Toni Erdmann
Well, here's the old question of movie moments vs a whole thing you can really get behind. I'm not sure this movie worked for me. It's too darn long for what it is doing. You can see it in the opening shot, which might have started at a delivery guy ringing a doorbell but is instead about a minute longer because we have to hear the car pulling up and then the guy opening and closing his car door, and then opening the sliding door on the car to get the package, and then walking up to the door and then ringing the bell. Maybe it's supposed to get the audience to identify with the delivery guy so that we start seeing how strange but also funny the "Erdmann" character is from the point of view of his own audience, which will then transfer onto the daughter when she joins in. But still, there's a ten second version of that which would have the same effect. Much of the rest of the film follows this kind of boring maximalist thing which diminishes much of my enjoyment/engagement with it. But then the same principle is applied to these two big scenes towards the end and it's freaking fantastic. I wasn't so turned off from the rest of the film that I couldn't get what feels like all I was supposed to get from these two scenes and I found myself laughing and being moved simultaneously, not a super easy thing to achieve. I'm not sure I would watch this whole thing again, but I do think my time was worth it to get to some of the best scenes of the year. Maybe I'm just a huge hypocrite.
B