The Other Side of Hope
Directed by Aki Kaurismäki
Opens December 1

Savant of deadpan and closeted optimist, director Aki Kaurismäki is a rare character and a singular filmmaker for it. The Finnish director shoots exclusively on 35mm and imbues his beautiful images with his droll humor and faith in human decency. One of the best-reviewed films of 2017, The Other Side of Hope is a wry social-realist fable about the European refugee crisis, told with tenderness and humor that only Kaurismäki could engender.

 
The Disaster Artist
Directed by James Franco
Opens December 1

After Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012), those with definitive opinions about James Franco and his role in the film industry should have done a double take. His transformative performance as the lurid local rapper ALIEN left Hollywood wondering: is he a poser or a genius? He certainly is an enigma. Directed by and starring Franco himself, The Disaster Artist tells the story of Hollywood outsider and definitive wannabe Tommy Wisaeu’s self-made disasterpiece The Room (2003). Can Franco’s ironic performance as Wisaeu himself help us unravel the conundrum? To be determined.

Loveless
Directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev
Opens December 1

Known for his bleak social dramas, inflected always with a critique of Russian mores, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s latest feature Loveless creates a political allegory out of a couple in the midst of a divorce, neither of whom want custody of their son. Winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes and Best Film Award at BFI London Film Festival, Loveless is getting a lot of love (and financial support) from the international community. Russia is another matter.

 
Cameraperson
Directed by Kirsten Johnson
Available to stream on The Criterion Channel December 5th

At once a visual memoir and an ethical inquiry, Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson plays like the Sans Soleil of documentary journalism - but perhaps all the more revelatory for its exposure of the moral imperatives filmmakers sacrifice in order to tell a story. Drawing from footage shot over the course of 25+ year career as a documentary cinematographer (Citizenfour, Fahrenheit 9/11), Johnson repurposes the offhand moments inscrutable in most nonfiction films - a sneeze that shakes the camera or hurried whispers while the camera is trained on the guards of an Al Qaeda prison. These are the images that have marked her and we can sense her presence intimately in every frame. Weaving together the abstracted footage, stripped of all exposition, the episodic juxtapositions accumulate poetically into an interrogation of the power a camera affords its wielder, exposing with bold vulnerability, the complex relationship between image makers and their subjects, between objectivity and the intervention of the camera.

 
I, Tonya
Directed by Craig Gillespie
Opens December 8

Be it through tabloids, occasional death threats, and unintentional mythmaking, the American public loves to terrorize their talent. Former U.S. figure skater and Olympian, Tonya Harding, is a stranger to none. With her homemade skating costumes and stocky build, she was already being painted as a classless wannabe before her ex-husband bashed competitor Nancy Kerrigan’s knee in, who, incidentally competed in Vera Wang and was America’s darling. Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl) revisits the deliciously salacious skate scandal in I, Tonya, a biopic meets mockumentary starring Allison Janney and Margot Robbie.

 
Wormwood
Directed by Errol Morris
Available to stream globally December 15

Errol Morris’ paranoid thriller meets documentary, Wormwood, takes us back to yet another time in U.S. history when the policing of information and unlawful surveillance of its citizens left the government’s integrity in question. Morris’s hypnotic account of Eric Olson and his sixty-year quest to identify the circumstances behind the disappearance of his father, a U.S. Army scientist involved in the development of psychological weaponry, weaves together elements of narrative and non-narrative filmmaking to create a genre-bending fever dream.