A Year at the Movies

With December movies always released in Boston a good fortnight or more after their LA/New York premieres, it seemed only fitting to wait a few days before posting our year in review. Of course, between the MFA, the Harvard Film Archive, the Brattle Theater, and other venues, Boston had great film events almost every night of the year (You do read Happenings, right?), and we could have easily turned this look back into a representation-is-as-big-as-the-whole allegory ala Synecdoche, New York or Borges' Exact Map. But, instead, we'll stick to the conventional format and highlight a few of the recent past's more notable moments.

This year, Bostonist decided to get in touch with our heritage and went to the Boston Muslim Film Festival, the Boston African Film Festival, the Magners Irish Film Festival, the Boston Jewish Film Festival, and the Boston Latino International Film Festival. (Cultural identity can be rather confusing when you're an agent noun!) Along the way, we saw some very good movies (the charming Maldeamores at the BLIFF; the surprisingly significant Holyland Hardball at the Jewish Film Festival) and some not-so-great movies (The Deal, which opened the BJFF and sadly turned out to be neither the Gordon Brown-Tony Blair biography of a detente The Deal nor the Yiddish epic The Deal (a gesheft), but William H. Macy's misguided Hollywood Satire).

There were plenty of other film festivals to keep you entertained, be they area specific (the Roxbury Film Festival, The Lowell Film Festival), transport centered (The Boston Bike Film Festival and Bicycle Film Festival), political (Human Rights Watch International Film Festival), time-based (International Women's Day Film Festival), subterranean (Boston Underground Film Festival), or pornographic (Good Vibrations 3rd Amateur Erotic Film Festival).

Fittingly, we somehow managed to miss the Boston Film Festival, where Appaloosa took top honours. But we did make the The Boston Independent Film Festival, which, with such standouts as Lance Hammer's Ballast (later screened at the HFA), Mama's Man, and Turn the River, had another great program this year.

The programmers at the Brattle and HFA continued their excellent work, with retrospectives of Ingmar Bergman, Sam Peckinpah, Alfred Hitchcock, Joseph Losey, and Nagisa Oshima, whose pictures we've twice now demanded you see, and will continue to do so until you finally do. They also put on interesting programs like this summer's Disturbed Suburbs at the Brattle and Technicolor Dreams at the HFA, both of which featured Burt Lancaster movies.

Of course, new movies also come to Boston from time to time, and we recommend Davis Square resident Dash Hammerskjold's sharp and idiosyncratic two-part Year in Review at Yesterday's Salad, and Ty Burr's Top 10 over at the Globe.

It was another good year for movies in Boston. Here's to next year.