You Mean My Whole Fallacy is Wrong?

2025 - A Year in Film

2026-02-04T17:30:00.001-05:00

I hope you enjoy the video.

Outside of the movies themselves, two events will seem to define the year in film 2025 for me: The New York Times poll of the best 100 movies of the 21st century and the impending takeover of Warner Bros. by… well, we don’t know just quite yet. The former is looking back, a celebration that, despite the disruption of seemingly every industry since the turn of the century, proves movies are still great. The latter though leaves anxiety for the future, the subsuming of an iconic movie studio–the legacy studio of all legacy studios–potentially by a company whose entire modus operandi seems to be the elimination of movie theaters altogether or potentially by another company that appears to be steadily morphing into the media apparatus of a fascist regime.

For what it’s worth, here’s my NYT ballot (in ranked order from left to right, top to bottom). While there are some expected entries, I find it interesting that in a few cases, I swerved with the consensus on some of the expected directors. I have the lowest ranked movie from the Coens and Paul Thomas Anderson–Inside Llewyn Davis and Punch-Drunk Love, respectively–and a Spielberg (Minority Report, a movie I feel like I’m way higher on than just about anyone I know) that just sneaked onto the top 100. And while lists like these raise as many questions as they do ire amongst its readers, what can be certain is that there will always be great movies, you just have to know where to look for them. This list is a decent start.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t quickly conduct a brief in memoriam. The year began and ended with the deaths of David Lynch and Rob Reiner, two directors who couldn’t be more diametrically opposed, yet impacted the culture all the same. Two acting stalwarts of the New Hollywood era and beyond, whose stardom was matched only by their talent, Gene Hackman and Robert Redford also passed. But of course the one that hit me the most was the passing of Diane Keaton, whose face has graced the top of this very site since its inception, and whose performances are as fundamental to my understanding of American cinema as anyone who has ever stepped in front of a camera. La-dee-da.

2024 - A Year in Film

2025-02-16T16:36:00.002-05:00

Not a movie year goes by without many lamenting the state of the art form. That, despite the occasional huge box office weekend, cinema is in dire straits, awash in endless IP, while good-to-great adult fare gets buried amongst the pile of "content" housed in the basement of the streamers. But for me, and many others, who try to take stock of the recently-passed calendar year, end up with a glut of great movies to discuss. Are movies really dead (again)?

Well it depends where you look. Hollywood kind of does suck right now. This is endemic to the industry and to the people who run it. The crevasse between the two parts of the term show business has never been wider and reflects the culture and infrastructure of a country whose defining characteristic in middle of the 2020s is its intent on tightening that very stranglehold. When a great Hollywood movie comes out, it's a miracle--a bug, not a feature.

But movies outside that system (or at least ones that are created mostly outside of it and only entering it for marketing and distribution purposes) flourished as it always does. Because, as it turns out, there are still artists out there and, when left mainly to their own devices, turn the movie year into another great movie year.

And here's another thing about the term "movie year." It's too nebulous. My favorite movie of 2024 is technically a 2023 movie. Sometimes that's not a concern for this kind of list--movies often get, say, festival releases one year only to get legitimate distribution the following year. But La Chimera, though it only got released locally in my area in early 2024, was a wide enough release that many considered it a 2023 release and eligible for Oscar consideration that year and made many year-end lists. Had I seen it in 2023, it would have been my #1 of that year too. But outside of the big markets, it only came out in 2024 and even some of the bigger critics and publications included it in their 2024 lists. Once I started to notice that, rather than let it vanish into the ether, I decided it would be included here. And while the other top choices on my list were outstanding, La Chimera was always going to stand alone.

I hope you enjoy the video.

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Full list: https://boxd.it/EeKbS

2023 - A Year in Film

2024-01-17T13:47:00.002-05:00

Another deep roster of movies that made it difficult to rank them for this year's list. As always, there were some notable omissions due to not being able to see them in time--chief among them, The Zone of Interest and The Boy and the Heron, not to mention a slate of domestic and foreign art house titles that received no distribution in my neck of the woods and will have to wait until a streaming release later in 2024. But that said, still a terrific year for movies.

Enjoy!

2022 - A Year in Film

2023-01-13T10:46:00.001-05:00

[Spoilers for the rankings below. Watch the above video first.]

From Once to Moonlight, from Only Lovers Left Alive to The Farewell, from Me and You and Everyone We Know to Lost in Translation, my pick for the top movie of the year more often has an air of melancholy--quiet, pensive movies you'd more likely see at the arthouse than at the multiplex (though that distinction feels weirdly dated). But for most of the year, I was prepared to write about how the top of my 2022 list would be a bit of an outlier, as I had two maximalist crowd-pleasers, two box office smashes (at least in relative terms) topping my list. Everything Everywhere All at Once and Top Gun: Maverick were my top 2 movies until very late December since having seen both of them before June. After watching Aftersun earlier in December, I "only" slotted it at #3. But in the intervening weeks, I haven't stopped thinking about it. The movie haunts in the same way the memories haunt its protagonist, Sophie. It's a shattering debut from director Charlotte Wells and as I was compiling this list, it felt inevitable that I had to place it at the top.

There were many movies I wished I could have caught up with before making the list: Armageddon Time, Women Talking, Jafar Panahi's No Bears (though his son Panah makes the top 10 with his moving debut!), All That Breathes, Pearl (the prequel to my #22, X), EO, Return to Seoul, and countless others.

As the Bowie clip at the beginning of the video suggests, a list of the best movies of the year is less an objective statement about the greatest films in any given twelve-month span than it is a story of how I traversed the movie year. It's a micro look at film history, a snapshot of one person's point-of-view. But the end of November gave us the opposite, a macro look at the art form, when the once-a-decade Greatest Films of All Time Critics' List was revealed by Sight & Sound magazine. There are better analyses out there than anything I could write and I'll link them below. But in some circles (to which I will not link below) will use the topping of the list by Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles as an excuse to rail against political correctness, identity politics, and some vague and as always unformed idea of "wokeness", as an excuse to argue that the broadening of the voting base unfairly spits in the face of the traditional canon. To this I will only say that I disagree with this assessment and that even if these assertions are true, so what?

"The Sight and Sound 'Greatest Films' Poll Presents a Bolder Vision of World Cinema" by Richard Brody
"Did 'Woke Culture' Sabotage This Best Movies Ever Poll?" by George Edelman
"2022: The year the Sight & Sound film poll blew up" by Scott Tobias

And by completely unpopular demand, here's my hastily considered list of the greatest movies of all time if I ever should be so dared to submit:

City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931)

Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)

My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946)

Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)

The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960)

Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)

Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977)

In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2001)

2021 - A Year in Film

2022-01-02T19:03:00.000-05:00

Not much to say. It was nice to finally get back into a movie theater this past year. Much like the previous year, it was difficult to see how the 2021 movie year would turn out. And as late as December, it looked like it would be a pretty weak year. But a flurry of movie watching in the last month brought me many of the year's best, an eclectic mix of American indies, foreign art house, direct-to-streaming titles, and Hollywood blockbusters.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the video. Happy New Year!

2020 - A Year in Film

2021-01-18T14:42:00.000-05:00

There's almost certainly never been a weirder year in the history of the movies. We will perhaps permanently lose our second biggest domestic theater chain. Most major studio releases have been postponed in some cases more than a full year. The traditional modes of production, distribution, and exhibition, already in the throes of a years- or decades-long evolution is reaching a tipping point due to the exacerbating circumstances surrounding the pandemic. AMC has already agreed to terms with Universal Pictures about an aggressive (and malleable) VOD strategy. Disney has released potential blockbusters to their own relatively young streaming service.

This isn't new. Netflix and iTunes started offering movies online over a decade ago. But we found out this year what it's like to live in a primarily virtual world. Well, that is of course not including the millions of frontline workers in healthcare and other service industries who never had that luxury, but I digress.

A growing revolution in the moving image hit its apex in ways that had little to do with what we consider "movies" in the traditional sense--and they came to us in a variety of directions. The first is clearly more pressing: cellphone footage of police brutality. Again, this isn't new. I'm old enough to remember quite vividly the Rodney King beating and the subsequent and volatile aftermath of that footage being released. But the recent acceleration in accessible technology has sadly made this an almost necessary tool to fight corruption and brutality. This all came to a head when the release of cell phone footage showing Officer Derek Chauvin's killing of George Floyd sparked nationwide (and eventually worldwide) protests of racial injustice. This came somewhat off the heels of footage being released of another senseless example of violence against a black citizen when white vigilantes shot and killed Ahmaud Arbery for the simple act of jogging.

On a hopefully lighter note, it's time to admit (begrudgingly) that the cell phone has not only become a dominant method for consuming content, but an increasingly viable way for creating it. In no way is this more apparent than the explosion of TikTok, the social network for creating short videos. (Even I joined it because, well, my friends made me.) Instagram's stories and reels features also fill this growing niche of video creation that puts the content directly in the hands of the consumers. And yes, many of these videos are nonsense. Some are charming sure, others little more than the narcissistic Facebook or Twitter posts of past years turned into a moving image.

Then there are the things that make you happy humanity didn't completely fall apart in the year of all years that it could have. As Broadway theaters have shut their doors, a crowdsourced musical version of Pixar's Ratatouille began to spring up on TikTok. Aspiring musical theater artists wrote and performed original songs, dancers choreographed their own numbers, and costume and set designers worked on production material for a show that didn't even exist. And the result was one of the most truly wonderful things in 2020, eventually leading to the somewhat professional streaming adaptation that dropped just as the year turned.

But if you're reading this, you're here for the movies. I feel like I say this every year, but there is no real point in trying to find a theme in any particular year's movies, no connective tissue to the myriad of films that happened to be released within a given specified calendar range. Movies that were lucky enough to get released in any format this year were created (at least for the most part) without the knowledge of what was to befall the world in the coming months.

And yet...

Many of the films that made my list express some sort of dissatisfaction or disillusion with the world, be it political or personal or both. These films either confront the various horrors of the world today--misogyny, sexual and racial violence, xenophobia, income inequality--or provide the needed respite from needing to constantly engage with them. Some of the very best of these are able to do both.

I'd be lying if I said the lack of bigger budget Hollywood fare changed the makeup of this year's list. Those types of movies tend to be outliers for me at least in terms of what I think the best of the best are. Yet speaking more broadly, it is perhaps that the noise created by the hype surrounding these tentpoles have quieted enough to make room for the smaller and more personal and idiosyncratic works. So, like the hope some had that the limitations to travel over the past year would reap some environmental benefits (turns out it didn't really), perhaps nature could have a hand in course correcting the cinematic landscape as well.

This is an eclectic list and while many lament what would seem like a lack of significant movies over the past year, like any other, I still had a tough time narrowing down my favorites and I am still filled with regret for the handful of titles I had to leave off*. Though we weren't able to see a number of nine-figure budgeted movies, 2020 was I think a real bright spot for American independent cinema. Young, up-and-coming directors with few titles to their name and veteran indie filmmakers alike are all over this list. And book-ending the top 10 are two incredibly disparate titles from a bona fide American master, one who can toggle seamlessly between big and low budget, narrative and documentary, yet whose stamp is unmistakably written on every frame.

*I will list them here, in the hopes you'll seek these out too:

Driveways (Andrew Ahn)

Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa)

The Woman Who Ran (Hong Sang-soo)

The Invisible Man (Leigh Whannell)

Mangrove (Steve McQueen)

Palm Springs (Max Barbakow)

Soul (Pete Docter)

Mank (David Fincher)

Time (Garrett Bradley)

What the Constitution Means to Me (Marielle Heller & Oliver Butler)

The Last Dance (Jason Hehir)

Hamilton (Thomas Kail)

Kajillionaire (Miranda July)

The 2nd Annual Fallacy Awards

2020-02-09T19:25:00.000-05:00

Animated Feature Film
Frozen 2
How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
I Lost My Body
Missing Link
Toy Story 4

Winner: I Lost My Body

Cinematography
The Lighthouse
Little Women
Long Day's Journey Into Night
Parasite
Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Winner: Long Day's Journey Into Night

Costume Design
The Irishman
Little Women
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
The Souvenir

Winner: Little Women

Directing
Hu Bo, An Elephant Sitting Still
Lulu Wang, The Farewell
Joe Talbot, The Last Black Man in San Francisco
Greta Gerwig, Little Women
Bong Joon-ho, Parasite

Winner: Lulu Wang, The Farewell

Documentary Feature
Apollo 11
The Cave
Honeyland
Maiden
One Child Nation

Winner: Apollo 11

Film Editing
The Farewell
Little Women
Marriage Story
Parasite
Us

Winner: Little Women

International Feature
Atlantics
An Elephant Sitting Still
Long Day's Journey Into Night
Parasite
Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Winner: Parasite

Makeup and Hairstyling
Bombshell
Hustlers
Judy
Little Women
Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Winner: Little Women

Original Score
Apollo 11
The Farewell
Little Women
Marriage Story
Us

Winner: Little Women

Original Song
"Beautiful Ghosts," Cats
"When I Am Older," Frozen 2
"Stand Up," Harriet
"Glasgow," Wild Rose

Winner: "Glasgow," Wild Rose

Production Design
Ad Astra
The Last Black Man in San Francisco
Little Women
Long Day's Journey Into Night
Parasite

Winner: Parasite

Sound Editing
Ad Astra
Ford v Ferrari
In Fabric
John Wick: Chapter 3 -- Parabellum
Long Day's Journey Into Night

Winner: Ford v Ferrari

Sound Mixing
Ad Astra
Ford v Ferrari
In Fabric
John Wick: Chapter 3 -- Parabellum
Long Day's Journey Into Night

Winner: Ad Astra

Visual Effects
1917
Alita: Battle Angel
Ad Astra
The Irishman
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

Winner: Ad Astra

Adapted Screenplay
Steven Zaillian, The Irishman
Greta Gerwig, Little Women
Christian Petzold, Transit

Winner: Greta Gerwig, Little Women

Original Screenplay
Lulu Wang, The Farewell
Joe Talbot & Rob Richert, The Last Black Man in San Francisco
Noah Baumbach, Marriage Story
Bong Joon-ho, Parasite
Jordan Peele, Us

Winner: Lulu Wang, The Farewell

Supporting Actress
Zhao Shuzhen, The Farewell
Jennifer Lopez, Hustlers
Florence Pugh, Little Women
Laura Dern, Marriage Story
Park So-dam, Parasite

Winner: Zhao Shuzhen, The Farewell

Supporting Actor
Joe Pesci, The Irishman
Jonathan Majors, The Last Black Man in San Francisco
Willem Dafoe, The Lighthouse
Brad Pitt, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Song Kang-ho, Parasite

Willem Dafoe, The Lighthouse

Actress
Awkwafina, The Farewell
Elisabeth Moss, Her Smell
Saoirse Ronan, Little Women
Scarlett Johansson, Marriage Story
Lupita Nyong'o, Us

Winner: Lupita Nyong'o, Us

Actor
Brad Pitt, Ad Astra
Robert Deniro, The Irishman
Adam Driver, Marriage Story
Antonio Banderas, Pain and Glory
Adam Sandler, Uncut Gems

Winner: Adam Driver, Marriage Story

Best Picture:
An Elephant Sitting Still
The Farewell
The Last Black Man in San Francisco
Little Women
Long Day's Journey Into Night
Marriage Story
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Parasite
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Us

Winner: The Farewell

2019 - A Year in Movies

2020-01-05T00:13:00.001-05:00

I feel like I say it every year: "It's been a great year for movies." And 2019 was no exception--in fact, it was one of the best years for movies that I can remember. Each year I keep a running list of movies that would make a potential best-of list and for the first time that list reached triple digits. Certainly, a large number of those movies had no real shot of making a top 10 or 25 list of the year's best, but it goes to show how deep 2019's slate really was. Even with that, I still feel like I missed a handful of movies that may have been included had I been able to screen them in time.

As always, the final list is in order of how I felt at the moment I finalized it. Ask me in two weeks or two months, something between 15-25 could be in the top 10 or something in my list of honorable mentions (see below) would be in the video. What feels like fixtures, though, are the two titles at the top of the list. There are a several things going on in each of those films: the internal conflict between coming of age in the West, but having your heritage come from the East (The Farewell); the options (or lack thereof) one has in deciding the path they take in life as a woman (Little Women). But what struck me about each of those is that they depict how time and circumstance can slowly pull a family apart. That as we age, even the closest of family bonds need tending to lest they wither away. It's something I've thought about a lot in my life recently and while these two films are much richer than just this aspect, it's perhaps why they seemed to have resonated with me more deeply than others.

I've long praised the quality of the releases from the production/distribution company A24. They are to me what perhaps Focus Features was in the early 2000s, a company that wisely devotes its resources to idiosyncratic auteurs who make personal films that, with regularity, end up being among my favorites of the year. Six A24 releases make the top-25 video above and another two make the honorable mentions below. That also makes 3 out of the last 4 years in which they claimed the #1 spot (Moonlight, 2016; A Ghost Story, 2017).

It almost pains me to have left so many other wonderful films off the video. So in the hopes you'll search some of them out and in honor of 2020, here are 20 more movies I loved released over the past 12 months. Here's to another great movie year.

3 Faces (Jafar Panahi)
The Art of Self-Defense (Riley Stearns)
Asako I & II (Ryūsuke Hamaguchi)
Ash Is Purest White (Jia Zhangke)
The Beach Bum (Harmony Korine)
Climax (Gasper Noé)
The Dead Don't Die (Jim Jarmusch)
Diamantino (Gabriel Abrantes, Daniel Schmidt)
Dragged Across Concrete (S. Craig Zahler)
First Love (Takashi Miike)
Ford v Ferrari (James Mangold)
I Lost My Body (Jérémy Clapin)
The Image Book (Jean-Luc Godard)
The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers)
The Nightingale (Jennifer Kent)
Non-Fiction (Olivier Assayas)
One Child Nation (Nanfu Wang, Zhang Jia-Ling)
Pain and Glory (Pedro Almodóvar)
Starfish (A.T. White)
Waves (Trey Edward Shults)

The 1st Annual Fallacy Awards

2019-02-24T17:55:00.001-05:00

Welcome to the 1st Annual Fallacy Awards, your aptly-named alternative to the Oscars. Below are the nominees in each of the 24 categories and announced as each is presented on the telecast here and on twitter. Good luck to all the nominees...

Richard Harbaugh / ©A.M.P.A.S.

Supporting Actress:
Marina de Tavira, Roma
Elizabeth Debicki, Widows
Regina King, If Beale Street Could Talk
Blake Lively, A Simple Favor
Geraldine Viswanathan, Blockers

And the Fallacy goes to Marina de Tavira

Documentary Feature:
Free Solo
Minding the Gap
Hale County This Morning, This Evening
Shirkers
Won't You Be My Neighbor?

And the Fallacy goes to Minding the Gap

Makeup and Hair:
Border
The Favourite
Mary Queen of Scots
Sorry to Bother You

And the Fallacy goes to Border

Costume Design:
Black Panther
The Favourite
Mandy
Mary Queen of Scots
A Simple Favor

And the Fallacy goes to Black Panther

Production Design:
Annihilation
The Favourite
If Beale Street Could Talk
Roma
Shoplifters

And the Fallacy goes to If Beale Street Could Talk

Cinematography:
The Favourite
First Man
If Beale Street Could Talk
The Rider
Roma

And the Fallacy goes to If Beale Street Could Talk

Sound Editing:
First Man
Hereditary
Mission Impossible -- Fallout
Roma
Zama

And the Fallacy goes to First Man

Sound Mixing:
First Man
Hereditary
Mission Impossible -- Fallout
Roma
Zama

And the Fallacy goes to Zama

Foreign Language Film:
Burning
Claire's Camera
Let the Sunshine In
Roma
Shoplifters

And the Fallacy goes to Shoplifters

Film Editing:
First Reformed
If Beale Street Could Talk
Madeline's Madeline
Minding the Gap

The Rider

And the Fallacy goes to If Beale Street Could Talk

Supporting Actor:
John Cena, Blockers
Richard E. Grant, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Brian Tyree Henry, If Beale Street Could Talk
Daniel Kaluuya, Widows
Steven Yeun, Burning

And the Fallacy goes to Daniel Kaluuya

Animated Feature:
Incredibles 2
Isle of Dogs
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

And the Fallacy goes to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Animated Short:
Abnie Oberfork: A Tale of Self-Preservation
Bao
Shahkboy
Nevada
Weekends

And the Fallacy goes to Weekends

Documentary Short:
Black Sheep
End Game
Lifeboat
A Night at the Garden
Period. End of Sentence.

And the Fallacy goes to Black Sheep

Visual Effects:
Annihilation
First Man
Mission Impossible -- Fallout
Paddington 2
Ready Player One

And the Fallacy goes to Annihilation

Live Action Short:
Detainment
Fauve
Marguerite
Mother
Skin

And the Fallacy goes to Marguerite

Original Screenplay:
First Reformed
Madeline's Madeline
The Rider
Roma
Shoplifters

And the Fallacy goes to Shoplifters

Adapted Screenplay:
Annihilation
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Burning

If Beale Street Could Talk

Leave No Trace

And the Fallacy goes to If Beale Street Could Talk

Original Score:
BlacKkKlansman
First Man
If Beale Street Could Talk
Madeline's Madeline
A Star is Born

And the Fallacy goes to If Beale Street Could Talk

Original Song:
"All the Stars," Black Panther
"Look What I Found," A Star is Born
"Shallow," A Star is Born
"Sunflower," Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
"When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings," The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

And the Fallacy goes to "Shallow"

Actor:
Nicolas Cage, Mandy
Lily Franky, Shoplifters
Ryan Gosling, First Man
Ethan Hawke, First Reformed
Ben Whishaw, Paddington 2

And the Fallacy goes to Ethan Hawke

Actress:
Sakura Andô, Shoplifters
Elsie Fisher, Eighth Grade
Regina Hall, Support the Girls
Helena Howard, Madeline's Madeline
Anna Kendrick, A Simple Favor

And the Fallacy goes to Sakura Andô

Directing:
Alfonso Cuaron, Roma
Josephine Decker, Madeline's Madeline
Debra Granik, Leave No Trace
Barry Jenkins, If Beale Street Could Talk
Hirokazu Kore-eda, Shoplifters

And the Fallacy goes to Barry Jenkins

Picture:
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
The Favourite
First Reformed
If Beale Street Could Talk
Leave No Trace
Madeline's Madeline
Minding the Gap
The Rider
Roma
Shoplifters

And the Fallacy goes to If Beale Street Could Talk

Congratulations to all the Winners!

2018 - A Year in Film

2019-01-11T17:23:00.001-05:00

Typically in this space, you'd read my list for the year's best movies. But since you have the video above, I thought I'd just discuss some of things I've been thinking about over the past year in cinema.

The most heartbreaking news in the cinephile world was the closing down at the end of November of FilmStruck, the streaming service from Turner Classic Movies that also served as an online home for the Criterion Collection. In the blip of only two years, it was a beacon of light for the serious moviegoer, a reservoir of some of the world's greatest art amidst the glut of fast food options who are satisfied merely to have its users consume its content and chill. In the short amount of time it existed, I felt I was a smarter movie watcher and frankly I'm gutted that I and other like-minded (and would-be like-minded) folks no longer have this as a resource.

The sadness of FilmStruck's closing was somewhat alleviated by the announcement that Criterion would soon launch its own standalone streaming service in spring. And while that is most certainly a wonderful piece of news, to be honest, even though I purchased the add-on Criterion channel to FilmStruck, it wasn't the resource I used most. I always knew I could get a large selection of Criterion titles on DVD, either through Netflix or my local libraries. Not to mention titles are available through the library-only service, Kanopy.

But FilmStruck would introduce a wide variety of obscure or somewhat forgotten titles, ones that didn't necessarily have the sheen of the Criterion logo on it. More than anything, though, is that the service provided a level of curation little seen (and in most cases unseen) in some of the more popular streaming services. A Netflix algorithm, intricate and rigorous though it may be, can't--or, perhaps more accurately, wouldn't--decide to curate a retrospective of films directed by Nikita Mikhalkov or George Cukor, or decide to have a weekly series of films dedicated to women directors.

That was the real value a service like FilmStruck provided. They didn't just see themselves as a virtual warehouse for these types of films. It also saw itself as a steward for intelligent and thoughtful cinephilia. And that's the case both for the budding cinephile as it is for the veteran one. I can only imagine the kind of thrill someone just starting to explore the world outside mainstream, American cinema would feel having FilmStruck at their fingertips. I, myself, have been serious about film for about two decades and I always feel like I'm still learning and growing as a movie watcher. FilmStruck, during it's tragically brief run, was constantly allowing me to do so.

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On the other side of the coin is MoviePass, the monthly subscription service that allowed you to watch a different theatrical release "every" "single" "day." The quotation marks are purposeful because, as any user of the service over the past year will know, what you were allowed to do with your card changed drastically almost daily.

Though MoviePass made the move to its popular $10/month subscription plan well into the second half of 2017, it wasn't until 2018 that we would see the larger implication of its drop in price. The results seem to have been fairly predictable. Multiple price changes and multiple changes to its basic services all pointed to the obvious conclusion that the business model wasn't sustainable. It was, presumably, sustainable back in 2012, when I initially joined at $35/month and even when I stayed after an increase the following year to $45/month. At that price, it caters to the serious moviegoer. The severely discounted price meant a fundamental change to its user base.

The shutting down of FilmStruck and the atrophying of MoviePass may seem like only tangentially related bits of news, but it raises the larger question of the subscription model as it relates to movie watching.

Subscription services seem the dominant mode for streaming at home. This isn't unlike the cable model we've grown used to for years, except of course that only one subscription basically got you everything plus some extra fees for premium channels. Now, the glut of streaming services stretches content out over a wider area. There are the broader services (Netflix, Hulu) and the ones becoming increasingly more niche. WarnerMedia, the company that shut down FilmStruck, also shut down Drama Fever, a site dedicated to Korean dramas. Both of which were done apparently with an eye towards creating a broad service of its own.

There's a lot to unpack here when it comes to on-demand streaming. But what happens when you transpose all of this to the theatrical model? Perhaps MoviePass, then, is cable TV: one subscription to watch basically anything that's out. But in the wake of its demise, AMC created its own service, A-List. And while AMC is the largest theater chain in the country and I'm happy to say does play its share of non-mainstream movies (depending on where you live), this starts to move into the direction of the streaming model. What happens if Regal offers its own subscription? And then your local art house? If you have Netflix, but not Hulu, then you watch Netflix, but not Hulu. If you subscribe to the multiplex, then maybe you don't take the time to bother going to the art house anymore. How it all plays out is anyone's guess. But there's a danger that the culture gets flattened. That the movies that have always been on the fringes get further marginalized. We're a worst-case scenario away from only getting Marvel movies. (Disney themselves will soon premiere its own service, Disney+ in late 2019, meaning those Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar movies on Netflix will eventually disappear, further complicating the landscape.)

But it's the movies we're here to discuss and, thankfully, we haven't reached the point where simply providing content isn't the means to its own end. I called last year a great year for movies, where I could've made the case for much of the titles on the list as being the year's best. While I don't think that's the case for the top spot here, the list as a whole is bursting at the seams. Deep as the list in the video above is, I was still heartbroken to leave so many others off and I look as forward to again watching those that missed the cut as those that made it.

At the very top of the list are two filmmakers who often appear at or near the top of this list in the past. I've long said Hirokazu Kore-eda is my favorite working international director and he's made a number of top 10 lists since I've been compiling them, including several other honorable mentions. Barry Jenkins has only directed three features and none of them have placed lower than #5 on this list, including now his second #1 in three years.

I'll also say that, though I somewhat trashed Netflix above, the company placed two movies in my top 10 and scattered several others throughout my list, so mine or anyone else's prediction of the demise of cinema because of streaming needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

And in lamenting the fact that I had to leave so many off of even a top-25 list, in honor of and in hoping for a great year in movies for 2019, here I am squeezing another 19 movies (listed alphabetically) that deserves some love. Happy New Year everyone!

Blockers (Kay Cannon)
Crazy Rich Asians (Jon M. Chu)
The Day After (Hong Sang-soo)
The Death of Stalin (Armando Iannucci)
Happy as Lazzaro (Alice Rohrwacher)
Mission: Impossible -- Fallout (Christopher McQuarrie)
Never Goin' Back (Augustine Frizzell)
Lean on Pete (Andrew Haigh)
Private Life (Tamara Jenkins)

A Quiet Place (John Krasinski)

Searching (Aneesh Chaganty)
Set It Up (Claire Scanlon)
Shirkers (Sandi Tan)
Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley)
Thoroughbreds (Cory Finley)
Unsane (Steven Soderbergh)
Widows (Steve McQueen)
Wildlife (Paul Dano)
Zama (Lucrecia Martel)

Oscars 2018, A Power Ranking

2018-03-04T16:59:00.002-05:00

My personal rankings of the nominees in each category. Movies I haven't seen are listed, unranked, at the end of each list. My predictions are marked on the ballot at the bottom as well.

Best Picture
1. Lady Bird
2. Dunkirk
3. Get Out
4. Phantom Thread
5. The Post
6. Call Me By Your Name
7. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
T8. Darkest Hour
T8. The Shape of Water

Directing
1. Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird
2. Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk
3. Jordan Peele, Get Out
4. Paul Thomas Anderson, Phantom Thread
5. Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water

Actress in a Leading Role
1. Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird
2. Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water
3. Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
4. Margot Robbie, I, Tonya
5. Meryl Streep, The Post

Actor in a Leading Role
1. Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out
2. Timothée Chalamet, Call Me By Your Name
3. Daniel-Day Lewis, Phantom Thread
4. Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour
5. Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq.

Actress in a Supporting Role
1. Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird
2. Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water
3. Lesley Manville, Phantom Thread
4. Allison Janney, I, Tonya
5. Mary J. Blige, Mudbound

Actor in a Supporting Role
1. Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project
2. Sam Rockwell, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
3. Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water
4. Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World
5. Woody Harrelson, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Original Screenplay
1. Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird
2. Jordan Peele, Get Out
3. Emily V. Gordon & Kumail Nanjiani, The Big Sick
4. Guillermo del Toro & Vanessa Taylor, The Shape of Water
5. Martin McDonagh, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Adapted Screenplay
1. James Ivory, Call Me By Your Name
2. Scott Frank & James Mangold and Michael Green, Logan
3. Molly's Game, Aaron Sorkin
4. Virgil Williams and Dee Rees, Mudbound
5. Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber, The Disaster Artist

Documentary Feature
1. Faces Places
2. Strong Island
3. Icarus
4. Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
5. Last Men in Aleppo

Foreign-Language Film
1. A Fantastic Woman
2. The Square
3. On Body and Soul
4. The Insult
Loveless

Original Score
1. Jonny Greenwood, Phantom Thread
2. Alexandre Desplat, The Shape of Water
3. Hans Zimmer, Dunkirk
4. John Williams, Star Wars: The Last Jedi
5. Carter Burwell, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Original Song
1."The Mystery of Love," Call Me By Your Name
2. "Remember Me," Coco
3. "This Is Me," The Greatest Showman
4. "Stand Up for Something," Marshall
5. "Mighty River," Mudbound

Sound Editing
1. Dunkirk
2. Baby Driver
3. The Shape of Water
4. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
5. Blade Runner 2049

Sound Mixing
1. Dunkirk
2. Baby Driver
3. The Shape of Water
4. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
5. Blade Runner 2049

Makeup and Hairstyling
1. Darkest Hour
Victoria &Abdul
Wonder

Costume Design
1. Phantom Thread
2. The Shape of Water
3. Darkest Hour
Beauty and the Beast
Victoria & Abdul

Cinematography
1. Hoyte van Hoytema, Dunkirk
2. Roger A. Deakins, Blade Runner 2049
3. Dan Laustsen, The Shape of Water
4. Rachel Morrison, Mudbound
5. Bruno Delbonnel, Darkest Hour

Production Design
1. Dunkirk
2. The Shape of Water
3. Blade Runner 2049
4. Darkest Hour
Beauty and the Beast

Film Editing
1. Lee Smith, Dunkirk
2. Paul Machliss & Jonathan Amos, Baby Driver
3. Tatiana S. Riegel, I, Tonya
4. Sidney Wolinsky, The Shape of Water
5. Jon Gregory, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Visual Effects
1. War for the Planet of the Apes
2. Blade Runner 2049
3. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
4. Kong: Skull Island
5. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

I've not seen a single film in the following categories:

Animated Feature
Documentary Short Subject
Animated Short Subject
Live Action Short Film

----------

And my predictions:

Best of 2017

2018-02-06T13:48:00.000-05:00

2017 was a fantastic year for movies. Narrowing and rearranging my favorite movies of the year was a nearly impossible task. I can honestly say that the top dozen (or more) could have legitimately contended for the top spot, though the one that ended up there was firmly entrenched from the first time I saw it. So, humbly, I offer the top 17 of '17.

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17. It Comes at Night (Trey Edwards Shults)
If Krisha, the great debut from Trey Edward Shults (#7 on my 2016 list), was a horror movie couched in the veneer of a family drama, then his latest might have simply flipped that approach. It Comes at Night looks and feels like a typical horror movie, but it's more concerned with the dynamics within and between two families than it is with whatever actually comes at night.

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16. Faces Places (Agnès Varda and J.R.)

It must certainly be the case that Agnès Varda--French New Wave pioneer and patron saint of all things good in the world--and photographer J.R. were 2017's cinematic odd couple. The story seems quaint: Varda and J.R. take larger-than-life sized photographs of villagers and plaster them on the sides of building walls. But as the travelogue continues, the cumulative effect reveals something deeper and it's not an accident that the film steers toward the retrospective, both melancholic (her failed reunion with fellow New Waver, Jean-Luc Godard) and exalted (her and J.R.'s recreation of that famous Louvre scene in JLG's Band of Outsiders).

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15. Baby Driver (Edgar Wright)

There was sadness in some circles when Edgar Wright left the production of Ant Man due to creative differences. With few exceptions, though, I would rather see directors I like not tie up their time and creative energy working on franchise installments and instead work on projects that express their own visions. So while his Ant Man may have been a solid entry into the MCU, Baby Driver shows Wright in his element, editing and choreographing all his action to his soundtrack. Like his previous work, the movie is musical without necessarily being a musical. He should probably go ahead and just make a musical.

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14. Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Every year there is a movie that I feel would place higher had I more time to consider it. It was the movie I screened the latest among the entries here and I only got a chance to see it once. Most of PTA's work gets richer with multiple viewings and this is no exception. But what's there at first blush is a craft as meticulous as his Reynolds Woodcock, the fashion designer at the center of this story, whose world is sent akimbo after wooing a pretty young waitress. Daniel Day-Lewis is... well, Daniel Day-Lewis and a great (and perhaps last) performance is to be expected. But, like her character, Vicky Krieps matches him blow-for-blow, and the result is a delicious unraveling of her sparring partner. It's crazy and at times hilarious, thoroughly unbefitting the apparent stuffiness of its subject matter.

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13. Get Out (Jordan Peele)

Independent of its place in everyone's year-end rankings or of the amount of gold and bronze statues it wins, Get Out might be the movie that ends up defining the year 2017 in movies. It has been at the forefront of the movie conversation since its release very early in the year. It's easy to see why, as it cleverly distills the larger anxiety about race in this country (particularly that of the past few years) into the specific story of a black man about to meet the family of his white girlfriend. Both funny and unnerving, it also may mark the presence of a new auteur, Jordan Peele, whose previous TV work, while brilliant in its own right, didn't necessarily foreshadow this sophisticated a work.

--------------------

12. Good Time (Josh and Benny Safdie)
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Robert Pattinson continues to move further and further away from his teen idol image with one of the best performances of the year as Connie Nikas, who after a bank robbery gone awry, tries to save his mentally disabled brother after being caught by the police.With laser focus, Connie manages both to get closer and further away from his goals, smooth talking his way in and out of trouble, while simultaneously escalating each situation to the highest of stakes. We're at the point now where we live in a world where two-thirds of the Twilight triangle turned out to actually be great actors.

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11. Wonderstruck (Todd Haynes)
Haynes has made a career out of recreating 20th century Americana. In this way, Wonderstruck may be the most Todd Haynes movie he's ever made, as it tells two parallel stories set in and eventually converging in old New York City, one in 1927 and the other in 1977. The period detail here is striking and it's as good as anything Haynes has done in evoking its historical setting. The stories converge through the connection of two children looking for absent or distant parents and as we move into the top 10, that kind of spectral presence seems to guide many of the movies: sometimes in merely a figurative sense, but also, as we'll eventually see, a more literal one.

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10. Okja (Bong Joon-ho)

Part cautionary ecological tale, part prison break, part Spielbergian creature fable, few filmmakers can make a movie that varies wildly in tone as Okja does work, yet somehow Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho manages to do so. I can see this not working for a lot of people and, frankly, I could take or leave some of the broader performances. But at the center is the moving tale of a girl and her best friend, and the lengths she will go to keep them from being apart.

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9. Dawson City: Frozen Time (Bill Morrison)

In 1978, over 500 silent film reels were discovered underground in Dawson City, Canada, existing as part of the Yukon permafrost since their thoroughly unceremonious burial in 1929. The great found-footage documentarian Bill Morrison assembles these treasures to not only tell the story of Dawson City, but the history of early cinema as well. And like the city itself, which at once flourished during a gold rush, but has oftentimes seen time pass it by, these images show a resilience that resists its own inherently ephemeral quality.

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8. Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan)
I'll admit that after the first viewing, while admiring much of the visual execution, the complicated narrative structure--certainly a Nolan hallmark--left me a little cold. But it was not so after a rewatch, as its unbalanced triptych of gradually intersecting storylines ratchets up the tension of the rescue and evacuation. It is perhaps Nolan's most elegant integration of his narrative proclivities with the story he's telling.

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7. Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas)
The most thrilling sequence for me in all of 2017 is nothing more than a series of texts sent between Kristen Stewart and an unknown source during a train ride. Much of this ghost story has that same eerie elusiveness, as Assayas keeps moving things just out of arms reach, both from Maureen (Stewart, in her second brilliant collaboration with the director) and his audience.

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6. The Florida Project (Sean Baker)

A movie about the dirt poor, semi-homeless population that lives in the shadow of Disney World seems like it should reek of poverty porn. But Baker, as he did with his previous Tangerine, manages to overflow his movie with life and color. He's aided and abetted by his two non-professional leads, Brooklynn Prince as the precocious Moonee, six-year old daughter to Bria Vinaite's Halley, a single mother who's barely keeping things together. And Willem Dafoe, in one of his most charming performances, is the manager of the candy-colored motel, The Magic Castle, where he has to be both the warm-hearted granddad and stern school principle. I live very close to Disney World, to the point that the second time I watched this movie was at the theater on Disney property where I watch most movies and often drive past many of the locations shown here. It's a sobering reminder of the things that surround us everyday yet we constantly ignore.

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5. Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig)

Though Gerwig's solo directing debut isn't strictly autobiographical, it certainly plays as memoir. And while each moment endured by her heroine is tenderly observed, they are cut together with such pace as if they were a flood of memories, taking the length of time your senior year feels like only after having left it. One scene of heartbreak jumps immediately to a scene of triumph and back and forth. Remarkably, none of it feels like melodrama. Gerwig (and one of the best ensembles of the year) manages to make the feelings as raw and grounded as the performances she herself built throughout her acting career. To misquote a bit of dialogue, I just wanted this to be the best version of this movie it could be. And it was.

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4. Columbus (Kogonada)
The feature debut from respected video essayist Kogonada proves that his eye for creating his own images is as strong as his eye is for curating those of the filmmakers he examines. His tale of two people torn between familial obligation and personal ambition has the pacing and tone of the best Ozu. Yet while his aesthetic owes a great deal to that titan of 20th century cinema, his thematic concerns are firmly of the present. That dichotomy is mirrored by its setting--Columbus, Indiana--a place so quiet and seemingly middle-of-nowhere that somehow also became a locus of modern architecture. Haley Lu Richardson graduates from the supporting roles she's mainly played in the past to play a young woman who can't decide if doing something greater is needed or even wanted. John Cho, in one of the rare leading roles for an Asian American man, is pulled in the opposite direction: forced to come "home," when all he's ever cared about is staying away.

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3. A Quiet Passion (Terence Davies)
"Live as a woman for a week... You will find it neither congenial nor trivial." The single best perfomance in 2017 was Cynthia Nixon's portrayal of Emily Dickinson. Though her life seemed to become more and more insular as she aged, neither the movie nor Nixon regards her reclusiveness with pity so much as curiosity, as her writing provides the solace that eludes her in life. In fact as the title suggests, her solitude does not necessarily mean detachment, and it belies a fiery wit that challenges all who come across her.

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2. The Beguiled (Sofia Coppola)

Even though Coppola's latest has a more straightforward plot than anything she's done since probably her debut, The Beguiled possesses all the hallmarks of her work: the languid pace and mood, the muted pastels, the exploration of characters who have reached the crossroads on their privileged ennui. Other writers have discussed, both positively and negatively, about Coppola's elision of a black character in the original story set at the end of the Civil War and of her consistent focus on a white-only version of womanhood, so, for here anyway, I'll leave it to those better thinkers. But I will say that the movie doesn't fail to acknowledge the complicity these women and girls share in their predicament and the way that it leads them inexorably to their collective fates.

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1. A Ghost Story (David Lowery)
In a year of great movies, the one that has refused to leave me is the story of a ghost that, ironically, refuses to leave the spot he once called home. That the hand of fate is cruel enough to keep him in that purgatory upon his death is painful enough, but gets worse once the living continue to live, making him but a (mostly) passive observer.

From the fragility of the images in Faces Places and Dawson City: Frozen Time to the aspirational permanence of the art created and admired in Phantom Thread and Columbus; from Kristen Stewart waiting to hear from her dead brother in Personal Shopper to the ghost of Casey Affleck waiting to be released from his cosmic prison in A Ghost Story, the best movies of 2017, no matter where or when they were set, seemed to feel the weight and urgency of the present, a collective plea to understand the blip of time we have as humans on this Earth and to figure out what the hell we want to do with it.

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And just for fun, since it was such a great year, 17 honorable mentions:

18. Thelma (Joachim Trier)

19. Gook (Justin Chon)

Directed and starring another Twilight alum. Go figure.

20. Raw (Julia Ducournau)

The best of several 2017 cannibal movies. Go figure.

21. Your Name. (Makoto Shinkai)

22. The Post (Steven Spielberg)

23. Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino)

24. All These Sleepless Nights (Michal Marczak)

25. War for the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves)

26. Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Rian Johnson)

Remember when I said I don't like my young auteurs being co-opted by franchises? This is the exception.

27. After the Storm (Hirokazu Koreeda)

28. Beach Rats (Eliza Hittman)

29. The Lost City of Z (James Gray)

30. Brawl in Cell Block 99 (S. Craig Zahler)

31. The Unknown Girl (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)

32. Princess Cyd (Stephen Cone)

33. The Ornithologist (João Pedro Rodrigues)

34. Pitch Perfect 3 (Trish Sie)

They say it's the last one, and I have many thoughts on how and why the series could keep going. But I'll spare you.

Oscar Predictions 2017

2017-02-26T13:43:00.001-05:00

Here they are. Do with them what you will.

Best Short Film, Live Action
Ennemis Intérieurs
La Femme et le TGV
Silent Nights
Sing
Timecode

I don't know how to predict the shorts categories. I'll say my favorite here is Timecode, though Ennemis Intérieurs being the stronger of the two "relevant" immigrant stories (along side the problematic Silent Nights) might be the voters' choice.

Should win: Timecode
Will win: Silent Nights

Best Short Film, Animated
Blind Vaysha
Borrowed Time
Pear Cider and Cigarettes
Pearl
Piper

Pixar's charming entry, Piper, will be the favorite, though I think Blind Vaysha was the richest selection of these five, both aesthetically and thematically.

Should win: Blind Vaysha
Will win: Piper

Best Documentary, Short Subject
Extremis
4.1 Miles
Joe’s Violin
Watani: My Homeland
The White Helmets

Should win: The White Helmets
Will win: The White Helmets

Best Cinematography
Arrival
La La Land
Lion
Moonlight
Silence

This will become a familiar refrain. I love both Moonlight and La La Land, the former just slightly more than the latter. The Academy likely feel the reverse.

Should win: Moonlight

Will win: La La Land

Best Foreign Language Film
Land of Mine
A Man Called Ove
The Salesman
Tanna
Toni Erdmann

I embarrassingly have only been able to catch up with one title, Toni Erdmann. Since it was my #5 movie of 2016, I feel reasonable saying I think it should win. But I think the news surrounding Asghar Farhadi's non-attendance due to President Drumpf's Muslim Ban^TM might nudge the Academy into making a political statement by giving him the award. And I'd be more than fine with that.

Should win: Toni Erdmann
Will win: The Salesman

Best Documentary Feature
Fire at Sea
I Am Not Your Negro
Life, Animated
13th
O.J.: Made in America

The question here is whether or not the voters in this branch were actually able to sit down to watch the sprawling, nearly eight hour documentary about O.J. Simpson. If enough of them did so, it's likely the winner.

Should win: O.J.: Made in America
Will win: O.J.: Made in America

Best Animated Feature
Kubo and the Two Strings
Moana
My Life as a Zucchini
The Red Turtle
Zootopia

All-in-all, a pretty strong category. Zootopia's animals-as-race metaphor and brightly colored animation will give it the win over the superior Kubo.

Should win: Kubo and the Two Strings
Will win: Zootopia

Best Film Editing
Arrival
Hacksaw Ridge
Hell or High Water
La La Land
Moonlight

Often a reliable predictor of the Best Picture winner. Spoiler alert: I think that will be the case here.

Should win: Moonlight
Will win: La La Land

Best Original Song
“Audition (The Fools Who Dream),” La La Land
“Can’t Stop the Feeling,” Trolls
“City of Stars,” La La Land
“The Empty Chair,” Jim: The James Foley Story
“How Far I’ll Go,” Moana

The two La La Land songs run the risk of cancelling each other out, giving Lin-Manuel Miranda a shot at winning the last leg in the coveted EGOT. I'll say that it won't happen this year though.

Should win: "City of Stars"
Will win: "City of Stars"

Best Original Score
Jackie
La La Land
Lion
Moonlight
Passengers

I mean, it's a musical that's going to win a million awards.

Should win: La La Land
Will win: La La Land

Best Costume Design
Allied
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Florence Foster Jenkins
Jackie
La La Land

Should win: Jackie
Will win: Jackie

Best Makeup and Hairstyling
A Man Called Ove
Star Trek Beyond
Suicide Squad

I liked Star Trek Beyond fine, it's a good popcorn movie. But it's fucking Citizen Kane compared to Suicide Squad.

Should win: Star Trek Beyond
Will win: Star Trek Beyond

Best Production Design
Arrival
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Hail, Caesar!
La La Land
Passengers

Should win: La La Land
Will win: La La Land

Best Sound Editing
Arrival
Deepwater Horizon
Hacksaw Ridge
La La Land
Sully

Even though it has a bunch of nominations, we won't hear Arrival's name much during the ceremony. It would get my vote here, though the war-is-hell cacophony of Hacksaw will probably get this one.

Should win: Arrival
Will win: Hacksaw Ridge

Best Sound Mixing
Arrival
Hacksaw Ridge
La La Land
Rogue One
13 Hours

The Academy will likely give this to the musical, but I'd also give this one to Arrival.

Should win: Arrival
Will win: La La Land

Best Visual Effects
The Jungle Book
Doctor Strange
Deepwater Horizon
Kubo and the Two Strings
Rogue One

Kubo's stop-motion animation is very impressive, but The Jungle Book was a pretty remarkable achievement in this technical aspect specifically.

Should win: The Jungle Book
Will win: The Jungle Book

Best Adapted Screenplay
Arrival
Fences
Hidden Figures
Lion
Moonlight

Screenplay awards often go to the "other" movies during the ceremony, the ones that usually get shoved out by the front runner. Since Moonlight has the second most nominations to La La Land and the latter is not in this category, look for it to capture this trophy.

Should win: Moonlight
Will win: Moonlight

Best Original Screenplay
Hell or High Water
La La Land
The Lobster
Manchester by the Sea
20th Century Women

The sentiment above applies here, except with the very obvious flaw in my logic being the inclusion of La La Land in this category. I do though think Manchester by the Sea manages to squeeze this one out.

Should win: Manchester by the Sea

Will win: Manchester by the Sea

Best Supporting Actress
Viola Davis, Fences
Naomie Harris, Moonlight
Nicole Kidman, Lion
Octavia Spencer, Hidden Figures
Michelle Williams, Manchester by the Sea

I'm too lazy to get into a discussion about whether Davis is actually a lead actress in Fences instead of supporting, but in any case, this might be the easiest acting category to choose as her performance is easily the best in this category and an overwhelming favorite to win the award.

Should win: Viola Davis
Will win: Viola Davis

Best Supporting Actor
Mahershala Ali, Moonlight
Jeff Bridges, Hell or High Water
Lucas Hedges, Manchester by the Sea
Dev Patel, Lion
Michael Shannon, Nocturnal Animals

Nearly as easy to predict as the supporting actress contest, Mahershala Ali will likely win the award, both for his soulful individual performance and also as a representative for what in my opinion is the best ensemble in a movie from last year.

Should win: Mahershala Ali
Will win: Mahershala Ali

Best Director
Damien Chazelle, La La Land
Mel Gibson, Hacksaw Ridge
Barry Jenkins, Moonlight
Kenneth Lonergan, Manchester by the Sea
Denis Villeneuve, Arrival

Chazelle is the heavy favorite, though every so often the Academy will decide to split the director and picture awards, meaning Jenkins could sneak in here. I'm guessing though that won't happen.

Should win: Barry Jenkins
Will win: Damien Chazelle

Best Actor
Casey Affleck, Manchester by the Sea
Andrew Garfield, Hacksaw Ridge
Ryan Gosling, La La Land
Viggo Mortensen, Captain Fantastic
Denzel Washington, Fences

Easily the tightest of the acting races, Affleck looked like a sure thing only a few weeks ago until Washington pulled a minor upset by winning the SAG. It's a tight race in my own personal ballot as well, but by the thinnest of margins, I prefer Affleck here and will guess the Academy does so as well. However, it won't surprise me in the slightest if they go with Washington.

Should win: Casey Affleck
Will win: Casey Affleck

Best Actress
Isabelle Huppert, Elle
Ruth Negga, Loving
Natalie Portman, Jackie
Emma Stone, La La Land
Meryl Streep, Florence Foster Jenkins

I'm torn here as Emma Stone has been among my favorite actresses since her debut in Superbad and my love for La La Land goes without saying. That being said, Huppert's performance in Elle is an amazing and thrilling piece of work, a daring one unlike the others in this category.

Should win: Isabelle Huppert
Will win: Emma Stone

Best Picture
Arrival
Fences
Hacksaw Ridge
Hell or High Water
Hidden Figures
La La Land
Lion
Manchester by the Sea
Moonlight

It's possible Moonlight pulls this out, but I don't really see the juggernaut that is La La Land winning the majority of the awards only to not get crowned for the biggest one.

Should win: Moonlight

Will win: La La Land

An Academy of One

2017-02-18T16:20:00.000-05:00

What if all the Academy Award nominations were chosen by one person? What if that one person were me? Well, here's your answer...

(none of the shorts programs are included, I ain't got time for that)

Cinematography
American Honey
The Handmaiden
La La Land
Moonlight
Sunset Song

Film Editing
Krisha
La La Land
Lemonade
Moonlight
Silence

Music (Original Score)
The Handmaiden
Jackie
La La Land
Lemonade
Sing Street

Music (Original Song)
"Another Day of Sun" (La La Land)
"City of Stars" (La La Land)
"I'm So Humble" (Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping)
"Someone in the Crowd" (La La Land)
"Up" (Sing Street)

Honorable mention: every goddamn Beyoncé song in Lemonade.

Documentary (Feature)
Cameraperson
Memories of a Penitent Heart
No Home Movie
O.J.: Made in America
Tower

Animated Feature
Kubo and the Two Strings
Moana
Sausage Party
Tower
Zootopia

I'll admit to not seeing as many animated features as one would like in someone nominating for this category.

Production Design
10 Cloverfield Lane
The Handmaiden
La La Land
The Love Witch
Sunset Song

Costume Design
The Handmaiden
Everybody Wants Some!!
Jackie
La La Land
The Love Witch

Makeup and Hairstyling
Jackie
Love & Friendship
The Love Witch
The Neon Demon
Swiss Army Man

Sound Editing
10 Cloverfield Lane
Arrival
The Handmaiden
La La Land
Silence

Sound Mixing
10 Cloverfield Lane
Arrival
Don't Breathe
Krisha
La La Land

Visual Effects
Arrival
The Jungle Book
Kubo and the Two Strings
The Mermaid
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Foreign Language Film
Elle
The Handmaiden
Our Little Sister
Right Now, Wrong Then
Toni Erdmann

Writing (Adapted Screenplay)
Arrival
The Handmaiden
Moonlight
Our Little Sister
Silence

Writing (Original Screenplay)
10 Cloverfield Lane
La La Land
Manchester by the Sea
Paterson
Toni Erdmann

Supporting Actor
Mahershala Ali (Moonlight)
André Holland (Moonlight)
Shia LaBeouf (American Honey)
Glen Powell (Everybody Wants Some!!)
Trevante Rhodes (Moonlight)

Supporting Actress
Viola Davis (Fences)
Greta Gerwig (20th Century Women)
Lily Gladstone (Certain Women)
Gillian Jacobs (Don't Think Twice)
Angourie Rice (The Nice Guys)

Director
Maren Ade (Toni Erdmann)
Andrea Arnold (American Honey)
Park Chan-wook (The Handmaiden)
Damien Chazelle (La La Land)
Barry Jenkins (Moonlight)

For whatever it's worth, only four women ever have been nominated for Best Director and I have two here, so eat that!

Actor
Casey Affleck (Manchester By the Sea)
Adam Driver (Paterson)
Andrew Garfield (Silence)
Ryan Gosling (The Nice Guys)
Denzel Washington (Fences)

I find it amusing that two of these (Garfield & Gosling) are nominated by the actual Academy, but for performances different than the ones I've listed here.

Actress
Krisha Fairchild (Krisha)
Sandra Hüller (Toni Erdmann)
Isabelle Huppert (Elle)
Hailee Steinfeld (The Edge of Seventeen)
Emma Stone (La La Land)

Picture
(You've no doubt already read my list of the best movies of 2016, so this is just the top 10 in alphabetical order.)
American Honey
Certain Women
The Handmaiden
Krisha
La La Land
Moonlight
Our Little Sister
Paterson
Sunset Song
Toni Erdmann

Some stats:

La La Land and Moonlight match their actual nomination count, with 14 and 8 apiece, respectively. The Handmaiden, which had no actual nominations, here has a whopping 9. Arrival, which had 8 nominations, here only has 4. Other movies earning at least 3 nods: Toni Erdmann (5), American Honey (4), Krisha (4), Silence (4), 10 Cloverfield Lane (4), Paterson (3), Sunset Song (3), Our Little Sister (3), The Love Witch (3), Jackie (3).

Later this week:
My hopes and predictions for the real awards...

Best of 2016

2017-02-04T11:41:00.000-05:00

On top of 2016 being a pretty shitty twelve months all around, it also seemed that way for movies for most of the year. But after having caught up with a slew of movies during the last few months including into the new year, it turns out 2016 had its own fair share of greatness. Here are a few.

Before the top 10, an additional countdown of the best 16 (+1) movies of 2016...

KAILI BLUES

26. Kaili Blues (Gan Bi)
25. The Mermaid (Stephen Chow)
24. Tower (Keith Maitland)
23. Kubo and the Two Strings (Travis Knight)
22. Elle (Paul Verhoeven)
21. Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sang-soo)

LEMONADE

20. Lemonade (Kahlil Joseph, Beyoncé Knowles)
19. The Nice Guys (Shane Black)
18. Everybody Wants Some!! (Richard Linklater)
17. Sing Street (John Carney)
16. Pete's Dragon (David Lowery)

THE WITCH

15. The Witch (Robert Eggers)
14. Hunt for the Wilderpeople (Taika Waititi)
13. 10 Cloverfield Lane (Dan Trachtenberg)
12. Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan)
11. Silence (Martin Scorsese)

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Honorable Mention:
Memories of a Penitent Heart (Cecilia Aldarondo)
I'll keep this one unranked because I'm close friends with one of the associate producers of the film, the story of how director Aldarondo tries to piece together the life and death of her uncle Miguel Deppa, a New York stage actor who passed from AIDS when she was a child. I'll just say that in the same way I'm not a huge fan of the personal essay, I'm also not often a fan of documentaries whose makers force themselves into their movies as subjects. But this is an example of the right way to do it, as Aldarondo gracefully weaves her own story of discovery with Miguel's story and how the issues of the past resonate, perhaps even more forcefully, still today.

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10. Our Little Sister (Hirokazu Kore-eda)

If Hirokazu Kore-eda isn't my favorite international director working today, he's certainly on the short list. His latest, about a trio of adult sisters living together who adopt the pre-teen half sister born of their estranged father who just passed away, continues his interest in exploring the dynamic within slightly broken families and the people within them who are just trying not to be broken themselves. Few directors are able to portray the fundamental goodness in people without sanctifying them as well as Kore-eda does in film after film. And few directors work with younger actors as well as him either.

9. Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt)
A simple collection of three stories (get used to that mini-theme in this list!) about women simply navigating their daily existences. All of Reichardt's movies in some way or another deal with people (mostly women, but not always) trying to find grace amidst the brutality of the world's indifference to their own lives. Sometimes the best movies get better with time. No movie on this list has grown so much in my esteem or stayed floating in my head since its initial viewing than this one. I've thought about it a lot since then. Ask me about it in a few years and I assure you it'll be higher on this list.

8. Sunset Song (Terence Davies)

"All things must pass," George Harrison once sang. This is something Chris, the heroine of Sunset Song, sure knows. Though embodied by the gamine former fashion model Agyness Deyn, Chris is of the land and earth, her waifishness belying toughness. She stands firm, her roots growing deeper and deeper, while the wind seems to blow away just about everything around her. Loss has become a too familiar escort through life, a fact she has accepted not with resignation, but resolve: "There are lovely things in this world, lovely that do not endure, and the lovelier for that."

7. Krisha (Trey Edward Shults)

As with John Magary's 2015 debut The Mend (my #9 that year), Trey Edward Shults's first feature is a bold announcement of an exciting new voice in American independent cinema. Taking place on Thanksgiving entirely in one house, Shults captures an explosive and chaotic family reunion as the title character (played the real-life aunt of Shults) physically and emotionally collides with everyone who comes within her orbit. Yet the young director, who also co-stars in the film as a family member with a particularly estranged relationship with Krisha, always seems in control of the proceedings, that the cacophony is always precisely choreographed, and the madness of it all always focused. A really stunning achievement.

6. American Honey (Andrea Arnold)

Leave it to a foreigner to make the most American "how we live now" movie of 2016, the story of a dirt poor girl who joins a group of traveling teens, going door-to-door across the middle of America selling magazine subscriptions out of a van. This sprawling and somewhat episodic film is immersed in the underprivileged class and its desperation without ever really wallowing in it. It's a road movie, with all the narrative asides--the stuff between all the pit stops--left in. You get to know very little about these characters individually, even Star, our protagonist, or Jake her pied piper into this world, but maybe that's the point. Their dreams and desires seem to bleed into one another. It's American Impressionism painted by the outside observer.

5. Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade)
You know how everyone's dad tells a groan-inducing joke, but you kind of play along because whatever it's just your dad, let him have it? Imagine that stretched over a 162-minute comedy and you start to get at what some of what it's like to experience Toni Erdmann. It's within that extra long running time (for a comedy in particular) though that Ade is allowed to subtly comment on women's struggle in the workplace underneath the more broadly rendered escalation of hijinks created by your own father.

4. Paterson (Jim Jarmusch)

When your movie's two biggest events involve a dog ruining an everyday item and a faux hold up with a toy gun that shoots foam bullets, you're not exactly dealing with the ebbs and flows of high drama--which is to this movie's credit. Paterson, as played by Adam Driver in perhaps my favorite male lead performance of year, finds his greatest satisfaction as an amateur poet. His joys are modest and found in the most mundane of places: overhearing conversations on the public bus that he drives, the solitary beer he drinks every night at the local bar as he walks his dog, the endless rotation his of wife's dreams (both literal and aspirational). And that calm, almost metronomic passing of daily life is this film's poetry, quiet and contemplative.

3. The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook)

Park's sumptuous triptych, a melodrama full of crosses and double-crosses, explicit sex and implicit violence, belies any simple description. Maybe no other movie, even the few ranking higher on this list has more cinematic joie de vivre frame-for-frame. And yet, unlike those other titles, which sometimes seem to want to burst out of those frames (the opening frame of my #2 literally has to get wider before the movie can start), The Handmaiden is packed with such visual richness that it can simply luxuriate in its own beauty.

2. La La Land (Damien Chazelle)

2016 was a musical year for me, having seen many Broadway and off-Broadway shows during three separate trips to New York. But the movie musical was a love of mine well before The Great White Way ever garnered my adoration. The movie musical has supposedly been dead for what seems like decades now but many successes over the past several years refute that notion easily. Many are misfires, specifically most of the screen adaptations of Broadway stalwarts. The few movies that attack the genre from its own slightly off-kilter angle are the real gems (such as the Magic Mike and Pitch Perfect series). But La La Land, the third movie from wunderkind Damien Chazelle, attacks the musical from every possible direction imaginable including directly head-on. Citing everything from the 30s RKO productions with Astaire & Rogers, to the classic MGM musicals of the 40s and 50s, to the Demy/Deneuve collaborations of the 60s and everything before, after, and in between, Chazelle synthesizes all these influences into something, yes derivative and pastiche, but wholly of a piece. From its genuinely thrilling opening number to the bravado of its finale, it is a celebration of the things about which we all fantasize while also slyly being about the realization of the compromises we make in pursuit of such aspirations.

1. Moonlight (Barry Jenkins)

Midway through the third and final section of Moonlight, director Barry Jenkins takes a step back to show one character in the kitchen of a diner cooking a special meal for another character. It's tangential to any of the actual plotting and a diversion in any sort of classical sense, but it beautifully weaves into context the history of these two characters and the possible direction it might take going forward. And it is indicative of the larger tone he's going for in these sequences. It's a pause, a deep breath, that many of the characters in the movie so desperately desire. To say that Moonlight has a dreamlike quality isn't entirely accurate. Maybe it's more like your memory (the large jumps in time between sections would suggest as much), where each moment progresses with such clarity and specificity but the moment stands still and the intensity of each situation is as saturated in your head as the cinematography by James Laxton is on the screen.

Jenkins is of course helped by the strongest ensemble of the year, buoyed by three performances that chart the life of one character. All of them do so much by saying so little, particularly Trevante Rhodes as the oldest version of Chiron, whose body language not only suggests the character's vulnerability, but his self-inflicted sublimation. Another character asks him "Who is you?" The tragedy is that he's spent his whole never having the chance to actually figure that out.

Casey's Top 40

2016-02-15T11:21:00.001-05:00

(Not really Casey. It's me, Jason)

No preamble. Let's get down to business.

40. Star Wars: The Force Awakens (J.J. Abrams)

39. Spring (Aaron Moorhead & Justin Benson)

38. Black Coal, Thin Ice (Yi'nan Diao)

37. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem (Ronit Elkabetz & Shlomi Elkabetz)

36. What We Do in the Shadows (Jemaine Clement & Taika Waititi)

35. Man From Reno (Dave Boyle)

34. Blackhat (Michael Mann)

33. Slow West (John Maclean)

32. Shaun the Sheep Movie (Mark Burton & Richard Starzack) & 31. Paddington (Paul King)
Two family films that neither pander to the kids nor needlessly cater to adult sensibilities.

30. Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako)

29. Horse Money (Pedro Costa)

28. Brooklyn (John Crowley)

27. The Martian (Ridley Scott) & 26. Creed (Ryan Coogler)
Proof that the Hollywood formula can still work wonderfully in the right hands.

25. Pitch Perfect 2 (Elizabeth Banks)
Read more here.

24. The DUFF (Ari Sandel)
"Is that a wiener in your mouth or are you just happy to see me?"

23. 45 Years (Andrew Haigh)

22. Hard to Be a God (Aleksey German)
A 3-hour, black-and-white, Russian movie about poop. How are you not in?

21. Chi-Raq (Spike Lee)
Home-run hitters tend to strike out a lot. Lee's film is bursting at the seams with ideas. That is both to its detriment and benefit. But he's swinging for the fences here and, enough to compensate for the misses, often makes contact.

20. The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-hsien)

19. The Diary of a Teenage Girl (Marielle Heller)

18. White God (Kornél Mundruczó)
Puppies!

17. Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas)

16. The Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland)
Butterflies!

15. Mississippi Grind (Ryan Fleck & Anna Boden)

14. The Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino)
Is that a wiener in your mouth or are you just happy to see me?

13. Güeros (Alonso Ruiz Palacios)

12. Ex Machina (Alex Garland)
Hot robots!

11. The Look of Silence (Joshua Oppenheimer)

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Non-movie interlude.

Kendrick Lamar's "Alright" music video (Colin Tilley and The Little Homies)

Referencing everything from Busta Rhymes to The Pharcyde, the video for the fourth single from To Pimp a Butterfly ended up being an unofficial anthem for the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Lamar floats through the video, like a ghost, or the specter of every unfairly slain kid of color in this country. When the white cop at the end points his empty hand like a gun at Lamar, the metaphorical weapon turns into a literal one, perfectly encapsulating the idea that the threat of oppression doesn't always manifest itself through physical force.

Taylor Swift's 1989 World Tour (Live) (Jonas Åkerlund)
Experienced it myself in person. It was glorious. Got the free trial to Apple Music for no other reason than to watch this concert doc. Deal with it, haters.

Master of None - "Parents" (Aziz Ansari)
I've never seen an episode of television (or a movie even) that so perfectly understands the duality of being a first-born American child of two immigrants--the desire to respect and honor the sacrifice they made bringing you over here while simultaneously almost feeling the need to marginalize your own heritage to feel like you fit in with the new society to which you now belong. And how so much of our parents' lives before our birth would fascinate us if we simply bothered to ask.

Hamilton (Original Broadway Cast Recording)
I could only put the cast recording here because it's basically impossible to get a ticket to the actual show. I'm not usually one for hyperbolically praising things, even if I'm particularly high on it myself. But this is seriously one of the greatest things I've ever experienced--and a uniquely American one too, combining hip hop, R&B, pop, and traditional Broadway song craft to tell a story of the country's founding fathers through the lens of a mixed-race cast.

These people are so talented, this is what they do between shows:

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10. Phoenix (Christian Petzold)
On its beautiful surface, Phoenix is a sort of riff on Hitchcock's Vertigo--a melodrama of (un)mistaken identity, the power struggle between men and women. But more deeply, it's about complicity and forgiveness, both personal and national, and the psychic toll of betrayal. And my god, one killer of an ending.

9. The Mend (John Magary)
The most exciting American debut on this list belies any mundane description. Yes, I could say that The Mend is about two brothers and their love for each other, their women, and the rest of their absent family, but that doesn't get you very far. Magary shoots and edits and scores and sound designs his movie with such ferocity, creating an anarchic, palpable energy that doesn't exactly plow forward so much as it radiates from the gravitational pull caused by these bodies that are constantly orbiting each other.

8. Magic Mike XXL (Gregory Jacobs)
You can read more here. Needless to say, recent comparisons to Gene Kelly are a stretch (I mean, come on), but the video below, a pure distillation of the joy of dance, might as well be Channing Tatum's "Singin' in the Rain."

7. Results (Andrew Bujalski)
Probably the most accessible of Bujalski's features (particularly after his Computer Chess of a couple of years ago), Results still has echoes of his earlier works. Here the awkward interpersonal relationships between the young protagonists in Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation are instead happening between an older trio of characters. And the higher star wattage--this is the first time he's used name actors--doesn't lower the honesty of their interactions, those in which pride, ego, and insecurity wrestle with, in the parlance of one of the characters, self-actualization. Or better still, to quote someone who misreads a poster, "Fear Excuses Surrender."

6. Carol (Todd Haynes)
Cate Blanchett may play the movie's title character and she's wonderful (when is she not?). But for me, the film rests on Rooney Mara's shoulders. Or rather, her face. A whirlwind of emotions are written in the way she merely looks out a car window, or the way she regards Blanchett's loving glances, or the way these complicated situations are starting to overwhelm her. I also love how straightforwardly their romance is treated. Eisenhower-era America had yet to even come close to accepting this sort of relationship and, to be sure, there are mainly external factors that threaten it. But their attraction is pure and their coupling isn't a statement. Their love isn't a reaction to anything, it's just a fact of life. Gorgeously shot by Edward Lachman on 16 mm and probably the year's best score from Carter Burwell.

5. Tangerine (Sean Baker)
The dominant chatter, at least in terms of its technical aesthetic, was about how this movie was shot on a tricked out iPhone 5. Though that is certainly a notable piece of trivia, it has the potential of reducing the movie to nothing more than a gimmick. But Tangerine is so much more than that, with the camera's mobility allowing us to fly by the seat of our pants along with its two leads, transgender prostitutes during one particularly insane day in Los Angeles. It's one of the funniest movies of the year, uproarious and thrilling and, by the end, one of the most touching.

4. Mustang (Deniz Gamze Ergüven)

After some innocent frolicking with boys on the beach, five sisters from a small Turkish village return home to be punished one-by-one by their grandmother. The sisters have been raised by their grandmother and uncle since their parents died. Inspired in part by this pretty innocuous event and in part simply by the world they live in, all five are forced to quickly learn the domestic arts so they can be married off one after the other. In the meantime, their uncle slowly but steadily turns their house into a prison, adding bars to the windows and putting up higher and higher fences. Lale, the youngest of the group and movie's narrator watches this methodical disintegration of her family and ultimately her freedom. It's a sad situation to be sure, but Mustang, like its young protagonist, is full of life, verve, and determination. A lovely, lovely film.

3. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller)
No you don't need to have seen any of the previous Mad Max films. Because really this isn't even a Mad Max film. Sure, Tom Hardy takes over the nominal role, but he's swiftly and almost unceremoniously relegated to supporting player, as Charlize Theron's Imperator Furiosa ends up steering this big rig of a movie. A case study on how to make a modern action movie without an over-reliance on computer-generated effects.

2. Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (David Zellner)
The Zellner Brothers have been a staple around the festival circuit for years now. (All of their features and shorts I've seen have screened at the Florida Film Festival among many others.) But their latest, the story of a lonely Tokyo office assistant who believes the suitcase of money buried in the movie Fargo actually exists, is a major step forward for them. The movie's quiet realism throughout is bookended by surrealist fantasy, dramatically and stylistically different from the rest, giving it a fable-like quality. The absurdity of the situation could have easily allowed the Zellners to laugh at these characters. But they're smart enough and kind enough not to do so and that final, bittersweet ending (which I'll of course leave for you to discover) is like the hand of God reaching down through that snowy North Dakota sky, the hands of its filmmakers guiding us and Kumiko towards that "x" on the map.

1. Mistress America (Noah Baumbach)
When college freshman Tracy learns her mother is getting re-married, it is suggested to her that she contact her soon-to-be older stepsister Brooke. As played by Greta Gerwig, Brooke is not entirely dissimilar to the titular character she played in Frances Ha, the first writing collaboration between her and Baumbach: post-collegiate New Yorkers who haven't really decided how best to navigate adulthood. But where the earlier film had a loose, unkempt style and sense of humor, this one is tightly wound and when it finally snaps, unloads a final act of remarkably sustained screwball comedy. It's, line for line, the funniest and in many ways most incisive movie of the year.

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It's promising that 8 of the top 10 features female actors in the leading roles. It's significantly less promising that only one of those was actually directed by a woman. I'd like to say that has more to do with the state of the filmmaking industry than it does about my own taste. But I'm a bit loath to point fingers without acknowledging my own biases. Do with that what you will.

Second Verse, Better Than the First

2016-02-01T15:02:00.006-05:00

Avengers: Age of Ultron, Mad Max: Fury Road, Minions, Furious 7, Ant-Man, Fantastic Four, Jurassic World, Terminator Genisys, Mission: Impossible--Rogue Nation, Ted 2, Star Wars: The Force Awakens. That's a partial list of sequels and franchise films that came out in 2015. The density with which Hollywood releases these films is certainly not a surprise to anyone. It's de rigueur by this point. Some of them are fine. Most are a bad.

The problem that often occurs in these sequels is that they've exhausted the possibilities inherent in their original stories. But two of my favorite sequels of 2015--Magic Mike XXL and Pitch Perfect 2--manage to sidestep this issue by regarding their originators as a stepping stone and not as a template.

In a way, the two have sloughed off the trappings of their "origin" stories, freeing them to fulfill and explore ideas more fundamental to their identities. As much as Magic Mike is about its titular character, nearly as much time is devoted to the exploits of The Kid and his sister, with whom Mike is having a budding romance. There's also the subplot of the failing economy, with Mike's increasingly dire dreams of starting his own business. In Magic Mike XXL, these asides are quickly and purposefully tossed away. Big Dick Richie even literally tosses Mike's cell phone out of the window as he constantly tries to keep track of the business back at home. The Pitch Perfect movies may more obviously possess the trappings of the musical, but by eliminating most of its predecessor's narrative threads, XXL also approaches the traditional genre's structure.

The story, such as it is, has Mike rejoining The Kings of Tampa as they drive from Florida to Myrtle Beach to put on one last show at a major stripper convention. (By the way, is there really such a thing and how does one get tickets?) And just like the plot in a musical is often merely the stuff in between the songs, the road trip here is little more than a clothesline on which to hang all these set pieces. The focus is almost exclusively on performance and the joy of those performances, both for the audience and the ones on stage.

Even the one set piece that isn't specifically a dance number is able to marry the dual themes of performance and pleasure. The scene involves the guys accidentally crashing a party thrown by a few middle-aged women. Some are married, some are divorced, but all seem dissatisfied. When Ken serenades one of the sexually frustrated women and does a version of his striptease act, it doesn't come off as exploitative, it comes off as legit marriage counseling. And when the next morning, the guys find out that one of the women was the right "fit" for Big Dick Richie, the joy they express isn't typical macho chauvinism, but genuine affection for two people's happiness.

Overall, in fact, there is a feeling of good will in XXL that its predecessor often lacked. In that first film, a seediness was bubbling under the surface, primarily through the characters of Dallas and the Kid, to the point where Mike actually rejects that life and the promise of what's to come when the entire crew moves to Miami. When he rejoins the group in the sequel, a simple line of dialogue explains that Dallas bolted to England and took the Kid with him. It's almost treated as a throwaway, like the movie has no time to deal with such nonsense.

Pitch Perfect 2 similarly gets rid of a couple of narrative threads that no longer need to be explored, though one could say that it's thoroughly in the pursuit of nonsense. Beca's will-they-won't-they with Jesse was resolved at the end of the first film, as were her ongoing battles with the Bella's leader Aubrey. (It is a little sad though that because of this, Skyler Astin and Anna Camp--whose presence in the first movie I enjoyed greatly--were reduced to basically bit players.) Kay Cannon scripted both movies, but the second ups the ante with its pure absurdity. Cannon was writer on 30 Rock, and PP2 more closely resembles that show's rapid-fire, joke-a-minute style. It's appropriate for who she has in front of the camera performing her dialogue. Anyone who's seen Anna Kendrick in an interview or follows her on Twitter knows she's perfect as a sort of modern-day screwball comedienne. Rebel Wilson, Adam Devine, and newcomer Flula Borg also seem particularly tailored to this type of quippy humor, as does Keegan-Michael Key, who makes an extended cameo during the film. That doesn't even mention John Michael Higgins and Elizabeth Banks (who also makes her directorial debut here) as the series' version of Statler and Waldorf. All of this was there to some extent in the first installment, but here it's like the reins have been let loose.

If there's a narrative connective tissue between the two, or a theme addressed in both pictures, it's that to create, one must follow one's own path. And in doing so, rather than building upon what was developed in their first installments, they are rejecting them. In Magic Mike, Dallas created the dances, the personas the strippers used for the show. In XXL, Mike implores everybody, like the movie itself, to perform how they want to perform. Just as Richie throws out Mike's phone, Mike makes everyone throw their costumes out of the truck window. They all decide they have to come up with a new routine just a couple of days away from the convention.

Similarly, Beca's mashups and ear for synthesizing multiple songs into a single whole was her road to triumph in Pitch Perfect. But in PP2, when she gets a chance to give her demo to the record producer (played by Key) for whom she is interning, it's not enough. He tells her she needs an original idea. It's that idea--by producing an original song with newest member, Emily--that allows Beca to both impress her boss as a producer and win the competition against Das Sound Machine.

In an era of franchises, reboots, and sequels, it's easy for a piece of serialized filmmaking to spin its wheels in the mud (I'm looking directly at you, Marvel Cinematic Universe). But these two movies, in their oddly similar ways, show that it's possible to use an original property as a successful jumping off point. Sequels are often promoted as bigger and better. Sometimes bigger and better just means stripping down to essentials.

Top 14 of '14 (+14, +14)

2015-02-01T18:03:00.000-05:00

Allow me a quick sports analogy. Some time in mid-December, a show dedicated to the NBA discussed the lack of a clear-cut MVP candidate. That for the first time in several years, the race seems to not be limited to one or two obvious choices, but a wide range of players.

The movies of 2014 seemed to line up that way for me as well: a handful of strong contenders for my favorite, without anyone clearly separating from the pack. It appears to have been a general consensus that the year as a whole wasn't the strongest, and that's probably true, but what it did give us was a wide variety of very good movies. What my favorite movies of the year also suggest is that the majority of interesting films are released outside of the ever-constricting bubble of Hollywood, both the big budget blockbusters and even the mid-level prestige pictures. The latter proven by the fact that most of these I saw (or were originally released) in the first half of the year. And each of my top three I saw before Memorial Day.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Here are my top 14 movies of 2014, including an alternate (/alt/) pick that I think would make a good double feature with the main choice. Think of them as an unofficial #15-28, though not necessarily in the order they appear.

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14. Winter Sleep (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
Though there are some gorgeous shots of the Cappadocian landscapes here, Winter Sleep has much less of an exterior focus than the director's earlier Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Yet Ceylan proves himself just as adept at exploiting the spaces within confined areas as he is with the undulating hills of rural Turkey. Those often claustrophobic interiors are mainly just long conversations and arguments and you have to be patient with it, but it'll slowly cast its spell on you.

/alt/ Force Majeure (Ruben Östlund)
The central relationship in Winter Sleep is between a couple who've gradually drifted apart whether they know it or not. The couple in Force Majeure have a fracture in their marriage after a single event (though there probably was some sense of malaise leading up to that). What's gradual is the aftermath, the slow and hilarious chipping away at the husband Tomas's (Johannes Kuhnke) manhood by his wife Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli)

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13. The Double (Richard Ayoade)
The dystopia of the world in which Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg) lives is matched only by the dyspepsia of the other people who inhabit it. The first bright spot for this most quiet and unassuming of persons--aside from his completely unrequited crush on the copy girl (Mia Wasikowka) who works in his building--is the arrival of a potential new friend. Problem is the new friend, James Simon, is in every physical way an exact replica of Simon James. Second problem is James is thoroughly more self-possessed than Simon and exploits that to his full advantage. Third problem is that, besides the two of them, no one seems to notice the uncanny resemblance. It took a second viewing of Richard Ayoade's second feature (his first, Submarine, I could not warm to) to appreciate not only how tightly plotted the story--adapted from a Dostoyevsky novella--is, but how insular and cohesive the world he creates is. Each moment, each frame, each gesture seems completely of a piece, yet none of it feels programmatic.

/alt/ Night Moves (Kelly Reichardt)
If the shapelessness of Reichardt's earlier films--Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, Meek's Cutoff--were off-putting to some (though certainly not me), then Night Moves shows she can craft a more structured story. It is essentially a movie of two halves. The first being the story of three eco-terrorists planning to bomb an environmentally unfriendly dam. The second, the aftermath of that plan. Reichardt slowly ratchets up the tension, first narratively, then psychologically, before exploding towards an ending of such banality, the abruptness of it all takes your breath away.

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12. Palo Alto (Gia Coppola)

April (Emma Roberts) is jumping on her bed, talking to an imaginary teacher, putting on sunglasses, feigning apathy. Minutes later, she's curled up on the bed, lying on her mother's lap while she tells her she's a good little girl. Such are the juxtapositions in Gia Coppola's debut, Palo Alto (based on a collection of short stories by James Franco). Other contradictions abound, including the fact that though this is a decidedly specific take on millennials, it's shot in a gauzy style (wonderfully by Autumn Durald) reminiscent of movies made decades earlier, suggesting that the ups and downs of high school life don't change much as time carries on.

/alt/ Adult World (Scott Coffey)
Amy (Emma Roberts, again) could be the older, only slightly more worldly, cousin of Palo Alto's April. If April is a lost soul in the way that high school kids inevitably tend to be, recent college grad Amy knows what she wants. She has purpose. Only problem is that purpose--becoming a successful poet--eludes her. Naively, when she meets her hero, the amazingly-named Rat Billings (John Cusack), she thinks it's all going to fall into place. In a society that presupposes that anybody can do anything, Adult World rightly says that maybe we can't, that maybe we're not all entitled to greatness. Billings, criticizing April's writings says that "If everything were great, nothing would be great." It's got a dark, irreverent streak of humor that hit a particular sweet spot in me.

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11. Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson)
The first thing most would say about PTA's latest is how confusing it is. That, it certainly is. And maybe that's as it should be, mimicking the feeling private dick Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) must be experiencing trying to keep track of all the narrative threads thrown at him during the course of the movie. (It's also possible that the thick cloud of haze he's walking through isn't so much confusion as it is an actual cloud of weed smoke.) Vice seems more overtly reminiscent of the Scorsese- and Altman-influenced earlier Anderson works than either of the more recent There Will Be Blood or The Master. But there's also a hint of the garish surrealism of Fellini and the kaleidoscopic dialogue of early Allen (taken largely from the Pynchon novel). Yet the stew is uniquely Anderson and like those two most recent works, a uniquely American movie.

/alt/ Selma (Ava DuVernay)

So often the biopic will tell the story of what made the man (and yeah it's usually a man) and then hit all the historically familiar beats. But Selma begins with Martin Luther King already an accomplished civil rights leader, as we watch him getting ready to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. Like Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, which focused specifically on the President's pursuit of passing the 13th Amendment, Selma too follows the deliberate and often painstaking steps a leader must undertake to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles. It's a movie about process, about the give-and-take needed to pass legislation. But that dry description belies the overwhelming power of the movement and the urgency with which that message is delivered not only by King (played with such determined pathos by David Oyelowo) but by DuVernay's elegant direction. World-altering moments sometimes come as a result of a slow evolution and unseen incremental steps. It is simultaneously a refreshing and sad fact that, in part due to Dr. King's--and many others'--efforts, a film like this only a decade or two earlier would have been directed by Oliver Stone or Spielberg himself, can now be directed by a woman of color. It's a potent reminder that Selma doesn't simply exist as a history lesson; that's it's a living document of race relations past and present.

(BTW, you got a beef with its historical accuracy? I got a bridge you can jump off of.)

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10. The Babadook (Jennifer Kent)
I don't care enough about or watch enough of the genre to make any sweeping declarations such as "Jennifer Kent's debut is among the best horror movies in recent memory." But holy shit, isn't Jennifer Kent's debut among the best horror movies in recent memory? Rather than being a detriment, its meager means (part of its budget was secured through Kickstarter) is a virtue, forcing Kent to rely on mood and suggestion to add to its ever-heightening sense of doom and dread. Add to that two of the best performances of the year (by Essie Davis and Noah Wiseman) and you have one of the real surprises of the year.

/alt/ Blue Ruin (Jeremy Saulnier)
When Dwight, essentially living as a hobo, gets wind that the person who killed his father years ago is being released from prison, he begins haphazardly plotting to avenge that wrong. The problem is that he has no idea what he's doing. Saulnier's first feature, Murder Party, was a very funny riff on horror movies but began to tiredly spin its wheels in its final act. Blue Ruin suffers from no such failing because of how fully a character he and actor Malcolm Blair create in Dwight, a man both in over his head and also so determined to wrong a right that there's no turning back. Ultimately what the movie shows is that sometimes revenge is proven to be a dish best served awkwardly and incompetently.

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9. Witching & Bitching (Álex de la Iglesia)
The funniest movie about a bunch of hapless crooks who accidentally run into a coven of cannibalistic witches I've ever seen. Women scare men enough on their own. When you add the supernatural into it, all bets are off.

/alt/ Neighbors (Nicholas Stoller)
The funniest movie about a fraternity moving into a suburban house next door to a married couple and their newborn I've ever seen. (Remember, man purses before regular purses.)

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8. Ida (Pawel Pawlikowski)

In terms of simple aesthetics, there were many beautifully shot movies in 2014, but the black-and-white, Academy ratio of Ida may be the finest. The story, about a nun-to-be who is sent to find out about her past before she takes her vows and learns that she's an orphaned Jew whose parents were murdered during the Holocaust, is haunting enough on its own. But Pawlikowski often shoots his actors to emphasize their isolation, putting them near the bottom of the frame and accentuating the vast space above them. It's as if the specter of history or even God continues to weigh on their shoulders.

/alt/ Two Days, One Night (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne)

The simplicity of the Dardennes' work obscure their greatness. Two Days, One Night doesn't possess a single flashy shot nor does Marion Cotillard's performance contain a moment of unnecessary histrionics. But there are moments of striking grace: the way one character will acknowledge the plight of another despite the fact they'll only act in self-interest or the way Cotillard matter-of-factly informs her husband that she's done something to harm herself without resorting to overdramatics.

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7. Gone Girl (David Fincher)
The slickness of Fincher's eye obscures the intrinsically pulpy nature of this movie. It's the kind of movie that would've appeared as the B movie in a 1947 double feature, but with the meticulous control of an A-level master. Underneath it all is also a piercing and cynical look at how relationships (marriages and sexual relationships especially) force us to play prescribed roles, how each interaction is an affectation. It's also the most fun--after four great, but portentous films--Fincher has had since the Fight Club/Panic Room days.

/alt/ Coherence (James Ward Byrkit)
Modestly budgeted science fiction (or lo-fi sci-fi as some have dubbed it) seems to be finding a strong foothold in recent years. What's great about Coherence is how it finds its drama within the simplest of situations: a dinner party among friends. When a comet passes overhead, something odd and troubling happens and a lot of scientific theory is discussed. But just about everything we see and hear happens between the characters. It's more chamber drama than space opera and though the inciting incident is celestial, the movie has its feet planted firmly on solid ground.

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6. We are the Best! (Lukas Moodysson)
Punk may have already been dead by 1982, the year We are the Best! is set, but don't tell that to Bobo and Klara. Adapted from his wife Coco's graphic novel, Lukas Moodysson returns to the sweeter and more generally good-natured tone of his earlier work with this story of two young Swedish teen wannabe punks. Klara, with her mohawk and says-what's-on-her-mind attitude, unafraid and even purposefully stirring things up, is the driving force of the two, making decisions even if others don't agree. But it's Bobo who's the heart and soul of the movie--her hair, look and personality almost completely antithetical to the punk aesthetic. The two start a band with a third girl almost fully out of spite (what could be more punk than that?) and when they finally perform at the end of the film chanting "We are the best," it's difficult not to agree.

/alt/ God Help the Girl (Stuart Murdoch)
Musicals these days are so few and far between that it's disappointing when Hollywood so regularly makes the ones they do put out pompous and bloated. That's part of what makes Stuart Murdoch's God Help the Girl so refreshing. It's a tiny sliver of a film really, so light and airy it's as if it floats away once you watch it. Some may find it a bit cloying but I found it utterly charming thanks to Murdoch's (of Belle & Sebastian fame) delicate and playful songwriting and, like We are the Best!, three endearing performances.

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5. Boyhood (Richard Linklater)

By now most everybody knows the backstory of Boyhood: director Richard Linklater briefly filmed his cast for a few days each summer over the course of 12 years showing the life of a boy from 6 to 18. It's certainly a daring approach that has little-to-no precedent in the history of cinema. The Antoine Doinel series, the Up series, and even Linklater's own Before Trilogy may come close, but those follow characters (or actual people) over a long period of time through a series of separate movies, not one. When the 16-year-old Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) visits his older sister at the University of Texas, he counters the normal enthusiasm of looking forward to going away to college with the idea by saying it's not a "transformative experience," specifically citing his mother who went back to school and is still going through the same struggles of everyday life. I'd say my experience with the movie (as opposed to many others who loved it) was also not transformative. I don't necessarily think it's trying to be. The power from the story comes from the everyday, the moment-by-moment accumulation of life. That scene, and one more heralded one later, is important also because it connects Mason to his mother (Patricia Arquette). We may talk about how lives drift apart or paths intersect but in reality everyone's life moves in a parallel direction with each other. And while this is certainly Mason's story, it's also about how time doesn't just pass for you, but everyone else in your periphery.

/alt/ The Boxtrolls (Graham Annable & Anthony Stacchi)
Each of the three features produced by the Oregon-based animation studio, Laika, explore the darker terrain of childhood. What's moving about this latest one--about a group of underground creatures wearing cardboard boxes that come out at night scavenging through trash to make tools and other contraptions--is that it celebrates the beauty in the ugly, the sublime in the mundane.

Don't listen to what "Richard Sherman" has to say on this.

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4. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (Isao Takahata)
I'll admit up front that Studio Ghibli is a huge blind spot for me and Kaguya is the first of Takahata's I've seen. And what a movie to start off with. The watercolor and charcoal animation give an appropriate otherworldly feel to this, which is based on an old Japanese folktale about a girl born of a bamboo tree and her rural "parents" who move her away from the country and into a palace to fulfill what her father believes is her destiny to become a princess. Kaguya overflows with moments of staggering beauty: the scene where she flees the palace, in which the animation changes from elegant to fiery and passionate or a sequence where she reconnects with an old friend. The first two acts are more or less focused on Kaguya's upbringing in the country then her desire to free herself from the shackles put on her by her "destiny" once she's moved to the palace. But the story shifts gears drastically in its final act, turning into something even more lyrical, and crescendoing to an overwhelmingly emotional last scene. This movie, frankly, devastated me. Even to a novice like me, this movie certainly feels like a closing of a door of some sort. It's an elegy for Takahata, for whom this is very likely a swan song, and for Ghibli, about whom rumors have swirled that their own production will cease. Bring your tissues.

/alt/ Bird People (Pascale Ferran)
Kaguya, as an adaptation of an ancient folktale and with its traditional animation style, is an examination of loneliness deeply rooted in the past. But Bird People, a remarkable accomplishment in the realm of visual effects and set mostly in a Parisian airport hotel, brings that sense of isolation bracingly into the modern day. I'd probably be spoiling too much to reveal just how those special effects manifest in the movie. But those effects really come to the fore in the second half, when the somewhat emotionally draining first half evolves into more magical realist. As silly as that turn may be, it all remains thoroughly clear-eyed, never forsaking the melancholy that exists within and among the lost souls of a lonely hotel.

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3. The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson)

Anderson's latest is his richest and most moving to date. And while it's central caper/mystery story possesses his typical whimsy, The Grand Budapest Hotel is also his darkest, creating--through it's sneakily powerful Russian doll structure--a real sense of loss and longing. Some of the best movies pack a wallop when you least expect it; when the totality of what preceded incrementally bring you to look back at it suddenly and figure out how the hell you got there. (Boyhood is similar in this respect).

/alt/ Whiplash (Damien Chazelle)

Anderson's Grand Budapest is a perfectly wrapped present. Damien Chazelle's Whiplash is instead that wrapping crumpled up and tossed aside. Also unlike the film above, its mentor/student relationship is destructive and unhealthy. But it's a means to an end for each of them, and the movie is shot like a fever dream only both of them share.

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2. Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer)

The opening moments of Under the Skin setup its unique vision. A series of images (mostly flashes of light, mostly circles) collide almost unintelligibly. What you may or may not know about the movie going in makes you think it's one thing before it finally reveals itself. The soundtrack too during this sequence doesn't quite make sense until further reflection. The Michel Faber novel from which this has been adapted apparently makes more traditional sense, exploring themes and narrative in a way more likely to be overtly understood. The film obscures all of that. You glean what you can from what's on screen but who Scarlett Johansson's alien character is and why she (it?) is really on Earth is never even remotely explained. Yet its elliptical nature is partly what puts you into the same trance Johansson puts on her unsuspecting victims. Another reason is Glazer's visuals, which seamlessly integrate gorgeous shots of the Scottish coast, verite-style travels through Glasgow, and--all due respect to The Babadook house--the most terrifying threshold you'll pass in any movie of the past year. Still another reason is Mica Levi's eerie and evocative score, a piece of music both beautiful and off-putting, melodic and shrill: one of the most remarkable individual elements of any movie last year.

/alt/ The Great Flood (Bill Morrison)
Sound and image combine in a different sort of way in Bill Morrison's documentary about the Mississippi River Flood of 1927. The images, culled entirely from film archives, are all as faded and dilapidated as the land and buildings the flood tore through all those decades ago. The music, by Bill Frisell (he on guitar as part of a quartet), is informed by both the jazz and blues that existed at the time as well as what morphed into something different as a result of the displacement of large communities. The music itself though is original (mostly), pulling these images fully into the present. But the final section has Frisell working in Kern & Hammerstein's classic "Ol' Man River" (which also came out in 1927). The people depicted in these archival films weren't concerned about their images being unearthed decades later. They were lives intent on being lived. But time, like old celluloid through a projector or the waters of the mighty Mississippi, just keeps rollin' along.

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1. Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch)
When you're a vampire couple, you've got enough days in your calendar to spend a significant time away from each other. So while Adam (Tom Hiddleston) lives secluded in Detroit, Eve (Tilda Swinton) lives, among the people, in Tangier. But when Adam goes through a depressive, existential crisis--brought on mainly by the human "zombies" who have wasted their much more limited time on earth--Eve pays a visit to the Motor City. Certainly you can read Adam's collection of vintage instruments and analog methods of communication as Jarmusch being nostalgic, but this is a longing of a different sort. And at the same time it's a lover's lament for the city of Detroit, a once vibrant metropolis, a cultural and economic powerhouse now in the midst of decrepitude. Yet Adam's pessimism is balanced by Eve's curiosity, her embrace of the contemporary, and her optimism. "This place will rise again," she says of the city. "When the cities of the south are burning, this place will bloom." Vampires themselves are the epitome of death and rebirth and Jarmusch, for all his old man pining for the way things used to be, finds a deeply felt resurgence in his own work here. If The Tale of the Princess Kaguya was an elegy, then Only Lovers Left Alive is a wake.

/alt/ Love is Strange (Ira Sachs)
Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina) are another aged couple dealing with a form of separation anxiety. The movie doesn't make a deal of its central couple being a gay couple or martyr them for the inherent unfairness of how they're separated because of it (George is a Catholic school music teacher who is fired because of his new marital status). Instead, the movie speaks to the specificity of their situation, the power of a decades-long relationship between these specific people.

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I'm often reluctant to calcify a year's collection of movies into a certain theme. For one, these are simply my personal favorite/best movies of 2014. These are all individual works that were conceived and executed at a different time by people from different parts of the world. But also these are opinions I have in the now. My opinions on some of these which I've seen only months ago may have shifted ever so slightly already. The real legacy of 2014's films can only be judged with time.

But it seems to me the thread running through a lot of my list is, as it happens, time--characters running out of time, trying to catch up with it, or just figuratively (maybe even literally) stuck in time. From the almost elongated but moment-to-moment accumulation of time in Boyhood to the section-by-section unpeeling of time in The Grand Budapest Hotel; from the frozen in amber historical times of Selma and Inherent Vice to the moving of time away from past tragedies in Ida and The Babadook; from the endlessness of time in Only Lovers Left Alive to the specter of time itself in Interstellar, it's the one bit of currency we will all have to exchange at some point.

To return to a sports analogy, Father Time is undefeated.

Wait, you thought I was done? Here's a list of 14 more!

(in no particular order)
Interstellar (Christopher Nolan)
Listen Up Philip (Alex Ross Perry)
Like Father, Like Son (Hirokazu Koreeda)
Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy)
Venus in Fur (Roman Polanski)
The Final Member (Jonah Bekhor & Zach Math)
Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho)
The Immigrant (James Gray)
Locke (Steven Knight)
Closed Curtain (Jafar Panahi)
The Trip to Italy (Michael Winterbottom)
They Came Together (David Wain)
Obvious Child (Gillian Robespierre)
Calvary (John Michael McDonagh)

Florida Film Festival 2014 - Day 3 & 4

2014-04-09T11:18:00.000-04:00

I had a short but good Monday night at the festival with two very good films. Every Monday night for the past several years has been Italian Night at FFF, with a retro Italian film being screened leading into a nice spread outside the Enzian sponsored by a local Italian restaurant (this time by Buca di Beppo). Whether Italian or otherwise, I've always seen the movies featured in the retro screenings before, but this night's film, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, was not only new to me but a film I had never even heard of before. Shame on me because it is a clever and funny satire about a high-ranking officer who kills his mistress then plants clear clues to see if the police will charge him with the crime, much less figure out that he's the culprit.

FFF favorite Bill Plympton is here as usual, but this time with a animated feature, his first since Idiots and Angels five years ago. In his post-screening Q&A, he scoffed at the widespread belief that animation is relegated only to big-budget CGI cartoons targeted to young children and this movie, Cheatin', certainly aims to dispel that myth. It's a bawdy, sexy, yet ultimately touching and of course hilarious look at a couple torn apart by infidelity, brought through with Plympton's typically expressionistic artistry.

Tuesday:

Ilo Ilo is a nicely rendered story about a Filipino maid who moves to Singapore to be a live-in maid with a couple and young child. It's a remarkably poised movie from first-time director Anthony Chen. In some respects reminiscent of the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda, Chen's camera work is straightforward but knowing, and ruefully observant, such as in a rare tender moment between the two parents, the shot seems to almost hide behind a bedroom television set as these two finally show some affection towards each other when throughout the film they've mostly been antagonistic.

The shorts programs this year (except for the Midnight Shorts) have really been killing it and the Shorts Program 1 is no exception. It was kicked off by Fool's Day, one of the more uproarious shorts I've seen in sometime about an elementary class's prank that goes awry. Also terrific was ZZZZZZZ, about a couple of sleepwalkers. The bulk of the short exists as a sort of avant-garde, slightly off-kilter look at odd cityscapes and would've been terrific if it was only that. But the final moments turn it into something more longing and more touching. The program ended with almost the reverse, in Setup, Punch. a heartbreaking moment in the middle of a stand-up comic's set gets revealed to be something slightly unexpected.

The night ended with the goofily titled The Final Member, about the Sigurdur Hjartarson (affectionately know as "Siggi"), an Icelandic man who founded and curates the only museum dedicated to penises. The museum contains thousands of specimens and the title refers to the one missing piece in the collection, one from a human being. Really the movie weaves together three stories: the one about Siggi and his search; a legendary (and aging) Icelandic adventurer named Pall Arason who has agreed to donate his penis after his death; and a Californian name Tom Mitchell, who is so proud of his junk he's willing to have it surgically removed so he can be the first to have it displayed at the museum.

The Mitchell story is fascinating and it certainly on first blush seems that he suffers from some kind of psychosis. But while he is in some ways the villain of this story, antagonizing Siggi with lengthy emails and calls about his ideas for how to display his submission to the museum, the film does well to not overplay that hand, pulling back from its judgment to show a real person with a bit of an odd relationship to his privates.

Great too is the film's (and its subjects') matter-of-factness about some normally cringe-worthy material. That's not to say I didn't cringe. A discussion about removing your penis, dead or alive, is not a particularly happy thought. But the film remarkably does have a spirit of happiness and even glee. Scenes like Siggi's tour of the penis-themed gift shop is quite a riot and make the film at times guffaw level funny. It's no wonder that the middle letters of the Icelandic Phallological Museum spell "lol".

Florida Film Festival 2014 - Day 2 & 3

2014-04-07T16:11:00.001-04:00

Dispatches from this year's Florida Film Festival

Nature in some ways seemed to be the theme connecting my first two movies of the fest. The title of the first, Druid Peak, refers to an area in rural Wyoming populated by wild wolves, a population maintained and monitored by dedicated scientists and naturalists. But this isn't a nature doc. The story begins with Owen, an apathetic high school student living in a small, working class town--the kind of town, frankly, you see in one too many of these microbudget films. Thankfully, Marni Zelnick's story (which she also directed) leaves this oft-looked at setting when after a tragic night that sees one of his friends killed in a car accident, Owen's mother sends him off to Wyoming to be with the father he's never met.

You could say what transpires is coming-of-age, as Owen slowly, but enthusiastically learns his father's craft of tracking and protecting these wild packs. Certainly, if there are cliches, it exists in Zelnick's dialogue, which at times very heavy-handedly drives home the parallels between wolves and man, such as when Everett suggests to Owen that all creatures have depths unrealized--even human beings (!). It's unnecessary.

But everything else works superbly. The drabness of Owen's home life is contrasted by Zelnick and cinematographer Rachel Morrison beautifully rendered Wyoming countryside. The grays, blacks, and dark blues of Owen's wardrobe slowly morph into an earthier yellow; the garishness of the neon blue laces on one (yes just one) of his sneakers become an appropriately brown work boot.

The movie, outside of a couple of more heartwrenchingly dramatic scenes, are a series of small moments: Owen falling asleep in the woods under the watchful eye of one of his beloved Druids, Everett's realization that his son has a crush on a local farmer's daughter, the dual tracking shot of Owen running along with several wolves he's finally been able to track down.

Judith Lit's documentary After Winter, Spring takes a more explicit look at being one with nature. Framed as a sort of memoir, Lit's movie starts off seeming like the story of an ex-pat who decided to buy a farm in the French countryside, but then turns into almost an ethnography of a very small and particular culture of family farms. As she explores the lives and hardships of several of her neighbors and their struggles to keep the ways of life generations before them ongoing, the theme each of them seem to come back to is how imperative it is to lead a life in some way attached, in a very tactile way, to the earth that sustains them.

The Shorts #2 Program was generally a pretty strong one. Kush, about the paranoia in India immediately after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, is a powerful exploration of both religious intolerance and personal perseverance. Fortune House, in a hilarious reveal at it's end, shows the lengths people will go for true(-ish) love. And a handful of criminals and hapless would-be criminals are at the mercy of a little girl when they botch a kidnap-for-ransom attempt in Penny Dreadful.

The night ended relatively disappointingly, with Crimes Against Humanity and the Midnight Shorts program. The former was a generally unfunny comedy dealing with either very mean or very stupid people. Conceptually the movie had promise and was not without its funny moments, but I felt like it would've been better as a sketch or a short and, like its characters, stretched out to a feature begins to test one's patience. I'll admit that a long day did not benefit me seeing the Midnight Shorts this year but, despite a few gems, particularly Whispers and Jack Attack, this year's program lacked any real shock value or punch I expect from all of the midnight screenings.

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Sunday began with the best narrative feature I've seen so far, Eddie Mullins's Doomsdays, following a couple of wanderers who go around searching for empty houses to break into and squat in until they need (or, more accurately, are forced) to run and find new accommodations. Things get complicated when two others, a teen and restless woman, end up joining the crew. Maybe because it only recently came out, I often thought of this as a shaggier younger cousin of Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring. Mullins's camera likes to linger far from some of the proceedings (which again reminded me of that great Harry Savides shot in The Bling Ring that watched the raid of Audrina Patridge's house), observing a character breaking into a house in the background, while the others watch in the foreground. In fact, I can hardly remember any standard over the shoulder, shot/reverse shots. Instead, Mullins traps his characters in single shots, emphasizing how bound they are to each other though their relationships seem to be steadily tearing at the seams.

Shorts Program 3 was another solid program, most of which were darkly comic, particularly the finale, Rat Pack Rat, about a Sammy Davis Jr impersonator who is forced to do a show under, well, extreme circumstances. It's dark and disturbing, queasily funny. And the one thing I wondered after the fact is why it wasn't part of the Midnight Shorts program!

Month in Review: February 2014

2014-03-03T10:00:00.002-05:00

February screenings (Links to Letterboxd reviews):

MY DARLING CLEMENTINE

2/1 Philomena (Stephen Frears)
2/6 Searching for Sugar Man (Malik Bendjelloul)
2/10 Greetings From Tim Buckley (Daniel Algrant)
2/13 Targets (Peter Bogdanovich)
2/14 The American Astronaut (Cory McAbee)
2/16 Hannah Arendt (Margarethe von Trotta)
2/17 Dirty Wars (Rick Rowley)
2/17 The Croods (Kirk De Micco & Chris Sanders)
2/19 20 Feet From Stardom (Morgan Neville)
2/21 My Darling Clementine (John Ford)
2/22 Three Colors: Blue (Krzysztof Kieślowski)
2/24 The LEGO Movie (Phil Lord & Chris Lord)

Just in time for the Oscars, Glenn Kenny's hilarious post counting down every Best Picture winner, while at the same time cataloging his attempt to make gravy.

David Bordwell has been doing a great series of posts regarding the history of film criticism. As always, englightening and rigorous pieces from the professor over at his blog.

Best of 2013

2014-01-31T16:01:00.000-05:00

How to sum up 2013? I found 2011 and 2012 to be particularly strong years and through much of the year I felt like this one was a bit of a downer. In large part, I think that has to do with the pathetic output coming out of Hollywood during ever elongating summer seasons, as each new movie released seemed to get bigger and louder, but also dumber and dumberer.

But as always, the real gems are found in the cracks. You just have to look for them. Some were surprising major releases and others were obscure titles found through intelligent curation among shared cinephilia. And, broadly, the best movies weren't just great stories, but they were in some way aesthetically and formally bold. Whether they were in MTV-inspired hypercolor or black and white (there are five of those in here); whether they were documentaries that challenged the form itself or space adventures that redefined the idea of the frame; whether they were quickly edited action comedies or a meditative series of conversations between two familiar lovers, many of the movies below reminded me why the cinema is alive and well, and still a fertile ground as long as there are people around with enough chutzpah to simply plant a seed.

Terrence Malick's TO THE WONDER

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Instead of a random list of runners-up preceding my top 10 list this year, I've merely expanded this post to a list of 25. Each of 11-25 will contain a brief snippet of (and link to) another critic's thoughts on that particular title, followed by my own brief thoughts on each of the final ten movies.

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25. Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland)

Bilge Ebiri, Vulture:

Director Peter Strickland is more interested in using sound to establish Gilderoy’s general sense of unease and displacement, and then turning that into its own kind of slowly gathering terror.

24. The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer)
Dana Stevens, Slate:

With its relentless focus on the pathologies, both personal and sociopolitical, that enable ordinary human beings to commit mass murder, The Act of Killing is resolutely uncathartic.

23. To the Wonder (Terrence Malick)
Peter Labuza, LabuzaMovies.com:

This is not a director finding “Wonder” in the images of contemporary society, the “To” suggests that this wonder is beyond us, a force outside of his images. And To The Wonder thus becomes the director’s most self-conscious question of his own persona, his own imagination. This is a film of self-doubt, of a search for faith in a world that no longer supports the articulations of the past.

22. Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami)
A.O. Scott, New York Times:

The gap between appearance and reality is Mr. Kiarostami’s native territory. He is fascinated by the ease with which people can pretend to be, and thus become, different versions of themselves, and sensitive to the ways that cinema can collude in such impostures.

21. Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach)
Stephanie Zacharek, The Village Voice:

At what age does one become a real person? There isn't really an answer, but Frances Ha captures the spirit of those times in life when you don't know what the hell you're doing, when even the simplest things—an OK place to live, a job that pays a living wage, a companion who gets what you're going through—seem desperately out of reach

20. Museum Hours (Jem Cohen)
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune:

The film is composed as a supple flow of scenes from ordinary modern Viennese life. Not much happens in terms of drama, but it's more than enough, because "Museum Hours" is about a place and two people and how our surroundings fill our senses with stimulation.

19. Blancanieves (Pablo Berger)
Noel Murray, A.V. Club:

Though shot in black and white and set in the ’20s—and though Berger relies on some montage and superimposition techniques that Sergei Eisenstein and F.W. Murnau would readily recognize—Blancanieves still feels modern, with a style of visual storytelling that owes a lot to music videos and the European New Wave cinema of the ’50s and ’60s.

18. Computer Chess (Andrew Bujalski)
Vadim Rizov, Filmmaker:

Computer Chess is bounded only by the ambitious weirdness of its creator’s willingness to baffle, discombobulate, introduce unexpected new elements. Like Alain Guiraudie’s No Rest For The Brave or Alain Resnais’ Wild Grass, it generates suspense partially by making you wonder what Bujalski will do next.

17. Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen)
David Ehrlich, Letterboxd:

What sounds like a premise ripe for a network sitcom soon reveals itself to be another one of Allen’s didactic origami chatterboxes, the story unfolding away from the broadly bitter comedy of Jasmine’s new life as a fish out of water in order to reveal who she was before the collapse. Rather than revel in the schadenfreude of its heroine’s riches to rags downfall, Allen cuts between the past and the present in order to unravel Jasmine’s history like a contrapuntal canon, skittering back and forth from Jasmine’s new life in San Francisco to her old life atop Manhattan’s society scene and squeezing the years between like a untuned accordion.

16. Side Effects (Steven Soderberg)
Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times:

...this clever bag of tricks is made with so much cinematic skill it makes implausibility irrelevant. What happens on screen is unapologetically far-fetched, but it unfolds with enough panache to make turning away out of the question.

15. Nebraska (Alexander Payne)
Elbert Ventura, Reverse Shot:

What transpires on this canvas amounts to a state of the union. Regret and loss hang heavy over the landscape. The premise—a delusional man on a quest to claim a non-existent prize—may seem flimsy-cute, but it deepens into something genuinely moving.

14. The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese)
Richard Brody, The New Yorker:

Anyone who needs “The Wolf of Wall Street” to explain that the stock-market fraud and personal irresponsibility it depicts are morally wrong is dead from the neck up; but anyone who can’t take vast pleasure in its depiction of delinquent behavior is dead from the neck down.

13. The Bling Ring (Sofia Coppola)
Eric Kohn, Indiewire:

By observing their attraction to a bottomless scheme and then watching as various repercussions play out, Coppola presents a smart cross-examination of the impact of media exposure on fickle young minds. While the ambitions of its young thieves often blur together and lack precise definition, "The Bling Ring" is the director's breeziest work, allowing the story to glide along with the ease of a heist movie.

12. Stoker (Park Chan-wook)
Scott Tobias, NPR:

[Park's] images are arresting and often graphic, but they're cut together with a metronomic precision that has the effect of softening the shock while suggesting some hidden meaning. For a director whose most YouTubed sequence involves a man thwacking a gantlet of attackers with a hammer, his style is the furthest thing from blunt.

11. Drug War (Johnnie To)
Sean Gilman, The End of Cinema:

The film has a pulsating rhythm, slowly building tension through dialogue scenes, involving one character attempting to convince another that he is being genuine. This is the film's Tarantinian inheritance: like Inglourious Basterds, Reservoir Dogs, or Django Unchained it is structured as a series of conversations wherein one person attempts to convince another that he is who he says he is (even though we know he's not). That tension builds to the point of eruption...

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10. Much Ado About Nothing (Joss Whedon)
I'm not entirely sure if I think this is the tenth best movie of the year, but I really wanted to squeeze this in just because it's so damn delightful. Shakespeare adaptations are a dime a dozen and this one might not be particularly new or fresh, despite it's updated setting. But what it is is good and what it is is funny. Whedon and Co. smartly update only the locale and time period to modern day, but outside of the peripheral signifiers (cars, cell phones, etc.), this version is entirely devoted to the true spirit of the bard, his dialogue performed with wit and aplomb by actors (whom he's worked with countless times) that have an enormously deft facility with language both old and modern. It exists as a nice antidote to the obnoxious bombast of Whedon's The Avengers. Also kudos to this movie for making me remember that the 24-year-old version of me wanted to marry Amy Acker in the worst way and that, apparently, I still do.

9. The World's End (Edgar Wright)
The final entry in Wright's loosely-tethered Cornetto trilogy is also the richest, plumbing depths only hinted at previously in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. The darker undertones of the Pegg/Frost friendship are explored--the former's smug apathy, the latter's sad ineffectualness--and taken to their logical extreme: the dissolution of that friendship. Wright is also one of the few directors working primarily in a comic vein to have a strong visual sense, rather than simply relying on the gag or dialogue to carry the humor.

8. The Grandmaster (Wong Kar-wai)
Often, even in good movies, national history or political climate merely serve as backdrop for a more specific narrative (think Gone with the Wind or Cold Mountain). But a personal story as allegory for a period in a national history (Hiroshima Mon Amour, 25th Hour) is a rarer beast and Wong Kar-wai's return to China (after his English-language debut with My Blueberry Nights) beautifully intertwines the two. So the story of the struggles between Ip Man and Gong Er for kung fu supremacy can be more broadly regarded in the context of the Sino-Japanese War. The fight scenes are impeccably framed and staged and the swell of emotion and regret that rise during the final moments are as moving a final act as there has been in the past year.

(Please note: this is the Chinese cut of the movie, not the edited and restructured one for American audiences. The sadly now former editor of Film.com, David Ehrlich, has an exhaustive rundown of the differences between the two versions.)

7. Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine)
From The Wolf of Wall Street to The Great Gatsby, from The Bling Ring to Pain & Gain, much has been made about the year's cinema with regard to materialism and excess. My favorite though was Spring Breakers, Harmony Korine's depiction of crime, sex, and all around debauchery in St. Petersburg. The movie cleverly never really shows its cards. Is it an indictment of this lifestyle or a celebration of it? Perhaps it's neither, perhaps both. But with its oversaturated, dayglo aesthetic, it's absolutely brilliant supporting performance from James Franco as--yes--Alien, and it's ability to bring agency to female characters who are normally nothing but sex objects in movies of this sort make Spring Breakers one of the more exciting and unique visions of 2013.

6. Blue is the Warmest Color (Abdellatif Kechiche)
The original title translates from the French as The Life of Adèle – Chapters 1 & 2, and though the long and graphic sex scenes have gotten a lot of the attention (and notoriety), this is really an epic coming-of-age story, with the remarkable Adèle Exarchopoulos in the lead. With Kechiche's notable and constant close-ups of Adèle and others eating, of her crying without reservation, and of all the bodily fluids that come along with that crying, some would suggest that his camera is trying its best to capture some sort of hard reality. But Kechiche is interested less in veracity than he is in voracity and the movie is all about appetites and desires, fulfilled and unfilled.

5. 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen)

Rarely has a movie about the darkest blot in American history been told with such punishing and relentless clarity. In two particularly harrowing scenes, McQueen focuses in two very different ways on the interiority of Solomon Northrup's unbearable circumstance. First, as Northrup hangs from a noose--toes barely touching the ground, but enough to keep him from dying--everyday work from slaves continues to be conducted around him. It's just another day on the plantation. In the second, it's Northrup who is forced to do the violence and, in a single long take that lands, among other places, squarely on his face, we see the aggregate weight of thousands upon thousands of moments not at all dissimilar to this one. And that's perhaps where the larger greatness of this movie lies. Northrup's story is as singular as anybody's, but it's one that comes about as a result of a systemic problem that belies any individual's control. Talking to another slave about their owner, Northrup calls him a good man "under the circumstance", to which the fellow slave retorts, "Under the circumstance, he's a slaver."

4. Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón)

Cuarón's long-awaited follow-up to 2006's Children of Men is, firstly, a towering aesthetic and technical achievement. But at its core, the movie is a survival story, as Sandra Bullock's Dr. Ryan Stone tries desperately to escape the vast emptiness of space to make it back home on Earth. At the time, weaknesses in the screenplay prohibited me from giving it an unqualified rave, but in the months since, those criticisms recede while the image of Bullock's harrowed face and the balletic precision of Cuarón's camera leave a powerfully lasting impression.

3. Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley)
For a young director, with only three movies under her belt, Polley's work is uniquely measured and mature. And while this latest is a documentary as opposed to fiction, the DNA of Polley's vision is still apparent. The movie--on the surface about the fact that the man who raised her is not her own biological father--echoes the themes from her other two films, infidelity in particular and the dissolution of marriage more broadly. But they're all also about (explicitly in Stories We Tell) how we construct are own narratives, that the people who surround us are supporting actors in the movie of our lives, and how those supporting actors are the leads in their own--sometimes slightly, sometimes drastically--different tales.

2. Before Midnight (Richard Linklater)
It's hard to believe that a small romance set in Vienna made 20 years ago would evolve into arguably the greatest of cinematic trilogies. But as the perfection of Before Sunrise begat the even more perfect Before Sunset, Jesse and Celine gave us one last (maybe) love letter. But this is a love letter perhaps laced with poison as it's also the toughest of the series, with the youthful hope of the first descending into the bitter realities of middle age. Yet in doing so, Midnight enriches the previous films, making all those small moments and long conversations even more precious and urgent as the cracks in the relationship becomes ever more apparent.

1. Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel & Ethan Coen)
The title character from The Coen Brothers' latest is a man rife with hypocrisies. In one moment, he says music is merely something he does as a profession, yet he castigates another artist as careerist. He asks a favor from a friend whom he secretly betrayed. He helps a fallen man that he'll later leave out in the cold. But the Coens don't, I think, treat him with their (what some would say) characteristic bleakness and distance. In fact, despite the cold and wintry world they've created--assisted by the wonderfully icy cinematography from Bruno Delbonnel--there is a palpable warmth through which they view their protagonist. And despite evidence that both the world and Llewyn himself conspire to sabotage any semblance of success or happiness he may encounter, we root for him to breakthrough.

The downside (if there is one) to watching a lot of movies and having access to so many movies is that the films themselves tend to take on an ephemeral quality. Stories and images blend into one another and moments and performances float away into the ether. Like stuffing your face with food when you're too hungry, you forget to actually savor what you're watching. More than any movie in recent years, this one really sticks to my ribs and it still hasn't left me. I haven't stopped thinking about it since I first saw it. I won't stop thinking about it anytime soon. It's my favorite of the Coens in a striking career. It's my favorite of 2013.

And finally to the year in movies, I say fare thee well:

Month in Review: December 2013

2014-01-12T20:44:00.000-05:00

December screenings (links to Letterboxd reviews):

MUSEUM HOURS

12/1 Magic Magic (Sebastián Silva)
12/7 Muscle Shoals (Greg 'Freddy' Camalier)
12/9 The Unspeakable Act (Dan Sallitt)
12/9 Ellie Lumme (Ignatiy Vishnevetsky)
12/11 Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland)
12/17 Laurence Anyways (Xavier Dolan)
12/18 Passion (Brian De Palma)
12/20 Sightseers (Ben Wheatley)
12/21 Nebraska (Alexander Payne)
12/21 American Hustle (David O. Russell)
12/22 No (Pablo Larraín)
12/22 Blackfish (Gabriela Cowperthwaite)
12/22 Sharknado (Anthony C. Ferrante)
12/23 The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (Francis Lawrence)
12/25 Museum Hours (Jem Cohen)
12/26 Drinking Buddies (Joe Swanberg)
12/26 It's a Disaster (Todd Berger)
12/29 Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach)

A few more big 2013 titles to see. Will be posting my top films of last year soon... hopefully!

Month in Review: November 2013

2013-12-12T09:16:00.004-05:00

November screenings (links to Letterboxd reviews):

11/1 Captain Phillips (Paul Greengrass)
11/2 A Band Called Death (Mark Christopher Covino & Jeff Howlet)
11/2 Somebody Up There Likes Me (Bob Byington)
11/2 Twixt (Francis Ford Coppola)
11/3 Blancanieves (Pablo Berger)
11/6 Gimme the Loot (Adam Leon)
11/8 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen)
11/8 Supporting Characters (Daniel Schechter)
11/8 Birders: The Central Park Effect (Jeffrey Kimball)
11/16 An Oversimplification of Her Beauty (Terence Nance)
11/17 All is Lost (J.C. Chandor)
11/17 Computer Chess (Andrew Bujalski)
11/17 The Sapphires (Wayne Blair)
11/18 Drug War (Johnnie To)
11/22 Call Me Kuchu (Katherine Fairfax Wright & Malika Zouhali-Worrall)
11/23 Blue is the Warmest Color (Abdellatif Kechiche)
11/23 Ginger & Rosa (Sally Potter)
11/24 Europa Report (Sebastián Cordero)
11/27 World War Z (Marc Forster)
11/29 Dallas Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallée)
11/30 Prince Avalanche (David Gordon Green)

Some other stuff:

Dana Stevens in Slate and Matt Singer in The Dissolve on Blockbuster's inevitable announcement that it will close it's remaining stores early next year.

Jim Emerson's first post in a new feature over at Cinephiled on the intersection between technology and art.

A very neat animated "paraphrase" of Blade Runner.

As always, an enlightening piece (even to the writer himself in this case) on the origins of Hitchcock's famous bomb under the table quote from David Bordwell.

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Lots of year-end catching up to do in December, so hopefully a lot of good movies to talk about!

Month in Review: October 2013

2013-11-04T21:21:00.003-05:00

October screenings (links to Letterboxd reviews):

Spike Lee and Nelson George in BROOKLYN BOHEME

10/5 Where the Boys Are (Henry Levin)
10/6 Slacker (Richard Linklater)
10/12 Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón)
10/12 Moonraker (Lewis Gilbert)
10/19 All That Jazz (Bob Fosse)
10/19 Room 237 (Rodney Ascher)
10/19 The Last Days of Disco (Whit Stillman)
10/23 Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan)
10/26 Brooklyn Boheme (Nelson George & Diane Paragas)
10/26 The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen)
10/29 Miami Connection (Y.K. Kim & Woo-sang Park)

Some readings:

First, the great A.O. Scott on, broadly, the future of cinema.

Chris Klimek in the Village Voice on "The Four Types of Spoilers and How Reviewers Should Handle Them"

Britt Hayes in Badass Digest asking "Why Can't Women Have the Same Journeys as Men in Film?"

Greg Ferrara on a particular predicament on blogging about film.

Winning the internet for October is The Hill Valley Project, which is basically a collective of twitter accounts re-enacting Back to the Future one tweet at a time.

Hopefully some more movie watching as we approach the end of the year when more great movies begin to come out. See you in November.