Charles Poekel: CHRISTMAS, AGAIN (2014)

A quiet docudrama in NYC style, actually shot in a real location, a Christmas tree lot, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where the director had himself worked for three years. It focuses on one guy, the actor playing the depressed night shift tree salesman. He is lonely because his girlfriend is not with him for the first time in five years. Not much to it, but the atmosphere is authentic in most details, though the plot is slightly contrived.

Yohei Suzuki: OW (2014)

A quirky Japanese sci-fi-fantasy-horror-humor film that is sui generis and has a great opening sequence of people who become immobilized when they glance at an alien orb floating on the ceiling of a middle-class suburban house, but not much folllow-uop. The bizarre very Japanese and often comical atmosphere I found quite entertaining, but many would consider most of this a snooze. Suzuki may be one to watch.

Nadav Lapid: THE KINDERGARTEN TEACHER (2014)

This was by general consent one of the best features of the series this year. Second film by the director of a NYFF film of several years ago, POLICEMAN. That one was good but its separate parts where not integrated; this doesn't have that problem and is highly focused on a woman who goes over the top in her admiration, adoption, and ultimate kidnapping of one of her five-year-olds who composes oracular or gnomic poems that seem to come to him in a flash of powerful inspiration. I personally found this a somewhat confused effort, powerful but still in another sense not well integrated. Lapid instinctively creates dramatic effects; they don't completely make sense. And the sensationalizing of "poetry" into a thriller plot at the end blurs the focus on art, if there was intended to be one. And if not, why this plot?