Category: Favorites of 2021 – 5

The Card Counter (2021) | Directed by Paul Schrader

5/5
Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter is another powerful, deeply moving film from the veteran filmmaker, continuing in his spare, quiet, introspective aesthetic. For all of its stillness and quiet, it’s an angry film, exploring our nation’s collective guilt – a country that has all but moved on from the grave moral bankruptcy of the Bush years and our post-9/11 willingness to overlook wartime atrocities in the name of our own feelings of personal safety and security. But in the midst of this anger, in the midst of this exploration of guilt, there are also questions of redemption and forgiveness. Is such a thing possible when we’ve perpetrated one of the worst crimes imaginable? When we as a society have allowed such crimes to occur in our name? Schrader uses the casino as a backdrop for these questions of guilt and redemption and forgiveness – a repetitive and soul-draining purgatory without the joy or life or vibrancy you’d find in most films that take place in the world of gambling. And the bleak, gray purgatory is contrasted by the extreme wide-angle hell of the shots he gives us of Abu Ghraib and the illuminated heaven we see in moments of connection – the potential for forgiveness in the touch of another human being. It’s an extraordinary film that gets better the more you analyze and explore the way Schrader’s visual techniques and aesthetics so thoroughly support the ideas he’s exploring – and it’s anchored by some great performances, especially from Oscar Isaac, who has never been better. It’s an exceptional film.

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The American Sector (2020) | Directed by Pacho Velez and Courtney Stephens

5/5
Pacho Velez and Courtney Stephens’s The American Sector is an astonishing work of nonfiction filmmaking, a patient and well-observed portrait of American society and values. The filmmakers travel the country and hold their patient camera on fragments of the Berlin Wall, while capturing snippets of off-screen conversations from visitors to these monuments or at times directly interviewing the individuals who have procured, maintain, or come as tourists to these relics of the past. In embarking on this project, Velez and Stephens’s camera have transformed these enormous slabs on concrete into windows that let us peer inside our country’s soul. The filmmakers give us space to make connections between the divided Germany of Cold War years and our own deeply divided nation, and it’s hard to avoid thoughts of our own borders and the ways so many fiercely attempt to keep out our neighbors to the south. Then there are the strange ways Americans attempt to either present or possess history – all on full display here. Without making any grand statements or giving us a thesis in bullet points, this may well end up being one of the most profound cinematic portraits of the American psyche to come out in recent years.

Where to Watch