The Year in Review: The Best Films of 2014 (Part One)

Tags

2014, A Field in England, Alan Partridge, best films of 2014, cinema, Enemy, favorite films, film reviews, films, Go For Sisters, Grand Budapest Hotel, Movies, Only Lovers Left Alive, personal opinions, The Babadook, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The One I Love, We Are the Best!, Witching and Bitching, year in review

And now, at long last, we get to the final stretch of the race: my selections for the Best Films of 2014. I’ve already listed my favorite horror films of the year but this is the overall list: everything gets thrown into the same pot, regardless of genre. Astute readers will definitely notice a little overlap with the horror list but I attempted to use two very different sets of criteria for judging the films: what may make a film one of the best horror movies of the year won’t necessarily make it one of the best overall films of the year and vice versa.

This was an especially difficult list to make this year for one main reason: I saw an awful lot of good-to-great films in 2014. I didn’t get a chance to see a lot of the “obvious” choices for Best of the Year, such as Nightcrawler or Boyhood, but I did manage to see most of the underdogs and “dark horses,” so to speak. None of this, of course, is by way of saying that my choices are any more valid than the mainstream: we just have slightly different priorities, that’s all.

For me, I define a truly great picture in a very specific way: it really has to move me. It can make me mad as hell, so giddy I’m karate-kicking the wall or so heart-broken that I want to die…but it damn well better make me feel something more than just entertained. Lots of films are entertaining (there are even parts of Sharknado that are entertaining, surprisingly enough) but that’s not quite good enough to make that kind of impression on me. After whittling the 350+ films I watched last year down to a shortlist of the very best 2014 titles, I’ve managed to whittle that down even further to my 21 favorite films of the year. Unlike the horror list, this won’t be in any particular order, save the top slot: if I thought whittling the list down to 20 was impossible (it was), then ranking them seems about as likely as flapping my arms and achieving liftoff.

With no further ado, I now present the first half of my Best of 2014 list. Make sure your trays are in the upright position, fasten your belts and prepare for take-off.

The Twenty-One Best Films of 2014

– – –

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Is The Grand Budapest Hotel Wes Anderson’s “ultimate” film? Despite my never-ending love of and loyalty to Rushmore, I might need to concede this point. Everything about the film speaks to some aspect of Anderson’s back catalog: the fascination with miniatures; the blink-and-you-miss-’em cameos; the “missing father” dynamic that’s at the heart of nearly all his films; the immaculately fashioned production design; the gorgeous cinematography; the “iron fist in a velvet glove” repartee; the intentionally screwy timeline…it’s all here. Holding the whole production together, however, are two of the best performances of the entire year: Ralph Fiennes absolutely owns the film as the impossibly cool, suave M. Gustave but he’s very nearly upstaged by young Tony Revolori as the eternally loyal lobby boy, Zero. There’s a real sense of joy and wonder to the film, along with the requisite Andersonian sense of tragic romance and a supremely dark edge, as well: there’s a real sense of menace and violence to The Grand Budapest that’s strangely missing from most of Anderson’s other films. Plus, you get Willem Dafoe in one of his funnest roles in years. The Grand Budapest Hotel brings Anderson back to the fore in a big way.

– – –

Only Lovers Left Alive

As a rule, I’m not the biggest vampire fan in the world but leave it to Jarmusch to force me to include a vampire flick on my Best of Year list. Only Lovers Left Alive is lush, atmospheric and hazy, the perfect complement to the Bohemian bloodsuckers at its center. There’s something swooningly romantic about the relationship between Adam and Eve, a romance that’s spanned across continents and centuries. Set against the decaying backdrop of modern-day Detroit, Jarmusch spins his usual web and everything about the film is as immaculate as miniature diorama: extra points for John Hurt’s delightful performance as the rakish Christopher Marlowe, Eve’s “shoulder to cry on” since the time of Shakespeare. This isn’t just one of the best films of the year: it’s one of the best films in Jarmusch’s long, distinguished career.

– – –

We Are the Best!

Perfectly capturing the frustrations, joys and miseries of being young and on the fringes of “polite” society, We Are the Best! is, without a doubt, one of the most joyful, exuberant films I saw all year. There’s something undeniably kickass about watching the trio of young girls at the center of the film slowly gain confidence, leading up to the joyful middle-finger attitude that sends the whole thing off on a happy note. Were this just a peppy story, it wouldn’t have stuck the landing as one of the best of the year: writer-director Lukas Moodysson guides everything with an assured hand, however, giving the proceedings just enough bite to give them weight. The scene where Hedvig blows away the chauvinistic music teachers with her display of guitar pyrotechnics may be one of my favorites of the whole year: if you don’t stand and cheer, you probably have coal instead of a heart.

– – –

Go For Sisters

I’ve followed legendary writer-director John Sayles career since I was a kid: Piranha (his first script) was one of my favorite movies, growing up, and I can still remember the first time I saw The Brother From Another Planet. Quite frankly, there’s no one else out there quite like Sayles and there never will be: with an almost uncanny knack for vivid characters and the ability to twist even the most straight-forward situation into a knot, Sayles is truly one of the keystones of “classic” indie film, right along with Jarmusch and Soderbergh. Go For Sisters is Sayles’ second home-run in a row, after the stellar Amigo (2010), and may be one of his best, most fun and most accomplished films yet. This time around, he gets phenomenal performances from LisaGay Hamilton and Yolonda Ross as former best friends who end up on opposite sides of the law, yet must rekindle their friendship in order to help Hamilton find her missing son. Edward James Olmos is reliably excellent as the former lawman-turned-private eye but the entire film, part and parcel, belongs to Hamilton and Ross: if there was any justice in this world, they’d both get nominated for Oscars.

– – –

A Field in England

Trippy, surreal, bizarre and intense, Ben Wheatley’s amazing A Field in England is the closest a film has brought me to insanity since the first time I watched Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain…umm…”altered,” shall we say.  For most of its runtime, the film is a strange little oddity about deserters during the British Civil War of the 1700s who stumble upon a strange, featureless and unbelievably foreboding field in the middle of nowhere. At a certain point, however, it’s like Wheatley cracks open the egg of knowledge right in your face, splattering your brain pan with so much terrifying insanity that it makes you physically ill. For one of the few times in my entire life, I sat staring at the screen, my mouth hanging wide, drooling everywhere: it’s no lie to say that, for one brief moment, I was standing on the downward slope of sanity, fully prepared to slide off into the abyss. Hyperbole? Maybe but we can talk after the film blows your head off and puts it back upside-down. This, friends and neighbors, is truly experimental cinema at its very best.

– – –

Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa

I’m going to assume that the sound I hear is all of the spit-takes out there, so I’ll give you all a moment to compose yourselves…ready? Good. How, exactly, did the Steve Coogan vehicle Alan Partridge end up on my Best of list? Isn’t this just another dumb big-screen version of another TV show/radio show/Broadway play/public access show/dinner theater-type thingamabob? Maybe yes, maybe no: I’ll admit to knowing nothing whatsoever about the character until I sat down to watch the film, so that certainly wasn’t the draw for me. Here’s what I can say, however: Alan Partridge is, without a doubt, the funniest film I saw in 2014, hands-down. In fact, I laughed so hard at the film that I was frequently crying, when I wasn’t almost falling out of my chair. Ladies and gentlemen: I haven’t laughed that hard in…well, I honestly can’t remember. Everything about the film is hilarious and quote-worthy: from the dream sequence involving a mob of Alans to the awesome dialogue to some of the very best sight gags I’ve ever seen, Alan Partridge is a film that keeps raising the comedy bar, yet effortlessly sails over it every time. Colm Meaney is marvelous as Alan’s put-upon and marginalized co-worker but Steve Coogan is an absolute god as the titular moron. Everything about this film is a complete winner: I’d be shocked if this isn’t considered a cult classic within the next decade or so…you can bet your forensic trousers on it!

– – –

The Babadook

In a year that seemed to split horror fans and critics in a million different directions, there was one thing that almost everyone could agree on: Jennifer Kent’s amazing debut film, The Babadook, was easily one of the highlights. Genuinely scary and with an air of originality missing from much popular horror fare, this Australian tale of a troubled mother and son facing down pure evil is old-fashioned horror given a bright, shiny new coat. If The Babadook were only a full-throttle horror flick, however, it never would have made it past my Best of Horror list. Instead, Kent’s film is just as much about the trials and tortures that parents must deal with when raising children, especially if said children are as immensely troubled as young Samuel is. When the film lets loose, it’s almost too raw to watch: the scenes where the mother tells her young son how much she hates him would be utterly horrifying, with or without the eerie specter of Mr. Babadook hanging over everything.

– – –

Enemy

The first thing you’ll notice about Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy is the sickly, jaundice-yellow hue that seems to infect every frame of the film like some sort of creeping mold, followed by the oppressively thick atmosphere of dread that hangs over everything like a pall. After that, you might notice how many truly odd things happen in the margins of the frame and how little explanation we get for anything that happens. Later on, you might notice how this seemingly simple tale of a man running across his doppelgänger keeps turning and folding over on itself, like a pulsating amoeba cleaving itself in two. By the time you get to the truly stunning finale, an absolutely terrifying revelation that’s the equivalent of waking from a dream and plunging into a nightmare, one thing should be clear beyond all else: Villeneuve’s film is the perfect horror tonic for our era, a surreal dreamscape where the rat race, our eternal search for immortality and our inability to resist flipping over as many rocks as we can results in our complete and utter destruction. Absolutely unforgettable, Enemy is, without a doubt, one of the finest films to come from a rather fine year.

– – –

Witching & Bitching

Alex de la Iglesia’s newest film, Witching & Bitching, opens with a gold heist that involves body-painted street performers (Silver Jesus for the win!) and climaxes with a pitched battle against a towering, blind fertility goddess. Stuffed between these two poles we get plenty of snarky “battle of the sexes” commentary (much of it quite politically incorrect, shall we say), some jaw-dropping practical effects, a sense of humor that can best be described as “out there” (one of the film’s best, most outrageous scenes involves someone hiding inside a toilet) and a romantic angle that starts as a joke and finishes in just about the sweetest way possible. This is a big, loud horror-comedy-fantasy that isn’t afraid to shoot for Peter Jackson by way of Steven Spielberg territory, while still manages to (usually) keep at least one foot anchored on solid ground. Even for a career as varied and delightful as de la Iglesia’s, Witching & Bitching is one varied, delightful film.

– – –

The One I Love

Without a doubt, one of the biggest, best surprises of the entire year, Charlie McDowell’s extraordinary The One I Love is that most impossible of things: an intelligent, trippy, doppelganger-themed love story that manages to shatter conventions left and right. The whole film is grounded by one of my favorite duos of the year, Mark Duplass and Elisabeth Moss: the two are so perfect as the imperfect couple looking to “fix” their broken marriage by way of shrink Ted Danson’s dubious “immersion” therapy that they almost overshadow the rest of the film. Note that I say “almost,” however, since The One I Love has a way of burrowing under your skin and taking root. At times laugh-out-loud funny, at times sinister, occasionally baffling and always brilliant, this was one of the freshest, most original films I saw all year. I know I’ve said this before but in a much weaker year, The One I Love would be a tough act to follow.

– – –

And there we have it: the first half of my Best Films of 2014, in random order. Tune in later as we finish off with the other eleven, including my pick for the very best film of 2014. What will take it all? Who will be left in the dust? Who will survive and what will be left of them? Stay tuned, loyal readers…stay tuned.

Advertisements

11/11/14: The Back of the Class

Tags

Accion Mutante, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Alex de la Iglesia, Anna Massey, auteur theory, based on a book, Burn Gorman, cinema, co-writers, disappointing films, dramas, El dia de la bestia, Elijah Wood, Film auteurs, film reviews, films, grad students, Guillermo del Toro, Jim Carter, John Hurt, Jorge Guerricaechevarria, Julie Cox, Leonor Watling, mathematical formulas, Movies, murder-mystery, Oxford University, Perdita Durango, professor, Santa Sangre, The Day of the Beast, The Last Circus, The Oxford Murders, twist ending, Witching and Bitching, writer-director

Without a doubt, Spanish auteur Alex de la Iglesia is one of my very favorite filmmakers, a mischievous maestro who combines the surreal, magical-realism of Alejandro Jodorowsky with Guillermo del Toro’s affinity for genre material (and impish sense of humor). When de la Iglesia is good, he’s absolutely amazing: I would happily rank his most recent films, The Last Circus (2010), As Luck Would Have It (2011) and Witching and Bitching (2013) as some of the best films I’ve ever seen, which doesn’t even take into account his legendary ’90s output that features such cult classic (if impossible to find) treasures as Accion Mutante (1993), El dia de la Bestia (1995) and Perdita Durango (1997).

At his best, de la Iglesia is like a more accessible Jodorowsky, filling his films with delightfully bizarre little asides and eye-popping visual spectacles: in fact, I’ve always felt that The Last Circus was the best film that Jodorowsky never made, an impossibly beautiful yet horrifyingly grotesque political parable that can sit shoulder-to-shoulder with the classic Santa Sangre (1989). When he’s not scaling those impossible heights, de la Iglesia manages to turn out massively entertaining, endlessly pulpy genre films that usually involve tough women, lots of cars and guns and odd supernatural angles. Despite not having the pleasure of watching his entire back-catalog, I can honestly say that I never met a de la Iglesia film that I didn’t like…until I met The Oxford Murders (2008), that is. Despite an excellent cast and an appropriately twisty storyline, the film is largely an inert, confusing mess that displays barely a glimmer of de la Iglesia’s trademark bravura filmmaking. For the first time, to my chagrin, here was my hero treading water.

Our hero, Martin (Elijah Wood), is a grad student obsessed with the legendarily difficult, reclusive mathematician Arthur Seldom (John Hurt). Seeking to get a face-to-face meeting with the professor, Martin takes up lodging with his sister, Mrs. Eagleton (Anna Massey), and her moony-eyed daughter, Beth (Julie Cox). Disrupting one of Seldom’s lectures, Martin makes an ass out of himself, which makes things even more awkward when both he and Seldom end up back at Eagleton’s boarding house. They soon have something to talk about other than Martin’s bad manners, however, when they stumble upon the decidedly dead body of the land-lady.

A note found at the scene seems to indicate that Mrs. Eagleton was the victim of a serial killer, one who inscribes mathematical symbols like perfect circles onto his missives. Putting their heads together, Martin and Arthur realize that the killer is trying to play a game with the professor, a game that involves creating perfectly logical murders, all towards the goal of proving that they don’t exist. Confused yet? As Martin and Arthur rush from one new crime scene to the other, ably aided by Lorna (Leonor Watling), a young nurse who’s been intimate with both the grad student AND his elderly professor, they discover an intricate series of “almost-murders,” crimes committed in such ways as to seem almost natural…unless one knows what to look for, of course.

As the clock ticks down, the dynamic duo finds themselves in more and more danger, along with an increasing police presence that sees their continued appearance at the crime scenes as being a little too coincidental. Will they catch their culprit or will a mysterious maniac continue to wreak havoc in the hallowed halls of Oxford University?

There are lots of rather critical problems with The Oxford Murders but we’ll start with the biggest one: the film is both overly complicated and impossibly stupid, a critically lethal combo if ever there was one. In an attempt to seem Hitchcockian (an obvious source of inspiration), de la Iglesia piles one double-cross after another left-turn into further complications until the whole thing collapses into a soggy mess of plot contrivances. There are so many red herrings here (Martin’s batshit crazy roommate is an obvious one) that it kinds of feels like parody, after a while, as if de la Iglesia decided to take the piss out of old “drawing-room” mysteries for no perceptible reason.

Trying to follow the plot is no easy task but it’s made immeasurably more difficult by the film’s manic pace and propensity for over-the-top melodrama: Burn Gorman’s Yuri is one of the best examples of a character who not only makes no narrative sense but is pitched at such an insane level (he appears to be dubbed, which makes his bizarre speech patterns a little more understandable but just barely) that he seems to belong in another film. The bit where he makes an ass of himself at the party is a real “high” point but there isn’t much to his performance that could be deemed natural or, you know, non-hysterical.

Wood and Hurt, for their parts, are reliably sturdy, although they both end up just recycling previous performances as if re-wearing comfortable suits: Hurt is the cranky, sardonic old mentor, while Wood is the fish-out-of-water newbie just having his eyes opened to the real world. They’re performances that either actor could give in their sleep, to be honest, and bring nothing new to the table.

It’s not all a dreary disappointment, however: buried within the muck is one moment of pure, unadulterated de la Iglesia that’s an absolute joy to watch. After leaving Prof. Seldom’s lecture, Martin heads back to the boarding house and the camera heads along with him. In a simply glorious single take, the camera glides along after Martin but ends up “tagging” various other characters along the way, jumping from person to person like a giddy child before finally swooping into the boarding house to reveal Mrs. Eagleton’s dead body. Quite simply, it’s a wonderful scene: too bad it’s the only moment in the entire film that actually reminded me of de la Iglesia.

All in all, The Oxford Murders is a middle-of-the-road mystery hobbled by some truly over-the-top performances, a needlessly confusing plot and a truly stupid twist ending. Were any other filmmaker attached to this project, I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about the film, since I’ve seen way too many “competent” movies just like this. This is Alex de la Iglesia, however, a genuinely brilliant writer-director: there was no need for the film to be so completely tedious and anonymous. Luckily, de la Iglesia would follow-up The Oxford Murders with the aforementioned trilogy of The Last Circus, As Luck Would Have It and Witching and Bitching, handily proving that this was only a minor blip in an otherwise impeccable career. As it stands, The Oxford Murders should only be of interest to de la Iglesia completists: all others are advised to go straight to his classics and give this as wide a berth as possible.

10/14/15 (Part One): The Sisterhood of the Flying Broom

Tags

31 Days of Halloween, 800 Bullets, Accion Mutante, Alex de la Iglesia, alternate title, armed robbery, auteur theory, battle of the sexes, Carmen Maura, Carolina Bang, El dia de la bestia, favorite films, feminism, Film auteurs, foreign films, Gabriel Delgado, Guillermo del Toro, horror movies, horror-comedies, Hugo Silva, Jaime Ordonez, Kiko de la Rica, Las Brujas de Zugarramurdi, love story, Macarena Gomez, Mario Casas, men vs women, misogyny, paganism, Peter Jackson, romance, Santiago Segura, Secun de la Rosa, small town life, Spanish film, special-effects extravaganza, Terele Pavez, The Day of the Beast, The Last Circus, witches, Witching and Bitching, writer-director, Zugarramurdi

Occupying a common ground somewhere between cinema-fantastique auteur Guillermo del Toro and legendary surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky, the films of Spanish writer-director Alex de la Iglesia are, without a doubt, one-of-a-kind treasures, little islands of individuality adrift in a cinematic sea of homogeneity. Since the early ’90s, de la Iglesia has used genre films like feature-length debut Accion mutante (1993) and El dia de la bestia (1995) to address everything from organized religion to societal responsibility, from the vagaries of the child adoption system to the horrors of the Spanish Civil War.

Beginning with 2002’s 800 Bullets, de la Iglesia began to move further afield from the scrappy supernatural-themed films that began his career to focus on more “mature” films, albeit ones which still bore very little resemblance to anyone else’s. El crimen perfecto (2004), The Last Circus (2010) and As Luck Would Have It (2011) might have been more grounded in reality than de la Iglesia’s previous films (although The Last Circus is a pretty surreal cake, no matter how you slice it) but were no less quirky and ground-breaking. Since As Luck Would Have It was his most linear, “normal” film yet, I found myself wondering if the wild man of Spanish cinema had decided to walk the straight and narrow, so to speak.

For his most recent film, however, de la Iglesia opted to go a little further back in his career: all the way back to the outrageous El dia de la bestia, as it turns out. Witching and Bitching (or the Witches of Eastwick-referencing original title, Las brujas de Zugarramurdi) (2013) combines action, slapstick, sly black humor and the supernatural in truly invigorating ways, offering up a treatise on the eternal battle of the sexes that manages to lob grenades at both sides while still finding plenty of room for romance, some sneaky asides about Spanish pop culture and some pretty awesome SFX setpieces, including a climatic battle with a massive, ancient goddess that would make Peter Jackson smile. In other words: that magnificent bastard de la Iglesia has done it again.

De la Iglesia has always been masterful with his opening segments and Witching and Bitching continues this trend. After a nicely atmospheric intro featuring some good, old-fashioned witch action (think “bubble bubble toil and trouble/big black cauldron type stuff), we get jumped into a thoroughly dynamic credit sequence that manages to juxtapose images of famous female actors, politicians, historical figures and celebrities with those of witches, pagan symbols, fertility statues, arcane images and serial killers, as if to make the claim that pigeonholing women is just about as stupid and pointless an exercise as possible. De la Iglesia seems to be making the statement that women, like men, are a little bit of every archetype: that old cliché of “the Madonna or the whore” is just as worthless today as it was a hundred years ago.

The film, proper, begins with Jose (Hugo Silva), his young son, Sergio (Gabriel Delgado) and accomplice, Antonio (Mario Casas), fleeing a badly botched jewelry store heist. They make off with a dufflebag filled with gold wedding rings but Tony’s girlfriend has taken off with their getaway car (in her defense, Antonio never bothered to let her know that he would be using her car for an armed robbery, so her reaction is kind of understandable), leaving them stranded as the cops begin to bear down. Springing into action, Jose carjacks a taxi, taking the driver, Manuel (Jaime Ordonez), and his passenger hostage. All that Jose wants to do is get to the French border and he sees Manuel’s taxi as his golden parachute.

Meanwhile, Jose’s highly irate ex-wife, Silvia (Macarena Gomez), has heard about the botched robbery on the news and is rushing over to rescue her poor son and slap Jose upside the head so hard that it jogs his common-sense loose. Along for the ride are bickering cops Calvo (Pepon Nieto) and Pacheco (Secun de la Rosa), who are both convinced that Silvia somehow abetted her low-life ex-husband with the robbery. As luck would have it, all of these disparate characters converge on the titular town of Zugarramurdi, where they will find themselves in the midst of an ancient coven of witches, led by Graciana (Carmen Maura), her elderly mother, Maritxu (Terele Pavez), and daughter, Eva (Carolina Bang). The witches are seeking to resurrect a pagan goddess, in order to replace the reigning patriarchy with a matriarchy and right the countless wrongs that have been inflicted on women since the dawn of time. As love affairs pop up left and right, however, loyalties will be tested: when Eva experiences the first pangs of true love, she must make the impossible decision to either betray her family and her gender or her own heart.

As with all of de la Iglesia’s films, there’s a lot going on in Witching and Bitching: at times, the film seems to move from one complex setpiece to another, with very little room in-between to catch one’s breath. This only ends up being an issue if the film’s setpieces are lacking which, fortunately, is not a problem that de la Iglesia ever seems to be saddled with. From the dynamic, thrilling and hilarious opening robbery (seeing SpongeBob Squarepants get all murdery with a shotgun is, to be frank, a sublime joy that my mind never knew it was missing) to the jaw-dropping special effects showcase that ends the film (I wasn’t lying about Peter Jackson approving: it’s one hell of an awesome sequence), there’s very little about the movie that isn’t captivating, visually stunning or flat-out hilarious.

As a comedy, Witching and Bitching works on a variety of levels, from the silly and slapsticky (Eva serves “finger food” that consists of actual fingers; the various chase scenes remind of Scooby Doo cartoons, at times) to the more subtle and cutting (Eva’s family frequently reminds her that she should be out engaging in “fist-fucking, golden showers and zoophilia,” not falling in love with a wimpy man…they didn’t send her to “the worst schools” just to suffer this indignity!). In addition, there’s plenty of commentary on the “battle of the sexes” from both sides: neither men nor women escape the film’s withering glare unscathed.

As a horror film, de la Iglesia’s movie is, likewise, a home-run – despite the near-constant comedy, he manages to sneak plenty of pure horror beats into the mix, as well. The town of Zugarramurdi is ridiculously atmospheric, coming across as nothing so much as the return of the fog-shrouded hamlets of Hammer Studios’ glory days. There’s a nicely tense bit involving a mysterious person reaching up through a toilet-bowl that’s nearly Hitchcockian in its sustained sense of suspense and the previously mentioned climax, featuring the massive, ancient and blind goddess (brilliantly depicted as a towering combination of the Venus of Willendorf and one of Jackson’s trolls from LOTR) is a real showstopper: they even manage to throw in a nifty mid-air “witches’ battle” to keep things lively.

Despite the nearly constant spectacle, the cast of Witching and Bitching manages to hold their own against the onslaught. Hugo Silva is a charismatic hero and he’s ably paired up with Mario Casas to give the film a pair of sympathetic (to a point) protagonists. Jaime Ordonez is, likewise, pretty great as the kidnapped taxi driver: the scene where he decides to “join” the gang, only to be met with mass confusion by Jose and Antonio (“Does this mean you want a cut or something? How do we know we can trust you?”) is an easy highlight and Ordonez’s nervous, fidgety energy contrasts nicely with Silva’s more traditional heroism and Casas’ kind-of/sort-of nice-guy dumbass.

On the female side of things, Carmen Maura, Carolina Bang and Terele Pavez pretty much steal the film from the rest of the cast: the bit where Pavez puts in razor-sharp steel teeth and Maura scuttles across the ceiling, like a fly, are undeniably badass, as is Bang’s ridiculously hot-headed Eva whenever she’s on-screen. More importantly, none of the witches ever come across as overly shrill or needlessly bumbling: unlike many genre films that purport to detail a (literal) battle of the sexes (Jake West’s Doghouse (2009) comes immediately to mind), there’s never the notion that de la Iglesia has unfairly stacked the deck against his female antagonists.

In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of the film is the way in which the notion of feminism is handled. Early on, we get a pretty much never-ending stream of misogyny from the likes of Jose and Manuel: even nice-guy Tony joins in after he realizes that his girlfriend actually “holds the reins” in their relationship. This is qualified, of course, once we get to Zugarramurdi and get the other half of argument from the female participants. As Graciana makes plainly clear, men are really afraid of women because they realize that God is actually female and are too terrified to admit the truth: by bringing about the return of their goddess, the women hope to usher in a new, enlightened era, one where women are not subjugated, abused and ridiculed. In a way, neither gender makes it out of Witching and Bitching completely intact, although most of de la Iglesia’s sharpest rocks are reserved for the lunk-headed men in the film.

Ultimately, de la Iglesia’s latest film is proof-positive of why I absolutely adore his movies: they’re big, brash, colorful, lively, funny and intelligent…pretty much any and everything that I possibly hope to find at the theater. While del Toro and Jackson might be better known, I’d argue that de la Iglesia is, without a doubt, the more accomplished, interesting filmmaker: he has a way of blending the fantastic and the mundane in some truly invigorating ways. While The Last Circus will probably always be my favorite de la Iglesia film (if there are flaws in that film, I haven’t found them), Witching and Bitching is an instant classic and should be required viewing for genre fans. Start with this one, start with The Last Circus or pick a random title out of a hat: whatever you do, make yourself familiar with the films of Alex de la Iglesia. If you love films as much as I do, I’m willing to guarantee that you might just find yourself with a new favorite director.