This year’s St. Louis International Film Festival was a relatively even experience in the final analysis. Most of the films I saw were noteworthy in some way. True, some were forgettable, and a handful were truly extraordinary, but for the most part the programming was modestly enjoyable and absorbing. My sense for relative quality has been sort of overwhelmed by the sheer volume of films I screened, so I’m not sure I’m even capable of ranking the best films of the Festival. That said, I’m just going to skim off the top third of the thirty-six films I managed to catch and offer this list of the works that turned my head or stuck with me. So take these as my personal recommendations when and if these films receive wider U.S. distribution or find their way on to DVD:
“Li dives into the topic of rural sex slavery in China–’bride purchasing’ is the polite euphemism–with an unblinking need to show every sadistic, ugly jot.”
“Ferocious and yet fragile, The Class is an astonishing work of social realism, one that caught my breath time and again.”
“There’s really no faulting Kurt Kuenne’s intentions or zeal in Dear Zachary, a remembrance of his friend Andrew Bagby that is as unabashedly canonizing in its treatment of the man as it is scathing in its assessment of his death.”
“Conveying the tribulations of reform and forgiveness with a knowing appreciation for its complexities, Vuletic captures the conflicting demands of law, peace, greed, and duty that overwhelm societies emerging from war’s shadow.”
“This fable of challenging, unlikely love in a contemporary Macedonia of slate skies and festering wounds ambles along with a soulful awareness of human misery.”
“Gently simmering, almost minimalist, Rodrigo Moreno’s quietly absorbing The Minder is a film that demands profound patience.”
“Proceeding much like the wandering thoughts of a reflective old man (which I suppose it is), Of Time and the City takes its sweet time getting nowhere.”
“The survivors recall the details of their trial with stunning clarity, and Arijón delicately frames their meticulous remembrances and their sobering meditations on life and death.”
“Bashir’s primary fascination is memory’s role in tallying guilt and digesting the seemingly unfathomable, and in this it attains a rattled, grief-stained vividness.”
“Earning every spasm of heartache with her genuine depiction of life’s casual cruelties, Reichardt captures a wrenching picture of the sacrifices we all make for those we love.”
“Assarat positively revels in the sheer process of a tentative romance, the ballad of looks, words, and gestures that thrill something deep within the human spirit.”
“For better or for worse, there’s no cleverness to Aronofsky’s grim gaze in The Wrestler. The film delivers a naked portrait of human endurance, fragility, and entropy, in both their physical and emotional aspects.”
Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler is so narratively straightforward and stylistically reserved (though not in any way humdrum) that I can’t resist comparing it to the director’s output of glittering, coal-black nightmares—Pi, Requiem for a Dream, and the underrated The Fountain—in search of a common thread. True to form, this tale of a 1980s professional wrestler gone miserably to seed bears the stamp of Aronofsky’s unflagging absorption with self-inflicted personal destruction, agonies that promise redemption, release, and annihilation. Eschewing his usual taste for visual flash and wobbly grandiosity, the director here favors gritty realism sans Requiem’s horror gloss. For better or for worse, there’s no cleverness to Aronofsky’s grim gaze in The Wrestler. The film delivers a naked portrait of human endurance, fragility, and entropy, in both their physical and emotional aspects. As the creased and battered Randy “The Ram” Robinson, Mickey Rourke captivates, conveying both the wrestler’s pummeled dreams and the pained simplicity of his ambitions. Aronofsky shies from operatic gesturing, but he also exhibits an unfortunately limp, aimless reliance on sports film tropes. Ultimately, The Wrestler as a fascinating slice of elegant, trim realism, a refreshingly humane vehicle for the director’s compelling, if morbid, artistic sensibilities.
Ari Folman’s troubled, magnificent Waltz with Bashir embraces a style/genre mating guaranteed to shake up cinematic expectations: the animated documentary. Wrestling with fragmentary memories of his days in the IDF during the 1982 Lebanon War—especially an unmoored, hallucinatory recollection involving flare-illuminated skinny-dipping—Folman interviews former comrades-in-arms and others who were involved in the conflict. The notorious 
The humanistic power of Laurent Cantet’s wrenching, glorious The Class is undeniable. Its naturalistic cinematic language, serviceable and modest, never truly sizzles, but it doesn’t need to. Here is a film whose strength lies almost entirely in its vivid recreation of the intoxicating, dreadful humming of adolescence. Based on a semi-autobiographical novel by François Bégaudeau, the film features Bégaudeau himself as a French instructor in inner-city Paris. Bégaudeau’ class is like a boat constantly on the verge of tipping over. His students are multi-cultural, rowdy, insolent, aggravated, and fiercely intelligent in staccato bursts. Yet Cantet and Bégaudeau eschew the feel-good moralizing of countless classroom dramas for electric realism, permitting the essential conflicts modern of French society (or any society for that matter) to swirl and surface naturally. In long, mesmerizing scenes of Bégaudeau herding his class through conjugation and composition, The Class conveys the cultural minefield and Sisyphean misery that its secondary education. Cantet refuses to simplify teachers as heroes, just as he resists painting every student as a potential convert to academic success. Ferocious and yet fragile, The Class is an astonishing work of social realism, one that caught my breath time and again.
If Ingmar Bergman and Wes Anderson had a love child, it might look something like Bent Hamer’s O’Horten, a compelling portrait of a life in transition, daubed with bits of illuminating strangeness. With a watchable blend of staid crispness and humorous insight, Baard Owe portrays Odd Horten, a taciturn, no-nonense train engineer on the cusp of retirement. The film follows Horten through a series of set pieces that can only loosely be termed a plot: a retirement party, selling his boat, purchasing a smoking pipe, meeting a drunk on the street. The film’s essence lies in its moments and gestures, rather than in the narrative inertia of linked scenes. In short, nothing really happens, but it’s a credit to Owe’s comforting performance and director Hamer’s unhurried empathy that it still engages. Uncanny sights pass us and Horten by—a man being arrested at a restaurant, a prone motorcyclist sliding past on an icy street—with Owe providing a subtle reaction and Hamer establishing a thematic context. Melancholy and determinedly gradual, it’s not the sort of film for everyone. Its potency lies in its slow discovery of a distinctively Scandinavian mood and its gentle probing of abstracts such as dignity and contentment.
Srdan Golubovic’s The Trap never hits the rattling neo-noir sweet spot that it aims for, partly because the director never proceeds beyond the story’s descriptive aspects. His themes laze on the surface, stated but not completely explored. Mladen (Nebojsa Glogovac), an engineer with an ailing young son, is offered a devil’s deal by a sinister stranger: murder a man I designate, and I will pay for your child’s operation. Glogovac delivers a scrawled, tormented performance, but Golubovic directs an unfortunate clinical gaze on Mladen’s plight, an odd choice given that The Trap’s most engaging potential angle is an excavation of the conflicted man’s headspace. Instead, Golubovic seems overly enamored with the tale’s twists—most uninspired, a few downright thrilling—and with conjuring the particular despair of Serbian class and cultural anxieties. There’s nothing particularly unpleasant about The Trap: It’s an entertaining thriller, and doesn’t engage in any hackneyed tricks to arrive at its destination. It’s also refreshingly free of stylized anxiousness, a gray, gritty breeze in the wake of Tornatore’s mesmerizing but exhausting The Unknown Woman. Still, it feels like a missed opportunity, a straightforward examination of criminality and economic hardship lacking the electricity of a denser thematic work.
Nacho Vigalando’s trippy, morbidly witty Timecrimes is a clever little achievement, demonstrating that an absorbing, competent science fiction film requires only four actors, three sets, and a familiar premise. Middle-aged couple Héctor (Karra Elejalde) and Clara (Candela Fernández) are just moving into a new home in the country when Héctor spies through his binoculars a naked woman lurking in the woods. He wanders off to investigate, leading to a uncanny sequence of events: an assault by a masked stranger, a flight into a series of bizarre buildings, and a journey back in time (albeit only a couple of hours). What follows is a spiral of events that loops in on itself with narrative tidiness and an air of portentous self-satisfaction, as in any time travel tale worth its salt. There’s a roteness to some of Timecrimes‘ allegedly shocking reveals, and Vigalando find the brightest sparks when he plays it fast and savvy, trusting our awareness of the genre’s conventions. Never mind that the moral ambiguity to the film’s conclusion—and perhaps the absence of any Twilight Zone twist—is a touch unsatisfying. The treat of Timecrimes is the thrilling, black humor that emerges from Vigalando’s tightly circumscribed ambition.
There’s both a sickening voyeurism and an endearing, if unreasonable, hopefulness at work in Silvio Soldini’s brutal relationship drama Days and Clouds. With a sadist’s talent for stomach-flipping emotional turmoil and an eye for tragic entropy, Soldini captures a discomfiting portrait of a middle-age relationship in decline. The marriage of wealthy professionals Michele (Antonio Albanese) and Elsa (Margherita Buy) begins to disintegrate overnight when he reveals that he was fired two months ago. Out goes the townhouse and Elsa’s academic ambitions as an art historian, not to mention the couple’s fragile illusion of marital peace. Crushed by economic realities that are alien in their privileged experience—a meager lifestyle, long hours in demeaning jobs, a grubby flat—Michele’s apathy and Elsa’s resentment grow. Soldini doesn’t evoke much sympathy for the pair, especially Michele, but he exhibits a morbid fascination with the poisonous nature of denial and silly pride. While the story is fitful, even dreary at times, it possesses an ugly authenticity, reflecting the haphazard realities of mature lives in perpetual crisis. Ultimately, Days and Clouds compels in the manner of a horrific, slow-motion calamity, leaving us wondering if anyone will emerge from the wreckage intact.
Gently simmering, almost minimalist, Rodrigo Moreno’s quietly absorbing The Minder is a film that demands profound patience. The narrative is simplicity itself: We follow Ruben (Julio Chávez), a bodyguard for a government minister (Osmar Núñez), as he goes about his daily routine. Shot entirely from Ruben’s perspective, the film captures with gnawing focus the dull and demeaning nature of living in another man’s shadow, forever hovering outside rooms and idling in cars. We learn of economic crises and family troubles through snatches of overheard conversation, but the backgrounding of these concerns highlights the film’s interest in Ruben’s personal angst. They footnote the film’s “action”—Ruben standing, Ruben waiting—and draw our gaze to Chávez’s wonderfully modulated performance. Moreno leavens the dreary routine with moments of private unpleasantness: Ruben’s flaky sister, his romantic loneliness, his talent for drawing (eventually paraded for the minister’s amusement). The Minder rewards sensitivity to fine narrative details and emotional subtleties. When the concluding twist arrives—don’t fret, one does arrive—it seems entirely fitting. There’s a bit of thematic rattle to the film, possessing as it does such wide open spaces for contemplation, but it only lightly diminishes The Minder’s astute cinematic vigor.