STREAMING CINEMA
In a Streaming Year, These Were Best
Strongest features and shorts; runners-up; gems from the past
BY STEVE ERICKSON
Looking back on a diffi cult
year in so many respects,
the fi lms stand out:
“Vitalina Varela” (Pedro
Costa): A dream of Portuguese
underclass life balancing images
worthy of Rembrandt and a clear
vision of the horror of poverty, “Vitalina
Varela” was released to theaters
before the pandemic. It features
cinematography so dark that
it might be unwatchable on home
video. Continuing Costa’s ongoing
collaboration with non-professional
actors Ventura (who plays a priest)
and the woman named in its title,
it paradoxically builds its highly
stylized vision out of the material
decay of Lisbon’s slums.
“She Dies Tomorrow” (Amy
Seimetz): A fi lm that perfectly fi t
the mood of this garbage dumpster
of a year, “She Dies Tomorrow”
concentrates tightly on the experiences
of a small group of friends as
they pass a mental virus around.
Despite the bleak plot, Seimetz is
no edgelord. Instead, “She Dies Tomorrow”
describes the challenge
of coping with a world where our
worst fears might well come true
and trying to reach out to our family
and friends could spread literal
disease. Its left-fi eld take on horror
feels more like the nightly news.
“Possessor” (Brandon Cronenberg):
His father David’s fi xation
with body horror, facts and conspiracy
theories about the CIA’s
MK-Ultra brainwashing program,
a very modern sense that spending
so much time online is robbing
us of our individual personalities
— all these infl uences went
into Cronenberg’s “Possessor,” but
it shows a huge leap in craft from
the director’s debut feature, “Antiviral.”
Both brutally and beautifully
violent, “Possessor” gives us a
misanthropic science fi ction where
killers take over ordinary people’s
minds to commit murder and then
return to their selves. In its world,
fi nding oneself might be the worst
thing that could possibly happen.
“Still Processing” (Sophy Romvari):
Few fi lms get as emotionally
Sidney Flanigan in Eliza Hittman’s “Never Rarely Sometimes Always.”
The title character in Pedro Costa’s “Vitalina Varela.”
raw as Romvari’s 17-minute short,
made as her York University master’s
thesis project. Based around
her reaction to old family pictures
including images of her two late
brothers, “Still Processing” uses
“processing” in both senses of the
word: dealing with grief and the
chemical development of analog
photography and fi lm. Her slide
FOCUS FEATURES
COURTESY OF NICO CHAPIN/ CMPR
show of these photos at the end
played to an empty theater in Toronto
(apart from her director of
photography), but it both suggests
a new birth of cinema and helps
bring her loved ones back to life for
the audience.
“Cenote” (Kaori Oda): A poem
would do more justice to the beauty
and originality of “Cenote,” which
Lincoln Center streamed in its “Art
of the Real” festival, as a response
than conventional fi lm criticism.
(In a mediocre year for narrative
features, its avant-garde approach
to nature, more “Enter the Void”
than David Attenborough, was welcome.)
Made by a Japanese director
off the coast of Yucatán, Mexico
(the title refers to underwater sinkholes
formed by meteorites), it uses
spare means — an iPhone, Super
8 — to incredible effect. Built upon
a series of oppositions (sound versus
image, past versus present,
land versus sea), it dives in and
out of the ocean, reveling in lush
blue and green beams of sunshine,
to express Mayan ideas about life
and death.
“Lovers Rock” (Steve Mc-
Queen): I thought about including
the entirety of McQueen’s limited
series “Small Axe” here, but
“Lovers Rock” is the only episode
that achieves greatness out of the
larger context. While earlier Mc-
Queen fi lms refl ect a worldview
where men need to suffer for spiritual
progress, “Lovers Rock” is
startlingly warm and celebratory.
Set at an all-night reggae house
party in the early ‘80s, it barely
qualifi es as a narrative fi lm (and
its 66-minute length also raises
worthwhile questions about what
we expect from a “feature”), but its
reliance on music-based set pieces
— Janet Kay’s “Silly Games” and
the Revolutionaries’ “Kunta Kinte”
bring the house down — links it to
Olivier Assayas’ “Cold Water” and
Claire Denis’ “Beau Travail.”
“Never Rarely Sometimes Always”
(Eliza Hittman): This fi lm
presents a hero’s quest of a kind
we’ve rarely seen in American cinema.
Trapped by an unwanted
pregnancy and the impossibility of
getting a legal abortion in Pennsylvania,
Autumn (Sidney Flanigan)
and her best friend Skylar (Talia
Ryder) head to New York for the
procedure. “Never Rarely Sometimes
Always” wastes no time defending
the morality of abortion,
instead framing the struggle to get
➤ STREAMING, continued on p.17
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