10. Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg)
Perhaps David Cronenberg’s best film since A History of Violence, Cosmopolis was also one of his most offbeat and
humorous. With the help of Robert Pattinson’s brilliantly stoic
performance, a crisp and icy color palette, and an ineffably
off-kilter tone, Cosmpolis transformed the interior of a
limousine, where the first hour of the film took place, into a universe
unto itself. A veritable hyperreality of futuristic global capitalism that
seemingly operated outside the confines of time, this living,
breathing entity thrust Pattinson’s Eric Parker through Manhattan to his
favorite barbershop, where he was seemingly immune and indifferent to the
chaos and danger of the protests, riots, and crime occurring just on the
other side of the glass. His crosstown odyssey was filled with a bizarre
array of characters feeding him raw data, tactical advice,
and philosophical quandaries, as he gazed at them with similar aplomb,
even while getting his prostate examined or taking a pie to the face. The
film’s final act, where Parker confronts the outside world, capped off
what may be the single most effective examination of the unbridgeable gap
between the elite and the 99% of this young decade, and while Cosmpolis did not enjoy the heaps of praise most
of Cronenberg’s recent output has received, its sheer singularity and bold
engagement with the political climate - with
the help of the equally fine Don DeLillo source material - made it one of the most important films of the
year and his career.
9. Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold)
Andrea Arnold’s earthy, visceral
adaptation of Wuthering
Heights is quite unlike any
other adaptation of the famed novel I’ve seen. The landscape is less magical
than magisterial, a commanding presence that looms over all the characters,
particularly Heathcliff whose existence is mirrored in its harshness.
Arnold’s handheld camerawork is magnificent, intensifying the characters
physical interactions with each other as well as the effects of the wind, mud,
fog and hills. This materialist depiction may seems at odds with such ethereal
material, but the delicacy of the rare moments of happiness between Heathcliff
and Catherine play as a beautiful contrast to the harshness of daily existence,
the coldness that the older Catherine displays coming as a logical extension of
the land’s mysterious hold rather than a desire for wealth or to please her
father’s will. Arnold’s skillful and unique style has finally found a proper
home, albeit in the unlikeliest of places.
8. Amour (Michael Haneke)
Perhaps the most divisive of all acclaimed
international directors, Michael Haneke throws a small bone to his critics
who find his films overly academic and devoid of life with Amour.
Haneke’s second straight to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Amour tells the story
of a couple struggling to deal with increasingly crippling dementia. The
awards and positive critical response couldn’t quite squash my fear that
Haneke would make the film either too sterile or sentimental, but his
ascetic style lends itself perfectly to a subdued take on the troubles of
aging and losing the capability to do the things one loves to
do. Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant are as lovely and
convincing as word-of-mouth has led us to believe, as they so effortlessly
sustain the organic ebb-and-flow of a couple who have been together for
decades, both in their understated sweetness and restrained bursts of
viciousness. Throughout the film, neither character sheds a tear; rather,
Haneke methodically tracks the wife’s inevitable descent into dementia and,
with a watchful eye, covers a wide range of emotional terrain through her
interactions with her husband as well as her distant yet well-meaning
daughter. What the film lacks in Haneke’s usually impressive formal rigor,
it makes up for with truly earned emotional truths and as the director’s
mother suffered a similar fate as Anne’s, one senses the subject
matter affects the director on a more humane than intellectual level and,
fortunately, the film is all the better for it.
7. Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow)
Zero Dark Thirty is a radically different take on military operations
than The Hurt Locker.
The latter was an effective and intimate character study where the former’s
scope is far broader, encapsulating everything from the mundane daily tasks and
protocols of CIA agents to the shifting landscape of global anti-terrorism.
Jessica Chastain’s Maya is the central protagonist, but only so far as her
involvement with capturing Bin Laden goes. There are numerous extraneous
plotlines or relationships that lesser films couldn’t have resisted playing out
– Thirty has essentially no love interests or
hackneyed backstories thrown in to add emotional heft and Chastain is herself
off-screen for most of the 30-minute military op at the end. Bigelow
shows enough confidence in that final sequence to allow it to stand on its own
rather than rely on constant crosscutting to attempt to put us in Maya’s shoes.
This respect of both the material and the audience extends to the much-debated
torture sequences. The objective representation of such harsh material has been
wrongly interpreted as some as an absolution of such tactics simply because it
may have helped lead the CIA to Bin Laden, but it is neither absolving nor condemning,
but rather presenting as accurately as it knows how the
events as they happened. This deft handling of such tricky material, that
miraculously never devolves into jingoistic or anti-American propaganda makes
for a remarkably economical film that is as great for the things is doesn’t do
than for those it does.
5 & 6. Paradise: Love (Ulrich Seidl) & Whore's Glory (Michael Glawogger)
Like his equally brilliant Import/Export, Ulrich
Seidl’s Paradise: Love,
the first film in his Paradise trilogy, seamlessly melds devastating
social conditions and dispassionate sexual encounters to deadpan humor and
sharp satire. Set mostly in Kenya, where a 50-year-old Austrian woman travels
as a sex tourist, the film operates with equal aplomb as a metaphor for
Western imperialism and an intimate character piece exploring the depths of
a woman’s loneliness and her inability to fill that void with anything
within her power. The exotic locale and explicit sexual content are
rendered flat and lifeless through Seidl’s dispassionate eye and schematic
staging, but the film is nonetheless intensely emotional and surprisingly
funny. The mutual exploitation of the woman/West and Africans is portrayed
with such vibrancy through the astounding performance of Margarete Tiesel,
who conveys tenderness and viciousness with equal skill, and portrays the
hypocrisy of her character with a careful balance of pathos and ferocity.
Seidl’s work with all of these dichotomies is remarkable, and this film
makes it easy to see why he’s one of Werner Herzog’s favorite working
directors. A perfect companion piece to Paradise:
Love, Michael Glawogger’s globe-trotting documentary, Whore’s Glory, examines the
nature of prostitution in three separate countries (Thailand, Bangladesh and
Mexico) with an array of interviews with pimps, prostitutes and johns. It's
quite an impressive feat both for tackling that subject matter without
resorting to anything remotely exploitative or emotionally manipulative and for
effectively capturing its three milieus with extensive research and
interviews rather than latching onto one particular person or guide.
Glawogger’s subdued, direct approach shows a respect both for the material and
the audience, understanding that the content is powerful and disturbing enough
without dressing it up. It’s a tough watch, but rewarding nonetheless.
4. Tabu (Miguel Gomes)
Miguel Gomes’ odd and intriguing love story starts
off like a typical, slow-burning Eastern European drama centered on the
struggles of a curmudgeonly old woman, her maid, and her kindhearted
neighbor before drastically shifting gears into a delicate, sweet
yet unsentimental retelling of the woman’s youthful dalliances in Africa.
In what essentially transforms into a silent film in one respect (none of the
dialogue is heard) is in another respect a truly experimental aural,
sensory experience. The lack of dialogue heightens the characters’
connection to nature and their surroundings while also intensifying the
drama through its dreamlike atmosphere. The crisp black-and-white
cinematography captures the stark contrasts of modern-day Lisbon, with its
rigid angular architecture and the lush fluidity of Africa. For a film
that easily could teeter on the edge gimmickry or preciousness, Tabu is especially striking in its knack for
grounding the ethereal in the real, its paradise lost remaining tangible
and full of genuine passion and emotion. Gomes is a talent to watch out
for, possessing an original voice and eye for detail.
3. The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Returning with the aesthetic developed and perfected
in There Will Be Blood,
complete with another brilliant accompanying score by Jonny Greenwood, The Master perplexed and underwhelmed a number of
Paul Thomas Anderson’s biggest supporters. All of Anderson’s prior films,
at least since Boogie Nights,
have contained scenes or moments of great awkwardness, where emotion erupts
violently from within a character (Julianne Moore in the pharmacy in Magnolia, Adam Sandler’s
outburst in the bathroom in Punch-Drunk
Love, Day-Lewis’s famed milkshake monologue in Blood) to such a degree that
its intensity, under the patient, watchful gaze of PTA, gives the audience a
concrete, albeit odd and unsettling, cathartic expression. While The
Master has a smaller scope
than the director’s previous film, it is far less accessible, essentially
taking odd moments like Plainview throwing a napkin over his face and creating
a feature length expression of that peculiarity. Not that The Master is simply strange only for the sake of
it – it’s one of the most fascinatingly original depictions of post-war,
pre-50s America, with both Phoenix and Hoffman embodying different sides of the
incomplete modernist man before suburbia was fully crystallized and the
uncontrollable yearnings and feelings of emptiness of the new self-aware
generation were given an ample social construct behind which they could vanish.
This fascinating piece of gonzo Americana is yet more evidence than Anderson is
our country’s finest filmmaker and working with two of the finest actors out
there only helps to cement that fact.
2. Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verena Paravel)
Co-directed by Sweetgrass director Lucien Castaing-Taylor and
Verena Paravel, Leviathan is a difficult film to describe,
but if you imagine an episode of The Deadliest Catch as directed by Stan
Brakhage, you’re on the right track. Shot with an array of tiny cameras on
a commercial fishing boat off the New Bedford coast, the film captures the
brutal realities of life at sea in a terrifyingly visceral, kaleidoscopic
montage of perspectives. Shots with cameras attached to wires, chains,
nets, and the fishermen themselves, take us up and down the ship, put us
in the pits among the freshly captured and sliced-up fish, plunge us in
and out of the ocean, and soar us into the sky amidst the seagulls,
creating a purely sensorial, visual abstraction that changes what would
typically be an observational documentary into an intensely physical and
experiential avant-garde piece. If given the chance, this is not to be missed
on the big screen.
1. It's Such a Beautiful Day (Don Herzfeldt)
I’m as surprised as anyone that my top two films are
a documentary about fishing and an experimental animated film with a stick
figure protagonist, but both Leviathan and It’s
Such a Beautiful Day defy
categorization in their sheer singularity, the former for its batshit crazy
adherence to its preset aesthetic limitations and the latter for its intensely
personal material and the avant-garde stylizations that perfectly and
creatively mimic the oft-shattered mental state of the film’s protagonist. My
first foray into the world of Don Herzfeldt, It’s
Such a Beautiful Day is
deeply moving, intensely neurotic and gut-bustingly funny. Herzfeldt’s
rough-edged, simple animation belies the amount of thought and skill that went
into make this film (a combination of 3 short films to make a complete
70-minute feature), but is perfectly suited for the unstable, delicate mental
states it depicts. Of course, the film is far more than stick-figure animation,
incorporating trippy backdrops and dizzying animated asides that enhance
Herzfeldt’s quirky voice-over work and its almost confessional content. The
balance of emotional turmoil with humor and pathos gives the film a much-needed
levity for such a devastating narrative, its overwhelming creativity and
originality as responsible for its transcendent effect on the viewer as its
highly potent emotional subject matter.
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