Although we’ve wrapped up 2014 with our 50 favorites of the year, many of the best releases will be in front of more audiences come this month. As Inherent Vice, Selma, Leviathan, Mr. Turner, Two Days, One Night, Winter Sleep, and more expand, this month of new offerings is nothing to ignore. Sure, January is full of sure-to-be-dreadful wide releases, but aside from a greatly promising one, some of the most acclaimed festival titles of last year (and beyond) will touch down. Check out our top 10 below, and let us know what you’re looking forward to.
Matinees to See: When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism (1/9), Predestination (1/9), Match (1/14), Little Accidents (1/16), Paddington (1/16), The Taking of Tiger Mountain (1/16), R100 (1/23), Black Sea (1/23), and Amira & Sam (1/30)
10. Girlhood (Céline Sciamma; Jan. 30th)
Synopsis: Marieme joins an all-girl gang in the projects of Paris and is slowly turned out of her shell by her three sassy neighbors. As she falls further under their bravado and volatile energy, she begins making brave and foolish choices.
Why You Should See It: Céline Sciamma‘s latest, not to be confused in any way with the most acclaimed film of last year, premiered at Cannes last year and will be arriving stateside this month. Bolstered by a strong response and festival run since its debut, we’re looking forward to checking it out in a few weeks’ time.
9. Mommy (Xavier Dolan; Jan. 23rd)
Synopsis: A peculiar neighbor (Suzanne Clément) offers hope to a recent widow (Anne Dorval) who is struggling to raise a teenager (Antoine Olivier Pilon) who is unpredictable and, sometimes, violent.
Why You Should See It: Xavier Dolan‘s latest feature has been the subject of much praise since its Cannes debut this spring, and while we’re a bit cooler on it than most, I’d still recommend it on account of a handful of top-notch scenes. As we said in our review, “Dolan is an impressive director who’s made a career out of his musical interludes and some tremendous performances. However, Mommy shows he has little tenacity for the actual materials that make up a narrative film, as the elements which made his previous pictures exciting get trapped in a mess without anything palpable to grasp.”
8. Red Army (Gabe Polsky; Jan. 23rd)
Synopsis: A feature documentary about the Soviet Union and the most successful dynasty in sports history: the Red Army hockey team.
Why You Should See It: Backed by Werner Herzog, the latest documentary from Gabe Polsky might have not made the Oscar shortlist for its category, but that’s hardly an indication of quality. Once set for a release last fall, Red Army will now hit theaters this month, and, judging by its early reviews, it’ll be one of the better sports documentaries in recent memory.
7. Beloved Sisters (Dominik Graf; Jan. 9th)
Synopsis: A love triangle forms between post-Enlightenment writer Friedrich Schiller (Florian Stetter) and two sisters — one who became his wife (Henriette Confurius) and the other, his biographer (Hannah Herzsprung).
Why You Should See It: Beloved Sisters, Germany’s submission for Best Foreign Language Film, is a nearly three-hour 18th-century period drama; while that description alone may turn off a fair share of viewers, it looks to be among the most-promising of its kind in some time. Our colleague David Ehrlich calls it “sophisticated,” having struck “a perfect balance between Resnais and the renaissance.”
6. Appropriate Behavior (Desiree Akhavan; Jan. 16th)
Synopsis: Shirin struggles to become an ideal Persian daughter, a politically correct bisexual, and a hip young woman from Brooklyn.
Why You Should See It: When it comes to Brooklyn-set, female-led features at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, Jenny Slate’s Obvious Child seemed to stir up the most attention, but, for those looking a bit deeper, there was Appropriate Behavior. Marking the directorial debut of Desiree Akhavan (who also writes and stars), it looks like a genuinely funny feature we’re looking forward to catching up with.
5. Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako; Jan. 28th)
Synopsis: Not far from Timbuktu, now ruled by the religious fundamentalists, Kidane lives peacefully in the dunes with his wife Satima, his daughter Toya, and Issan, their twelve-year-old shepherd. In town, the people suffer, powerless, from the regime of terror imposed by the Jihadists determined to control their faith.
Why You Should See It: When talking about one of our favorite films from Cannes, we said in our review, “Abderrahmane Sissako can no longer be called one of the greatest African directors of our time; he has become, simply, one of the greatest directors of our time. With his fifth feature, Timbuktu, Sissako fuses the poetic visual language of Waiting for Happiness with the political urgency of Bamako to bring about a revelatory work, something along the lines of a Howard Hawks jihadi-hangout movie. I mean that as a very good thing.”
4. Hard to be a God (Aleksei German; Jan. 30th)
Synopsis: A group of scientists is sent to the planet Arkanar to help the local civilization, which is in the Medieval phase of its own history, to find the right path to progress.
Why You Should See It: With production beginning back in 2000 and a festival premiere in the fall of 2013 — following director Aleksei German‘s death earlier that year — we wondered if we’d ever see Hard to Be a God stateside. Thankfully, Kino Lorber picked it up late last year, and we’ll be seeing it at the end of this month. Our review said it is “without a doubt, a stunningly radical work: a three-hour journey into the heart of darkness that doesn’t just grab you, but envelops, haunted by a moral bleakness that leaves nothing beyond the images of terror it creates. While German remains simply a curiosity in the United States (he is as beloved as Tarkovsky in Russia), Hard to Be a God is the perfection of the director’s long-take approach, likely to remain unmatched for years to come.”
3. The Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland; Jan. 23rd)
Synopsis: An aspiring lepidopterist and her lover explore their sexual desires.
Why You Should See It: One of the most acclaimed films coming out of TIFF, we said in our review, “At its best, Strickland disorients us until we aren’t certain what is real and what isn’t. And whether he wants us to see metaphor or not, you can’t help trying to reconcile the insects with the girls, once depictions of metamorphosis shine throughout from costuming, role playing, or the sense that an ornate punishment box only vacated with the safe word ‘pinartii’ is a cocoon. There’s blatant repetition, vantage point reversals, double exposures, and visually stunning transitions from a character’s gaze through a microscope into a fantasy playland of desires. These are minutely different from passages we’ve already seen yet are just as surreal until normalcy appears as nightmare, sadism as dream.”
2. Blackhat (Michael Mann; Jan. 16th)
Synopsis: A man is released from prison to help American and Chinese authorities pursue a mysterious cyber criminal. The dangerous search leads them from Chicago to Hong Kong.
Why You Should See It: Over five-and-a-half years since his last film, here is the long-awaited return of Michael Mann. Going from the Prohibition era to the present world of global hacking, Blackhat looks to provide the ideal narrative match for Mann’s digital approach, and will hopefully give Chris Hemsworth more to do than his typical franchise fare. With the most-promising studio offering of 2015’s first few months (by a long shot), we’re confident that Mann will refute the standard-caliber of the usual January wide release.
1. Li’l Quinquin (Bruno Dumont; Jan. 2nd)
Synopsis: A clueless police inspector stumbles his way through a provincial murder investigation.
Why You Should See It: Named by Cahiers du cinéma as the best film of last year, Bruno Dumont‘s latest, a four-part comedic drama, is one of the most acclaimed features of 2014 — and with comparisons to Twin Peaks, it’s shaping up to the be ideal way to kick off this cinematic year. We said, in our review, that the film “exists to suggest and provoke rather than declare, and is all the better for it.” Li’l Quinquin is now in limited release, but if you’re not near a theater, it can be streamed in full through Fandor.
What are you most looking forward to this month?