Brimstone & Glory (2017, Viktor Jakovleski) (Patreon)

A (very) late-breaking addition to last year's top 10 list. At its best, rivals Herzog's Lessons of Darkness for terrifying beauty, with a more pronounced sense of ever-present danger; last felt this queasy during Cameraperson, but here I'm constantly being distracted by awe-inspiring eye candy—plus, instead of a single unsupervised toddler tugging at an axe, it's pretty much the entire freakin' town willingly risking life and limb. Jakovleski mostly refrains from active moralizing, though virtually every remark made directly to camera (of which there are refreshingly few) involves either past accounts of people being maimed and killed or wariness about future accidents. I'd probably have preferred a full-bore Sensory Ethnography Lab approach, minus the intermittent focus on a couple of "characters," but this still represents an admirably deft balance of exposition (minimal) and abstraction (not quite maximal, but frequent and oft-overwhelming). Here's the kicker: I don't even like fireworks. Generally find 4th of July displays a big snoozefest. But Tultepec's annual festival is astonishing, a heedless crazed jaw-dropper. Some of these images damn near seared my retinas. And even the lulls can thrill: I chuckled at GoPro footage shot by a smoker whose cigarette juts out from the bottom of the frame, thinking that a goofy accidental diversion from the intended sightline...until the guy plucked the cigarette from his mouth and used it to light a fuse, kicking off another round of projectile insanity. Conflagration is always an arm's length away.