1. Carol- Todd Haynes’ Carol is a prolonged and profound examination of the sparks that lead to romance. Featuring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara in the year’s two best, most intwined performances, Carol is a sublime 1950s-set melodrama about falling in love in a dangerous time. Almost every rapturous frame lets us in on these strangers’ secret, from the first time they make eye contact in a department store to every brief moment of intimacy. Each of Therese and Carol’s muted exchanges is whisked out of the sexually repressed time period by the deep longing in Carter Burwell’s score. Haynes captures the fragile intimacy at the core of Phyllis Nagy’s script (adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt) with confident restraint. Carol is a masterpiece, and one of the most ravishing movie romances.
2. Hard to be a God- This decades-long passion project from the late Russian director Aleksey German is one of the filthiest feeling movies you’re ever likely to see. Set on Araknar, a planet similar to Earth that is experiencing its own Middle Ages, Hard to Be a God tells the story of scientists from our planet who were sent there to study it and then become deities. Araknar is also in the midst of a violent rebellion where all intellectuals are being publicly executed. German’s camera is so embedded in the feelings of this world, of its eternal wetness and clogged sinuses, that narrative all but disappears. Almost every black-and-white frame of this grotesquely beautiful epic is coated in some kind of slime, whether it’s snot, shit or mud. Hard to be a God captures human cruelty in a ferociously close proximity; it’s a depraved, totally unforgettable experience.
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