cranky, analytical, frankly skippable stuff afterwards.

20. Love & Mercy – A great cast and savvy attention to sound design allow this Brian Wilson musician biopic to transcend the genre’s typical reverential history lesson pitfalls. Paul Dano is great as young Brian, somewhat overshadowing the serviceable John Cusack as washed-up Brian, while Elizabeth Banks and Paul Giamatti are great is supporting roles.

19. Marshland – True Detective’s Spanish nephew. Marshland is a 1980s-set noir, in which a pair of anti-buddy cops attempt to solve a series of murders in rural swamp country, uncovering the usual conspiracy, but also some personal secrets of their own. Wallow in the offhand perfectionism of the period detail and immaculate sense of place supplemented by occasional overhead “god’s-eye” cinematography.

18. The Invitation – Two years after the death of their only son and subsequent divorce, Will, along with his new girlfriend, is invited to a dinner party hosted by his ex-wife Eden and her new husband, ostensibly to achieve some emotional closure by commemorating their lost child. Several other close friends have been invited, most of them somewhat out of touch with the hosts, who’ve been on retreat in Mexico. It’s an awkward get-together, and the taciturn Will increasingly suspects something is not right. This is a brooding low-budget thriller that amplifies paranoia and social anxieties into a form of horror that kept me guessing, but also relating. A hard combination to juggle. Director Karyn Kusama disliked her Hollywood experience on the thoroughly mediocre Jennifer’s Body, and returned to low-budget filmmaking in exchange for having her own way, including a lot more diversity than the genre usual accommodates.

17. Anomalisa – Charlie Kaufman’s previous film, Synecdoche New York, is one of my all-time favorites, and was bound to be a tough act to follow. Anomalisa, a story about a middle-aged motivational speaker having a one night stand while attending a customer service convention in Ohio (“Try the Chili!”), lacks his previous film’s existential ambition, but it’s still smarter, funnier and more original than 98% of cinema. Some immediate signs that this isn’t your typical midlife crisis indie movie: all the characters are puppets and all of them except two are voiced by the infuriatingly cordial-bland Tom Noonan.

16. What We Do in the Shadows – Doesn’t this sound insufferable: a reality-TV style film about four New Zealand dudes living as roommates? But Taika Waititi (Boy) adds a brilliant twist: they’re all vampires. The plot revolves around the reluctantly accepted new addition Nick, who clashes with self-centered bon vivant Deacon, 8000 year-old Petyr and a rival gang of werewolves. The screenplay explores the premise thoroughly without wearing out its welcome, and the silly but morbid skit-based comedy is sustained by performances that play off each other effortlessly.

15. The End of the Tour – Yet another biopic on my list! I must be getting old. But this highly focused, carefully modulated and relatively honest look at a brief encounter, perhaps just short of friendship, between writers David Lipsky and David Foster Wallace, highlights one of my favorite things: the sublime flow of a good conversation. Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg both inhabit their characters with grace and sincerity. Despite being framed around Wallace’s high profile suicide, the drama is wisely low key, more interested in Wallace’s fundamental humanity and need to express himself in everyday contemporary terms, than in his much touted genius. This is a quiet film, but a very full one. Its main shortcoming is that it isn’t as good as reading one of his books.

14. Wild Tales – 6 black comedic shorts from Argentina, themed around revenge in many shapes and sizes. Anthology films rarely work for me, but this one has a cohesive core without repeated itself and is ordered so that each tale overtops the previous. Lots of observations about topics as diverse as road rage, love, bureaucracy and the media. Revenge is a theme that cinema has done to death, but Wild Tales knows how to escalate things with just the right degree of cynical wit and gleeful absurdity.

13. The Last Five Years – A relatively straightforward adaptation of Jason Robert Brown’s not-so-straightforward musical, The Last Five Years spans the rise and fall of a relationship between novelist Jamie (Jeremy Jordan, a bit out of his depth on the acting side) and actress Cathy (Anna Kendrick, awesome as always). Their careers go in opposite directions, with Jamie dealing with fame even more poorly than Cathy with failure. The film’s uncompromisingly literary lyrics and holistic perspective on the stages of relationships are paired well with an experimental structure: Cathy’s story is told chronologically backwards, her songs alternating with Jamie’s story as it unfolds chronologically forwards.

12. Spotlight – A team of Boston investigative journalists gradually chip away at the systemic nature of priests molesting children and high-ranking church officials covering it up. Sure, this is ensemble Oscar-bait, but it is really, really good ensemble Oscar-bait, saved from histrionics, heroics and finger-wagging by Tom McCarthy’s (The Station Agent, The Visitor) borderline obsessive desire not to sensationalize. In fact, by dialing down the dramatic, the film managed to ratchet up the emotional impact, at least for jaded viewers like me. Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams and Michael Keaton are all top notch. Liev Schreiber is the best he’s ever been. 

11. Room – Ma is a 22-year-old woman who has raised her 5-year-old son, Jack, in captivity, locked in a small room somewhere in suburbia where she is kept by a kidnapper named Nick. It’s an instantly creepy, troubling, stressful set-up, anchored by a note-perfect Brie Larson (Short Term 12). The first half of the film would have been fantastic alone, but it’s the second half that shows real maturity, psychological insight and follow-through. This is really two great films, with different genres and tones fitted together seamlessly.

10. It Follows – This year’s breakout cult horror film. Spoilers ahead. Jay’s older boyfriend Hugh seems like a nice guy. Though he sometimes acts strange, they eventually hook up in his car in an empty lot behind some abandoned buildings. The romantic moment is shattered when, afterwards, he chloroforms her and ties her up. But just when you think you’ve stumbled into some awful torture porn, It Follows takes off in a really fascinating direction. Hugh isn’t a sadist; he just wants Jay to understand the gravity of the STD he’s just given her: a creature that can look like anyone will start following her. Slowly, implacably, unstoppably. If it catches her, she will die in extreme pain. And then it will return to hunting Hugh. Her only long-term survival plan is to pass it on to someone else. It Follows is a scary atmospheric thriller and a thoughtful allegory for teenage sexuality, surprisingly free from crass exploitation and cheap payoffs.

9. Tangerine –Tangerine has to be the year’s most surprising critical darling. Two take-no-prisoners trash-talking transgender sex workers, Sin-Dee and Alexandra, meet up at Donut Time on Christmas Eve, just after Sin-Dee is released from a 28 day prison sentence. Alexandra accidentally lets slip that Sin-Dee’s pimp/boyfriend Chester two-timed her with a cis-gender gal while she was in lock-up, and Sin-Dee is off on a bloodthirsty but oddly hilarious vengeance quest. A beleaguered Armenian taxi driver also gets involved. Shot on iPhones along the Sunset Strip, this is a film full of energy, guts, genuine friendship and a fresh comic voice. Much better than its po-faced East Coast indie darling counterpart, Heaven Knows What, about homeless heroin addicts.

8. Inside Out – Do I need to talk about this? It’s a Pixar film. You already saw it. Superb CG, story-telling, pacing, etc. They have a formula, but it works well, especially tucked behind such a beautiful and actually riskily original façade: personality traits controlling a teenage girl’s brain and exploring the landscapes of her mind. It’s also brave enough to dispense with both romantic subplots and villains. All “kids” movies should aspire to be this good.

7. Clouds of Sils Maria – A crafty, sophisticated, multi-layered enigma in which Juliette Binoche plays Maria, a middle-aged actress offered the role of the older woman in a play about a May-December lesbian relationship. A few decades past, she’d achieved her breakthrough to superstardom playing the younger woman, a role now being offered to hot up-and-comer and tabloid regular Jo-Ann (Chloe Grace-Moretz). Maria’s real life isn’t far from her art, as her relationship with much younger personal assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart, winning all kinds of awards!) is fraught with subterranean sexual tension and power struggles. Director Olivier Assayas’s career has been uneven, but never uninteresting, and this mesmerizing, ambiguous showcase of serious acting talent and subtle psychological warfare is his best work yet.

6. Embrace of the Serpent – A German botanist in 1909 and an American in 1940 both embark on similar quests for a rare legendary flower, capable of restoring dreams to the dreamless, supposedly found deep in the Amazon. They are guided by Karamakate, a shaman who doubts their ideologies and their intentions and who, by 1940, is suffering from severe memory loss. The lopsided two timeframe structure is a strange choice, but allows Colombian director Ciro Guerra to explore the unpredictable long-term ramifications of cultural clashes, both violently physical and dangerously mental. This is definitely a thinking man’s adventure film, with beguiling mystery wisps blooming out in every direction as their canoes take them deeper into a land feverishly rejecting its heart transplant. Shot in dense, evocative black-and-white.

5. Ex Machina – Caleb is a hotshot programmer who wins a chance to meet reclusive AI genius Nathan, who lives in an inaccessible high-tech glacier-side bungalow. He never quite finds his balance. Nathan immediately begins toying with him under cover of a disingenuous friendship and saddles him with an unexpected challenge: deliver a Turing test to Ava, a robot who looks, talks and possibly even thinks like a human. Caleb finds himself emotionally involved, attracted to Ava’s curiosity, intelligence and vulnerability, not to mention her sleek packaging, while trying to maneuver out from under Nathan’s thumb. Meanwhile the maestro is tortured by his visions of the coming future, a future he is compelled to create, but his condescension and narcissism have left him even more isolated than his imprisoned inventions. Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson and Alicia Vikander are perfectly cast, and provide much-needed human stakes to underpin the cerebral dialog. It isn’t often I would give these two awards to the same film: best debate about technology and best dance scene.

4. Son of Saul – Does the world need another Holocaust film? There’ve been a lot, and I have to admit I go into them with a degree of skepticism. After all, what is there left to say that a film is even capable of communicating? Son of Saul has an answer, but it can’t be paraphrased. It has to be seen. This is a harrowing, soul-crushing odyssey through the inner workings of a the world’s most heinous machine, the concentration camp, seen from the perspective of a victim-employee determined to provide a proper Jewish burial for a boy who may or may not be his bastard son. The relentless over-the-shoulder long takes are technically brilliant, but even more brilliant because they force us not to do what we long to do: look away.

3. Mad Max: Fury Road – A glorious, nonstop post-apocalyptic desert car chase led by one-armed mechanic/warrior Charlize Theron and subdued, inarticulate Tom Hardy. The two, by necessity, learn to operate as a well-oiled machine as they attempt to outrun the enraged mutant tyrant whose harem they’ve just stolen. Pursued by an eccentric army of inventive vehicles of destruction, they leave a path of carnage and mayhem behind them while bonding through body language and mutual respect. Memorable action sequences and visual flourishes abound. The stripped-down script is ruthlessly efficient. Nothing else this year approached Mad Max in terms of adrenaline.

2. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem – A protracted Jewish divorce case set largely in a single nondescript white-washed room might not seem like a barrel of fun (it isn’t), but as an intersection of great writing, directing and acting (the astounding Ronit Elkabetz in all three cases, with some help from her friends), you can’t find much better. Viviane and Shimon have been married for twenty years. Viviane has been unhappy almost since day one, and longs to be free of him. Shimon claims to still love her and points out that he has never hit her or given her religious grounds for divorce, though it’s clear to everyone that he’s awful to live with. In the course of two hours, their relationship is slit open, dissected and left exposed until it starts to stink. Nobody, not the lawyers, judges, witnesses or the couple themselves, seem to be able to do anything about it. It is uncomfortable, but in the best sense: unbearably honest, human and hard to resolve.

1. Sicario – Following a raid on a suburban drug lab turned mass grave north of the US-Mexico border, FBI SWAT agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) is attached to a clandestine joint operation to extradite a high ranking officer in the drug syndicate responsible. Her glib but reticent new boss (Josh Brolin) and his ununiformed partner (Benicio del Toro) immediately strike her as shady, but they reassure her that their legally murky methods are fully sanctioned from above, and they certainly prove quite effective. Kate gets embroiled deeper and deeper, fatally unwilling to accept that she is being used as a pawn in a game played above her pay grade and below the moral high-ground. Sicario is a series of linked set pieces alternating white-knuckle tension and bursts of chilling violence. It’s also a pessimistic exploration of border spaces, both national and ethical, and what it costs us to cross them. But ultimately the winning combination is three people at the top of their game: director Denis Villeneuve, cinematographer Roger Deakins and actress Emily Blunt.

I never feel like it’s been a great year until I have to bump films I really liked off my top 20. Some of the titles that were edged off towards the end include:

Blind – A sightless Swedish novelist wrestles with her sexual insecurities.

White God – A gritty Hungarian parable in which a young girl is forced to abandon her pet dog, who struggles to survive on the street before toughening up and leading a blood-soaked (but also kind of adorable) canine revolution against humanity.

The Martian - A nearly ideal adaptation of a book into a movie, with some of my qualms about the source material (character development in particular) fixed by strong acting on Matt Damon's part, playing a resourceful astronaut stranded on Mars. 

Beasts of No Nation – Cary Fukunaga provides gorgeously lensed reasons why you don’t want to be a child soldier in an African civil war, in case you had some doubts.

Court – An Indian satire of the justice system, in which a street poet is arrested for inciting a sewer worker to suicide (actually a workplace accident caused by grossly inadequate safety equipment), and a deconstruction of the legal thriller, showing the mindless bureaucracy, corruption and apathy under the thin coating of law, procedure and middle-class morality.

General thoughts on film in 2015:

Although I often focus on the negative, I want to start out by saying how much I really enjoyed so many movies from 2015! It was a triumphant year for middlebrow offerings (Spotlight, The End of the Tour, Love & Mercy, Carol, Beasts of No Nation) and fantastic acting, especially from actresses in roles actually worthy of them (Sicario, Gett, Clouds of Sils Maria, Mad Max, Room, Phoenix, Inside Out, Girlhood, Heaven Knows What). There were a lot of really original and personal creative works (Anomalisa, The Duke of Burgundy, The Kindergarten Teacher) and exciting debut/breakthrough directors. 

For genre fans, there was a little of everything. Some excellent sci-fi (Mad Max, Ex Machina, The Martian, Inside Out), creepy horror (It Follows, The Invitation, Goodnight Mommy) and even comedies that I actually found funny (Tangerine, What We Do in the Shadows, Mistress America, Wild Tales), though be aware that my sense of humor is highly suspect.

Meanwhile, the studio franchise factories offered us an unprecedented number of marquee sequels and reboots (Avengers, Star Wars, Jurassic Park, James Bond, Rocky, some increasingly indistinguishable superhero stuff) setting box office records, but rarely offering anything fresh or interesting. A couple exceptions were Mission Impossible, with Rebecca Ferguson redeeming Rogue Nation’s fun but otherwise formulaic entry, and Mad Max, which I’d never have predicted being my favorite summer blockbuster so far this decade. I also have a bit of a crush on The Man from UNCLE, with its appealing cast and 60s fashion sense.

On the flip side, critics raved about many an art film from established auteurs (Hou’s The Assassin, Alonso’s Jauja, German’s Hard to Be a God, Sissako’s Timbuktu) that failed to connect with me.

The Assassin, in particular, baffled me. One of Asia’s most influential directors of the 80s and 90s decides to bring his high art sensibilities to the martial arts genre and critics were quick to toast it as a masterpiece. I was truly excited to see what would result! But what a painful theater-going experience: pretty, but totally lifeless. Hou married the vacuity of navel-gazing slow-cinema to the plotless confusion of bad kung fu, eschewing action, character, historical context, thematic relevance and emotional depth in favor of static tableaux shot through diaphanous curtains (cue thunderous critical applause). After the festival screening in St. Louis, the audience poured into nearby restaurants and bars discussing the disaster.

Hard to Be a God, on the other hand, while long, slow, grim, brutal,  muddy, rainy, ugly, unpleasant and monochromatic, at least had a truly distinctive vision that I found itchingly compelling though I wish more (or really, anything) had been done with its sci-fi medieval plot adapted from a Strugatsky brother novel.

Jauja is Argentine minimalist Lisandro Alonso’s most accessible film to date, but it is still utterly impenetrable. A-list star Viggo Mortensen spends the entire film looking as confused as I felt. He plays a Danish explorer lost in the Argentine dessert while searching for his child. He hallucinates an encounter with an old hermit who may be his daughter from the future. Then the film abruptly cuts to a girl waking up in a mansion and wandering a forest in the present day. I’m probably making it sound better than it is. For a superior 2015 colonial-explorer-hallucinating-in-the-Latin-American-wilderness art film, stick with Embrace of the Serpent.

Update:
A few films I watched after already publishing this post: The Revenant (Mind-blowing visuals and high-grade Leo attached to a so-so script), The Hateful Eight (Talky, gory and stetched to the breaking point; I'm a fan!), Brooklyn (Feel-good immigration tale. Solid, but I'd rather see a more challenging film about modern immigrants who are ANYTHING other than Irish or Italian).

Among the films that I missed or haven’t yet caught include 45 Years, Victoria, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, Chiraq, Grangs of Wasseypur, Bridge of Spies, 99 Homes and Youth. What do you recommend?

Film Atlas (Mauritania): Timbuktu

Country: Mauritania

Title: Timbuktu (2014)

The film is set during the 8-month occupation of Timbuktu, Mali by Ansar Dine, a militant Islamic movement associated with ISIL. They impose sharia, an extremely strict set of laws that includes the banning of music, singing and sports, forcing women to completely cover their bodies, and levying heavy punishments like lashings and stonings for violations. 

The local population, unassuming shepherds, fishers, farmers and shopkeepers, who’ve never needed a standing army and practice Islam as a private, inward-directed faith, are at first merely bemused and annoyed by the newly-arrived outsiders. But their policies, pitilessly, disproportionately and often hypocritically applied, soon turn the once-vibrant region into a fearful and despotic hellhole. The main character, Kidane, is a leisurely but very loving husband and father, who grazes eight cows in the grass-patched dunes outside the city. When “GPS,” the pride of his herd, is killed by an angry neighbor, Kidane gets caught up in the senseless ‘justice’ of Ansar Dine’s reign.

Veteran helmer Abderrahmane Sissako has shown a welcome inclination to tackle contemporary political topics, but what makes Timbuktu work is that it has a great deal more grace and moderation than we’re used to from political pieces and social commentaries. It functions on a much smaller and more intimate scale. The “heroes” of the story are members of a quiet unambitious family so inconsequential that the occupiers are barely aware of their existence until circumstances make them just conspicuous enough to merit a quick, callous, informal trial. The soldiers of ISIL, on the other hand, aren’t depicted here as an army or terrorist organization so much as a small-time gang; self-interested men who thrive on seeing their own will imposed on those around them, something only possible because they happen to have guns. They shroud themselves with a religion they little understand, warping it to their short-term, petty desires while disregarding the articulate common sense of the local imam.

Sissako’s style has intermittently flirted with European slow cinema and he’s developed an eye for breathtaking telephoto scenes that increasingly merit being held for a minute or more as we fully digest. Perhaps the best is a long shot of two men separating after a struggle in the middle of a shallow lake, lurching to land, their expressions far too remote to read, but in the full awareness that their lives are ending. Another hauntingly beautiful scene weaves around a soccer match taking place with an imagined ball, the real one having been confiscated as un-Islamic. 

Timbuktu also has Sissako’s best script to date, balancing the slacker ennui and mute acceptance of his Waiting for Happiness and the in-your-face polemics and foregrounded debate of his last feature, Bamako, in which an African village literally puts the IMF on trial.

Major Directors:

Abderrahmane Sissako

Med Hondo

Film Atlas (Kuwait): The Cruel Sea

Country: Kuwait

Title: The Cruel Sea / Bas ya Bahar (1972)

For the men and women who eke out a living on the coast of Kuwait, the sea is both friend and enemy, generous giver and ruthless taker, and at various times a meal ticket, a home and a grave. Moussaed, your typical handsome-but-poor young man is in love with Nora, your garden variety beautiful-rich-out-of-reach woman, who reciprocates his feeling despite her father’s objections. Moussaed is more successful at vetoing his dad, determining to make his fortunes as a pearl diver even though his father’s arm was paralyzed by a shark pursuing the same career. 

Once underway on a four month tour of duty, Moussaed partners with Badr, his only friend on the conspicuously solidarity-starved ship, and the two are reasonably successful at first. However, it soon becomes clear that they are playing a dangerous lottery rigged against them by both man and nature. The prolonged time spent submerged and the constant pressure changes saddle Moussaed with an excruciating earache while other illnesses plague the crew. Forced to push on anyway, his arm is caught in an underwater cleft and, after a terrifying struggle, he dies. 

Late that night Badr cuts open the clams from his ex-buddy’s basket and discovers several shimmering pearls. The ship returns from the season late. In the meantime Nora has been married against her will to a wealthy merchant. Badr gives the pearls to Moussaed’s parents, but, overcome by grief, his mother throws them back to the cruel sea.

The Cruel Sea was the first feature film from Kuwait and major landmark in Arabic cinema. The production is technically rather rough, marred by injudicious zoom shots and ambitious but frequently confusing editing and lighting that confuse several scenes, but the sweaty, sickly claustrophobia of the diving boat and the misleading serenity of the underwater photography elevate the film’s latter half. Similarly, the narrative begins rather conventionally with a pair of thwarted lovers who’ve got very little spark and at one point loses momentum during Nora’s extended wedding scene, but the story has a timeless wisdom and sadness, not to mention a great deal of thematic interest, that build towards the final acts.

Family, tradition, masculinity and life at sea, while shown as essential to community life and as cornerstones of their value system, are undermined by self-interest, parochialism and unjustifiable risk. Even dreams, the thing that movies are made of, are revealed as siren songs. In an extended flashback Moussaed’s father pursues a phantom pearl to his own disaster, and later fails to avert his son, who refuses to obey him, from an even worse fate. Conversely, Nora’s father should have been disobeyed, but can’t be, and result is also tragedy. This false choice, where respecting parental authority versus paving one’s own way both lead to misfortune, echoes the movie’s more explicit theme of an ocean on which lives both depend and end.

Film Atlas (Honduras): Garifuna in Peril

Country: Honduras

Title: Garifuna in Peril (2012)

Garifuna in Peril, despite its grassroots production, has a great deal of ambition, not only attempting to rescue an ethnic community and their fading language by telling their story of survival in both the historical past and the economically-shaky present, but also presenting a warm-hearted family saga with all the breadth and intimacy that entails. Ricardo is the foundation of an extended family that spans two countries. He lives in the US with his wife Becky, where he manages the business end of a Honduran company with his brother, Miguel, who conducts tours of their traditional Garifuna village. Together they are building an English-Spanish-Garifuna-language schoolhouse with the proceeds. 

But Miguel befriends Pedro, a bus driver for a nearby luxury hotel, and falls in love with Pedro’s sister Vera, who makes him a more lucrative offer. Ricardo has to travel back to his homeland and clear up the mess. Meanwhile Ricardo’s daughter, Helena, deals with a much older boyfriend, Gabriel, who is dragging his feet about getting tested for HIV, and his oldest son Elijah, initially indifferent to his cultural heritage, stars in a play about the Garifuna people’s 17th century resistance to British colonialism and slavery on the island of St. Vincent.

One of the keys to low-budget filmmaking is to play to your strengths. Car chases and CG are expensive, but good writing, though difficult to achieve, is cheap. Garifuna understands this, and succeeds by focusing on a strong script that captures the everyday realism of a unique pocket of Honduras and never cuts corners in terms of what it wants to tackle and how. Of course, not every subplot gets an in depth treatment, but even the ones brushed over (like Helena’s relationship or everything having to do with the youngest son, Jimmy) give us a greater sense of a living, breathing family.

There are a lot of scenes that may look like soap opera, but don’t feel like it, largely because the writing is both fair and honest. For example, Miguel’s passion for Vera is understandable even as it leads him to make an obviously poor decision and I was impressed that the film resisted giving him a tearful reunion back into the family fold after realizing his mistake. Instead he gets tipsy, wrestles inarticulately with guilt and self-disgust and finally takes off never to be seen again; pretty harsh, but also pretty true to life. Another great example of naturalistic writing, painfully reminiscent of my own experiences, is a sort of town hall meeting in which miscommunication, blame apportioning, anger venting, lingering resentments and cross-cultural mistrust make it hard to get anything meaningful done, though that doesn’t stop a few optimists from trying.  I was also keen on the hotel owner’s climactic “villain speech,” which is actually reasonable, persuasive and open to some compromises, an almost unheard of rarity in stories about communities squaring off against large corporations.

The acting and directing don’t quite live up to the same level as the writing. Ruban Reyes, who stars as Ricardo and co-directed, raises the level of every scene he’s in (and thankfully he’s onscreen a lot), but the rest of the cast feel like first-time actors, which isn’t surprising, because they are. Garifuna in Peril isn’t likely to generate a lot of buzz, but for those among the Garifuna diaspora or who take an interest in Central American cultures, they’ll be well satisfied by this film.

This was the first Film Atlas title submitted by a reader (and it beat out the Honduran films I was able to track down on my own). If you know of or represent a great film from a country not yet on the Film Atlas, please let  know! I'd be happy to hear from you.