The Future of Film - movies since 2010

October 24, 2014, 11:18 pm

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The following is a survey of the films we find most representative of the greatness of the cinematic medium since 2010. The decade is just about half over and this is our attempt to figure out what the landscape looks like right now. So everyone has picked a film they loved and talked about its important. What these movies say about the world we live, what we see in them that we want other movies to aspire to. 


Scout Tafoya

For the last few years Robert Greene has written a column on the continuing progress of cinematic non-fiction over at Hammer-to-Nail. Greene's been on the front lines, trying to talk people down from their anti-documentary bias and America's tendency to laud movies content to give you information with all the tact and grace of an infomercial. Meanwhile he's championed groundbreaking oddities like Leviathan, The Act of Killing and even line-riders like Computer Chess. More than any kind of film, what Greene pursues over everything is the truth, and that is bigger than just facts told you to be a guy in a room. The truth sometimes bypasses your brain and heads right to your guts and it's impossible to ignore. Greene's own films are an extension of his search for a better, more enlightened conversation about nonfiction, and they're like nothing you've ever seen. For the last decade-and-a-half American indie fiction has been searching for the language that Greene finally found in his second film Kati with an I, about his cousin's heartbreaking final days as a high school student. He returned a year later with Fake It So Real about the characters in a non-professional wrestling circuit. And now he's a month away from seeing his latest film, Actress, play theatres across the country. Which is good news for everyone who wants to know how close to perfect the modern non-fiction film has yet come. 

I toyed with writing this about any number of mind-blowing 'documentaries' including Manakamana, Miners' Hymns, Patience (After Sebald), Leviathan, Perhaps Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve, Two Years At Sea or Whores Glory or even Computer Chess and Under The Skin, but ten minutes into Actress I knew ita was special even in that rarified company. Actress follows Brandy Burre, who took a few years off from her career to have children, getting back into the world of auditions and performing. Burre is a sparky, vivacious person and a loving mother. Like any of us she has flaws that hurt her relationships, and every one of them complicates what we thought we knew about her. Filmmakers try and fail to write characters like her every day. Greene's there at every crucial juncture in Burre's life over many months including her efforts to deal with several changes to her life and daily routine, most of which she's placed there herself. She talks to Greene and the audience as if we were all sitting in her kitchen, sharing a drink with her after her kids have settled down for the night. There's immediacy and honesty, and then there's a woman pouring herself a glass of wine and telling us when she fell out of love with the father of her children. Greene's always found humanity where others would have found mere objects or figureheads, and Actress hums and shakes with it. Burre's the first of his characters who's middle aged and has a sense of her legacy and her place in the world and watching her contemplate them is impossibly compelling. Greene provides a slow-motion playback of the moments just before everything came off the rails, using little else but what Burre surrounds herself with day after day. It's gripping, but more importantly, it's fucking cinematic. 

Greene places himself where few others would dare to venture, her private rehearsals, curlers still in her hair, in the shower after one of the most taxing days of her life. He's not recording because it has anything to do with her life as a series of facts, but because he's telling her story the only way he knows how, with the language of dramatic filmmaking. A standard doc about the life of a struggling actress would be answering questions left and right, squeezing every inch of drama from her nerves, getting between the audience and the subject. Greene hangs back, no agenda, no judgment, letting Burre tell her own story through gestures on her own time. One of the film's best moments has her driving to meet someone listening to Colin Blunstone's "Let Me Come Closer To You," which has more thematic resonance than she or Greene could ever have known when the moment occurred, as Burre just drives to a train station. She's deep in thought and we only later know what's going on in her troubled mind. Then the song continues as the film jumps through her evening, but it remains the recording from the car stereo. Greene always keeps rough edges and in so doing the making of a modern documentary becomes the subtext, the third party to everyone of his character studies. You would never mistake Actress for conventional (and what greater tragedy is there then a film this heartbreaking looking like a mutation next to most distributed docs?), least of all because in spending time with a woman reliving and restarting the part of her life where she pretends to be someone else, we find the perfect encapsulation of Greene's pursuit. A headlong dive into the space between cinematic reality, life and fiction. Who is Brandy Burre? Is she her job, her family, her flaws, her characters, her hopes or fears? Greene never makes us choose because Burre herself doesn't have to. She's not a character in a movie, she's a person fighting to make sure tomorrow's better. Actress is the non-fiction film of the decade, a gauntlet thrown at anyone looking to tell the truth with a camera. Cinema, like Burre, is staring into its future. "This is what I wanted...but now I have to do it." 

Noah Aust 

Because I’m jaded and desensitized to movies. I can’t suspend my disbelief—and do I even want to? I’ve read Laura Mulvey and Brecht and is mimesis even good? Or is it just escapism/bread and circuses? Is catharsis good, or does it just satiate us so we don’t challenge the status quo? Freshman year I was fascinated by mumblecore. Joe Swanberg stripped away all the excesses of filmmaking—plot, camerawork, production values, acting, dialogue—but his movies were still powerful. By getting rid of everything that I thought made a movie, Swanberg got to the heart of what a movie really was. Or could be, anyway.

Holy Motors does the same thing from the opposite direction. There’s no suspension of disbelief. There’s no character development—no characters, really. There’s no narrative continuity. And it still works. The musical sequence is totally self-aware but it’s still tragic and moving, somehow. But tragic and moving in a way I can connect to. Tonight I saw The Immigrant and I loved it, it was beautiful and heartbreaking and melodramatic and tragic, but how am I supposed to connect to that? There’s nothing ugly or ironic or cynical in the world of that movie. How am I supposed to reconcile that with my life? I’m so cynical and jaded and I think that was keeping me from totally entering the world of the film. Whereas with Holy Motors, it’s understood that you’re jaded. It’s understood that you can’t fully commit to the reality of the story, and no one’s asking you to.

I read something a while back about how Georges Méliès never really went for suspension of disbelief in his movies. People draw a binary between him and the Lumière brothers, with them advocating realism and him advocating escapism, but it’s not that cut and dry. This writer called Méliès’ films “montages of attractions,” and to me Holy Motors went back to that. Holy Motors is so cinematic. It’s Cinema with a capital C. It’s like Léos Carax asked himself what Cinema is, what it feels like, and then compiled scenes that illustrate that. If an alien asked what movies were about, I’d show them Holy Motors. When the beggar is running through the cemetery and the Godzilla theme song comes on, there’s no reason why that should have conjured such a profound feeling in me, but it did.  The movie is beautiful. That scene at the very beginning with the forest wallpaper? Oh my god, that’s beautiful. It’s like they took out everything I don’t care about in a movie and just left the music and the images and the moods. 

There’s also something that I can’t quite put my finger on... something about the end of film and digital cinema. I get so depressed about that stuff. Holy Motors felt like a requiem, a summing up of everything that film meant. Film is more than just a medium, it’s Cinema, it’s Melodrama, it’s Ingrid Bergman, it’s La Strada, it’s something tangible and mechanical that you watch in a theater. It’s bourgeoisie and decadent and so it’s doomed to die, but it’s beautiful. But maybe Holy Motors is also a map for how to go forward. Because it’s self-aware and digital and it still packs a punch. Léos Carax finds poetry in digital tracking markers. Just like Joe Swanberg found power in cold, sterile video,  Carax finds beauty in deconstruction and self-awareness. 

Once at Boston Underground I saw a video mixtape from the Whore Church: an overwhelming ADD onslaught of trash videos and pornos cut together at subliminal speeds. Really terrible stuff. But I was watching it and I was really struck by the vocabulary and style of it. I remember thinking, “This is new. If artists want to keep moving forward, they’re going to have to find the power in this stuff.” Then I saw M Dot Strange’s film We Are The Strange. He draws from trashy digital vocabularies: anime, 8-bit video games, 4chan stuff, but he uses that iconography to tell a really haunting story about trying to live in a world gone mad. It’s legitimate melodrama told in a contemporary style. A movie like that can reach people on a level that traditional melodrama can’t. A movie like The Immigrant can synch up perfectly with a certain kind of person, but for film students that are jaded and desensitized and filled with this buzzing anxiety, they need a movie that recognizes that and takes that into the equation. It’s like a different level of semiotics. I want movies that say "even with real life in its awkwardness and ugliness, it’s still possible for life to be beautiful and important like in the movies." I feel like melodrama is a really important aspect of human nature, and maybe it’s the most important part of cinema. I want movies like Holy Motors that say “Even when you’ve lost all suspension of disbelief, movies can still be beautiful.”



Tucker Johnson

I’m actually fairly surprised I landed on this film as the best but then I realized that out of all my possible choices I come back to this one the most. I own a fair few of my choices and I’ve definitely carved the deepest path in my copy ofThe Social Network. Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay took a revolutionary true story and turned it into an arguably even more interesting piece of fiction that paints the facts of Mark Zuckerberg’s rise to being the youngest billionaire of all time with broad strokes and spends far more of its time in the trenches of exactly what people will do to each other when unbridled success is waiting in the wings. He even manages to squeeze sympathy out of audiences for Jesse Eisenberg’s character by showing that despite the juggernaut that Facebook became, it was still driven by the very human needs to succeed, to impress, and to inspire forgiveness in those we care about most. But even with Sorkin churning out arguably the best screenplay of his career, the material needed a director who could handle the dialogue and work the actors hard enough to deliver it with the verve and emotion it deserved. Enter: David Fincher. 

I’m definitely biased towards David Fincher. I consider the man a master of filmmaking at this point in his career but even I remember being very wary of him taking on “the Facebook movie” early in the film’s production. I saw the film in a theater packed with an audience that was more likely expecting the kind of film that the Ashton Kutcher movie Jobs ended up being. I spent the film’s two-hour runtime in awe of Fincher’s crisp, dark visual style (aided by Jeff Cronenweth’s realistic yet beautiful cinematography) and his total control over some of the best young actors working today. He had a firm handle on Sorkin’s dialogue but still managed to direct performances that sounded like intelligent people talking rather than actors simply reading movie dialogue. All this combined with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ eerie ambient score propels the film into a place that I think films rarely get to go. 



Michelle Siracusa 

From the start, something is not quite right. You are thrown all the makings of a horror story, down to ink drops that spatter like blood behind a title that's haphazardly scrawled across the screen. Stokersputters like a volcano and stops just in time for the birds to resume their chirping. But every now and then the earth beneath us shudders again. The pressure builds: a hint of violence, of the macabre here and there. And all we have to do is sit back and wait: wait for something to surface, wait for the monster to be revealed.

It's the suspense of not knowing what route a story might take that keeps us excited and engaged, but lately, I find this can be a movie's downfall. There are too many clues, sometimes characters even stating the circumstances outright. Why tell me what you're doing when you can show me? The point of film is to be able to see a story unfold, right? Unfortunately, most movies these days can be deciphered long before the story comes to fruition. And that's the "good movies". The bad ones don't even have plots to hint at. Oftentimes, I end up paying New York City's $14 ticket price to ogle Hollywood's sexiest men and women for two hours. They hop around a green screen saying words to each other that don't mean anything in tight outfits. Don't get me wrong, this is a spectacle all it's own, but I don't consider it art. How can it be when I'm not changed by it? My eyes are just darting back and forth, convincing my mind it's being entertained. For people like me, who are hungry for a good story, who crave something that will shake their souls and rattle their brains, I suggest you watch Stoker.

From the start, something is not quite right. A father has just died. And we are introduced to a mourning family that seems a little too put together for the circumstances.  We never see them cry, but that's not what makes them stand out from the rest of the humdrum denizens that populate their town. The mother (Nicole Kidman) always appears freshly hair-sprayed and doll-like, overdressed and made-up. She makes cheery and careful small talk with fellow family and guests at the funeral reception. Here, we meet an estranged uncle (Matthew Goode). Too charming and too cool, he tells stories of having traveled the world, which is his apology for not being a present member of the family until the death of his brother. He wants to turn that all around, and everyone smiles and accepts him without question. After that all talk of the beloved late father is hushed. The mother invites the uncle to stay with her and her daughter, India (Mia Wasikowska). And the family is once again a man, a woman, and a child. From the outside, they would appear perfect, if no one knew the circumstances. This is a lovely theme that Stoker puts in place early on exploring appearances versus reality and the external versus the internal. The house is pristine, but the basement is shadowed, cob-webbed, and damp. Some people are beautiful to look at, but it doesn't mean they're beautiful to be around.

India is ivory skinned and forever curious, as young people are. She's an oddball at school, perhaps because of her sullen and quiet nature or her prim and studious demeanor. But that isn't the only reason why she's "different". She is also the only one who refuses to smile for the sake of appearances, the only one who has never gotten alone with her mother, and the only one questioning her Uncle's presence. She stands out from her family just as much as her family stands out from the rest of the town. Stoker is a coming of age tale, told through India's perspective. At moments, poetic voiceover and brilliantly composed shots show what her eyes would see or what her ears would hear. We are with her, in her head, catching glimpses of private conversations and tense moments between the other characters through cracked doors and open windows. They are all pieces of a puzzle, lava beginning to boil. And the more India learns about who to trust and who to not, the more we do as well.

There's not evidence of foul play. There's no crime. In fact, everything's peachy, but we still don't know why the father died. No one's asking. Everyone's eating ice cream or being picked on by the school bully like normal, until suddenly we catch a glimpse of a body stored in the freezer. The pressure is building. Sometimes characters stare a bit too long, unblinking, and we're reminded, something is not quite right. An explosion is imminent. The film begins with India as a young as can be, climbing trees and running through leagues of grass without a care in the world, other than finding that year's hidden birthday present. But suddenly , everything changes for her. Her father's death and her uncle's appearance become a catalyst for her growing up. We watch her trying to discover who she is and trying to find independence while dealing with her new family and their new rules. We learn that she was only ever close to her father, and, now, without her instructor and protector, she must learn to fend for herself. 

We are all that child, or we have been. We've been derailed and insecure, needing something more to feel whole. We know the wide-eyed discovery of a first sip of wine. And we know what it feels like to find something that makes us feel free. Stoker is about India's discovery of what makes her feel free, what makes her adult. The movie's grandest achievement lies in that it's both artfully constructed and relatable. The characters never state a thing outright about their family's history, but the film's intricate subtleties manage to fill us in on the mysterious Uncle's past and, eventually, expose the family's many skeletons.  Scenes are interwoven to reveal similarities between the 3 surviving family members, showing just how far from the tree the apple falls. India learns that there are some things you can't help but inherit from your genepool. I think my favorite part was never once knowing what exactly was going to happen. The script never reflected upon itself, and instead, I had the pleasure of seeing actors react to events and each other without words. Park Chan-Wook's direction was guttural and captivating, and I applaud it.

Although the volcano takes its time seething, frothing and finally exploding, Stoker had me from the start. I was so wrapped up in all that was not quite right that I forgot I was waiting for a monster to appear. I'm glad I forgot because the ending would eclipse all my expectations. Stoker isn't a typical horror film.  But, I hardly expected the monsters I was looking for to be in plain view. I had been living with them. I watched them grow and change. After 99 minutes, I knew them and sympathized with them; so that, by the time they were fully grown and evil, I was there too. Secretly having turned savage, anxious to spill blood alongside characters I'd grown to love. Stoker is a primal and dark film. It explores evolution and survival of the fittest in a modern world, where lying and confidence are your best friends. It challenges the definition of a villain. It's complex, yet simple; inspiring, yet terrifying, in suggesting that we are not responsible for who we become. We are all born with both light and darkness. It's only until we stop resisting our true wants and needs that we are finally free, finally adult, and finally content. With this realization, India becomes both our hero and our villain. She's unapologetic. I think we all want to be that girl, at least a little.

Lucas Mangum 

I'm going with The Dark Knight Rises. I'm a sucker for a good hero story, especially when the hero has to really descend before he triumphs. I also like how the ending seems upbeat (I, for one, have always wanted a Bat/Cat romance), but also carries some ambiguity. Is he really alive, or is Alfred dreaming? It came out in the same summer as The Avengers, which I loved. They had similar plots, but the Batman film felt like The Avengers' evil twin. So much bleaker.


Tim Earle

Films face a crisis these days. Home entertainment systems are high enough quality, and downloading films is easier and easier. Meanwhile, television has quietly become the preferred medium of talented, forward thinking storytellers. The Avengers is, for better or worse, the solution to this crisis. I like the film - it’s surprisingly well written for a big budget slug fest - but more than anything, I admire what it represents, in terms of historical precedent. The film is a demonstration of film learning from TV. It’s a deeply serialized story that requires an understanding of what’s happening in a previously established world. Like the Lord of the Rings series, it is a film for fans. A film for people who have maps of places that don’t exist. A film for people who like watching impossible universes built and populated with impossible people. Unlike Lord of the Rings though, its storytelling possibilities are limitless. It is the first step in a long, potentially endless story. Of course, there are dangers in making a movie franchise like this. The biggest one is that I worry studios have gotten the impression that to make real money you need bloated franchises with lots of people punching each other. What The Avengers should be teaching us is that the talking is far more important than the punching. And it is a deeply corporate entity; it’s inseparability from other films and TV is just as much a boon to its storytelling as its inseparability from toys and lunchboxes is a hindrance. But what really knocks this film out of the park for me is that the great technicians of film, George Lucas and James Cameron, have finally been dethroned by the writers. Also, “Mewling quim.”


Noah Adrien Lyons

Polydoxical Cinema Poetics for Under the Skin

Under the Skin is the best film of this decade so far, and this is why: We now live – in our birth bodies and our avatars – in a post-secular world that has seen tidal waves of progressive and liberatory movements. Civil rights, waves of feminism, postmodernism, post-structuralism, nihilism, cold and hot wars, multiculturalism, liberational theory, queer theory….Science fiction has shifted from the hard-science and optimistic teleology of the Golden Age, through the New Wave counter-cultural ‘highbrow’ of Samuel Delany, Joanna Russ, Zelazny, Disch….then a return to optimism in the guise of cyberpunk, which glamourizes and aestheticizes the neon city, drugs, Donna Harraway’s feminist-cyborgism and modification of the self. But Rodney King, to name just one instance, demythologized the cyberpunk allure, exposing the grim reality of urban poverty and gentrification; HIV/AIDS and the War on Drugs demonized – and gave subjectivity/agency – to the marginalized and the underground. Suddenly, “The Truth is Out There”, and the government conspiracy is fantasized about to resurrect the Mythical Being (alien, god), and to place blame not on ourselves but the Government for the slow decline of community, trust, and holistic art. Y2K – HAL is back, and it’s our fault. Apocalypse is not heaven-sent or cosmic, but technological avarice and enslavement. Remember Alan Watts and the French profs, they were right. This is illusion. There must be a real body, a real affair of the heart, a real Earth. But proliferation of 2000s cynicism and media saturation obliterates this gnostic hope, and leaves tepid cynicism and submission to the internet’s “virtual” alternative to an already virtual world. This ‘time’ line I choose to end arbitrarily with the “hipster ironic” zeitgeist. A Lacanian mirror phase so perverse that to be ironic, one must not be ironic, which is in fact ironic; any actual claim like “I believe in…” or “I love…” or “This is the best fuckin  film ever” are NEVER said, because we feel we cannot believe in any truth or believe in our own opinions – for shame.

Why Under the Skin? Because it caused me to write this aporia-laden time-line of science fiction and modern solipsisms. Because it invokes past occasions, actualizes itself in the present, and ruptures open exciting and novel potentialities for the future. Because the world we live in is a soft, autumn sadness; CGI and avatars and ironic art are not explosions but dreadful, fading echoes of eschatological joy. Look and listen. See how what we were formed what we are, and what we are is more than skin or name; we are not Cartesian schizo-monads. We are others. Shed skin, ashes in snow, geometric deities yawning wide in space. Re-enchantment. Look it up if you have to. Post-secular, and polydoxy – ditto. When was the last time you touched someone? Stare hegemony straight in its slithering maw, fear it, fear irony, and scream. But do not rape the rapist. Gently hold your tattered body like the holy relics they are, and really look at your own face, tears of mourning and praise. The fire consumes, but ashes drift UNDER THE SKIN OF DAWN and perish, everlasting, atoms for those born tomorrow. 


Dan Khan

These days, I am a sucker for movies that take their time. What people generally call  boring, I call contemplative. That may sound pretentious I am aware, but I think it’s valid. There were a number of films I could’ve picked, so why did I choose Sofia’s Coppola’s Somewhere?  I still don’t quite know, but I know that I love every minute of it. After the experimental period piece misfire, Marie Antoinette, Coppola returns with something far more refined and personal. You can certainly tell there’s something close to her heart here and there’s no doubt that it’s also something quite special.

Stephen Dorff is one those actors that never really quite had the career that most actors dream about and too few people care about him. You probably remember him as the villain from Blade, but thankfully (though I admit I enjoyed that performance) he is nothing like that here. Dorff has never really been given this kind of role before and he nails every nuance, every line, every movement, every expression so naturally.  Here he plays Johnny Marco, an actor experiencing an existential crisis who has to deal with his 11-year old daughter (Elle Fanning) when his ex-wife suffers a breakdown and vanishes, leaving the girl in his care. This is a premise rife for a Lifetime movie, but luckily it’s not and it’s in the hands of someone who rises well above that sort of trite material. Coppola used her childhood experiences, recalling her father, Francis Ford Coppola making movies. The way in which the film unravels reminds one of Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.  In that film, we see the daily routine of a a Belgian housewife. In Somewhere, we see the daily routine of an actor and how in many ways just how simple, uninspiring and repetitious that can be. 

When I saw this film the first time, way back when, I was immediately very dismissive.  I used that much reviled word “boring” to describe it.  No doubt, it’s a film that requires patience and it’s certainly not paced in a way to elicit excitement. It’s a film that demanded I give it another chance and I am glad I did, because it’s more far rewarding that I initially realized. It’s a character study in a way that unfolds unlike most others, it doesn't have a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s just life.  Coppola understands this. Dorff has never better and Fanning is as wonderful as you would hope she’d be, in fact if I have a complaint it's that I wish she was in it more. I realize, this is not a film most would choose, and while I had other classics like The Tree of Life, The Master and Holy Motors (and, I might add, Coppola's followup, The Bling Ring, is also a treasure) to choose from, I think Somewhere is as great as those or any film released in the past four years.

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Gone, Baby...

October 28, 2014, 12:06 am

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Just who is David Fincher? At a press conference for his latest film Gone Girl, his star Ben Affleck said that the directors he works with are typically either great technical minds or they're great writers who can work with actors well. Fincher is both the foremost expert on the nuts-and-bolts of filmmaking and he can make actors feel at ease doing the most challenging work of their career. Or to put it simply: for what other director would Ben Affleck get fully naked on camera? Only a man who'd proven his bonafides directing modern cult classics like Zodiac, Seven and Fight Club could possibly make an event out of a book as inauspicious and ordinary as Gone Girl. Only a man who knows cinema like the rest of us know our own bad habits could work miracles like this. And make no mistake, Gone Girl is a miracle. A roaring, rollercoaster of a film with a terrible screenplay and a lot of ugly things to say about people, Gone Girl just might extend cinema's lifespan.

Back in the 1950s, the invention of TV threatened the livelihood of filmmakers everywhere. If viewers could be entertained at home, why would they breach the white picket fence? Movie directors decided to go big, producing one rollicking epic after another to get viewers out of their home for thrills the small screen wouldn't provide. David Fincher has been hitting the small screen hard and low these last few years. He created a TV series strictly for people who don't have cable and he's now adapted two runaway best sellers. The first, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, was a head-spinning exercise in forward momentum that bordered on futurism; airport fiction rebuilt as a Rube Goldberg machine. If you see network TV walking down the street putting pressure on a headwound, muttering "You should see the other guy," that's because David Fincher administered a beatdown that it won't soon forget. Gone Girl is a whole season of TV, complete with guest stars, in two and a half hours.  

At that same press conference, Affleck described Fincher's breakthrough, Seven, as a film that was built like a swiss watch. If that's true, then here he's twisted every gear tighter, perfecting a brusque narrative flow that seems to obfuscate curiousity. He moves faster than the human mind, exploring every possibility while opening the door for six or seven variations you hadn't even considered. Gone Girl is his most precise film, if not his best, and proves that he can best any source through sheer force of will and pure cinematics. A beautifully plastic sheen falls over the memories Nick and Amy share of their courtship, which can only be perverted by the cold, unromantic light of day during the investigation scenes. Meanwhile the music by frequent collaborators and Oscar winners Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross betrays everyone, creating an inch thick layer of uncertainty that grows on every move our hero makes in his own defense. Affleck's Dunne tries to get ahead of his own story, only to realize that his public persona in the wake of Amy's disappearance has a life of its own. Everyone has more than one life in Gone Girl. Fincher delights in watching characters watch themselves on the news, their identity sculpted by pundits and headlines, sewing seeds of doubt. The way we interact with our own image is a new phenomenon for the common man, but the characters in Gone Girl must master it like old pros because everyone's already watching them. The only hope lies in choosing what they see. Paranoia is the dark heart of the film, and the tabloid television cycle keeps its blood flowing.  

Gone Girl may be the most ugly indictment of TV's power to do evil since Spike Lee's Bamboozled, and both are heavily indebted to the ultimate statement on the politics of the small screen Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet's Network. But there are older ghosts hanging from its family tree as well. In the mid-50s movies like It Should Happen To You and All That Heaven Allows cast a scathing light on what TV offers the American people. Fame and a false sense of comfort, both of which alienate you from the people you love. Other films went big, hoping to draw Americans out of their homes with thrills the glass teat couldn't offer them. Fincher wants this to be his North By Northwest, a country spanning twist-athon with images indelible and confident enough to make us believe in them. It puts the viewer in the role of judge and jury, playing with our sympathies and watching us squirm; parsing out red herrings through the jaundiced lens of broadcast news. Fincher makes Affleck throw himself on the mercy of the court of public appeal and banks on your liking or disliking him enough to stay rooted to the spot as the narrative turns darker and darker. Fincher has picked up the gauntlet thrown down by Scandal, The Good Wife, New Girl, The Leftovers, How I Met Your Mother, True Detective and Mad Men and thrown one of his own. It's a blockbuster whodunnit with more twists than your DNA and flashy, stylized support from icons like Tyler Perry and Neil Patrick Harris. The odds are great that when it's over you'll yell at the screen, begging to know what happens next week. That sound you hear is David Fincher having the last laugh. He always does.

Perfectly tuned as it is Gone Girl has a big problem. The more we learn about the girl of the title, the less we know her, the less certain we are that any outcome could be satisfying. Naturally the one we get leaves a bitter aftertaste. Which is itself a cruel inevitability. If the girl of the title could be anyone, doesn't it make sense that our hero'd get saddled with the worst possible iteration? I don't know if Fincher believes in that depressing outcome but Flynn definitely does. She pits her too-smart hero against one regressive cartoon after another and Fincher's only too happy to play her game, because it lets him change the game at regular intervals. The problem? If the film never has to make up its mind about who the girl is, then it never has to decide what it thinks about her. So ultimately what is Gone Girl? A thriller? A procedural? A horror film? A courtroom drama? It never decides. It's a film without a center. Without a soul. Good as it is, slick and entertaining and provocative, it can never transcend that absence. It will never be better than entertaining. Is that the future we're heading for? If movies don't aspire to much more than beating TV and paperback fiction at its own game, then the battle's already over. Without a beating heart, like the one in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo or Zodiac, entertainment is hardly compensation. Not when you can be so much more. 

I'm Thinking' I'm Back: John Wick and The Return of Action Cinema

October 28, 2014, 12:29 am

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I’m a sucker for a lot of things in film. I’m a sucker for sequences that are beautiful or moving like when Joey runs through no man’s land in War Horse or when Martin Scorsese unleashes his own love affair with filmmaking in the guise of two children discovering the identity of George Méliès in Hugo. I’m a sucker for a great song on a soundtrack or a well-used long take, both of which can be handpicked from just about any of P.T. Anderson’s films. Above any specific example though I’m a sucker for filmmakers doing things well. It doesn’t seem like much but most productions these days aren’t populated by anyone being more than adequate at their jobs. So then it falls to a select few to actually prove that when movies are good there’s absolutely nothing better. Now that’s maybe too much praise to start a review of John Wick but I have to make it clear that despite any silliness or absurdity that occurs within its runtime, directors David Leitch and Chad Stahelski know exactly what their jobs are: to choreograph and direct some incredible action sequences. And they’re damn good at their jobs.

Action films are a dime a dozen. I shouldn’t say that. Action sequences are a dime a dozen. And they're too often the most boring parts of the films they break up. The water has been so muddied by blasé action films to think anything else. Action in American cinema has boiled down to a set of steps to follow. If one were to cut together action set pieces from the last decade of big budget American films it’d be difficult to tell one from the other. And that’s the problem. Movies that are marketed as action films seem misunderstand the very reason the genre exists. These moments of “action” are supposed to stop the film. Not because they’re bad but because they’re so engrossing by the intensity of what’s happening onscreen that the viewer forgets the rest of the film momentarily. The Expendables trilogy springs immediately to mind. I actually can’t think of a movie that fits the bill more perfectly. Every second of the trailers for these movies are filled with shooting, explosions, and whatever else the editor can grab to make the film look exciting. The problem is it's not exciting. It’s anything but. The action becomes so average that instead of thrilling the audience, they irritate the senses and make viewers wish for them to get back to the quieter parts of the film because at least the dialogue-driven sequences may still afford a surprise or two.

Fans of action films all have their favorites. The ones they stand by. I don’t think I would be alone in saying that the best shootouts on film belong almost exclusively to Michael Mann. Films like Heat, Collateral, Public Enemies, and Miami Vice all managed to lock themselves in my mind as the best of what realistic gunplay on film is supposed to look and feel like. But there’s another side of what guns are capable of onscreen. The more fantastic side. The side reserved for filmmakers like John Woo, Kurt Wimmer, The Wachowskis, and Robert Rodriguez. Movies like Hardboiled, Equilibrium, The Matrix Trilogy, and Desperado make it difficult to not suspend one’s disbelief for the sake of truly enjoying what these filmmaker’s have created: loud, bloody ballets of bullets.

And on that note, enter John Wick. Directors David Leitch and Chad Stahelski and writer Derek Kolstad create a world of gentleman criminals and killers that operate in their own personal version of New York City. They have their own clubs, bars, hotels and even currency, realized in the form of gold bullion coins. The world of John Wick is not unlike the worlds that Rian Johnson has created in any of his three features, especially Looper, his latest. Characters interact with codes and lingo that border on ridiculous but because the film manages to realize every other aspect of their fantasy lives, their dialogue never feels out of place. The balance of realistic dialogue versus fantastical world building is one of the easiest ways a film like this can fail. Luckily for John Wick, just the right amount of time is spent realizing what needed to be realized to sell the world that these characters inhabit. I’m not saying that we’re looking at lived-in history and production design to rival Lord of the Rings or Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes films (yes, they’re that good). I’m trying to say that the success of John Wick is that we don’t have to rely on the world these characters live in to sell the film. Why? Because this film was directed by two former stuntmen. They wanted to make an action film that harked back to the generic ideal. Films with action setpiecess that take you out of the film entire and have their way with you.

The major action sequences in John Wick are half Michael Mann-realism and half John Woo-surrealism. Keanu Reeves moves with precision and skill and it’s almost impossible to not think of Tom Cruise’s vicious hit man character, Vincent, in Collateral.  But as much as Reeves portrays Wick as a cold, calculated killing machine who is an absolute pleasure to watch deal out death, there is another side of him. A side reminiscent of El Mariachi, Robert Rodriguez’s pistol wielding legend played by Antonio Banderas in Desperado and Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Wick makes quick work of wave after wave of gun-toting henchmen in this film and at no point did I ever question any of what I saw in front of me. I was too busy trying to keep myself from standing on my seat and shouting with excitement at the screen.

Action done right is the best. It’s one of the only things in cinema that you can’t react to while it’s happening. At least I can’t. If I’m watching a perfectly done piece of action I have to reserve all physical reactions until the sequence is over. Then I let loose. I laugh. I exhale. I say “…shit.” as quietly as I can but always a little too loud. The only times I’ve had that feeling in recent memory is while watching Gareth Evans The Raid: Redemption and The Raid 2: Berendal, films I consider to be the finest showcases of both martial arts choreography and cinematography of all time. John Wick wisely borrows from these films where it can. Whenever Reeves' character finds himself in combat without a firearm, he’s savagely beating his opponents with the same intensity, though maybe not the same mastery, as Iko Uwais’s Rama in the Raid films.

I won’t say John Wick is a film that’s going to change things. It won’t. But it did give me something I rarely get to see at the movies anymore. Truly thrilling action. Action that made me grip my armrest and move without my knowing it to the very edge of my seat. If every film were able to produce this effect through its action mechanics, going to the movies would undoubtedly get boring, but...having just seen the heights that truly good action choreography can bring me to, I can only hope that were I to have a conversation with quality genre filmmaking, it would mirror the one that John Wick has with his former employer near the end of the film’s second act. “People keep asking if I’m back. Yeah, I’m thinkin’ I’m back.”

The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism: Tina Hassannia

April 11, 2014, 1:54 pm

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Tina Hassannia
Instead of using the earthy, colorful atmosphere of the museum as an antidote to the brightly lit and sterile hospital scenes, Cohen sticks steadfastly to his thesis and asks us to look more closely at the rhythmic heart monitor and the quiet sounds of IV fluids dropping into its container. Like everything else in the film, they too possess a beauty worth noting.

Contributed to: Slant Magazine, Little White Lies, Movie Mezzanine, Keyframe, Grolsch Film Works, Maisonneuve, The Globe and Mail, Reverse Shot, Guernica, cléo, In Review Online, Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Spectrum Culture.

Noted champion of: You've Got Mail & Nora Ephron, Abbas Kiarostami, Sohrab Shahid Saless, the Coen Brothers, Errol Morris, Spring Breakers, Whit Stillman.

Influences: Jonathan Rosenbaum, David Foster Wallace, Siegfried Kracauer, Sasha Frere-Jones, Manohla Dargis, David Kehr, Pauline Kael, Hamid Naficy, Molly Haskell, Richard Brody, Fernando F. Croce, Adam Nayman. 


Born in Tehran and raised in Ottawa, Tina Hassannia (April 12, 1984-) has a unique perspective to say the least. Her first piece of criticism was a review of the Arcade Fire album Funeral in the Fulcrum, the student publication at the University of Ottawa. "I was interested in aesthetics in adolescence and attended an arts high school, but other than one savvy drama teacher my influences were mostly music magazines, Pitchfork and XPress, Ottawa's arts weekly. In university I decided to try writing for my campus newspaper and eventually worked my way up to Arts & Culture Editor. After university, I covered music, theatre and comedy for the XPress, but around this time I started to get bored of arts journalism, or as I liked to call it, fluff journalism. I found new cinephile friends who excelled at analyzing music and movies in an earnest, cerebral fashion that I found both intimidating and stimulating. With their suggestion, I took Film Studies at Carleton University. It's perhaps a tad strange that I turned to a medium that was less familiar to me (compared to music and theatre), but film academia was exactly the kind of critical foundation I needed to sharpen my writing skills. I started reviewing movies for In Review Online in 2011 and became more active the next year with my contributions to Spectrum Culture and Not Coming." 

Hassannia's integration of technique and global context is stunning, treating films as more than merely works of art, bad or good. Hassannia has done a lot of incredible work on the films of the Iranian directors like Asghar Farhadi, on whom she's written a book, and Abbas Kiarostami and founding hello-cinema.net, a site dedicated to Iranian film. On top of being one of the most accomplished and deeply felt cinematic wellsprings, it's also among the most vital because each statement carries the weight of crisis and torment. From her review of Jafar Panahi's Closed Curtain: Jafar Panahi's harsh sentence from Iranian authorities—his house arrest, restrictions on filmmaking and travel, and communicating with media—have forced the filmmaker to contemplate not only the intellectual struggle that accompanies tyrannical artistic censorship, but its combined psychological and emotional manifestations. Which is a good way of looking at her criticism; a combination of intellectual/aesthetic concerns harmonizing with psychological and emotional ones. She places everything in sociopolitical context, knowing that surefooted ideology gives the purely cinematic merits of a film more weight. She never resorts to hyperbole or easy classification, keeping a respectful distance to preserve the film's achievement, rather than its 'importance.' A sense of history and the notion that we write it with every work of art runs through her work like a main circuit cable, to coin a phrase, and she reads as part essayist/historian in the most exciting fashion. Whether she's talking about Palme d'Or contenders or Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, she writes with formal assurance and accessibility, possessing a clear-eyed view of where art could take us not just as viewers, but as the people who shape the future. 

On The Past
For those Iranians living abroad, the fight for a unified identity remains just as fraught. In some places, like the popular independent media centers in Los Angeles (“Tehrangeles”), one can see a forged Iranian-American identity that has unified the secular, upper-middle-class Iranians who made a mass exodus from their homeland following the revolution. But otherwise, if one looks to the cinematic output as a source of confirmation, the Persian diaspora—based mostly in North America and Europe—suffers from a lack of cohesiveness. Although a handful of Iranian artists have established themselves outside of the country, to date, the creative output of arthouse filmmakers has not helped to forge a united voice or provide an alternative identity for diasporic Iranians. This is not to suggest that their role lies in pioneering such an identity. But their encompassing reach and personal experiences abroad, which many have internalized into their work, present them with opportunities and an audience to articulate the Persian diasporic experience that others don’t have.  To begin answering the question about the cultural identity of The Past, it’s helpful to consider Farhadi’s own goals in creating the film. The director spent two years abroad researching and working on the story. Though initially guided by the cultural differences between Iranians and Europeans in the beginning of his research, Farhadi became increasingly inspired by their similarities. The Past does not contribute to a collective voice for the Iranian community abroad—at least not directly. Though the film details the experience of an Iranian man who once lived in Europe, the story is not focused on his diasporic perspective like with other films in that vein, like Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Yet in a roundabout way, the film does seem to offer something unique and also entirely essential for the Persian diaspora: the normalization of an Iranian protagonist in a Western film.

On 12 Years A Slave

Using his signature visual composition and deafening sound design, McQueen portrays the harrowing realism of Northrup's experience and the complicated relationships between master and slave, master and master, slave and slave, and so on. The film's most fascinating scenes explore the phenomenon of favoritism and the use of language in defining the scarce rights and dignities of African-American slaves, like the black mistress who tries to sell a younger female slave on the benefits of being her master's concubine. With her nose looking down at the serfs around her, the mistress smugly tells the young woman she could easily come to "manage them all" if she got into her master's good graces. Such characters say and do horrendous things, but the film isn't trying to make some blanket criticism against the different strategies used by American slaves; instead it shows that a complete void and desperation for humane treatment changes people into justifying their actions.

On Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster

The independence and tenacity of Ghidorah’s female characters mark the film’s most fascinating elements, particularly noticeable in lead character Naoko, a journalist who beats her colleagues to the scoop in finding the Venusian, whose predictions are one by one coming true. Naoko is the series’ first real heroine, with a resilient independence that has her unbound by relationships to male characters (including her overprotective brother). In fact, she dismisses her family’s insistence that her friend, a professor studying the Ghidorah meteorite, is also her boyfriend. He is simply an acquaintance that can help her land a story, as she values her own career above else. Indeed, her open-mindedness leads her to ask the right questions to the Venusian and the Shobijin fairies that help to uncover the truth about Ghidorah. This particular scene, set in a hotel room – intended to establish exposition about the invincibility of the three-headed monster – is an integral, pivotal point in the narrative. It’s interesting that despite the convenient grouping of the female characters in these closed quarters, the Communist spies sent to assassinate the Princess and who have been stalking the hotel room, are treated like distractions in scenes such as this one (easily tricked by the Shobijin fairies) rather than operating like the James Bond-like villains they so clearly imitate.

The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism - Olivia Collette

December 6, 2014, 1:44 pm

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Olivia Collette

Since becoming agnostic, I’ve often said that I preferred it when I believed in a god, because it meant believing in a magical afterlife…When I die, I probably still won’t believe in god, at least not with any certainty. But I will no doubt wish that I did.

Influences: "Roger Ebert was probably the greatest influence, and he inspired me in a couple of ways. Firstly, and I say this in “My Favorite Roger”, he was a terrific writer, and one I turned to often when I was studying film theory. The second thing he made me appreciate was how to be a better reader. Even if I only knew him for 3 short years, I can’t begin to express what a privilege it was to be one of the people in his entourage in those later years.

Another influence is Matt Zoller Seitz, who I started reading after meeting him at Ebertfest 2011. I doubt he realizes this, but I nearly peed myself when he first complimented my writing, and then asked me to contribute to the Grand Budapest Hotel book, which is sort of an appendix to his book The Wes Anderson Collection. I wrote the chapter on music. I especially enjoy his TV recaps, because while most recappers tell you the order of things that happened in an episode, Matt tells you what was really going on. He talks about the layers rather than the events. And then there’s how he does it, which is just so many levels of good. 

Finally, there’s Odie Henderson and Steven Boone. They have very different styles of writing, and they’re both equally captivating. I especially recommend Odie’s Silicon Valley recaps and everything Boone’s written for Capital New York. Every now and then, Odie and Boone write together in a kind of epistolary blog post, which, for me, is an absolute treat. We haven’t necessarily worked together, but we’ve had the pleasure of talking to each other live, and the exchanges are incredible. They shape my writing because as a writer, I strive to have a voice as distinct as theirs. So I guess what I’m really saying is, I’m lucky to have worked with people I also admire greatly."


Proud champion of: Norman Jewison, Night and Fog, Jesus Christ Superstar, Ari Folman, Moonstruck, Tous les matins du monde, Ron Fricke, Celda 211, El laberinto del fauno, A Serious Man, Michael Slovis, Yin shi nan nu, Wandâfuru raifu, Pedro Almodóvar, Pleasantville, Federico Fellini, Suspiria, Volver, ¡Átame!, Denys Arcand, Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón, Brian Froud, Koyaanisqatsi, Persepolis, Wes Anderson, Julie/Julia, Lee Daniels, The NeverEnding Story, The Dark Crystal, Michel Gondry, The Doinel Cycle, Agnès Varda

Contributed to: The McGill News, Caustic Truths, Journal Place Publique, enRoute, eHow, RogerEbert.com, Montreal Gazette, Mondo*Arc, The Spectator Arts Blog, World Film Locations (San Francisco), Sparksheet, Indiewire/Press Play, Urbania, Huffington Post Québec and her writing is collected at oliviacollette.com


Despite a gift for it, Montreal-based Olivia Collette (October 19, 1976-) doesn't consider herself a film critic: "I feel I’m a journalist first, and an art critic second. And I say “art critic” because I’ve written about music, cinema and TV. And I put the emphasis on “journalist” because I’m much more interested in a variety of topics that shape society, not just art; things like linguistics, architecture, urban planning, transportation, politics; stuff that’s not necessarily artsy."

"What made it possible for me to even dabble in criticism was a combination of things: namely writing, studying film theory in university, and studying music before going into film theory. Even when I was studying music, it became clear that I was far more interested in deconstructing an art medium than being the artist. Although there are parts of me that still need those artistic outlets, writing will always be the most fulfilling thing for me."

"I feel that I got started with film essays before getting the chance to review anything. I really like to analyze the shit out of things, so I suppose the first time I did that, and made a significant mark, was when I wrote an essay in university about the visual theme of chess in Jesus Christ Superstar. It wasn’t the first film essay I wrote, but it was the one that made the most waves. My professor really liked the idea, and my cousin, who’s a religious scholar, used my premise to dig into representations of Christ in pop culture. "

"The first time I published any kind of review, it was in a community newspaper called Journal Place Publique, and it was about Yagayah, a play co-written by d’bi young and Naila Belvett. The first time I started to commit to writing about pop culture was on my blog, and it was with this entry, which I followed up with this piece [on devilry in the movies]. And eventually led to this piece [on video games], which continues to be the most popular on my blog: The first time I wrote for Roger Ebert about film was with a piece on the role of architecture in Inception."

Olivia identifying herself as a journalist is the key to understanding her film writing. Her pieces have an honesty, not only about the fundamental form and image in front of her, but about herself and what she brings to every piece of art she encounters. Kent Jones, among others, has frequently called for, to put it simplistically, people to actually write about the movie they're watching, and Olivia is one of the few writers who rarely strays from what can be known about the film, about its reality, and about how it achieves its effect on the viewer. Her prose, candid, funny and relatable, lowers a bridge for readers, offering an easy, rewarding rapport. She thoroughly researches the movies she watches to fully engross herself in the artist's intentions and palette. Her endlessly fascinating look at religion informs her writing on film, in that both approach something unknowable with two feet firmly planted on the ground. She offers the safety of the rational world while examining gigantic, often terrifying subjects, offering her healthily skeptical POV as a way into discussing sacred cows, from religion to sexism to blockbusters. Every subject is treated equally, with the same scrutiny and openness. More concisely, Olivia Collette is fearless. 


On Laurence Anyways: 
The film's biggest strength is dealing with a taboo as if it wasn't. When Laurence starts dressing in women's clothing, she looks less like Jenna Talackova and more like an awkward man in a skirt, because it takes time to get comfortable with who you are. Eventually she returns to pants because a dress doesn't make the lady. Despite her ability for great tenderness, Laurence can also be selfish and rude. She's not an angelic transgender heroine; she's just exceedingly normal.


On A Hijacking:
The bulk of the stress revolves around 12 phone calls between Peter and Omar. Connor is always present to make sure each conversation never gets frantic. The one time things reach Samuel L. Jackson pitch, there are immediate consequences. The film earns Dogme points with handheld cinematography and uncomfortable, sometimes inefficient lighting. But Lindholm wanted to achieve maximum realism. So the boat scenes were filmed on a real ship in the Indian Ocean. A satellite phone was set up on the boat to make phone calls to the actors in Denmark, so echoes and lagging weren't scripted and the reactions were often improvised. Gary Skjoldmose-Porter, who plays Connor, is an actual hostage negotiator. He convinced Lindholm not to create a plasma screen-filled situation room and instead opt for a small conference set-up and sticking red tape on the phone the CEO would use. Other non-actors include 4 of the crewmembers of the MV Rozen, which was hijacked by Somali pirates in 2007. "Violence is expensive," is the simple — and loaded — thing that director Alrick Brown said during Ebertfest 2011, when someone asked him why there was a lack of bloodshed in "Kinyarwanda," a movie about the 1994 Rwandan genocide. That's why all the violence in "A Hijacking" occurs off-screen.


On The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey:
Some people hate "Dune" because it's nothing like the novel, but venerate "The Shining" for the same reason. You can't please everyone when you adapt a book to film, so you're better off hoping you'll please anyone. Even if it's just a handful, it's those few who will be your fiercest defenders against the purists. So let's start with what Peter Jackson's "The Hobbit" isn't: If you read the book, it's not the book you read. It includes plot elements from "The Hobbit," details that weren't fleshed out in "The Lord of the Rings" movies, bits from the "LOTR" appendices, and stuff that was created for the sake of this new trilogy.

We all know why, too. As a standalone story, "The Hobbit" had enough material for just one movie: a Hobbit named Bilbo Baggins is recruited by the wizard Gandalf and 13 dwarves to reclaim the kingdom that was stolen from them by a dragon; along the way, the company fights dangerous trolls and orcs, while Bilbo finds a ring that makes him invisible; it all leads to a final conflict. The End. 

That brevity won't do for such a lucrative franchise. And Hollywood economics dictates this must be a trilogy. Sporadic insertions of the Middle-Earth mythology were the only way to stretch the otherwise succinct saga over three films. Just the same, any film--whether it's adapted from a novel, comic book, TV series or video game--deserves to be reviewed as a separate entity, and on its own merits.

The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism - Daniel Kasman

December 7, 2014, 9:55 am

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Daniel Kasman

I must admit I saw more, much more, in something small due to the titanic vision of something almost too large. Cinema is so full of images it seems like history only remembers that which looms, towering; but perhaps the mysteries of the lesser things are those created by—if not existing on—those towers' shadows.

Contributed to: MUBI, Senses of Cinema, The Chiseler, La Furia Umana, LUMIÈRE, and Cinema Scope

Daniel Kasman (Born 1982) has been the editor at the MUBI Notebook through many changes to the site over many years and, along with Adam Cook, has kept the place a most vital destination for anyone looking for incisive and unique film criticism. He's been breaking down borders and questioning assumptions [look no further than his involvement in posthumously granting Tony Scott the respect he was denied in his lifetime] with grace and deftness since he first started writing criticism. He's a formally adventurous writer and curator, giving time to short form, image-based, long-form, epistolary and conversational criticism. In a given week he could post spare, minimalist entries in the Notebook, or long, winding diary entries about how his experiences of getting to and experiencing a festival can reflect the films on offer. I've mentioned before that his conversations with Fernando F. Croce are some of the most entertaining reads in any given year. Should one ever need a reminder that criticism is as beautiful diverse and nebulous an art form as the one it comments upon, Kasman is always up to the task of providing one. 

Take a look at this entry, a report from a trip to the 2014 Viennale:

It is a joy, of course, to see such grandiose films by Ford as How Green Was My Valley (1940) and The Searchers (1956) on vibrant 35mm prints. (The weak but comparatively experimental shaggy-dog cavalry film She Wore a Yellow Ribbon [1949] positively radiated warmth from its immaculate color quality, restored by the UCLA Film & Televsion Archive.) But better still is that pleasure particular to large retrospectives full of accepted masterpieces to encounter the smaller, more inconsequential films made in-between. Such is certainly the case for 1925's Kentucky Pride, a tale narrated by a once-favorited racing horse (!) and not so much a drama as a quintessentially Fordian combination of sentiment and silliness. Likewise 1933's Will Rogers vehicle, Doctor Bull, one of my favorites and a film, like Vincente Minnelli's The Reluctant Debutante (to pull another favorite), that's an example of a master filmmaker and an A-list actor collaborating on what feels merely a programmer between more ambitious and/or lucrative projects. Such movies have a humility to them that is utterly freeing.

"Freeing" is the keyword there because on top of being what he searches for from film culture, it's also the perfect way to sum up his approach to writing. Look, for instance at the range of entry points he provides, without slavishly sticking to one. They're not only entry points into the movies, but ways that the experience itself can impact him and the film. He's a gripping extra-textual documentarian. In this paragraph he comments first on the way the 35mm prints of the classics improves them, even a "comparatively" minor film like She Wore A Yellow Ribbon [the juxtaposition of "major" and "minor" is a pet theme], then on the way the way the program he attended presses films together in unconventional ways, allowing them to converse with each other. Then he moves onto the way reputations collide to create hybrid art, taking time to impart personal preference and speak openly about his place in the program as an audience member. Letting himself into the pieces and the films does not sap his razor-sharp focus one iota. He's one of the most refreshingly clear-eyed around. His attitude is never  that a film doesn't meet his standard, but rather that it doesn't meet the standard he knows cinema capable of. And on top of all that, his prose can be delightfully labyrinthine when he finds himself on a roll, a thing to behold. Kasman's understanding of the essence of a filmmaker makes his shorthand intensely satisfying. Look at the asides in this sentence from a review of Steven Soderbergh's Che: 

If The Argentine recalls Preminger and Exodus, the second part of Che, called Guerilla and detailing the man’s failed attempt to move the revolution to Bolivia, recalls Merrill’s Marauders (1962), though certainly not Samuel Fuller’s brute forcefulness as a filmmaker. A more accomplished film, though to a degree less interesting because less baffling than the indeterminate angle of attack that The Argentine takes, the second half of Soderbergh’s film grasps more firmly the physical sense of guerilla life.

His rhythm here, not to mention the "forcefulness," to use his own phrase, tonally communicate his feeling for the film as well as his individual points. His writing here and elsewhere at times recalls the style of Ghostface Killah, taking gamble after gamble on sentence structure and focus that most writers wouldn't dream of attempting, and getting it right every time. Indeed it's not hard to imagine his last sentence in one of Ghostface's verse's on the Wu-Tang Clan song "Gravel Pit." Kasman's created a safe space for exploration of every facet of film and criticism at the Notebook and his own writing has always led the charge toward ever more freedom of expression and form. 

On The Hole:
One thing I’ve found consistent in the handful of film festival experiences I’ve had is that by a certain point you’ve seen so much sloppiness that when a crafty movie comes along, one made with skilled deliberation and mature filmmaking, there is a danger of overrating its supreme comparative steadiness and experience.  At Toronto this year, Joe Dante’s The Hole is the embodiment of that phenomenon.  Its first act alone is made with such inspired knowhow of how to stage a dramatic scene, how to express and use space, and how to define in human terms genre-based characters—in short, are directed with such expressive expertise—that the relief at being in the hands of someone of obvious experienced talent was palpable, regardless of whether the film would stand as highly on its own.

The Hole suffers from a similar problem as Claire Denis’s White Material in being fundamentally rooted in its screenplay, an heavy-weighted anchor to the imagination.  Still, Dante is one of our foremost spirits of imagination, and let’s count our lucky stars that he’s still getting money to make feature films (his last was 2003’s Loony Tunes: Back in Action); unfortunately with The Hole he is hampered by the overbearing literalness of the Mark L. Smith’s script.  When a single mother (Teri Polo) and her two sons (Chris Massoglia and Nathan Gamble) arrive in a new town and the boys, along with their next door neighbor (Haley Bennett), discover a hole under their house that opens to an endless void, the potential for horror is beautifully evoked and modulated.  Dante keeps the scale of the idea in check and focuses on the various ways the kids explore their new found fantastical feature, how at first it treads the line between creating wonder and horror, and the regular, highly suburbanized ways the boys start and stop their investigations, hide their discovery from their mom, and otherwise integrate supreme weirdness into their every-days lives.  But once the titular void starts literalizing each child’s fears so that they may over come them, there’s little Dante’s directorial imagination can do to enliven a plodding series of supposedly fearful confrontations.

On Redbelt:
With a Mamet film, we can be propelled forward on the confident completeness with which the writer/director thinks he has crafted his characters. Whether or not they are whole, or even meaningful, they nevertheless exist and move like defined masses, whose only purpose is to exhibit their own definition, secureness, and resiliency by coming into volatile contact with other such masses. Lean little planets in orbit, they are dying for a galactic collision that will never come in a cinema so pre-determined. But at least in the best of Mamet there is a sense of melancholy recognition, the awareness that since everything has been set up from the beginning—in both senses, Mamet being a dialog writer above all else, and that so many of his films feature elaborate confidence games—a character should accept the sad fate of never exploding gloriously, never being truly tested for this philosophical wholeness Mamet's killer dialog encases everyone in. The over-determination eliminates the spectacular but it does provide a fast ride of confidence, stories and characters skating forward with believable momentum and weight on rails to the end of their films.

On Kinatay:
Dedicate a movie to one thing, respect the singular attention of the camera, and a film should be rich enough to overcome just about anything.  Brillante Mendoza gives almost half of his film Kinatay to the nocturnal drive of a group of policemen out of Manila to its suburbs, and another half hour of night awaits them at their destination, a police black site.  This rich vision of so much gloom, dim suspension, no action, no spectacle, no drama is a beautiful thing, something out of an avant-garde film dedicated to textures, subtle shifts in color, and spatial uncertainty of a sunless world.  There is a story of course, of a young police trainee just married (that very day!) taken along on an off -he-books mission to torture a drug addicted stripper, and for a long time Mendoza plays the story like Haneke’s Funny Games (or a Park film), building up the audience’s desire for his hero to act violently, here to lash out at his sadistic superiors.  And some of Kinatay is that tasteless, with its handholding music (riffing off of Kubrick’s synth scores for A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket) and artless, didactic cutaways That Explain Motivation by showing the cops’ horrific acts, the home that must be thought of.  But, as with Mendoza’s previous film Serbis, the rest of the movie is given as a handheld dedication to space—there, a porno theater, here, a sinister, anonymous police van traveling great distances at night for the purpose of terrible things, and later a torture house.  But it is a space of obscurity, of uncertainty in a morally certain situation, and so the space, covered and run over again and again by the roving camera, takes on an abstraction nearly outside the story itself.   A palette of sleek grays makes a death grip on this film that started—again, didactically—in daylight with a marriage, and Kinatay’s immersion into nightfall stands strong, splendidly, as independent force. 

The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism - Kiva Reardon

December 9, 2014, 7:13 pm

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Kiva Reardon

I use verbs to describe what I do, not nouns. I hesitate to say “I am a writer” because in my mind a writer isn’t just someone who gets paid to put words to paper (or a screen) as I do, but someone whose words provoke revolution, tears, laughter, orgasms, and other things that make life worth living.

Contributed to: Cinema Scope, Reverse Shot, NOW Magazine, National Post, POV Magazine, Fandor, Masionneuve, Little White Lies, The Black Museum, MUBI Notebook, Cineaste, The Globe and Mail, Torontoist, The AV Club, cléo, The Hairpin and collected writings here at KivaReardon.com

Noted champion of: Denis Côté, Claire Denis, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Haywire/Gina Carano, The Grey/later-career Liam Neeson, Eliza Hittman's It Felt Like Love.

Influences: Manohla Dargis, bell hooks, Michael Koresky, the essays in Interrogating Post-Feminism, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Nina Power, Adam Nayman, Virginie Despentes' King Kong Theory.

Toronto-born Kiva Reardon (March 27, 1987-) can be easily spotted at festivals and screenings thanks to her iconic top-knot, which is fitting because she's got a samurai's dedication to fostering a more informed critical climate. "I started writing by blogging in 2009. I had just graduated from McGill (where I did Cultural Studies) and missed thinking about and discussing film. From there, I started covering film and culture for Torontoist.com, a local site. This city has a rather large and active film community and as I continued to write I met more critics and editors, which led to writing for (in some rough chronological order): Cinema Scope, Reverse Shot, NOW Magazine, National Post, POV Magazine, Fandor, Masionneuve, Little White Lies and The Globe and Mail. In January 2013, I was chosen to be a part of the International Film Festival Rotterdam's Young Film Critic Trainee Programme. In 2013, I founded cléo, a journal of film and feminism. Now run by myself, Julia Cooper (Managing Editor) and Mallory Andrews (Submissions Editor), the journal is published three times a year and issues are based around a theme."

There may be no better way to dive headlong into Reardon's essential point of view than to read this line from her capsule review of '71 by Yann Demange: "’71 takes an ethno-nationalist conflict rooted in hundreds of years of colonialist history and makes it beige, apolitical and gutless. As is said, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, and apparently also make mediocre films." Like the best political writers, she has an infectious fierceness, a refusal to suffer destructive and self-defeating tendencies in modern cinema and the covert, even unintentional messages they send. This blithe dismissal of '71 is a macro masterstroke, but her greatest strength is in dissection of the micro, gestures and the way they so often define films. When she goes small, there's nothing more satisfying, as in a clever 26-part essay on Trouble Every Day. She takes an often comical, incredibly thorough tour through the ways the film and director Claire Denis makes humans connect, both erotically and grotesquely. At bottom, the article is about the way that a male critical and filmmaking community views what a female director's role is and the way Denis refuses to care about what it means to fit that role. Reardon might helpfully be thought of as  the critic most concerned with celebrating/analysing films that break from expected sociopolitical and generic molds. Look at the way she ends a brief, dissappointed review of Peeples: "Peeples fails to deliver one crucial thing: real people." In that one sentence are galaxies of anger, whether you get from it a Marxist deflation of Hollywood's inability to imagine the other or a cry for films that rely less on cliche is up to the reader. She says a lot by saying a little. Though of course when she goes long her prose is impossible to break away from. She gains and loses speed knowingly throughout, knowing when to slow down and expand, and when to run with an idea as quickly as possible. When she's plugged into a subject, she's unstoppable, and when she's removed from it, she's still terrifically purposeful. She cuts a figure not dissimilar from Toshiro Mifune's character in Yojimbo [topknot and all]. She's capable of playing the long game beautifully, but when push comes to shove, a quick, merciless turn of phrase will get the job done beautifully. Kiva Reardon is a force to be reckoned with. 


On Tracks:
It’s too bad, since Tracks could have offset the gender imbalance that’s so prevalent in the “on the road” genre. Outside of Thelma & Louise, such travel-based excursions of self-realization are normally the realm of those with XY chromosomes (Easy Rider, Two-Lane Blacktop). Or if there is a woman in the picture, she’s usually part of a doomed romantic duo (Bonnie and Clyde, Natural Born Killers). This is especially true of sand-swept stories, which truly put the “man” in “no man’s land”: the lone cowboys of 1950s westerns, David Lean’s epic Lawrence of Arabia, the wandering bros in Gus Van Sant’s Gerry, any number of modern war films set in parched-earth conflict zones (Three Kings, The Hurt Locker). So when Davidson proclaims, “I just want to be by myself,” the moment is filled with vast potential – here’s a female lead heading off on her own. The issue is that her character isn’t compelling enough to carry this one-woman quest. Wasikowska does her best to convey the strain of the near cross-continent walk (embracing the role by growing out her leg and armpit hair for verisimilitude), but beyond squinting into the harsh sun, the actress isn’t left with much to work with: Any attempts at fleshing out Davidson’s backstory are reduced to softly lit, slow-mo childhood flashbacks. Because of this heavy-handed tone, Davidson comes across as flat as the desert, which hardly makes her tracks worth following.

On Gone Girl:
Of course, none of Amy’s actions represent any kind of sustainable feminism. But who cares? What revenge fantasy is wholly defensible? In the end, Amy’s revenge is getting her rom-com ending of a husband, home and baby. It’s the latter that finally nearly causes Nick to break, as he slams Amy’s precious head against a wall. Pinning her down, Nick hisses in her face she’s a cunt. "I'm the cunt you created," she replies, unfazed by his violence. Nick, and all men like him, have to live with that. Joke’s on them.


On The Immigrant:
The last thing cinema needs is yet another tale of female exploitation that uses prostitution as some allegory for saintly sinning by yet another male director. The Immigrant, however, cannot—or ought not—be so easily dismissed. If Gray’s previous work hadn’t already established him as one of the greatest storytellers of contemporary times (see the mirror opening and closing shots of Wahlberg riding the subway in The Yards, or the perfectly envisioned Russian family homes where couches overflow with mink coats at Christmas parties in We Own the Night), The Immigrant only proves the point. Because while Gray works in archetypes—the bad gangster brother; the good-cop son; the beleaguered but tenacious girlfriend; the innocent woman turned lady of the night—he always captures the person within. No one is so easily reduced.

On What Now, Remind Me?: 
This ambitious aim makes E Agora? Lembra-me far more than a diarist approach to doc filmmaking, though it never feels sensational. In one particularly evocative scene, Pinto relates how the drugs he is taking cause him to feel a pain that makes him constantly aware of his body. Beginning by attempting to express this feeling by speaking straight into the camera, the scene then changes. Pinto captures his body moving in time delay, creating a layering effect, as his frail form becomes something of a bespectacled, multi-limbed specter. The technique itself is not radical, but in the context of the film it speaks to the limits of language — both cinematic and linguistic — when it comes to expressing lived, sensory experience. Here, Pinto attempts to give a form to his pain so we can understand his bodily experience, yet this can never fully be. As such, we're brought intimately in to his life, yet constantly aware of the gulf that remains. This is further echoed when Pinto, a longtime producer and director, at one point confesses: "I don't know how to talk about film." Here cinema feels oddly similar to his illness: central to his life, yet beyond expression; a structuring transcendental force. In these moments, the film transcends mere confessional narration and enters the realm of the philosophical.

Marissa D'Elia's 2014 in Music

December 17, 2014, 1:17 pm

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The following is promoter Marissa D'Elia's list of her favourite albums of the year. Her list doubles as an account of a year spent inside a music scene -Scout

It’s true that I rarely seek new music to listen to. This year it was so pathetic that less than a month ago I went to my Facebook, begging friends to tell me what they thought were the best records released this year. Some ninety comments later I was deep into a music vortex that pulled in me in all directions from hardcore to twinkly shit to pop punk and places I had never been before. Below you’ll find the few records I did find on my own and others that my friends suggested (so s/o if you were helped with that). The list ends with my favorite record of the year. Enjoy!


Soul Glo- “ “
favorite track: "closer to god"

A little while ago I was standing next to Blair Elliott, who owns Siren Records in Doylestown, talking about the current state of hardcore. The conversation turned to the subject controversy. Blair saw the rise of bands coming out of the early 80s, specifically ones that took strong political and social stances, as the heydey of the scene. Those bands had something to say. They were angry. I’ve never personally been big on the music from that era but spent nearly 6 months working on a project that asked how punk/hardcore worked as a revolution. Blair posed the question “Where are all the bands that give a shit about something? Where are the bands that actually say something?” The best answer to that question today is Soul Glo. Their record might make you uncomfortable and it should as it cross-examines race, class, gender and all of the ways violence and oppression flirt with those pillars of society.




Radiator Hospital - Torch Song
favorite track: "Fireworks reprise"

When I sat down to listen to this record it was my first time listening to RH (again, I’m very lazy).  But oh I’m so happy I did. As I was listening I jotted down real time reactions like “I’m literally crying” because there were so many times where the lyrics met the music in the most beautiful way. I felt like with every song I was further on a journey that examined a relationship so honestly and whole from being in love to the moment you realize that it’s over to the moment you have finally started to move on. It is bittersweet, melancholy, and optimistic all at once.




Clique - Clique
favorite track: "Sucker" + "Get By"

Bands in Philly are a dime a dozen... Truly. I believe that many of those bands subconsciously write music that they think will mean something to someone else that has no personal meaning to the musicians. There are a lot of Snowing and American Football covers for that reason. And that’s okay, it’s just boring. Then there’s Clique. Their self-titled EP is lyrically debilitating with no better way to describe than to say it makes me feel “some type of way.” I feel like I’m in a deep reflectively trance from start to finish. They really hit it out of the park on their first try and that’s more of an accomplishment than some band’s entire discography.




The Hotelier - Home Like Noplace Is There
favorite track: "Dendron + The Scope of All This Rebuilding"

I don’t even remember when I first heard this record. That may be because I have nearly played it to death and back hundreds of thousands of times. A phenomenal record for me is determined by its listenability. This means sitting down and listening to a record start to finish without getting bored or confused when it takes an irreverent turn. Home Like Noplaceis There listens like a diary left open. Every time it’s picked up it tells a story, whether it be about personal identity, abandonment, or mental illness. It is impossible to put down once you’ve begun as you are bound to find a song that hits you in a place that nothing else has. I got to see the record performed in its entirety at FEST 13 and I can say it nearly changed me. They are not empty feelings or realities and you can see that in the way people respond and how the songs themselves are presented. I have never felt so connected to a record - at least I haven’t for a really long time...




Hightide Hotel - Naturally
favorite track: A Soft, Subtle Sound

It’s not a secret that as all patiently waited for the final HH record to be released after being completely finished last fall/winter there were several of us that got our hands on it a little earlier. I would say nearly all of Philadelphia, in fact. We had housed the best kept secret and I think when people heard it for the first time this September they would agree that it was worth the wait. I had always heard about this band from my Lehigh Valley friends who would probably tell you that listening to this band’s discography is like going to church. It took me a minute but I finally found myself agreeing. Naturally this is best listened to while coming out of a rut as the music itself feels terribly optimistic juxtaposed with lyrics describing the motions of acceptance and moving on which compliments their Nothing Was Missing, Except Me record. That was more acceptance, reflection, and depression more than anything else. I felt like Naturally was the most perfect end to that story but also an incredible record to leave us with as we personally mourn the end of Hightide Hotel.



Drake - Singles

"How Bout Now" is my favorite Drake song we are so blessed




Mitski - Bury Me at Makeout Creek
favorite song: "first love/ late spring, i don’t smoke, i will"

I worship this record. Worship. It feels like waking up from a winter hibernation. It feels like floating while being hypnotized by a choir or meditating to drawn out fuzzy guitar. It is mesmerizing. It can be haunting. It feels like being up at 2 am with a buzz staring at your ceiling and wallowing. Lyrically, this record is worthy of a pulitzer. Musically, this record is intoxicating and goes on a new journey with each track. I don’t think there are enough ways for me to describe how important this record is to me and how it is probably more than the top of my end of the year list but also one of my favorites of all time.

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Tim Earle's Episodes You Should Have Seen in Twenty Fourteen

December 20, 2014, 7:58 pm

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Reviewing TV pilots is, in some ways, a lot like evaluating a baby. It doesn't matter if he'll grow up to be Neil deGrasse Tyson, for now he's a drooling idiot who keeps trying to eat his own vomit. Pilots are often the worst episode of a show. On the other hand, sometimes a pilot is all a show has to offer and after the first episode the show just circles the drain. So I want to talk about episodes that were really damn good in 2014 that weren't pilots. Here's my list, in no particular order. 


The Legend of Korra - "Ultimatum"

"As long as I'm breathing, it's not over."

Avatar: The Last Airbender was one of the more important kids shows of the last decade. It handled adult themes in a way that was kid friendly and yet in no way watered down. The Legend of Korra is an excellent companion piece to Avatar, but for a slightly older generation. And yet it has been shat upon by Nickelodeon, its third season getting released with no marketing, then pulled from air halfway through its run, available only via streaming on the Nick website. And it's a shame because the third season of The Legend of Korra is the best by far. The fourth and final season, airing currently, is not bad but pales in comparison. "Ultimatum" is a perfect specimen of what Korra does best. It's mostly fun and fast paced, and yet complex, highly political events underline every moment, every choice. On top of that, this episode has the best fight scenes I've seen on television ever, in my whole life. They are beautifully animated, amazingly choreographed and staged. The represent everything that animation can bring to the table with martial arts and they do so without ever forgetting about the stakes that underpin the action. I'm happy to be able to suggest many high caliber kid's shows (Adventure Time, Over the Garden Wall, Bravest Warriors) that parents can watch as well. But The Legend of Korra is the only kid's show this year that is constructing a cohesive lesson on how to view world politics. Also, girl power. So much girl power.

The Good Wife - "Last Call"

"What does it mean if there is no god? How is that any better?"

"It's not better. It's just truer." 

Speaking of girl power and politics... The Good Wife! There's nothing quite as shocking as killing a main character in a TV show. Since it is such an easy way to drum up emotion and pathos, it is frequently misused as a cheap trick to cover up poor character growth or to mine some drama out of an actor's contract dispute. Despite being a personal top ten drama for the last four years, this year, The Good Wife decided to kill off a main character for all the wrong reasons. And yet, from the ashes of this bad decision, the writers for The Good Wife created an hour of unwavering emotional free fall, the likes of which I have not seen since Buffy The Vampire Slayer ("The Body"). What is most fascinating about "The Last Call" is that there is a very serious discussion of atheism plopped down in the middle of what is otherwise a very focused story about discovering the meaning of a dead man's last voicemail. I find that atheism is often misrepresented in TV if represented at all. Atheists in media are always either acerbic intellectuals or nihilists. Rarely do you see a woman with a family, and a job that has nothing to do with science, who simply does not believe. There is no reason, no psychological framework, for her atheism. She just has no faith. And after decades of shows dealing with matters of faith, it's nice to see the other side represented with the same emotional care.

The Americans - "New Car"

"It's nicer here, yes. It's easier. It's not better."

And speaking of struggles with atheism... The Americans! I've started pitching The Americans to people as "Mad Men with a plot." I don't mean to disparage Mad Men. Sometimes finely crafted wandering is enjoyable. But every now and then, it's nice to see a little story between all that symbolism and critique. And story is where The Americans is king. Each season is a mile-a-minute spy thriller, loaded with heaping doses of critique and satire. What stands out about "New Car" is just how many themes it juggles. American commercialism, patriotism, the futility of vengeance, all culminating with the tearful breakdown of a child who was caught sneaking into the neighbor's house to play video games. And it's moment's like this, where the stakes are relatively low and the setting is intimate that the show strikes its hardest. Because no battle, no global event will ever hit as close to home as... well... home. 

Game of Thrones - "The Mountain and the Viper"

"People die at their dinner tables. They die in their beds. They die squatting over their chamber pots. Everybody dies sooner or later."

And speaking of the futility of vengeance... Game of Thrones! Where everybody dies and nothing has any meaning. This episode is Game of Thrones at its finest. The fight has edge-of-your-seat tension, breathtaking choreography and nightmare-inducing special effects. The writing is crisp, the meanings layered. And while it ends with a woman shrieking in horror, it also features one of the show's most triumphant moments. Sansa Stark, after seasons of nonstop torture, emerges from the castle, clad in black feathers, powerful, magnificent. It won't last, because nothing ever does. But for a moment, Game of Thrones has given us the kind of triumph you can't manufacture with all the special effects in the world. It is the triumph you earn. The victory you claim by passing through the flames.

Rick and Morty - "Rixty Minutes"

"Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody's going to die. Come watch TV."

And speaking of everybody dying and nothing having any meaning... Rick and Morty! This is the funniest half hour produced in 2014, without a doubt. No contest. It takes what is essentially a throwaway sitcom B plot and turns it into a mission statement. And it couldn't have come at a better time. 2014 was a decidedly unfunny year. Robin Williams passed away, Bill Cosby probably raped a lot of women. It was hard to find new things to laugh at without feeling bad about yourself. But not Rick and Morty. Rick and Morty laughed at all the bad stuff and said, "Not only is it OK to laugh, it is the only thing you can do." Not since Douglas Adams has a show mined this much humor out of destroying all life on earth. And I can't think of a time in the history of television when nihilism has kept a family together. Life sucks, I know. Wubalubadubdub! 

True Detective - "Who Goes There"

"Enough with the self-improvement-penance-hand-wringing shit. Let's go to work."

And speaking of nihilism... True Detective! I think I loved True Detective a lot less than everyone else. It's on my top ten list, so obviously I loved it, just not as much as the guy sitting next to me. The main complaint I have with the season is that it isn't as profound as it pretends to be. But not being profound is not a bad thing. If you aren't telling us a story about life, but instead just telling us a story about two guys and a case, it frees you up in a lot of ways. So, why do I love this episode so much? Rust says it all when he says, "Let's go to work." This is the finest hour of True Detective. There is no pontificating, no discussions of emotional turmoil. Instead, Rust and Marty go off book and get into some serious shit. And boy is it thrilling. Everyone and their mother knows about the six-minute continuous take, but what is more interesting to me is the six minutes of no scripted dialogue in what is otherwise such a talky show. It is just action, tension, spectacle, and dread. And in the end, what makes "Who Goes There" such a good episode of television is that all that talk of "touching evil" is just talk. Finally, here, we see the lengths Rust is willing to go to for the truth, for his obsession. It is hypnotizing and deeply troubling. 

Hannibal - "Tome-wan"

"Whenever feasible, one should always try to eat the rude."

And speaking of hypnotizing and deeply troubling... Hannibal! I honestly cannot get over how beautiful this show is. It is unthinkably pretty. And it has the greatest score on television - all sloshing water and bending pipes with the occasional brush of piano strings, haunting and murky. Season one of Hannibal was a descent into madness, while season two is a game of cat and mouse between Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter. Of course, you're not ever sure who is the cat. Unfortunately, the season finale wraps up this battle of wills in a very stupid and clunky way, but right before the final episode came "Tome-wan," a moment of stillness and camaraderie between Will and Hannibal before it ends. Hannibal is very much like an epic poem of old, prone to hyperbole and meandering philosophical musings, filled with heroes, gods, and the Devil himself. But like all good epic poems, it makes a world of strange beauty that you cannot help but tumble into.

Fargo - "A Fox, A Cabbage, And a Cage"

"I'd call it animal except animals only kill for food."

And speaking of the Devil... Fargo! Fargo could have easily wound up the ugly stepchild of one of the greatest movies ever made, but instead it treated its pedigree as a challenge and rose to the occasion, becoming one of the greatest miniseries of all time and my favorite show of 2014. How it does this is honestly beyond me. The twists and turns, the humor and horror, all make a little clockwork universe too complex and tightly wound for me to ever really wrap my head around. At first I thought it was impressive that Noah Hawley wrote every episode, but after watching the whole season, I can say that no committee could have ever made that show. It is a singular creative vision, and it is a bold one. Though I can't ignore the fact that Noah Hawley had help from some of the year's most brilliant performances. Allison Tolman is a gem, Joey King is possibly the best child actor out there right now, and Martin Freeman deconstructs everything that has made him lovable in a long career of being lovable. Eventually, Martin becomes a villain so malevolent he dwarfs even Billy Bob, who is the actual Devil.

The reason I chose Fargo's penultimate episode is, like the show's very inception, it takes what seems like a bad idea on paper, and makes it brilliant in actualization. Shows rarely come back from inserting a "one year later" in the middle of a season. Hell, most shows rarely come back from inserting anything more than a summer break. But Fargo does exactly that. It skips ahead a year. Lots of things change, cases close, people move on, and more importantly, the Devil is now a dentist. Turning your biblically evil bad guy into a dentist may be the single greatest story decisions I've ever seen in television. And the Billy Bob really commits to his character reassignment, constructing a new look, a new demeanor, and a new catchphrase. Aces!

The Honourable Woman - "The Paring Knife"

"Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that in a room full of pussies, I'm the only one with a vagina."

Speaking of a miniseries with a single bold creative vision... The Honourable Woman! Hugo Blick's strange, dreamy, chronologically-impaired spy thriller. This show, despite having star power from Maggie Gyllenhaal, managed to slip right under the pop culture radar, which surprises me since it is very similar to True Detective. One mysterious (spy thriller instead of serial murder), two complicated leads (women instead of men), lots of philosophical musing (about politics instead of nihilism), and the same writer and director for every episode (except in this case Hugo Blick is both the writer and the director). Just take a moment to appreciate this accomplishment: a single man directed and wrote what is basically a six-hour film. The show is about an investigation into the very strange life of Nessa Stien (Gyllenhaal) as she tries, in her own way, to bring peace to Israel and Palestine. It's an unwavering parable, and over time Nessa becomes less and less a character and more and more the embodiment of naivety and goodness. So, predictably, she is quite thoroughly punished. The show manages to discuss politics without ever becoming condescending or preachy. It makes some rather bold assertions, not all of which I agree with, but all well thought out. The reason I chose "The Paring Knife" is because it is the final episode, so to see it, you must have watched every episode preceding it. Unlike Fargo or True Detective, the show does not have peaks and valleys, higher and lower quality episodes. The Honourable Woman is a straight shot, a rocket to the finish line. It's a new and fascinating way to make a show.


Last Week Tonight With John Oliver - "Episode 18"

"Currently, the biggest scholarship program exclusively for women in America requires you to be unmarried with a mint condition uterus and also rewards working knowledge of buttock adhesive technology."

Speaking of bold political assertions... Last Week Tonight! This show seemed, at first to be a knock-off Daily Show but missing the daily aspect. Of course, what seemed at first a disadvantage wound up being far from it. Giving John Oliver and his team a week to fully investigate every story meant that Last Week Tonight could do some honest investigative journalism into subjects not usually considered newsworthy - but very much lampoon-worthy. I respect what Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are doing, but they are mostly just sitting on the sidelines making fun of bad journalists. Meanwhile, John Oliver is actually in the game, reporting on real issues that no one seems to care about but everyone should. Interestingly enough, the episode I picked criticizes the US embargo of Cuba which wound up being rather prescient as Obama is now discussing lifting that embargo.

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So there you have it people - my favorite episodes in a banner year for good episodes. Strangely, while writing this I discovered an interesting theme that connects all these shows. It seems 2014 was the year for finding solace in hopelessness. And now that I understand this, it's not so strange that Rustin Cohle took over the internet with his cool disaffected nihilism. This was the year in which the end was nigh and everyone just shrugged and made another beer can sculpture.

10 Excellent Songs from 2014

December 21, 2014, 4:40 pm

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Faith No More - "Motherfucker"

Whirr - "Penny Royal Tea"

St. Vincent - "Birth In Reverse"/"Digital Witness"

Scott Walker & Sunn 0))) - "Brando"


Spoon - "They Want My Soul"



Temples "Shelter Song (Live on the Tonight Show)"

FUCK NBC UNIVERSAL FOR NOT RELEASING THIS CLIP OR THE AUDIO FROM THE PERFORMANCE. YOU GUYS ARE AWFUL.

Circa Survive - "Scentless Apprentice"

Future Islands - "Seasons"



Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - "As Always"

The Best Films from 2010-2014

December 22, 2014, 8:56 pm

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Below is a list of excellent films, to my mind the best, that were made and released between January 01, 2010 and today, December 23nd, 2014. Obviously there are many I haven't seen and I've not included shorts or animated films, for no real reason. Just to make my job easier. I realize there is repetition of auteurs, but it's my dumb list so there. These aren't in any real order. 

1.Hard To Be A God

2.Dormant Beauty

3.Computer Chess

4.You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet

5.Leviathan ('12)

6.Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

7.Holy Motors

8.13 Assassins

9.Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

10.The Tree of Life

11.House of Pleasures

12.On Tour

13.The Turin Horse

14.The Immigrant

15.Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

16.The Deep Blue Sea

17.The Master

18.The Unspeakable Act

19.Once Upon A Time In Anatolia

20.Cosmopolis

21.Force Majeure

22.In Darkness

23.Tabu

24.Patience (After Sebald)

25.Two Years At Sea

26.Shit Year

27.John Carter

28.The Lone Ranger

29.Certified Copy

30.The Grey

31.The Color Wheel

32.A Separation

33.A Touch of Sin

34.Stranger By The Lake

35.Timbuktu

36.The Strange Case of Angelica

37.Beyond The Hills

38.The Hunter

39.Journey To The West

40.Actress

41.Moebius

42.Under The Skin

43.The Grand Budapest Hotel

44.Only Lovers Left Alive

45.A Field In England

46.Hugo

47.The Sleeping Beauty

48.The Rover

49.Perhaps Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve

50.The Wall

51.Inside Llewyn Davis

52.The Past

53.The Wolf of Wall Street

54.Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari

55.Vanishing Waves

56.In The Fog

57.Never Let Me Go

58.Jealousy

59.A Screaming Man

60.Tuesday After Christmas

61.Beloved Sisters

62.Super 8

63.Norwegian Wood

64.Last of the Unjust

65.NEDs

66.Margaret

67.Melancholia

68.War Horse

69.Art History

70.Manakamana

71.We Need To Talk About Kevin

72.Silver Bullets

73.Foxcatcher

74.The Skin I Live In

75.Silent Souls

76.Anonymous

77.Archipelago

78.Beginners

79.Looper

80.Lore

81.Kati With An I

82.The Bling Ring

83.Alps

84.Wuthering Heights

85.Jauja

86.Killing Them Softly

87.Somewhere

88.One Minute of Darkness

89.Miners Hymns

90.Tender Son: The Frankenstein Project

91.Inherent Vice

92.Keyhole

93.Lines of Wellington 

94.La Noche De Enfrente

95.The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

96.Listen Up, Philip 

97.The Mill & The Cross

98.Contagion

99.Mr. Turner

100.Night Moves

Our Favourite Albums of 2014

January 2, 2015, 10:07 pm

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Scout Tafoya

Floor - Oblation
Hands - The Soul Is Quick
D'Angelo & The Vanguard - Black Messiah
Death From Above 1979 - The Physical World
Wye Oak - Shriek
Temples - Sun Structure
Dirty Beaches - Stateless
Cheatahs - Cheatahs
Eagulls - Eagulls
Wu-Tang Clan - A Better Tomorrow
Nick Cave & Warren Ellis - West of Memphis
Cymbals Eat Guitars - Lose
Owen Pallett - In Conflict
Ty Segall - Manipulator 
Ghostface - 36 Seasons
Interpol - El Pintor
Electric Youth - Innerworld
The New Pornographers - Brill Bruisers
Golden Retriever - Seer 
Chad Vangaalen - Shrink Dust

Eli Ianacone

1.Menzingers - Rented World
2.Crosses - Crosses 
3.Electric Wizard - Time to Die
4.Floor - Oblation
5.Death From Above 1979 - Physical World
6.Single Mothers - Negative Quality
7.Sam Smith - In The Lonely Hour
8.Budos Band - Burnt Offering
9.In Utero - Tribute Album
10.“Weird Al” Yankovic - Mandatory Fun

Kyle McDonald

Clap! Clap! - Tayi Bebba
Fatima - Yellow Memories
Photay - Photay
Teleman - Breakfast
CEO - Wonderland
Damon Albarn - Everyday Robots
Ricky Eat Acid - Three Love Songs
Kyle Bobby Dunn - Kyle Bobby Dunn & The Infinite Sadness
Beaty Heart - Mixed Blessings
Bradford Cox - Teenage (Original Soundtrack)
D'Angelo & The Vanguard - Black Messiah
Mica Levi - Under the Skin (Original Soundtrack)
Nick Hakim - Where Will We Go (Parts I & II)
Lullatone - While Winter Whispers


Cooper McKim

Taylor McFerrin - Early Riser
Hiatus Kaiyote - By Fire
Mac Demarco - Salad Days Demos
Matthew Sheens - Untranslatable
Roger Seller - Primitives
Posse - Soft Opening
Wye Oak - Shriek
Statik Selektah - What Goes Around
Gramatik - Beatz & Pieces Vol. 1
Bad and Blue - Bad and Blue


Chloe Stewart

Empty Hearts - Empty Hearts
Robyn Hitchock - Love From London
Vibrators - Punk Mania: Back to the Roots
Real Kids - Shake…Outta Controls
Buzzcocks - The Way

Paul Duane

Fat White Family - Champagne Holocaust
Sturgill Simpson - Metamodern Sounds in Country Music 
Sunn O))) & Scott Walker - Soused

Brettney Young

Alt-J - This Is All Yours
Weezer - Everything Will Be Alright In The End
Beck - Morning Phase
Kendrick Lamar - "I"
Owen Pallett - In Conflict
Tune-Yards - Nikki Nack
And the so-insane-it'- good award goes to What if there was an imp who knew your insecurities by Clean Sadness


Marissa D'Elia

Soul Glo - ""
Radiator Hospital - Torch Song
Clique - Clique
The Hotelier - Home Like Noplace Is There
Hightide Hotel - Naturally
Drake - Singles
Mitski - Bury Me at Makeout Creek

Tim Earle

St. Vincent - St. Vincent
The Belle Brigade - Just Because
Run the Jewels - Run the Jewels 2
Tune-Yards - Nikki Nack
Porter Robinson - Worlds
Masked Intruder - MI
The Both - The Both
Tokyo Police Club - Forcefield
Bombay Bicycle Club - So Long, See you Tomorrow
FKA Twigs - LP1



Tucker Johnson 

Jungle – Jungle
Future Islands – Singles
Yob – Clearing the Path to Ascend
Gary Clark Jr. - Live
Interpol – El Pintor
Jack White – Lazaretto
Tom Petty – Hypnotic Eye
Weezer – Eveyrthing Will Be Alright in the End
Beck – Morning Phase
New Pornographers – Brill Bruisers
Pink Floyd – The Endless River
Death From Above 1979 - The Physical World

Ashley Tryba

1. Grouper - Ruins
2. Angel Olsen- Burn Your Fire For No Witness
3. Avi Buffalo - At Best Cuckold 
4. Swans - To Be Kind 
5. Ty Segall – Manipulator
6. Against Me! - Transgender Dysphoria Blues
7. Sharon Van Etten - Are We There 
8. Spirit of the Beehive – Spirit of the Beehive
9. Alvvays- Alvvays
10. Goat– Commune 

Daniel Khan

1. Aphex Twin - Syro
2. Death From Above 1979 - The Physical World
3. St. Vincent - St. Vincent
4. Sam Roberts Band - Lo-Fantasy
5. Lykke Li - I Never Learn
6. Caribou - Our Love
7. Ty Segall - Manipulator
8. Real Estate - Atlas
9. Swans - To Be Kind
10. Flying Lotus - You’re Dead
11. The War On Drugs - Lost in the Dream
12. Sharon Van Etten - Are We There
13. The Men - Tomorrow’s Hits
14. Beck - Morning Phase
15. Liars - Mess
16. TV On the Radio - Seeds
17. Sondre Lerche - Please
18. Leonard Cohen - Popular Problems
19. Run the Jewels - Run the Jewels 2
20. Owen Pallett - In Conflict
21. Goat - Commune
22. Jack White - Lazaretto
23. Echo & The Bunnymen - Meteorites
24. D'Angelo & The Vanguard - Black Messiah

Our Favourite Films of 2014

January 2, 2015, 10:56 pm

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Tucker Johnson

The Immigrant
Inherent Vice
Boyhood
How to Train Your Dragon 2
Snowpiercer
The Babadook
They Came Together
The Rover
Life Itself
Interstellar


Scout Tafoya

Below is a list of films that I saw and loved last year, that only just saw US releases this year. My complete, long-as-christ's-beard list will go up very soon. 

1. The Immigrant
2. Vanishing Waves
3. A Field In England
4. Stranger By The Lake
5. The Congress
6. Moebius
7. A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness
8. Gebo & The Shadow
9. Me & You
10. Outrage Beyond


Michelle Siracusa

1. Snowpiercer
2. Nightcrawler
3. The Babadook
4. The Boxtrolls
5. The Guest
6. Grand Budapest Hotel
7. Only Lovers Left Alive
8. Cold In July
9. Under The Skin
10. The Rover


Sean Van Deuren

Boyhood
The Grand Budapest Hotel
The Wind Rises
Under The Skin 
Only Lovers Left Alive 
Nightcrawler
Life Itself 
Obvious Child 
Listen Up, Philip 
A Most Wanted Man


Kyle McDonald

Journey to the West
Snowpiercer
Over The Garden Wall
Interstellar
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
A Field In England
The Lego Movie
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Under The Skin


Brettney Young

We Are The Best!
Edge of Tomorrow
Grand Budapest Hotel
Frank
Godzilla
Big Hero 6
Boyhood
Grand Seduction
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1
The Lego Movie


Mark Lukenbill

 Nymphomaniac
See You Next Tuesday
Under the Skin
It Felt Like Love
Butter on the Latch
Gone Girl
Adieu au Langage
Night Moves
Exhibition
Lucy
Manakamana

Short:
Person to Person

Unreleased:
Incompresa
Approaching the Elephant


Olivia Collette

This list comes with the caveat that because I’m not a full-time critic, there’s a whole lot of cinema I still haven’t seen. Since much of it has already appeared on other full-time critics’ top 10 lists, it seems pointless to belabour the points already expertly drawn out by these fine folks. So I’ll stick to just a few of my faves. Warning: spoiler-ish details ensue.

The Congress
Animation has the potential of being graphene for the imagination, so I’m always disappointed when it’s used to look life-like. In Ari Folman’s previous film, Waltz with Bashir, animation was a tool to exhume and reconstruct memories, long crippled by the fog of PTSD. In The Congress, Folman collaborated once again with animator Yoni Goodman, this time to convey the fluidity of a hallucinogenic state, coupled with the idea of a world we’d prefer. The film explores the ramifications of fame on our collective consciousness, while challenging the notion of self-preservation and just how much of yourself really belongs to you. Goodman’s animation doesn’t try to be realistic, and the world he and Folman create is fragile and unreliable. It’s paved in betrayals of the mind, but it’s more candid about it than reality.

The Babadook
The scariest movies observe the horrors that live inside the mind. At the heart of this story is a mother, Amelia, who still hasn’t processed the grief of losing her husband as they were en route to the hospital to deliver their baby, or the resentment she feels towards her son Samuel for surviving what her husband didn’t. If this film is the spiritual sequel to Rosemary’s Baby, Amelia is the mother Rosemary turned out to be: exhausted, embittered, cursing her parental duties and her problem child. There are so few actors in The Babadook, and any character who’s steady or dependable enough to latch onto is never around for very long. The Babadook “monster” turns out to be a MacGuffin, because the film is more interested in the unsettled psyches of a mother and son who are essentially at war with one another. The film is a bloody good horror that spills very little blood.

The Grand Budapest Hotel
I don’t know if The Grand Budapest Hotel is the most Wes Anderson of all Wes Anderson films, nor if it’s the best among them. There’s certainly some maturity to the production, and because I wrote about Alexandre Desplat’s score for Matt Zoller Seitz’s upcoming book on the film, I’m biased about the way music textures the movie, or even how it establishes comedic beats. The reason it’s on this list at all is because it’s quite simply an entertaining romp. Looking just at the casting: Ralph Fiennes is wildly hilarious, Tilda Swinton is never too big for a small part, and a grunt from Willem Dafoe is more menacing than most movie villains with a gun manage to be. There’s a lot more going on in this film than a first viewing will catch, which speaks to the great amount of detail Anderson writes into his scenes. Altogether, it’s a fun trip to his distinct universe.

Jodorowsky’s Dune
What happens to movies that never get made? Usually, they’re forgotten forever in showbiz purgatory. But Alejandro Jodorowsky has proof that his mid-1970s version of a Dune movie could have happened. Reams of it! It’s all documented in a thick pre-production book that includes some of the most valuable drawings that may have been put together in a tome: concept art by H. R. Giger, storyboards by cartoonist Jean Giraud, aka Moebius, and production design by Chris Foss. Jodorowski also managed to recruit Dan O’Bannon for special effects, Pink Floyd for music, and he cast no less than Orson Wells, Salvador Dalí and Mick Jagger in key parts. In my favourite sequence, the storyboard is animated to show us of what the opening scene of Jodorowsky’s Dune would have looked like, and it’s a very exciting 30 seconds. But Jodorowsky’s project was too ambitious, and despite rampant Dune purism among the novel’s fans, I doubt that even its most loyal disciples would have sat through a 15-hour film. Still, wouldn’t it be great if they made a TV series out of it? I know it’s already been done, but Jodorowsky’s crazy wasn’t on it.

Lucas Mangum

Birdman
Cheap Thrills
Blue Ruin
Guardians of the Galaxy
20,000 Days on Earth
The Babadook
Nymphomaniac
The Lego Movie
Horns
The Grand Budapest Hotel

Honorable Mentions: Chef and Occulus


Daniel Khan

1. Citizenfour
2. Mr. Turner
3. Listen Up Philip
4. Under the Skin
5. Snowpiercer
6. Force Majuere
7. Only Lover Left Alive
8. The Babadook
9. The Dance of Reality
10. Nymphomaniac
11. The Grand Budapest Hotel
12. The Immigrant
13. Ida
14. The Rover
15. The Blue Room
16. Selma
17. The Tale of Princess Kaguya
18. Venus In Fur
19. They Came Together
20. John Wick

Honorable Mentions:
Captain America: The Winter Soldier, The Unknown Known, Birdman, Beyond the Lights, Gone Girl, Cold In July, Love Is Strange, Life Itself

Noah Aust

The Immigrant
Beautiful and heartbreaking. Film at its purest. This isn't the real world, this is the world of cinema, melodrama, doomed antiheroes and tragic love triangles. It's a reworking of Fellini's La Strada, but while that had elements of neorealism, The Immigrant is planted firmly in the world of operatic make believe. But it's a world I desperately want to believe in. Film critics talk about 'the death of cinema,' and sometimes it feels like they're lamenting this antiquated bourgeoisie artifact. But I'll miss cinema like The Immigrant.

Zero Theorem
I fucking love Terry Gilliam. Watching Baron Munchasen at six or seven changed my life; ever since, his films have basically defined the medium for me. So it's possible that I approach his new work with a certain level of bias. But holy shit, I loved Zero Theorem. It's his most mature film yet. Brazil was an adolescent punk rock rally against the system. It was exhilarating in its clumsy, angry energy. The message wasn't that complex-- it's the institution, guys, we're all cogs in the machine!!!-- but that didn't matter. The joy came from watching Gilliam hurtle every thought, idea, gag, anxiety, and fantasy against the screen.

Zero Theorem is an older, sadder vision. This time the conflict is personal. Even though the plot sounds typically zany, at its heart it's a very simple, quiet story about one man's struggle with anxiety and depression. The world seems dystopian, but that's only because it's shot through our protagonist's incredibly subjective viewpoint. The apocalypse is internal. Everybody else is having a blast. Everything feels a little sadder, a little more worn-out, bargain bin. (Gilliam's budget restraints definitely add to the feeling.) Usually Gilliam treats his characters a little like bugs, cackling as he brings down his boot. By the end of Zero Theorem, nobody's cackling. The smirking dark comedy is over. Gilliam's garish cartoon characters have turned into actual people, and Cohen's fate made me really, deeply, honestly sad.

Birdman
I thought it was brilliant. The acting, the camerawork, everything was absurdly wonderful. I loved Keaton's character, and I loved how his artistic quandaries mirrored so many of my own creative anxieties. It's cathartic to watch your deepest fears projected and made fun of on a movie screen.

The Grand Budapest Hotel
Kind of like The Immigrant, I was completely swept away by the beautiful storybook feeling of it all. Wes Anderson has this really unique style, and he keeps trying it out on different genres, trying to make sense of it and figure out what it means. With The Grand Budapest Hotel, I think it finally clicked. At the film's tragic ending, his aesthetic suddenly made sense to me. All the quirky affectations, the nouveau frills, the Wes Anderson-ness of it all took on this enormous dramatic weight of the loss of innocence. The storybook life ends abruptly, and we're left with an old man alone with his memories.

The Double
Loneliness and isolation have never been so fun. I loved the strange Kafka-esque world and the plot that clicked together like clockwork. In the film's first half, its absurdist style suggests a series of isolated, meaningless episodes. In the second half, you realize it's all cleverly concealed setup, and it all pays off with an amazing punchline. There are references to Švankmajer  Kafka, and Dostoyevsky, but it feels less like a postmodern remix and more like the latest in an old, classical storytelling tradition.

Snowpiercer
I love this movie's passion. I love its hyper-saturated zeal, with everything cranked up to manic surrealism. Put every 21st century anxiety into a blender, throw in Hong Kong action cinema, absurdist political theatre, and Tilda Swinton channeling somebody's nightmarish grade school teacher, and this is what you get. Above all, I love a movie with the guts to say "Sometimes it's better to blow up the train."

I also reallllly dug Mike Fink's webseries Mick Fink.

The Best Films of 2014

January 4, 2015, 11:30 am

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The thing I used to believe about the Palme d'Or was that it rewarded the film that represented the greatest leap forward in the art of cinema. The film that showed us the way towards a brighter future. I've since learned that that is rarely the case, but I've always kept that principle in my heart. What brings us further into the possibilities of the future? What looks back and forward at the same time. What is fearless? What is graceful? What have I never seen before. The first ten films on this list fulfill those qualifications and then some. They are transmissions from our potential. They are bolts from the clear blue sky. They have broken me down and built me back up. They show how great things can be, and how wondrous they already are. I'm already kicking myself that I couldn't see more...

1. Hard To Be A God
by Aleksei German

As swan songs go, they don't get much better. Aleksei German, one of the greatest filmmakers the world ever produced, died before he could see his final masterpiece completed, but he'd been living it his whole life; he'd once been a respected artist and had fallen prey to a government who would rather take his freedom and privacy than support him. He became a refuge in his own country. His final film, a revisionist take on a Strugatsky Brothers novel, is a grotesque reveling in the worst animal instincts bubbling in man's guts and that useless cushion called a brain. A scientist, a transplant from Earth, wanders through the feudal societies on a distant planet observing their slowly pulling themselves from the primordial mud. They are us, hundreds of years in the past, enlightenment a star's luminescence that hasn't reached them yet. German follows the closest thing they have to a leader, Don Rumata, a wretched intellectual charged with punishing anyone who grows any smarter. Rumata traverses the length of the known world avoiding death through luck alone, as it comes for everyone with no rhyme or reason. Rumata's world is ours, their references occasionally modern to jolt us into realizing it, and German predicts the fall of mankind back into the savage protomen we all descended from. He looked around and saw nothing but chaos, a violent kakistocracy that smothers the spark that makes us human in its crib. German drunkenly ambles through a world without art, a world we're hurtling toward with the speed of a comet. German died for his art. His final masterpiece is a request, like the final vomited howl of a gutshot wolf, to not let art die with him, and every other artist who leaves us before their time. 


2. Actress
by Robert Greene

I've already called this the best documentary of the last ten years, and I don't see much undoing my claim. After all, you'd have to invent a new kind of documentary, a floral language, an uncomfortable closeness, a completely original kind of subjectivity. A way to turn life inside out for our inspection. Film and humanity fusing perfectly. A hundred years from now, Greene's beautiful ode to the life of an actress and the very idea of performance will be remembered as the start of a movement. 


3. Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari
by Aleksei Fedorchenko

Aleksei Fedorchenko is not only one of our most precise image makers, he's also our foremost anthropological fiction filmmaker, turning the customs and colour of the Russian backwater into the stuff of sincere, wild cinema. Following up his breathtaking funerary Silent Souls with an omnibus comedy without a hero, or even any recurring characters, and yet a shockingly clear sense of purpose was a gamble that paid off handsomely. Dozens of women are visited for a minute or two to elucidate an older, long unknown way of life, all of them revolving around odd sexual practice and staggeringly lovely rituals. Fedorchenko finds a vein of rich humour here without once resorting to condescension, and there's more invention in one of these vignettes than a dozen mainstream comedies or documentaries. He gets more pathos and awe in two minute chunks than I thought possible. The pleasures crawl over the viewer like a horde of kittens. A woman with a bird caught in her vagina, a gaggle of ghostly mods frothing over dancing girls, a zombie sent to do some romantic harm to a callous woman but winding up at the wrong house. The sense of exploration is just as thrilling as the gags are timelessly bizarre. Fedorchenko is the kind of director who makes me glad I'm alive now instead of during any other golden age of cinema. 


4. Over The Garden Wall
by Patrick McHale

Patrick McHale is a sort of Chris Van Allsburg meets Jon Kricfalusi, a guy who conjures worlds and fills them with the most insane things he can get away with. Impossibility is just a calm reality. His drawings have just the right mix of specificity and broad, elemental history, and his writing toes the line between perverse and adorable, and that loaded mixture works better for him than almost anyone else. In a climate of brilliant animated films and often even more brilliant animated television, McHale still sets himself apart through his idiosyncratic vision of a past only glimpsed in Dickens, Melville and Irving. His latest, the world's first animated miniseries Over The Garden Wall, is the Berlin Alexanderplatz of children's entertainment; a ridiculously moving fairy tale about boys lost in a world they don't understand. McHale paints a lost American landscape and peoples it with critters of every strip, some cute, others terrifying, each one tailored to their genius creators specifications. There is no world quite like that of Over The Garden Wall, but knowing I can visit one fills me with hope and a child's elation. 


5. Only Lovers Left Alive
by Jim Jarmusch

Jim Jarmusch fans have known what it's like following him down rabbit holes. He's tried everything from urban Jidaigeki to Slow Cinema hitmen, and let everyone know what genre looks like when painted with his brush. What I never expected was for a film in which he nakedly lays out his fetishes to seem so fresh and exciting after over thirty years of watching him recast cinema in his image. What was there left for him to share? Well, his idea of a normal, functioning marriage for one. And the perfect ways in which to wile away the minutes of your life. What's ironic is that the rhythm here is the sprightliest Jarmusch has opted for since...well, maybe ever, and the film is about two people who will be around for all eternity if they're careful. Here's hoping Jim Jarmusch lasts at least half as long as that. He's one of the most vital filmmakers in the world because he still sees life as worth living. 


6. Night Moves
by Kelly Reichardt

Kelly Reichardt is like an American Bela Tarr, a director with a hawk's focus and patience, keeping totally cool while everything explodes a mile beneath the surface. She's been making her way through 70s America, revising as she goes. She turned Jerry Schatzberg's Scarecrow into the achingly sad Wendy & Lucy about two vagabonds looking to belong somewhere. Then she remade the entire Monte Hellman canon with Meek's Cutoff. And now here's her fusion of Arthur Penn's 1975 oddball detective story of the same name and William Friedkin's Sorcerer. Reichardt's Night Moves takes the paranoia of Penn's film and the white knuckle existentialist tension of Friedkin's and lights a fuse on America's increasingly bifurcated sense of self. And then simply watches and waits, making us squirm. The odd Bressonian flourish turns the minutest gesture into titanic cries into the void. A man looks at his hands; could they do what he's going to make them? What if they fail him? Can they act without a man's permission? Night Moves hasn't left my mind for longer than a few days since I saw it. 


7.  Inherent Vice
by Paul Thomas Anderson

There is nothing else in the world to rival the experience of watching Inherent Vicefor the first time. A comedy made from the rawest imaginable celluloid, like blotchy paint thrown at a screen. Nothing has its peculiar, bleached vantage point. Nothing has its shocking realness. Nothing has its languid playfulness. 


8. Listen Up, Philip
by Alex Ross Perry

The Color Wheel, Alex Ross Perry's sophomore feature, gestured towards a greatness that only felt out of reach because his budget wouldn't allow him a few key ingredients. Well the budget showed up, and Perry got serious. Aided by Sean Price Williams' sun-baked images and Robert Greene's precision at the editing bay, Perry's gone big and won't ever look back. He's kept his comedy so acidic it melts through the screen, managing to somehow return to the elastic parallel universe he created in his previous films while staying absolutely true to reality when it matters. The insults fly faster than anyone can keep track of them but the cartoonish boors spouting them actually deal with the consequences. The film may seem to entirely surrender the egoist voids at its center, but then it cuts to the people whose real lives are being ruined with every new sling and arrow. Perry may be able to write an asshole better than anyone, but here he crucially makes the fall out felt in tears, screams of exasperation and vacant gazes. The pain of being too close to those who can't love us back is all too real, and Listen Up, Philip knows only too well that when we love ourselves at the exclusion of everyone else, life becomes the nasty, brutish thing we've been promised. 


9. Under The Skin
by Jonathan Glazer

The bliss of knowing you're in safe hands. The shock of realizing you can't know what comes next. The feeling of slowly sinking into a director's wavelength and letting him guide your mind to a warm, safe place to contemplate the image and what wonders it beholds. A work of sensory pleasures and horrors. 


10. Manakamana
by Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez

I may never do better describing this film than when I jokingly said was "life in 2 hours. A real time saver." Here in the foreground is us, homosapiens waiting patiently to get off the ride. There behind them is the screen, showing the world outside. Which do we stare at and why? The characters or the rear projections? Our lives or the natural world we can only gaze at in wonder? It asks us to consider why we stare at a movie screen at all? What comforts do images give us? What do they teach us about ourselves? Why do we keep staring at them, day after day after day? And what do we see in the eyes of others? A sublime rendering of the human condition, which now includes the permanently fixed stare at a falsehood. This film sends shivers down my spine it's so good.


11. Beloved Sisters
by Dominik Graf

George Orwell's Keep The Aspidistra Flying played as a love triangle between romantic poets. Graf tries every imaginable fourth-wall shattering trick to breathe life into conventional lives to remind us that love is always new and original when it happens to us, especially when we don't want it too. Beloved Sisters presents the agony of love we can't control, and the shame of having to feel it's taking up space in our heart when the world refuses to make allowances for it. Your love is not just inconvenient, it's dead, left behind as everything marches forward. Better than any film I've ever seen, Beloved Sisters treats forbidden love as both the serious affront and utter trifle it is. The world is always on the verge of ending and your feelings need edification? It's the cowardly thing to do, but I'm always willing to hear about love that isn't as important as the world around it. 


12. The Grand Budapest Hotel
by Wes Anderson

What is there left to say about The Grand Budapest Hotel? It uses the camera as a practical storytelling device. It has the single most charming performance of the year, if not the decade. It has Wes Anderson's most wicked, morbid gags. It is his most majestic, eccentric, florid and exciting work to date. It's a masterpiece. I wish I had more to offer...


13. Force Majeure
by Ruben Östlund

A film head-over-heels in love with awkward silences and unspeakable explanations. Östlund wrings out two or three Ingmar Bergman scripts into a pot of mordant humour, uncanny interruptions and mise-en-scène so precise it borders on mathematical. Few directors are completely unafraid to dive headfirst into awkward silences and deeply discomfiting situations, and then once they're there, stretch out and make themselves at home. You will want to crawl out of your skin. You will also wish it was about three hours longer to keep hearing how big a grave these poor, hapless fellows can dig for themselves. 


14. Foxcatcher 
by Bennett Miller

In a year filled with cutting examinations of gender and the expectations placed on you because of the gene pool you climbed out of and the organs you were saddled with, Foxcatcher is the most operatically fatalistic. That proved to be quite the turn off for a lot of people, but I fell for it like the star quarterback. Bennett Miller's focus has never been on the exact why's and hows, but the mere horror of what, as that's often the simplest way to make sense of something seemingly impossible to comprehend. Why did John E. DuPont shoot Dave Schultz? He correctly deduced that it's not his concern to figure out why. He's not a journalist nor a psychotherapist. He was interested in the dehumanization that comes from being able to make your brain feel as though it belongs in its body. That you weren't born for greater things. The men of Foxcatcher believe in destiny and it lets them down worse than any father figure could, because they come so close to it. Miller's haunted, brassy compositions and chilling sound design turn this true crime story into something half Ambersons-esque tragedy and half Innocents-esque horrorshow. The world of the rich and their athletic charges, Atlas-like in their perfection, is one painted with formaldehyde. The body must only give up and be mounted on the wall so that the unattainable can remain so. The film observes the conventions of tragedy and fairy tales the same way DuPont must only watch his wrestlers succeed where he fails. The same way Mark Schultz must observe the world DuPont dwells in without ever setting foot in its hallowed ground, no matter how much DuPont takes from him. 


15. Selma 
by Ava DuVernay 

Who was it that said this was the cinematic equivalent of D'Angelo's Black Messiah? Ava DuVernay creates monolithic tableaux of black bodies standing proudly together on hot city streets, unwilling to be moved. Unable to be broken, even by clubs and bullets. DuVernay has a seductive confidence, turning legends into flesh and blood so that we might truly understand the few hours we get to spend with them. She hovers over them, David Oyelowo's Martin Luther King especially, the phantom from the future reminding them that they are being watched by history. King may sit at a table eating grits and cornbread with his friends, but he will always be the closest thing to God that many people have. His performance is a marvel; a man trying to shed his importance and become a cog in the machine he's built. He's at war with his gifts and the hatred that compels every other person on earth and victory of any kind is always just outside his grasp. It comes with a price, measured in bodies, and it tears him apart. DuVernay's loving, trusting camera props him up while he's mired in doubt. It knows the truth even when King forgets it. It's shocking to think we're once more living in an era when images of Black men and women are needed more than ever and incredibly difficult to find in the mainstream. Selma needs to be seen. It needs to win every award. It needs to be on every Movie screen and TV in America. It's a great film about the black experience and when you walk out of the theatre, you realize that we haven't taken two steps forward since LBJ pushed the Voting Rights Act. Walk out of a film since in 1965 and realize that in 2015 we're still so fucking far from free at last. 


16. The Babadook
by Jennifer Kent

I haven't been as terrified of anything since I was a little kid. If Tim Burton had the nerve to really terrify people, he'd have made The Babadook, but then it would have been missing the most essential component of the whole film. Motherhood. The anxiety of being a woman. Of having a child become your sole responsibility. That alone is terrifying, of course. It's a monster that never goes away and it takes the form of the face you love more than anything in the world. The world is full of monsters. Some of them stare at you as you struggle to make your child stop crying. Some of them ride in the carseat behind you. Some of them leave you with the responsibility of raising a child by yourself. Some of them greet you in the mirror. Some live under the bed. Who's to say which is most terrifying. 


17. Snowpiercer
by Bong Joon-Ho

A banquet for fans of 90s Harrison Ford films and dyed-in-the-wool commies alike, Snowpiercer is the adventure film of yesterday tomorrow. Unrepentant in all its excesses.


18. Ernest & Celestine
by Stéphane Aubier, Benjamin Renner & Vincent Patar 

The last ten years have seen animation studios the world over trying to compete with Pixar's reign over the landscape. The only upside in movies like Cars 2 and Monsters University representing the creative nadir of the world champions of honest tears and mile-wide smiles is that a gap opened for animation fans to go looking beyond the usual suspects. The last time we saw this particular team of kooks was the delirious A Town Called Panic, a film bursting at the seams with anarchic invention. In Ernest & Celestine they keep the more-is-more antics intact, and add an ingratiating sweetness. I dare you not to fall in love with the world's cuddliest domestic partnership. There's is a triumph over society's expectations, and the films one of reliable, hand-drawn comforts. I'm all for Pixar returning to form, but there will always be endlessly warm alternatives to find solace and joy in. 


19. Mr. Turner
by Mike Leigh

Mike Leigh's biggest stumbling block at this point in his life is that he's made so many goddamned masterpieces that we have to reckon with each new film's place in his stunningly consistent canon. Mike Leigh made one of the crowning achievements in film biopic in his Gilbert & Sullivan homage Topsy-Turvy, which had musicality on its side. Mr. Turner, on Msr. JMW that, wants for a little of Topsy-Turvy's jaunty rhythm and vivacious score. But that's really all that's wrong with it. Timothy Spall's ragged, jagged performance is one of the finest actor's creations I've ever seen; his rumpled pallet sputtering out Victorian english like a drunken novelist at a reading. He grunts and stumbles around his life and legacy, aware that all that remains is for his art to fall out of favor as he gropes towards modernism. Leigh follows suit, skipping over convention like a missed hopscotch block, leaving traditional biopics behind by just enough to be boldly unsatisfactory as biography. Life just happens. It doesn't mean anything. Mr. Turner embraces the meaningless by painting it the way Turner did, in as rapturously gorgeous terms as possible. The ugliness is there, but life is too vibrant to be pointless.


20. Timbuktu
by Abderrahmane Sissako

The most Fordian film I've seen all year. Sissako is a first-rate symbolist who lets a lithe, aromatic sensuality flutter between the awkwardness of cruelty. You can smell the sweetness of the homes, feel the soft fabric draped around welcoming visages, and feel it in your bones when they're ruined by dogmatic violence. Objectivity and stillness guides a lot of African cinema. Sissako looks to the past, to works like Wend Kuuni and Tilaï as well as golden age Hollywood Westerns for inspiration. The result is a colourful tear-jerker with one foot planted in the disgusting truths about mankind. 


21. Journey To The West
by Tsai Ming-Liang

The patron saint of slow cinema breaks free of the constraints of narrative. Absolutely jawdropping command of space. The purest collaboration with his soulmate, Lee-Kang Shen, and the endlessly game Denis Lavant. No car chase or gunfight could equal the thrill of watching two performers cross axis after axis as slowly as they can manage. The world is their playground. 



22. The Rover
by David Michôd

Mad Max for the slow cinema set, a study in faces and voices. Robert Pattinson and Guy Pearce ricochet off of each other's performances with utter confidence, soft where the other is hard, coiled where the other is loose, scared where the other is threatening. Michôd just sits back and films them like two wild dogs he found. This movie captures you without you realizing it. 

23. Jealousy

by Philippe Garrel

Philippe Garrel's still one of the most vital voices in the French cinema, from his early silent experiments to today, he's known when to cut away from action to inform what he wants us to see. Jealousy is his latest look at the perils of marriage, and at 76 minutes it's most efficiently bewitching. Garrel drops us in one domestic scene after another, allowing us to wonder what happiness means in the 21st century, and how much it's possible to live alone when you surround yourself with other people. Sharp as a tack and soft as snow. 



24. Exhibition
by Joanna Hogg

Joanna Hogg is that rare artist who can make the idle rich more compelling than a natural disaster. They're lush accoutrements are prisons, their unions traitorous, their love untrustworthy. They doubt everything gesture, every bit of ease afforded them. Life at the top is a horror movie with no monster. Trust goes first, then love, and all one can do is peer covetously into strange windows. 

25. We Are The Best!
by Lukas Moodysson

The last ten years taught us that Lukas Moodysson does muuuuch better work when trying to make people happy. He's politely asked his moralizing streak to takes a walk, and in from the cold comes his non-judgmental companion piece to his excellent 2000 film Together. Three girls embrace punk rock, life without rules, freedom from masculine expectation, and most importantly each other. We Are The Best doesn't have a maudlin bone in its body. The journey to agency, compassion and friendship are engrossing enough without help from the director. He knows his trio of rockers don't need anyone telling them how to live their lives.



26. The Boxtrolls
by Anthony Stacchi & Graham Annable

Laika are fast becoming the heir apparent to Aardman Animation. If the leap in quality from the perfectly enjoyable Paranorman to the sublime The Boxtrolls is any indication, we've got a stream of classics in our future from the young turks. An utter delight, creeping and crawling into your heart, coyly divining the nature of human happiness. "We are the good guys, right?" Indeed, indeed, indeed.



27. P'tit Quinquin
by Bruno Dumont

I laughed like a drain at much this year, but never felt as good doing it during Bruno Dumont's send-up of Bruno Dumont movies. 3 hours and change of the kind of sincerely warped fire-and-brimstone as only the monarch of misery, the sultan of sad, the duke of depression, could have dreamt up. For once you don't have to laugh to keep from crying. You can just laugh.


28. Pasolini
by Abel Ferrara

One flawed man pays tribute to another in his own sweet, honest way. I may have cried at the end of this film because Ferrara played his hand correctly and made me care about his character. It may have been because the world was robbed of one of its smartest, most generous artists and socialists. But I think maybe it was because I sensed in Ferrara a respect for Pasolini. Here was his humble offering, a rose on the great man's gravestone. No one now will be able to tell the heroes of the 20th century how much we owe them. We can only try our best to give back.


29. Burning Bush
by Agniezka Holland

One more of Agniezka Holland's outraged political histories. Her years working for TV has given her work a fullness of perspective, covering vast swathes of incident without losing track of the human beings in the eye of the storm. She has the ability to not lose her head when everything looks hopeless, something she shares with her long suffering heroes. 


30. Maidan
by Sergei Loznitsa

An unblinking look at the act of protest. Loznitsa steps out of the past and into the very real, violent revolution taking place on his front door. An essential act of courage from every protestor who passes behind the camera. It's anthropology as much as it's a polemic. And every second of it matters. Revolution matters. Holding a camera or a sign makes no difference, so long as you stand on the right side of history.


31. The Strange Little Cat
by Ramon Zürcher

A quick, warm lesson in how to make the everyday immortal and fascinating. Zürcher grants heartbreaking humanity to an ordinary family, rendering them enormous before our eyes. Every inch of their home is curated to bring out what is hidden behind a glance or a scream. Head to Fandor.com for some of the best writing on this magical little movie. 


32. The Last Of The Unjust
by Claude Lanzmann 

Though The Last of the Unjust serves an imperative function as an investigation into a subject that cannot be covered in enough detail, it's also a weary look at how we record our history. The clarity of digital shows a man in the autumn of his years wondering how we'll look back at the image of our past. The resplendent pastels of celluloid are a brick through the very idea of an untouchable past. The Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein wants to leave his experiences where they lay. Lanzmann and his grainy film know better, that the past exists whether we choose to give it the kiss of life personally with our recollections. Lanzmann struggles with Murmelstein's reticence all those years later. He knew the man, but what did his refusal to become emotional say about the nature of the tragedy he survived. He hid from film as best he could, and now Lanzmann just has digital to help him try to make sense of the man, his memories and the worst crime Europe ever played host to. 


33. Jauja
by Lisandro Alonso

This has been, without question, a banner year for slow or trance cinema. Jauja takes a colonialist, paternalist narrative and stretches it on a rack until all the blood has been drained from Euroheteropatriarchal power. I have a lot more I want to say about this film. Another time. Soon. 


34. The Dance of Reality
by Alejandro Jodorowski

The great surrealist comes out of retirement to dazzle once more with his spinning plates of cinematic tenses. Yesterday and today, real and unreal, possible and impossible, memory and fact. Such splendor in his perfectly sentimental roman-a-clef. His powers haven't dulled a whit. Alejandro Jodorowski is still a magician. He will always be.


35. The Guest
by Adam Wingard

A sexy breach of the fourth wall, as if the characters ask with their come hither glances whether you want to join them on the futon and marathon the best of John Carpenter on VHS. There is much integrity in this loveletter to the 80s, and much to smile at, even when darkness creeps in. Earns every uptick in the body count. A story of many awakenings, not the least of which is that of director Adam Wingard finally making a great film after showing much potential. Dan Stevens is the ultimate impostor, too perfect to be real, too real to be perfect and dripping with ripe, fat carnality. 


36. Obvious Child
by Gillian Robespierre

Unassuming empowerment, the kind that you could watch without realizing you're being shown a devastating show of strength, is quite the neat trick. I like the idea that anyone could laugh at Jenny Slate's adorably prickly performance and the surfeit of gross out humour and not realize how awesomely singular this movie is. We're going to look back on Obvious Child the way we look back at Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. 


37. Story of My Death 
by Albert Serra 

Mayhaps the most colossally weird work of art I saw this year. I treasure my bewilderment as the movie began devouring itself in its lugubrious, teeth-barring second half. The aristocracy as pre-undead, decadence encased in dancing pixels. A construction that never stops giving. 


38. Cold In July
by Jim Mickle

A matryoshka narrative uncovered by a never-better Michael C. Hall who discovers courage in friendship and the catch-22 of male bonding.  Hugely touching when it isn't abjectly bleak and violent. 


39. Nymphomaniac
by Lars Von Trier

Diary as early 20th century novel. Self-effacement and discovery in an untamed narrative. There has been so much great criticism on this movie that even writing these few words feel inadequate. It's such a huge, wonderful film I don't think I could possibly say anything fresh. Von Trier's finally gotten back to making movies I love after a break into the theoretical I found hard to love. 


40. Joe
by David Gordon Green

David Gordon Green's had trouble convincing critics that he's the same old genius they thought they'd uncovered back when he made George Washington back in 2000. I don't really think that guy ever went away, he just followed his muse down a barbed path, one that asked that he leave his skills at home. Well he's back in the wild he knows, and in Nicolas Cage, he's found a kindred spirit. Joe is the roughest film Green's ever made, but also the easiest to love. His formal chops have come out of storage to prop up four characters on the verge of implosion. His post-Malick longueurs are kept to a minimum, and his rhythm is quicker. His orphaned characters are compelling enough without needing to make nature more than just the unappreciated setting for one horrific clash of wills after another. Green is keenly aware that this will happen again tomorrow just down the road. 


41. Goltzius and the Pelican Company
by Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway not giving up, despite his apparent disdain for modern art is cause for celebration. His freeform experimentation has never felt so light-as-air, so devilish, so totally mad. Godard may have finally figured 3D out, but my favourite âgée terrible is still Greenaway, a pugnacious wizard, conjuring great roaring seas of metacinema. 


42. The Look of Silence
by Joshua Oppenheimer

Defiance belongs to the smallest and the greatest. Oppenheimer's been giving a voice to the voiceless, practicing slash-and-burn issue documentary technique, making the grammar up as he goes. The hideous intimacy of The Look of Silence outpaces the gonzo artifice of The Act of Killing by refusing to let murderers hide. It does not wait to demand that humanity be recognized. Every war, every conflict, genocide and holocaust needs a Look of Silence. Maybe then they'll stop happening. When those who kill without mercy are really held accountable, really made to understand what they've done, maybe then they can pass that message onto their children, and they to their children's children. 


43. Enemy
by Denis Villeneuve 

Toronto movies are in short supply. Movies that proudly show off the schizophrenic town and its particular anonymity. After a few years abroad Denis Villeneuve returned home anxious to take big risks in little ways. He surrounds his impossible dual protagonists with Toronto's imposing architecture, and coats them in a Soderbergian yellow smog. Their uniqueness is rendered moot by their lack of vision, their stunted ambition, and the mere fact of their being no room for one of them to succeed, let alone both of them. Enemy, like the best work of Villeneuve's countrymen Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg, infiltrates your consciousness like a brooding, viral fog seeping into your ears, putting ideas and thoughts in there that you'd rather not fully comprehend. What mustn't get lost, however, is how much fun this petite brain teaser is. I had such fun waiting for the next bad decision to arrive. Villeneuve has proven he's unafraid of any implication, so it was merely a question of how far he'd go. He didn't disappoint. 


44. The Blue Room
by Mathieu Amalric

Puzzlebox perfection from my favourite person in France. Amalric is a chameleon on and off camera, slipping into characters with the same practiced ease he changes directorial modes. After making his masterpiece, the gently bawdy On Tour, he opted for a conventional mystery told in a dazzling unconventional way. The Blue Room runs through your mind like a bullet, and when it's over, you'll wonder what hit you. 


45. Saint Laurent
by Bertrand Bonello

Bertrand Bonello may never find subject matter that fits his sensibility quite so stupendously as his last film, the 2011 gem House of Pleasures, he had to settle for going completely on the nose. No problem there. The release of a by-the-numbers biopic of the famed designer and his particular buttoned-up decadence highlighted just how well Bonello's sexually charged ennui finds the truth of a subject by revealing the feel of it. Anyone could tell you how Yves Saint Laurent rose to prominence and fell from grace. Who else could give you front row seats to an understanding of the power he felt by being the world's most sought after fashion icon. Bonello describes the condition of being Yves Saint Laurent. Here's how it felt to have a fleet of designers at command, to have boardrooms full of people trading millions of dollars just so that your clothing might be seen on a runway. That is Bonello's gift. Saint Laurent is his gift to us. 


46. Land Ho!
by Aaron Katz & Martha Stephens

Katz finds essential humility in yet another genre,  this time the hoary self-discovery road trip movie, ably helped by Martha Stephens in letting the manginess of the characters blossom. It's good to have Katz back, because I once again trusted him to turn something pat into something vivacious and humble. 


47. The Dark Valley
by Andreas Prochaska

A Western that embraces not only the cursed masculine sexuality of the 1950s, not only the brutal darkness of the 1970s, but the balletic deconstructions of the 2000s. Put more simply The Dark Valley is The Day of the Outlaw meets McCabe & Mrs. Miller through the filter of The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford. It's a film we need more of in a hurry. Sam Riley is both hero and villain here, and is just wretchedly alluring enough to pull it off. 



48. Ida
by Pawel Pawlikoski

It's about the simplest sensations. Of a camera remembering to change angles when the dynamic changes and hope falls from the faces of its characters. It's about the sound of jazz music in a big, smoky hall. It's about a woman trying on elegant clothing for the first time. It's about discovering the wide world, one depressing realization and excited new feeling after another. I can see why people took against this, but I don't think it had the ambition many assumed it did based on its positive notices. This isn't a film out to change the world. Just one trying to show one girl's worldview expand by increments. Tragedy is everywhere. That's no longer special. A young girl's life is. 


49. Serena
by Susanne Bier

A pre-code programmer in post-Dogme clothing. Unafraid of great melodramatic gestures, Susanne Bier finds a home for her version of doomed love and broken men that doesn't show the strain of making them make sense to a modern audience. Serena, more than the high profile feel-goodery they've done together, how magnetic and winning Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper can be. They work as the kind of people Clark Gable and Barbara Stanwyck used to play before anyone knew their names because they knew that only abandoning self consciousness could make a film like this, heart nakedly on sleeve, work so well. 


50. Transcendence
by Wally Pfister

The Terminal Man for an audience who didn't appreciate the effort it took to make it palatable for them. I find this movie almost unbearably sad.


51. The Homesman
by Tommy Lee Jones

A psychodramatic western with a heart that sags into its guts, weighted down by sadness. Bemoaning what it could have been is pointless. The film and its protagonist are deliberately ill-equipped to handle the full breadth of a woman's pain and suffering. Women were as foreign to men back then as the natives they took their land from. We have done very little to correct this dissonant attitude. Too few people have made an attempt to understand the gesture that makes the film change horses midstream. Watch this twice if you don't get what Jones is doing. 


52. Djinn
by Tobe Hooper

An urgent plea for an understanding of the pressure facing mothers, and that it becomes amplified when religion is a factor. Hooper still gets much mileage out of filling the dark with ghouls, nearly forty years after he put the ultimate boogieman around the next corner.




53. A Walk Among The Tombstones
by Scott Frank

From the grime to the pace to the shamus calling the shots to the satisfaction of watching a gruff bastard put the pieces together and save a very broken day, everything's an antique in Scott Frank's version of noir. 


54. Rambleras
by Daniela Speranza

In a year full of cutting edge documentaries that scream for understanding, for basic decency, there's maybe no louder demand for acceptance than this deceptively breezy comedy. A friend recommended this film, convinced he'd seen one of the best movies of all time. A few more viewings and I might be inclined to agree. Right now? It's absolutely magnificent. Three women with nothing in common learn to be able to rely on each other when their usual companions prove unreliable. Their crawl toward understanding each other (not to mention themselves) is enthralling. It's so simple, yet it's the hardest thing they've ever done. 

55. Gerontophilia

by Bruce LaBruce

Bruce LaBruce, you old softie. The heart of Canada's raunchiest provocateur grew three sizes that day and out came a pitch-perfect parody of Gregg Araki movies. An uber 90s-punk fantasia of slow-mo caresses and tainted l'amour fou. I'd never been happier that I'd given someone 8 bucks on kickstarter, though I'm quite certain this would have been good with my help. 


56. Like Father, Like Son

by Hirokazu Kore-Eda

This is what American studios should be producing every month. The premise is so contrived it could only happen in a movie. Yet the performances and carefully withdrawn direction find the truth in the lie. 


57. Calvary

by John Michael McDonnagh

What kills you does make you stronger.


58. The Quiet Ones

by John Pogue

When I met Oren Moverman last year, I congratulated not for his very serious statement on the homeless in New York City, but for his rewrite of this possession chamber piece. He looked embarrassed. I stand alone on this, but watching Hammer recast Demons of the Mind in the year that film was made is too much for my nerd heart to resist. And as if that weren't enough, Jared Harris plays the world's worst college professor. The gray, 70s aesthetic is seductive, bringing to mind not only hammer but oddities like Roddy McDowell's Tam-Lin. I may well be the only one talking about it in years to come, but there is much to love here. 


59. Life of Riley

by Alain Resnais

One final laugh riot from one of the artist who helped define the last 60 years of our culture. 


60. Our Sunhi

by Hong Sang-Soo

Borrowing the colour pallet from Bergman's Autumn Sonata, South Korean auteur Hong Sang-Soo casts us adrift in a quadrangle of love.  

61. Two Days, One Night

by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

An economic horror movie about the raw strength it requires to look another human in the eye and say you deserve to be treated as an equal.

62. Cheap Thrills

by E.L. Katz

An economic horror movie about the depravity you'll endure just to pay the rent and look your spouse in the eye. Pat Healy is a national treasure. 

63. Natan

by David Cairns & Paul Duane

Two good friends made this movie, so thank heavens it's fab. A hunt for buried facts that invites you into a dark room waiting for pictographic evidence to develop. A crime was committed, and a man was murdered. The man who gave cinema back to France. Every person who sees this film gives a little back to cinema. 

64. Starred Up

by David Mackenzie

A storm of male ego and violence, a fluid, appropriately edgy dive into well-trodden ground. Mackenzie's camera keeps just the right distance from his subject to build tension in the simple act of walking from one side of a prison corridor to another. Every performance an outstanding balance of broiling rage and hidden sadness. It's the male animal attempting to understand why it's been caged and failing almost every time. Almost.


65. The Captive

by Atom Egoyan

At it's worst, it's a sort of Haggis-ification of The Sweet Hereafter. At it's best, it's about a father who can't come to terms with what he knows to be true. This is Egoyan back on form. I could watch this movie once a week if for nothing other than the tremendous Ryan Reynolds performance at its core. 


66. Edge of Tomorrow

by Doug Liman

This is as good as a movie whose fundamental premise, grammatically, thematically and considering it's another goddamn Tom Cruise sci-fi movie a year after Oblivion put me the fuck to sleep, is as uninteresting to me as it gets. That this works as well as it does is all Doug Liman...and a special ingredient called Emily Blunt keeping Cruise in check. 


67. The Purge: Anarchy

by James DeMonaco

Death Race 2000 by way of J. Lee Thompson. A pulpy good time. 


68. Abuse of Weakness

by Catherine Breillat

Catherine Breillat turns her encyclopedia of pain on herself, in this study of trust and mistrust, the lengths we go to feel loved. An incisive dissection of identity. 


69. Tom At The Farm

by Xavier Dolan

A hyperactive queer fusion of Straw Dogs and The House on Straw Hill. I'm still not entirely sure what I watched and what exactly it all means, but I had a blast being befuddled. Dolan's images are no fucking joke. 


70. Winter Sleep

by Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Spend three hours in the frostiest place on earth, mentally and physically. This film is no great shakes stylistically. It only really has the safety of a series of womb spaces to offer. That's enough for me. 

71. '71

by Yann Demange

There is something to be said for a director whose only ambition is playing the audience like a thrift store fiddle. There isn't much more than confidence in set pieces, fine performances and the fear of what happens now. On the other hand what else could you ask for from an efficient thriller such as this?


72. Horse Money

by Pedro Costa

A Herzogian installation about those the world forgets. One indelible image peering into you after another. The greatest, most frightening opening of any film this year. The crimes against the poor become a disease that only the upper class claim to know how to cure. Poverty a mindset as much as a set of circumstances. And both keep the poor where the government wants them. 

73. La Sapienza

by Eugène Green

In which people are almost as difficult to move as the buildings they so admire. A sublime work of transformation. 


74. If You Don't, I Will

by Sophie Fillières

In a year with seven different Mathieu Amalric performances to choose from, sometime I like it when he's called upon to provide the best possible space for another performer to do their best work. Here, his hapless boor sets the stage upon which Emmanuelle Devos can strut. Devos is beyond great as a bourgeois woman who realizes that she never goes anywhere without her husband, who she doesn't even seem to like being around anymore. They've gotten used to each other, so she throws a monkey-wrench into the works. Her usual resolute demeanor is challenged by the sights that greet her on her vacation from normality. She and the natural world size each other up and in case you didn't know you wanted to watch that, you do now. One of the most intelligent romantic comedies of the year. 


75. Step Up All In

by Trish Sie

The 30s by way of the 80s. Call it Gold Diggers 2: Electric Boogaloo. Remarkably old hat, and twice as fun for it. Sie makes a ridiculously assured showing of herself as a first-time feature director. The voltage that flows through Briana Evigan while she dances is not to be ignored. John Wick ain't got nothing on her. 


76. Grisgris
by Mahamat Saleh Haroun

Haroun's latest cry from the gutter concerns a man who for once isn't absolutely gutted by the cruelty of fate. Just when it seems ready for a fall he can't recover from, after a lifetime of such things, he chooses to believe in himself. This time out, he finds a beat that keeps the vicissitudes of unfeeling men at arm's length. Love is finally to be trusted, even if looks ready to fail you. It might not be A Screaming Man (what is?) but it is an incredibly fine piece of work. 

77. Venus in Fur

by Roman Polanski

After a few years playing nice, Polanski returned to what captures his imagination; sexual head games in confined spaces. A devious bit of congress from two of the world's most attractive screen presences, Polanski, the unseen third character egging them on, begging them to get lost in their role-play. 


78. Two Shots Fired

by Martín Rejtman

A deadpan hydra-headed comedy about suicide. I guarantee you won't see anything else like this for a long while. 


79. Mary Queen of Scots

by Thomas Imbach

An abrasive anti-fable about the loss of agency. Edward Hogg and Camille Rutherford both give unfairly fabulous performances as enemies stuck in the same bloodline and under the same roof. These are full human beings and both actors need much more attention for the hard work they do. 


80. Viola

by Matías Piñeiro

A roundelay in close-ups and self-awareness. A souffle filled with knowing smiles and dramatic irony. Shakespeare as backstage hijinks. The human face as a 300 watt bulb, filling a screen and the human heart with intense heat. 

81. Michael Kohlhaas

by Arnaud des Pallières

A brooding anti-western set during the 16th century. A film that morphs with every viewing. A work of vast and impressive textures. 


82. National Gallery

by Fred Wiseman

While my favourite of the great man's work remains La Danse, his treatise on classical art and its place in the world is not to be missed. Wiseman will never stop being among the most important filmmakers out there so long as he chooses to point his camera at something. 


83. Hill of Freedom

by Hong Sang-Soo

Maybe not major Hong (Sunhi's already on this list) but it's non-stop hilarity, with Ryo Kase able to pull the real feeling out from the translation problems. It does have my favourite of Hong's framing devices. 


84. Maleficent

by Robert Stromberg

The film is pretty much all Jolie and Fanning, and that's just fine because they're perfect together. Jolie reminds how spectacularly voluptuous a performance she's capable of, Fanning gives yet another example of how we're all correct to believe her the best actress under 20. But thankfully the people off camera don't drop the ball either. It's a beautiful film without all the murk and poor-me theatrics that ruins these re-Disney films. It's a handsome, quite likable argument for adoption. As if that weren't enough, there's a pretty stellar dragon.


85. Heaven Knows What

by Josh & Benny Sadie

This one hurts like hell, but it demands to be seen. It's all courage.


86. Life of Crime

by Daniel Schechter

The film that finally, mercifully figured out what to do with Jennifer Anniston. In a rogue's gallery of lovable faces, belonging to some of the great character actors of our time, she holds her own. That alone makes this worth watching. But it's also just a rip-roaring good time besides. Daniel Schechter gets the feel of 1978 down pretty good, moving at a brisker clip than Blue Collar or Carwash, but with so much ground to cover, it's a decision that justifies itself. 

87. The Retrieval

by Chris Eska

Showing up the flashy likes of Django Unchained, The Retrieval asks much deeper and much more difficult questions of an audience looking back on the civil war, only vaguely aware of what former slaves went through. Here two black men become bounty hunters, turning in another for money they need to stay alive and out of bondage. Where do you draw the line? At what point do you become as bad as your oppressor? I would like to have seen this film get six times the attention it did. But I guess America only has room for so many movies about people they don't want to think about, circumstances they don't want to put themselves in, problems they wish weren't real. 

88. Goodbye to Language

by Jean-Luc Godard

Godard decided he wasn't done inventing modern cinema. 


89. Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq 

by Nancy Buirski

An object lesson in negative space and sound design turning a conventional documentary to new heights of sensitivity. An engrossing experience from the word go. 


90. Zero Theorem

by Terry Gilliam

It may just be plastic Brazil with a different ending, but that ending makes all the difference. The choice that Gilliam's paranoid lover makes is the backbone of human folly. I couldn't believe he ended the film where he did. And I quite liked getting there. 


91. Jimmy's Hall

by Ken Loach

Ken Loach, the last honest Commie, the last angry humanist, and still a great director. Loach somehow makes room for both milieu specific discussions of property, education and demonstration rights without ever forgetting he's telling a story about people fighting for the right to get close to each other and dance. I reject claims that this is minor Loach. 


92. Beauty & The Beast

by Christophe Gans

This is cheating, I grant you, as I had to order this from overseas to watch it, but there was no way I was going to wait for the next Christophe Gans film to suddenly appear in American theaters. The odds that a fairy tale, designed primarily for 8-15 year olds in another language, would ever make it's way over are were so small you need a microscope to see them. And just as I suspected, I haven't heard word one about distributors deciding we deserve this film. Which...sadly, is just as well, because I suspect that like The Moth Diaries before it, this version of the old chestnut would be written off as unfit for adult consumption because it was made for a teenage audience. Ignore that. Gans, who has Tim Burton's goth streak, Rob Zombie's flair for stylized violence, and a fondness for Ophulsian unrequited passion, crafts a rich world for his very 2014 take on a country girl and the wicked creature who loved her. It may be too cuddly for some people. I just found it enchanting. 

93. Jump Street

by Phil Lord & Chris Miller

Lord & Miller are not going to rest on their laurels just because most everyone thinks they're winning every hand their dealt. This was not only funnier than both of their previous outings, it also had time for a very real discussion about friendship. Man children the world over need that lesson. 

94. Life Itself

by Steve James

What is there to say? Ebert made it ok for me to tell people I'm a film critic. I owe him, his wife Chaz and Matt Zoller Seitz my self-respect. This film is one more step towards trying to legitimize an artform which is merely the conversing with film. Something I do every day. 


95. Seventh Code

by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

A pint-sized whatchamacallit from the massive busy other Kurosawa, Seventh Code is one zany reveal after another. It's a romantic comedy, then a spy movie, and it's always anchored by a fiercely committed performance by Atsuko Maeda. Kurosawa's other two films this year (the byzantine Real and the behemoth Penance) were missing this little offering's unwavering sense of fun as the structure makes a left turn every few minutes. What ever could happen next?

96.  Norte, The End of History

by Lav Diaz

Lav Diaz doesn't make movies, he makes isolation tanks to dissolve inside, to bathe in ideas, times and places. His latest, a laconic riff on Crime & Punishment, is like entering someone else's dream for four hours, and thanks to his expressive, smooth colour photography, it's the easiest and kindest to drift through, though the fate of his homeland is just as painful as ever. 

97. Red Army / The Unknown Known

by Gabe Polski / Errol Morris

Two whirlwind tales of corruption, betrayal, espionage, failure and escape told by men unwilling to flinch. Of course one's about hockey and the other's about the world almost ending, but both are made with maximum attention paid to how to suck viewers further down the maelstrom.


98. Stray Dog

by Debra Granik

Debra Granik goes back to the Ozarks for a simple, often unbelievable story of perseverance. After writing her own ticket with the quietly successful, incredibly moving Winter's Bone, Granik turned away from fiction and found a story that she cared about. Ron Hall, like any Vietnam vet, has demons he can't always wrestle alone. The film is about the community who helps him, and how far-reaching and tireless those people are. Hall travels the country with his fellow vets trying to make sure that everyone who has ever had a night terror because of the horrors they saw during foreign wars gets the help, love and support they so desperately need. At home, he's a rock to his tenants and his wife, for whom he learned Spanish and she learned better English. The world needs more people like Ron Hall, and more movies like Stray Dog. 


99. Jimi: All Is By My Side

by John Ridley

On top of possessing the most radical montage of any film this year, it also walk the same path as Alex Cox's Sid & Nancy, no mean feat. A film on the cusp of a racial divide. Ridley's portrayal of Hendrix is fascinating, still not used to the idea that he can go anywhere and do anything, thanks to shortsighted parents and the experiences of his adolescence. His optimism is mighty, aware that people do really like his art, but when it's betrayed, he lashes out in frightening ways. It's an important film for white boys who worship him to watch, aware that he struggled, suffered and messed up. Oh, and André Benjamin is Hendrix.

100. They Came Together

by David Wain

This one's all taste. If you didn't laugh, not the film's direction nor the cameo appearance by Michael Shannon wasn't going to save it for you. If you did laugh? You laughed all the way through, and you laughed hardest when Michael Shannon shows up. I went maybe 7 seconds without laughing.

Accident Art: Nixon

January 16, 2015, 10:52 am

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This film was the perfect vehicle for my weird brand of fake art, not just because distorting the faces of these characters externalizes their descent into madness, paranoia and monstrousness, but because Oliver Stone's films live and breathe conspiracy. Distorting the images bring out new patterns, layers and symbols that make you wonder what's going on below the surface. Or anyway, there's something incredibly haunting about Anthony Hopkins' Richard Nixon impression turned even more shark-like by removing the humanity of his face. Nixon is one of both Stone and Hopkins' greatest achievements. 

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In A Lonely Place

January 17, 2015, 7:28 pm

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"You're thinking like you're back there." says a character whose name I can't even remember in Michael Mann's Blackhat. I know she's played by Wei Tang from the terrific and underrated Lust, Caution. I know this because like Public Enemies, Michael Mann's last film, Lust, Caution was the last film before a director threw up his hands and said "What do you want?" to an audience he no longer knew how to please. The further into discovering digital - the medium someone else found for him, that he knew would be the future, for better or worse - the further away from audiences he's gotten and the more he's burrowed into a select few critics' hearts. Having worked in a record store that specializes in trade-ins, few directors have their whole catalog traded in with the regularity of Mann, a director I've loved since I was old enough to know what a director is. People don't have the time for him they evidently once did - you can't return a film you didn't buy. And just as Lust, Caution sent Ang Lee racing toward middlebrow, NPR-friendly fare after a fearlessly intimate decade-plus to himself, and Ridley Scott retreated into Gladiator style pablum after the formally abstruse TheCounselor was called the worst film of his already polarizing career, the indifference that greeted Public Enemies seems to have broken Mann's stride. Public Enemies was an experiment in a time, place and language that were altogether unfamiliar to him - I know I'm not the only one who thinks that film redefined the possible in digital grammar. I wouldn't change a frame of Public Enemies. It's perfect in its deliberate imperfections; one of the defining films of the 21st century. And when people shrug at your masterpiece it might just hurt your feelings. 

I don't pretend to know what Michael Mann went through in 2009, but a few things seem clear enough - Blackhat's attitude is one of defeat, a movie defined by grief for a world that has changed and will continue changing. Progress means nothing anymore. Mann was likely equally devastated when he returned to Los Angeles - his true home despite that beautiful Chicago accent - and discovered they'd changed the lights on him. The sick yellow glow of the Halogen street lamps he used to play his greys, blacks and blues against has vanished. Replaced by white/blue flourescents. The resulting vacancy in the air was caught expertly by Robert Elswitt in Nightcrawler - the town finally looks like a set in a tv studio. It's anathema to Mann's version of reality; he has a formula for background stylistics being inversely proportional to the stylishness of the action. Chicago looks like a cool neon nightmare in Thief, but the action itself is all purposely grounded. Tough, but real. He met in the middle for Heat. A new LA just won't do. So, like a thwarted moth, he sought a new source of light. There are the neon orgies on the streets of Hong Kong, the dull sizzle of computer monitors blurring and muting flesh, always presented in contrast to the earthy reality of the skin of those watching, and finally the unearthly glow of the banks and towers of harddrives. Mann's recreation of the inhuman space of data traveling through circuitry is all the virtue (and none of the boneheaded mythology) of Tron and Tron: Legacy in one bravura little sequence. And it hints that a resigned Michael Mann isn't someone concerned with people anymore. His hero is a Chicagoan, like Mann himself, and he's only interested in getting every single task taken care of as quickly and efficiently as possible, because the motivation to do them splendidly isn't there anymore. 

Chris Hemsworth's Nicholas Hathaway is a man who forgets what it meant to do things because there is joy in them. He does them because on the other side is the possibility of remembering how to love them. He emerges from prison after the same number of years since the last time Mann has made a film. He hasn't made a film set in the modern world in almost ten years. That's a long break from depicting our world as we know it. Hathaway is shown first listening to headphones, his hearing muffled. The world is now a little too big, a little too fast. Maybe that's why the mouths speaking Mandarin dialogue seem to lag a little behind their voices. Why Hemsworth needs a long second to himself before boarding a plane to LA. The world is bright now, and both perversely bigger and smaller than it's ever been, to paraphrase Transcendence. We're all in the same room, but no one's on the same wavelength. Hathaway/Mann's way of doing things just don't work anymore. The bad reviews that have greeted Blackhat confirm as much. There are hints of the old Mann in here (The action sequences still glue you to your chair, Viola Davis channels Pacino in Heat very effectively, the frenetic camera work of that film returns briefly, though in truth it resembles a hungover pantomime of the precision ambling of The Color of Money), but we're looking at a director looking for new pleasures. He's found only a few. 

I don't think the Chinese setting was arrived upon idly, as the influence of its vanguard is strongly in evidence. Wong Kar-Wai used to juxtapose the deadly serious (cops, traffickers, hitmen) with the lighthearted (clingy ex-lovers and OCD lovers-to-be) and Mann's fused them without too much fluctuation in tone. The discussion about whether an ex-con should be dating a cop's sister crops up right before a police raid, a stray thread that will eventually be woven into the quilt once the focus has narrowed toward the end. There's a scene in a Korean restaurant that has the languid awkwardness in its choreography that calls to mind the delicate dance of space in Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Three Times. It's clumsier, but Mann has a heavier footfall. The lightest he's ever been was in Public Enemies. Those days are a distant blip in the rearview. Everything here weighs a ton. It starts with how he chooses to fill a frame. He builds himself a considerable team; Davis, Hong Kong police including Hemsworth's love interest, Hemsworth himself, his minder (played with little fuss and credible workmanlike anonymity by the ever-dependable Holt McCallany, still showing the beauty he wore forever and a day ago as a rapist in Alien³) and whoever else happens to be within arm's reach. Mann arranges them in chaotic patterns and erratic formations, hinting that they aren't united by a purpose, merely by incidental geography. Then he makes this giant crew sprint through the X and Z axis as frequently as he can find a reason to. The running is labored and ugly. It looks strange. Perfunctory. "What'd she say?""Move fast." They run because they're being compelled. Different from the usual desperation with which Mann imbues his action sequences. They don't live for this. It's a task, like anything else.  When asked what he'll do once he's been freed Hemsworth lamely suggests that he'll fix TVs. The world doesn't need Mann's version of a hero. The world is quiet and his characters have fallen quiet with it. Mann searches the faces of the dead for meaning and finds nothing as sad as Hemsworth, framed alone in worlds moving at an alien pace. Blackhat is a very lonely film.

There is, however, a dignity in the silence, and here is where Blackhat works best. The villain's philosophy, that which is not in front of him does not matter, is what Mann has discovered he's up against. Audience attention span, audience willingness to indulge fetishization, audience's sympathy for an idea that takes a whole film to bloom. That which does not stimulate continuously is not worth considering. That scheme - or is it a fear? - informs the film in every imaginable way. There's the dialogue, recorded haphazardly, fading in and out seemingly at random, forcing audiences to think about whether the content of a conversation matters in a film that's meant to be all momentum. There's the way the team slowly disbands, leaving Hemsworth and his love interest alone. Soon their influence fades and the film begins to reshape into a movie that seemed to be about them all along. Did they have any impact on each other or on Hathaway? It's a film ruled by a tide it can't seem to control, like the Apocalypse Now style festival and its current of bodies that keep Hathaway from his target in the final shootout. The action comes in, forcefully washing away the quiet. The action washes away and the quiet returns. In the quiet, gestures and symbols register. A sleeping man's hand lies on the floor. Hemsworth and his love interest lie together on their sides, facing each other in bed, waiting for a phone call. Three people walk through a bustling marketplace to a secret rendezvous, colours and sounds flaring up all around them, no point beyond seeing them navigate the crowds. Hemsworth's perfect face staring holes  into data-filled screens and the night sky, feeling disproportionately connected to them, mournful synthesizer telling us what he can't ever come out and say. Conversations have no punctuation. When Tang is told by her brother that she's the only one he can trust, she looks away from him and into space we can't see for a small eternity and then turns back briefly to say "when do we leave?" in heavily accented English. Hathaway wants to let suspects walk around and lead them to the next man on the ladder. "I say we let 'em ride" he says to Davis. She sits with the idea for a long, long moment and simply offers a soft "yeah." Nothing clever, nothing memorable, except that the film had led us to believe that something greater was coming. Nothing great comes. Just violence that is all the more destructive for interrupting human contact founded on shared silences and knowing when not to talk anymore. Nothing more spectacular than death awaits them. There is time to stop, talk, and look into each other's eyes. Watching Blackhat is realizing that we can't possibly protect what we imagine to be our future. No government can plan for malevolence with no motive, a lesson some still refuse to learn. The indifference is here to stay. 

The Tree of Knowledge

January 31, 2015, 11:17 am

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Aleksei German had one of the harder lives of any working filmmaker of the last half century. His movies - six in all, though he disowned his debut The Seventh Companion - never went according to plan. His early work was considered anti-patriotic by the Russian Government, one of the more activist when it comes to arts funding, and had their releases delayed or they were banned outright. In 1971 and 1984 he mounted films (Trial of the Road and My Friend Ivan Lapshin) based on books written by his father, the successful communist writer Yuri German, though neither enjoyed much of a life in theatres. Trial of the Road was released during Perestroika, some 15 years after it had finished shooting and the Union of Soviet Filmmakers’ Conflict Committee shelved My Friend Ivan Lapshin for three years. He paid direct tribute to his father the man in the form of the lead character of his 1976 film Twenty Days Without War. Though ostensibly based on the writing of Konstantin Simonov, it tells the story of a wartime writer who cuts a figure very similar to that of Yuri German. It concerns a journalist who returns from the front to help organize a film based on his experience writing about it and finds everyone has their own idea about what the moral center of a war’s narrative should be. Twenty Days Without War was also kept away from audiences. Rumour has it that the end of its banishment in 1981 only came about when the well-liked Simonov directly intervened on the film’s behalf. It is, in short, a miracle that Audiences are going to get the opportunity to sit down and watch his films when they play a retrospective at Anthology Film Archives this month to coincide with the release of his final film, on which more in a moment.

Aleksei German’s fortunes could not have been more different than those enjoyed byhis father. According to Alexander Werth in his book Russia: Hopes and Fears, writing two years after Yuri German’s death: “His novels, many of them wartime novels with good plots and full of adventure, were unusual in Russia and, therefore, enormously popular…he was a man of great moral courage…” Aleksei never had Yuri’s populist appeal in Russia, despite working for over 50 years and culling material from his father’s much loved work, but they shared that moral courage. German was vehemently anti-Soviet from his first film until his dying breath. His 1998 masterpiece of a film maudit Khrustyalov, My Car! about Stalin’s final week on earth as experienced by a paranoid General, was based largely on German’s experiences having observed not-so-secretly by the state after a life delivering one . German’s films present the alternative history of life in the Soviet Union and modern Russia. The one that journalists are still murdered for trying to talk about. These movies feel like Aleksei’s way of dealing with not only his own history, but that of a country that strayed so far from its ideals he couldn’t find a way to make sense inside its borders.



Perhaps realizing that attempting to deal in facts would mean making a film no one would ever see, German got to work on his passion project, adapting a metaphor-rich sci-fi novel by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky called Hard To Be A God. He’d always intended it to be his first film, but it didn’t pan out that way. The story goes that when the novel was adapted in 1989 by theatre veteran Peter Fleischmann, the brothers Strugatsky were less than pleased. They thought Fleischmann’s approach (turning it into straight pablum a la Krull or Outlaw of Gor, but with a detached, cool Berliner energy that works against it) was all wrong. Their novel could only be handled by a Russian who shared their reference points and lived through the same winters. Someone who'd really understand what they were trying to say. Someone like Aleksei German, for instance. German worked on his adaptation for years, shooting from 200-2006, stopping the incredibly complicated editing process when he died in February of 2013, leaving the finishing touches to his wife and son. There’s a touching continuity to his family carrying on his legacy, just as he’d done for his father, but the truth is that losing German felt more than tragic. It felt deeply unfair. It seemed as though a conspiracy that had lasted most of his adult life had finally swallowed him whole. Even his wikipedia page has a tone of hostile ambivalence, like an intern went in and changed key adjectives and verbs to make his achievements sound unearned.


Whether or not the Brothers Strugatsky ever actually said that German was the only man for the job of adapting Hard To Be A God, the fact remains that few directors endured the whips and scorns of a government that seemed to actively resent his existence. This made him uniquely qualified to tell the story of a civilization stuck in the dark ages. Tossing out just about everything except what felt true to the central conceit - mainly the drunken antihero’s perpetual snit as he drifts around a world he's not allowed to change - German hasn't so much made a movie as engineered a case of Stendhal Syndrome. There is no way to avoid being sucked into the slithering bowels of this film. It lassos you and drags you across 3 hours of mud and every sort of sec-and-excretion. On paper it's worth mentioning that the film is set in the future, and the protagonist is a scientist sent from earth to monitor alien life on a planet where educating yourself is a criminal act. In reality, the film is about earth right now and the abhorrent way we treat artists and intellectuals. How we stamped out revolution, egalitarianism and positive invention. How we no longer put our energy into bringing people together, just pointing out our differences and allowing xenophobes to commit crimes based on imaginary imbalances of character. It's a planet where everyone has abandoned reason and replaced it with a dimwitted equality and to stand apart from the public is to risk random, horrifying execution. 

German achieves total immersion in this world through a three-pronged attack. First, he jams frame with extras so deep in character Meryl Streep should be losing Oscars to them, each betraying a lifetime spent in ignorance through a handful of gestures. Second, the camera moves like the inebriated cousin of Terrence Malick's god's eye view in The Tree of Life and The New World. Rather than blinking when its overwhelmed by creation and jumping to the next dizzy steadicam shot, Hard To Be A God stares dumbly for as long as it can manage until it begins to tear up from the smoke and dust in the air. Third, objects and characters rush into the frame like deer jumping in front of headlights. There is no time to get used to their presence, nor any use, as they're often gone before any sense can be made of their appearance. Tempting as it is to extend the Malick comparison – it feels more like an inversion of the American poet’s style than a compliment – a more useful reference point might be Andrzej Żuławski's half-finished post-punk sci-fi odyssey On The Silver Globe. In that kindred film, memories are recorded on panes like antique photographs. In both films, you become an unremarked upon character in every scene, a sensation helped by people often staring into the lens. Which is a long way of saying that the film doesn’t tell a story so much as crawl through a fully realized, grotesquely tactile landscape. You're in this up to your neck, whether you like it or not.

German’s textural accomplishments cannot be overstated. The world of Arkanar, the fictional region where the film is set, is a perfect organism. Every inch of every chamber and courtyard seems to serve a function, down to the last jangling trinket. The clean black and white cinematography by Vladimir Ilin and Yuriy Klimenko splendidly and unsparingly captures the abject filth that coats every surface. The perfection of the environment is laid like a blanket over all but the faintest narrative concerns. Our scientist hero has assumed the identity of a minor lord called Don Rumata (German all but excises this bit of backstory from the novel), which grants him a little power over his fellow cretins. One senses that he’s gotten a little too in character. The film follows Rumata as he navigates the faintest glimmer of a social and political hierarchy and loses his footing due to poor planning, or possibly trusting the wrong people. Rumata’s knowledge of Earth keeps him smarter than even his most cunning enemy, but he assigns a logic to them that they consistently fail to conform to. His brain is a curse and a crutch, the reason he’ll always be an outsider. His wallowing, in self-congratulations, in muck, in pity, in his imagined freedom and regality, is the engine that propels the film’s POV-camera through every gross corridor of Arkanar. The sights that await him can never be scrubbed from one’s conscious: a gang of prisoners carrying their gallows on their shoulders like a parade float, a catapult-sized torture device shaped like a phallus, a man drowned in an improvised toilet, bas-reliefs of sexual torments adorning the halls of a lord, soldiers called to attention and puking as if on cue, bizarre wooden symbols built up in a town square, casting eerie shadows on the wall as the indifferent night mist blows through. It’s an outlandish series of events that took boundless imagination, not to mention an obsessive-compulsive attention to detail. The blocking alone is mind-boggling, and it's all in service of one of the simplest theses German could have dreamt up: If living up to our potential isn’t incentivized, and we continue to punish development and free-thinking, we’ll sink into darkness so quickly it’ll be hard to remember a time when growth was possible. Hard To Be A God is a disgusting, disorienting journey into a foreign land where no future seems guaranteed.

Rumata’s aimless wandering takes him in and out of womb spaces that don’t offer the comfort and safety he wishes from them. Those zones and the appearance of Leonid Yarmolnik in the lead role hint at shades of Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan The Terrible, about a man who loses his soul in his mad quest for power. Don Rumata already has power and a tenuous grip on his soul when we meet him. He’s been separated from earth, his mother and father, for so long that he forgets what values they imparted to him. He tries continually to crawl back inside any sheltering body that will have him, desperate to return to a state of innocence, away from the responsibility of having to be himself. He wants to cast off responsibilities to his people, past and present, to live without continuity. German too had been absent his father, the man he paid tribute so often before the government took that away from him. Russia ground down German’s connection to his past, his home and family into a pile of ashes. Would that the aftermath of an epoch-making statement not be defined by the absence of its creator but German is gone now, too, and he’s left us with a double-edged sword of a parting gift. On the one hand, we have one of the most most damning diagnoses the human race has ever received. On the other, one of the richest works of art ever produced. All that remains is to see which we rise to. We live in a world where German’s films can be found and watched, which is a better place than the one he lived in.

The 2014 Monsieur Oscars

February 5, 2015, 5:54 pm

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≪ Previous: The Tree of Knowledge

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Every year I hand out (invisible) awards to the movies and artists who made the biggest impression on me throughout the year. This year, I'm a little bummed at how much I lined up with conventional awards show nods. But, hey, maybe the rest of the world is finally catching up with what actually matters in art? For more of my superlative lists you can go here. Alas, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night still eludes me. 

Favourite Fiction Film

1. Hard To Be A God
2. Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari
3. Over The Garden Wall
4. Only Lovers Left Alive
5. Night Moves
6. Inherent Vice
7. Listen Up, Philip
8. Under The Skin
9. Beloved Sisters
10. The Grand Budapest Hotel
11. Selma

Favourite Non-Fiction Film

1. Actress
2. Manakamana
3. The Last of the Unjust
4. The Look of Silence
5. Maidan
6. Citizenfour
7. National Gallery
8. Natan
9. Afternoon of a Faun
10. Stray Dog

Favourite Performance By a Director

1. PT Anderson - Inherent Vice
2. Aleksei German - Hard To Be A God
3. Abel Ferrara - Pasolini
4. Rupert Wyatt - The Gambler
5. Denis Villeneuve - Enemy
6. Robert Greene - Actress
7. Dominik Graf - Beloved Sisters
8. Abderrahmane Sissako - Timbuktu
9. Mike Leigh - Mr. Turner
10. Aleksei Fedorchenko - The Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari
11. Alex Ross Perry - Listen Up Philip
12. Bennett Miller - Foxcatcher
13. Ava DuVernay - Selma
14. Gabe Ibáñez - Automata
15. Albert Serra - Story of My Death
16. Peter Greenaway - Goltzius and the Pelican Company
17. Bong Joon-Ho - Snowpiercer
18. Gina Prince-Bythewood - Beyond The Lights

Favourite Performance by a First Time Director

1. Patrick McHale - Over The Garden Wall 
2. Jennifer Kent - The Babadook
3. Ramon Zürcher - The Strange Little Cat
4. Graham Annabel & Anthony Stacci - The Boxtrolls
5. Gillian Robespierre - Obvious Child
6. Wally Pfister - Transcendence
7. Eliza Hitman - It Felt Like Love
8. Alfonso Gomez-Rejon - The Town That Dreaded Sundown
9. Trish Sie - Step Up All In
10. Gary Shore - Dracula Untold

Achievement in Cinematography

1. Dick Pope - Mr. Turner
2. Darius Khondji - Magic in the Moonlight
3. Robert Yeomans - The Grand Budapest Hotel
4. Robert Elswitt - Nightcrawler / Inherent Vice
5. Mátyás Erdély - The Quiet Ones
6. Sean Price Williams - Listen Up, Philip
7. Robbie Ryan - Jimmy's Hall
8. Fabrice Aragno - Goodbye to Language
9. Michael Goi - The Town That Dreaded Sundown
10. Sofian El Fani - Timbuktu
11. Greig Fraser - Foxcatcher
12. Benoît Delhomme - The Theory of Everything/A Most Wanted Man

Favourite Screenplay

1. Jim Jarmusch - Only Lovers Left Alive
2. John Michael McDonagh - Calvary
3. David Chirchirillo & Trent Haaga - Cheap Thrills
4. Alejandro Jodorowsky - Dance of Reality
5. David Cairns - Natan
6. Hong Sang-Soo - Hill of Freedom
7. Martín Rejtman - Two Shots Fired
8. Hugo Guinness & Wes Anderson - The Grand Budapest Hotel
9. Gina Prince-Bythewood - Beyond The Lights
10. Hirokazu Kore-eda - Like Father, Like Son
11. Lars Von Trier - Nymphomaniac
12. Sophie Fillières - If You Don't, I Will

Favourite Lead Performance by an Actress

1. Camille Rutherford - Mary, Queen of Scots
2. Emmanuelle Devos - If You Don't I Will
3. Brandy Burre - Actress
4. Angelina Jolie - Maleficent
5. Jenny Slate - Obvious Child
6. Melanie Lynskey - Over The Garden Wall
7. Arielle Holmes - Heaven Knows What
8. Dorothy Atkinson - Mr. Turner
9. Elisabeth Moss - Listen Up, Philip
10. Lisa Loven Kongsli - Force Majeure
11. Charlotte Gainsbourgh - Nymphomaniac
12. Melisa Sözen - Winter Sleep
13. Elena Lyadova - Leviathan
14. Dakota Fanning - Night Moves
15. Essie Davis - The Babadook
16. Briana Evigan - Step Up All In / Paranormal Island
17. Atsuko Maeda - Seventh Code
18. Gugu Mbatha-Raw - Beyond The Lights

Favourite Lead Performance by an Actor

1. Mathieu Amalric - Venus in Fur / Blue Room / If You Don't I Will / Love Is The Perfect Crime
2. Ralph Fiennes - The Grand Budapest Hotel
3. Ryan Reynolds - The Captive
4. Timothy Spall - Mr. Turner
5. David Oyelowo - Selma
6. Robert Pattinson - The Rover
7. David Gulpilil - Charlie's Country
8. James Caan - The Tale of Princess Kaguya
9. Jake Gyllenhaal - Nightcrawler
10. Dan Stevens - The Guest
11. Andre Benjamin - All Is By My Side
12. Chadwick Boseman - Get On Up!
13. Michael C. Hall - Cold in July
14. John Jarratt - Wolf Creek 2
15. Philip Seymour Hoffman - A Most Wanted Man
16. Joaquin Phoenix - Inherent Vice
17. Frank Grillo - The Purge: Anarchy
18. Oscar Isaac - A Most Violent Year

Favourite Supporting Performance by an Actress

1. Radha Mitchell - Bird People
2. Pamela Flores - The Dance of Reality
3. Katie Boland - Gerontophilia
4. Misty Upham - Jimmy P.
5. Eva Green - 302
6. Uma Thurman - Nymphomaniac
7. Reese Witherspoon - Inherent Vice
8. Krysten Ritter - Listen Up, Philip
9. Sara Paxton - Cheap Thrills
10. Elle Fanning - Maleficent / The Boxtrolls
11. Nina Hoss - A Most Wanted Man
12. Grace Gummer - The Homesman

Favourite Supporting Performance by an Actor

1. Jonathan Pryce - Listen Up, Philip
2. Mark Ruffalo - Foxcatcher
3. Stacy Keach - If I Stay
4. Ronnie Gene Blevins - Joe
5. Shia Lebeouf - Fury
6. Jean-Claude Van Damme - Enemies Closer
7. Rupert Friend - Starred Up
8. Josh Brolin - Inherent Vice
9. Riz Ahmed - Nightcrawler
10. Don Johnson - Cold In July
11. Gene Jones - The Sacrament
12. Ben Kingsley - The Boxtrolls
13. Dave Bautista - Guardians of the Galaxy
14. Chris Isaak - Over The Garden Wall
15. Edward Hogg - Mary, Queen of Scots
16. William Hurt - Days and Nights
17. Hugh Bonneville - Monuments Men

Favourite Duet Performances

1. Denis Levant & Lee Kang Sheng - Journey to the West 
2. Tallie Medel & Jordan Clifford - Joy Kevin
3. Harry Treadaway & Rose Leslie - Honeymoon
4. JK Simmons & Miles Teller - Whiplash
5. Niels Arestrup & Andre Dussolier - Diplomacy
6. Zoe Kazan & Daniel Radcliffe - What If
7. Kristen Wiig & Bill Hader - The Skeleton Twins
8. Nicolas Cage & Anton Yelchin - Dying of the Light
9. Liam Gillick & Viv Albertine - Exhibition
10. Paul Eenhorn & Earl Lynn Nelson - Land Ho!
11. Agata Kulesza & Agata Trzebuchowska - Ida
12. Tilda Swinton & Tom Hiddleston - Only Lovers Left Alive

Favourite Debut Performances

1. Cecep Arif Rahman - The Raid 2
2. Armando Espitia & Andrea Vergara - Heli
3. Collin Dean - Over The Garden Wall
4. Giulia Salerno - Misunderstood
5. Maria Alexandra Lungu - The Wonders
6. Gina Piersanti & Giovanna Salimeni - It Felt Like Love
7. Liv LeMoyne, Mira Grosin & Mira Barkhammar - We Are The Best!

Favourite Performance by an Ensemble

1. We Are The Best!
2. Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari
3. Hard To Be A God
4. Beloved Sisters
5. The Homesman
6. Timbuktu
7. Inherent Vice
8. Mr. Turner
9. Listen Up, Philip
10. Like Father, Like Son
11. Selma
12. Leviathan

Favourite Original Score

1. Jeff Grace - Cold in July / Night Moves
2. Steve Moore - The Guest
3. Hans Zimmer - Interstellar
4. Rob Simonsen - Foxcatcher
5. Alexandre Desplat - The Grand Budapest Hotel
6. Micah Levi - Under The Skin
7. Danny Elfman - The Unknown Known
8. Amin Bouhafa - Timbuktu
9. Sven Rossenbach & Florian van Volxem - Beloved Sisters
10. Alberto Iglesias - Two Faces of January
11. Howard Shore - The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
12. Jonny Greenwood - Inherent Vice

Achievement in Art Direction

1. The Boxtrolls
2. Mr. Turner
3. The Dance of Reality
4. The Tale of Princess Kaguya
5. The Strange Colour Of Your Body's Tears
6. Automata
7. The Grand Budapest Hotel
8. Zero Theorem
9. Maleficent
10. Timbuktu
11. The Double
12. Goltzius and the Pelican Company

Achievement in Production Design

1. The Grand Budapest Hotel
2. The Double
3. Snowpiercer
4. The Quiet Ones
5. The Boxtrolls
6. Beloved Sisters
7. Hard To Be A God
8. Inherent Vice
9. Mr. Turner
10. Foxcatcher
11. Beyond the Lights

Achievement in Visual Effects

1. Viy
2. Godzilla
3. Edge of Tomorrow
4. Noah
5. Goodbye to Language
6. Birdman
7. Interstellar
8. Automata
9. WolfCop
10. Birdman

Achievement in Costume Design

1. Dracula Untold
2. X-Men: Days of Future Past
3. Hard To Be A God
4. Step Up All In
5. Maleficent
6. The Homesman
7. Mary, Queen of Scots
8. Mr. Turner
9. Inherent Vice
10. Timbuktu
11. The Grand Budapest Hotel
12. Beloved Sisters

Achievement in Sound Design

1. The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears
2. Hard To Be A God
3. Night Moves
4. Under The Skin
5. The Babadook
6. Exhibition
7. Godzilla
8. Afternoon of a Faun
9. Edge of Tomorrow
10. Cheap Thrills
11. Wolfcop

Special Award for creator of a TV series that beat film at its own game for a beautiful second:

Steven Soderbergh for The Knick

50 Week Film School Curriculum

February 22, 2015, 9:53 am

≫ Next: Double Exposures

≪ Previous: The 2014 Monsieur Oscars

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Inspired by Catherine Grant sharing Mark Cousin's idea of a 50 week film school curriculum, here's my own version of that idea.

Week 1 

Hand students a digital camera and tell them to go film something honest. Can be anything so long as I believe it. Film it in days 1 and 2, edit them the rest of the week. 

Week 2 

Watch documentary films by Robert Flaherty and Robert Greene, examine dramatic truth, cinematic non-fiction. 

Week 3 

Keaton, Chaplin, Murnau and truth without words

Week 4 

Show all of John Cassavetes' movies as director, and the Dick Cavett interview with Falk, Gazzara and Cassavetes. Film is a series of accidents. 

Week 5

John Carpenter, Ingmar Bergman and how to fill a frame. 

Week 6 

Montage, from Eisenstein to Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. 

Week 7 

See any and all repertory cinema available in the outside world. Must be on celluloid. Students must take notes on impressions of watching film in every case. 

Week 8 

Joe Swanberg's Silver Bullets, Art History, Kissing on the Mouth, and Aaron Katz'Quiet City, and Cold Weather - focus as a way around budgetary restrictions.

Week 9 

Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, Peter Kubelka, James Benning and how to communicate with the natural world. 

Week 10

Cameras handed out again. Short films (20+ minutes) must incorporate environment and written dialogue. 

Week 11

Edit resulting films. Show them to cadre of critics for reactions. 

Week 12

Powell & Pressburger and how to build a world across several films.

Week 13

Terence Malick and what a script can't tell you

Week 14 

Bill Morrison and how to interact with images. 

Week 15 

First week on how to film comedy, Preston Sturges vs. Jerry Lewis

Week 16

Second week on how to film comedy, Frank Tashlin, Billy Wilder & Jacques Tati. 

Week 17

Third week on how to film comedy, Laurel & Hardy. 

Week 18

Fourth week on how to film comedy, screwball comedy. 

Week 19

Exploitation: from Dwain Esper/Kroger Babb through to Michael Findlay

Week 20

Exploitation from Russ Meyer to Shauna Grant

Week 21

Third World Cinema: marxism and equal distribution of the tools of filmmaking. 

Week 22

Romantic Comedy, and how to draw characters worth caring about.

Week 23 

French New Wave & Giallo, radicalism evolving in two different directions, all from Roberto Rossellini 

Week 24

Filmed plays and how to handle theatricality

Week 25

Film scoring, Miklós Rózsa through to Jonny Greenwood, but really we're talking about Michael Nyman here. 

Week 26

Italo-modernism: L'Avventura, La Dolce Vita, The Grim Reaper, Fists In The Pocket, Before The Revolution, 8 1/2, L'Eclisse, Red Desert

Week 27

Learning how & when to move camera: PT Anderson, Max Ophüls, Ramon Zürcher, Wes Anderson, Orson Welles. 

Week 28

Old Hollywood grandeur. Presented without comment: forgetting about context and just trying to enjoy the image. One Tobe Hooper  film at the end of every day of screenings. 

Week 29

Classic Criticism: close readings of Manny Farber, Andrew Sarris, Otis Ferguson, Roger Ebert, Cahiers Du Cinema, James Baldwin, Pauline Kael, Lindsay Anderson.

Week 30

Modern Criticism: Kent Jones, J Hoberman, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Dan Sallitt, Daniel Kasman, Ryland Walker Knight, Molly Haskell, Linda Williams, Miriam Bale, Calum Marsh, David Cairns, Wesley Morris, Armond White, Aaron Cutler, Fernando Croce, Ben Sachs and more. Students will write about a film meaningful to them.

Week 31

Video Essays: Haroun Farocki, Kevin B. Lee, Matt Zoller Seitz, Chris Marker, Nelson Carvajal. Students will make a film without once picking up a camera.

Week 32

Cinematography masterclass: How to hide truth in sumptuousness, and how to properly film Tilda Swinton: The Conformist, Apocalypse Now Redux, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Pandora & The Flying Dutchman, The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, I Am Love, The Limits of Control, Ashes of Time Redux, We Need To Talk About Kevin. 

Week 33

Week off: no film or TV watching allowed. Students will go to museums and look at paintings, read poetry and listen to classical music. 

Week 34

Ken Russell & early work of Andrzej Żuławski. Students will train for steadicam pentathlon. 

Week 35

Werner Herzog. We'll see if we can meet him by a waterfall at the end of the week. 

Week 36 

Weird, independent America (Coleman Francis, George Romero, Ted Mikels, Ray Dennis Steckler, Eagle Pennell, Jim Jarmusch)

Week 36

Triumphs of independent African cinema. 

Week 37

Westerns, how history talks to itself. 

Week 38

Modern textural filmmaking: The Turin Horse, Joe, Guy Maddin, Albert Serra, Hard To Be A God, Michael Mann, Phillipe Grandrieux. 

Week 39

Film Noir landmarks. Students will rearrange the lighting scheme in eight different rooms to change psychological profile of the space. 

Week 40

Soviet Cinema

Week 41

Landmarks of feminist cinema: Dulac, Dorothy Arzner, Deren and The Wasp Woman. 

Week 42

Landmarks of feminist cinema part 2: Akerman, Breillat, Chytilová, Campion, Coppola, Shortland and more.

Week 43

North American Melodrama/Fassbinder. Start drafting final projects: one feature, format up to students.

Week 44

Write & edit final projects, run dialogue with each other and start casting. 

Week 45

Black independent American cinema: From LA Rebellion to Ava DuVernay.

Week 46

Bresson in colour / Buñuel in Paris

Week 47

John Ford, (closing night screening: If....)

Week 48

Film projects. Nightly showing of dailies. 

Week 49

Editing, midnight movies on loop in breakroom (El Topo, The Ruling Class, The Savages, 13 Assassins, Putney Swope, Below The Belt, Bohachi Bushido, Mark of the Devil, Horrors of Malformed Men, The Holy Mountain, the complete David Lynch, Sweet Movie, Mr. Freedom, Mansion of Madness, Who Could Kill a Child?, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde)

Week 50

Show final films. Celebrate by going drinking with guest lecturers Pedro Costa, Hong Sang-Soo & Lisandro Alonso. 

Double Exposures

February 28, 2015, 1:33 pm

≫ Next: The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism - Daniel Kasman

≪ Previous: 50 Week Film School Curriculum

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It's taken me a while to figure out how to articulate this but if you looked at last year's best movies and squinted, you could be forgiven for assuming someone had swapped them out for the greatest hits of the 70s. So I've gone through and matched a bunch of films released within the last year with something from the 70s, trying where possible to avoid the obvious (remakes for their sources, older films by the same director). So if you liked any of these, maybe try their counterpart and see how we've been talking to the past. I don't mean that all of these are superior, mind you. I'll leave that up to you. 


Listen Up, Philip - Mikey & Nicky
Inherent Vice - Marlowe 
Night Moves - Sorcerer
Actress - A Woman Under The Influence
Under The Skin - Phase IV
Beloved Sisters - Two English Girls
Force Majeure - Scenes From A Marriage
Jealousy - The Mother & The Whore
Winter Sleep - Providence
Blood Glacier - Food of the Gods
Jauja - The Story of Adele H. 
Obvious Child - Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
Dance of Reality - The Tin Drum
Story of My Death - Heart of Glass
Joe - Scarecrow
Enemy - Shivers
Nightcrawler - 10 Rillington Place
The Blue Room - LA Babysitter
Saint Laurent - The Bitter Tears of Petra Van Kant
A Field In England - The Wicker Man
The Dark Valley - Four of the Apocalypse
Transcendence - The Terminal Man
The Homesman - The Missouri Breaks
A Walk Among The Tombstones
Calvary - Apocalypse Now
The Quiet Ones - Demons of the Mind
Our Sunhi - Wanda
Two Days, One Night - Wanda
Cheap Thrills - Autostop Rosso Sangue
Starred Up - Mean Streets
The Captive - Frenzy
The Purge: Anarchy - Death Race 2000
The Rover - Jeremiah Johnson
Tom At The Farm - The House on Straw Hill
Horse Money - Nosferatu: Phantom Der Nacht
Step Up: All In - At Long Last Love
Grisgris - Badou Boy
Venus in Fur - Last Tango In Paris
Goltzius & The Pelican Company - Lisztomania 
Michael Kohlhaas - Lancelot Du Lac
Maleficent - Escape to Witch Mountain
Heaven Knows What - Panic in Needle Park
Life of Crime - Family Plot
The Retrieval - Leadbelly
Goodbye to Language - Eggshells
Jimmy's Hall - Norma Rae
La Sapienza - The Spider's Strategem
Snowpiercer - Quintet
The Guest - Deathdream
Stray Dog - The Whole Shooting Match
Strange Color of your Body's Tears/Whiplash - Four Flies on Grey Velvet
Mr. Turner - Edvard Munch
Interstellar - The Black Hole
Boyhood - Sounder
Godzilla - Prophecy 
The Double - Dead Mountaineer's Hotel
The Raid 2 - Detonation: Violent Games
A Most Wanted Man - The Offence
Jimmy P - One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
A Most VIolent Year - The Nickle Ride
Wolf Creek 2 - Almost Human
Charlie's Country - Emperor of the North Pole
Beyond The Lights - A Star is Born
Paranormal Island - Frozen Scream
Timbuktu - Chronicle of the Years of Fire
Nonstop - The French Connection II
The Congress - World on a Wire
The Town That Dreaded Sundown - Sisters
Dear White People - Hi Mom!

Leviathan - Posse

Burning Bush - Executive Action

Left Behind - Blood Freak