2006

[ Do you need to hear any more reasons why the unsparing, revisionist French Resistance epic Army of Shadows is the best film of 2006? Because, despite being released in Europe in 1969,  its stateside premiere took place on April 28, 2006 in NYC. By that rationale, this is its technical release date. And nothing released this year has come remotely close to
topping Melville's masterwork.]

The Best Film Released this year for the first time in the United States:

Army of Shadows - Jean-Pierre Melville

Practically without limitation, Army of Shadows indulges cruelty and tragedy as sobering techniques, perhaps to keep the director in mind of his subject: It's playful
without being glossy or otherwise tastelessly stylish. It's also the speediest two and a half hours on two feet. So confidently does Melville sculpt the episodes in the
up-and-coming steps and missteps that usher in the French Resistance Movement as most people know it (prior to the era of the Maquis), that we find him using his trademark/brilliant, spartan mise-en-scene even more aggressively than in his gangster pictures: Melville seems to show you everything without telling you anything. Bizarre and disturbing moments like the running-start execution and the quickdraw stabbing of a Gestapo guard seem to ooze with a savagery we tend not to associate with the time period. Removed from the events depicted by a mere seventeen years (audiences of the time were probably jarred by the sight of the nazis marching on the Arc d'Triumph), Melville avoids the implication of words or general exposition, rather, pledging himself to the in-the-moment horrors of WWII realism and its weight on normal people forced to do unspeakable things.

The Best Films Released this year for the first time:

01. United 93 - Paul Greengrass

Like 2003's Elephant, United 93 points out how loathesome involving anything more than the moment at hand can be by sucking the film dry of political context, thereby forcing the viewer to see the tragedy of species as it happens, without time to assign blame, slant or angle. I felt the need to apologize almost before I was able to articulate it, but I'd be dishonest not to acknowledge that I feel Greengrass's film is one of the finest thrillers I've ever seen. Assuming our foreknowledge, he slices life with asymetrical mundanity, as an unforgiving handheld camera sideswipes terrifically unpolished and backstory-free dialogue. Quips are nowhere to be found. Attacker and Passenger are given equal face. Even the epilogue follows suit. It gives us neutral, indisputable facts we already know, reaffirming its intention to abolish a partisan viewpoint.

02. The Prestige - Christopher Nolan

Treads in the same thematic murk as Batman Begins (and, to a lesser extent, Insomnia), but succeeds because its subject matter is glued to the chair riveting. Purporting to find the essential, underlying resonance in the matter of science versus magic, Nolan's film is powerfully entertaining, balancing sacrifice on multiple levels, with Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale as magicians attempting to outdo each other. That Nolan so successfully makes these men merely delivery devices is a wonderful trick. Watch closely: It's self-reflexive (one could say it is about the fading nature of suspending disbelief in films themselves) and so utterly profound, I found myself thinking about it for weeks on end after screening it.

03. Brick - Rian Johnson

With its dizzying complicity and shorthand, cut-to-the-quick dialogue, Rian Johnson's Brick recalls Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest transplanted to the High School scene. Joseph Gordon-Levitt - one of our finest actors - walks off sstrutting, limping and shuffling his feet with the film, bent on being one step ahead of everyone even as he slams on the brakes to attack from the rear. It's also possibly the most appropriate use of a fond high school recall I've seen in forever; Johnson sets a very specific story in this world without sending a valentine to his own experience or appearing otherwise self-indulgent

04. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story - Michael Winterbottom

What if Ricky Gervais'"Extras" and Oliver Assayas's Irma Vep had a one-off bastard child and gave it up for adoption? To Soderbergh's Full Frontal. And after that, I laughed out loud. Repeatedly. And Steve Coogan played himself. Readily mocking its own conceit on more than one occasion (the whole film is essentially a DVD featurette profiling a fictitious film shoot of a title adaptation), Tristram Shandy is, in fact, less a mockumentary (though its rightly pointed vision of how filmmakers would mess up the transfer from novel to film is well taken) than a self conscious walk on the eggshells of pretention, hoping the audience either won't notice or will forgive due to having been cracked the frick up. Deleted scene reveals the possibility that Steve Coogan The Jerk is a clever extension of his persona/character in "Cousins?", his Coffee & Cigarettes segment. Even if I'm half right about that theory, it would be the most wonderful, unthinkably comfortable crossreference since Michael Keaton appeared for free in Out of Sight.

05. Marie Antoinette - Sofia Coppola

A sprawling art film, cut beautifully to zip through time and photographed with a lush, soft-day blur and attention to detail. It's a gorgeous piece of eye candy on a relentless quest to duplicate hazy, youthful pleasure. Dunst is wonderful and full of lusty asides and quick-wits, intelligent yet flawed, almost constantly sidestepping the film's tendencies to sympathize with a figure who was smart enough to know better, but still spent all the country's money on clothes and cake. And though it seemed a sticking point for most, Coppola's music choices are even more brilliant than in her last two films, draping Gang of Four's anti-capitalist anthem "Natural's Not In It" over the opening titles (setting the stage), plugging in Radio Department's lush feedback over the sunshine-speckled rooms of Versailles as she comes to power, and echoing an ideal blah of hangover descent as the film closes to The Cure's "All Cats are Grey".

06. When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts - Spike Lee

When the Levees Broke carries the same objectivist sobriety of 25th Hour, Lee's masterful and underrated 9/11 allegory (I stand by it). Told over four hours, Levees sprawls thoroughly through the wrenching catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina, how it was bungled as it occured, how it was bungled after it occurred and the heartbreakingly cruel aftermath of displacement and abandon. Clearly the film elicits a naked response, one nearly impossible to separate from its aesthetics: Carved of Lee's commanding montage skills and a heaping spatter of his own voice, it pulls no punches and left me drained and weeping both nights I watched it.

07. Bubble - Steven Soderbergh

Ruled by the seemingly casual nature of its characters (they're all non-actors), Bubble relies on our instinctual recongnition of archetypes, always seeming to beg some unexpectedly haunting rhetorical questions: Does middle American poverty delude its servants (like Kyle and Rose) into such a vicious circle of survival, or would these characters be in these dire straits no matter what their circumstance? Do they live out a desperation they've become so accustomed to that it is no longer even acknowledged? Do the red-staters in question (namely, Martha) really think the self-exoneration of their religious fabric as universal moral compass is anything more than hyper-hypocritical? Riding the cherrypop creative lightning one typically associates with rebirth rather than upkeep, Soderbergh mines the experiment of Full Frontal/Schizopolis territory to create a moving and detailed portraiture of human stepping stones.

08. The Departed - Martin Scorsese

I feel almost ridiculous adding my brand to the already heaping pile of "entertaining" accolades, but the film really does present the illusion that it is an entry in the filmography of Scorsese's past: Sprawling, unapologetic, violent, lightning quick on its feet and perpetually high on The Rolling Stones. That's not to say that the new, silkier (and less risky, by my count) Scorsese is back to making masterpiece after masterpiece - but I don't suspect he ever will be. At least not like before. He's streamlined his process almost to fluidity, allowing his films to unfold rather than hurling them at the audience. It's as if he's settled into making prestige pictures, but hasn't changed his taste for off color, uncannily violent pulp. Case in point: The breezy, "silly" Infernal Affairs couldn't have been a film more ripe for remake, yet it could have easily become an overhaul of sleazy excess weighting a premise of genuine merit (dueling cop and crook moles are tasked by their superiors to root out themselves, unbeknownest to each other). Veering beautifully from its source, The Departed not only make sense of the whole strand, it seems to reinvent the very idea of sense, proving things movie style with a single shot or a single line of dialogue.

09. Children of Men - Alfonso Cuarón

Children of Men is best when off the cuff and on its feet, tone and atmosphere becoming intertwined among the political hopelessness, swirling among the palpable dread of refugees in holding pens, eerily abandoned elementary schools and desperate, dirty forest marauders. Its bleak worldview (arguably parallel to one or more of our current topical messes) is consistent and driven full force by Clive Owen, inimitably desheveled and downtrodden, but still immensely appealing - and immediately so; He has turned into one of our most likable brooders, found here killing time in a low-level government career that tides him between booze and his next visit to former political cartoonist Michael Caine. All this to say nothing, I must add, of Emmanuel Lubezki's beautiful, uncomfortably long continuous shots that trek and trek and trek, eliciting an audible gasp of air when they finally cut (you'll know the piece d'resistance shot when you see it - and it will blow your mind).

10. Monster House - Gil Kenan

Churns on fumes of the bizarre appeal of second generation fans of The Goonies and That Summer Changed My Life movies (The 'Burbs in particular), steeps with the fond nostalgia of a time-stamped era like a John Hughes picture and boasts characters that could have come out of Beetlejuice or River's Edge (no, seriously, Bones appears to have been dolled up in Layne's digs with Matt's conflicting casual cruelty and genuine sensitivity). From its outlandishly grand narrative about children doing battle with a house inhabited by a crotchety old man and his dead wife's spirit to the spot on comparison between puberty and mourning the acceptance of change, Monster House is easily the best digitally animated film not bearing the Pixar name, made, to date.

Five more

Inside Man - Spike Lee

A terrifically convoluted heist picture that never stops feeling like great, exhilirating 40s noir (the spartan pleasure of cops v. robbers, suspenseful urban grandeur, moral treatises on levels of corruption). And Denzel, pulling directly from his Carl Franklin gallery of good guys (despite the occasional hint de Alonzo that sneaks in), seems much more germane than he has of late, as if even he can taste the mellower, more focused Spike.

Down in the Valley - David Jacobsen

It's about three different films in one, but most of all it's a wild exercise in shifting loyalties and unjustified imperfection. I was so entranced by the film's
age-mismatched love story between a wild teenage girl (Evan Rachel Wood) and a(n unstated) schizophrenic (Edward Norton, whose childlike vulnerability is matched only by his unwavering dedication to delusion), that I was subsequently flabbergasted by its sudden uproot in narrative tectonics; It's the rare film that keeps us with it even as it repeatedly veers from our comfortable grooves.

An Inconvenient Truth - David Guggenheim

It's rare to see a film this aggressive. A purely motivational film that melds its expansion of Gore's presentation (to a larger venue) into autobiography, all the time in always-be-closing mode: Either it's stroking the credibility of the man or the credibility of global warming itself. Part of its greatness, though, is its ability to do this in the same way Gore composes himself, with an honesty and diplomacy that seems acutely admirable. One cannot deny the film's exhaustive arguments (all well-stated and detailed) and responsible spirit, as it points out how apolitical the problem of greenhouse gases is by talking about the whole planet without a hint of condescending.

Manderlay - Lars Von Trier

Abandoning any simulacrum of understanding for Grace's naïveté (as she was already schooled in the reversal of well-meaning societal concepts in this film's predecessor, Dogville), Von Trier suggests that Grace's interventionist liberation of a slave plantation cultivates the inconclusive lessons of two separate ideas - the protruding wrong in slavery's foundation (with its permeating gloom in modern society) and the slipping mask of America's "goodwill" involvement in Iraq. Just as he did in Dogville, he assigns the film "chapters" in his essay of moral skits, each more challenging and thought provoking than the last. It's exhilirating to see political allegory that feels so dead-on: While Dogville hit us at gut level, Manderlay kicks us while we're down, telling us even more vividly than before that, as long as we're human beings practicing human nature, democracy can only act to suggest the appearance of itself. Manderlay is another mouthful of particularly strong medicine.

Why We Fight - Eugene Jarecki

Taking its name from the WWII propoganda films explaining to Americans why our involvement in that war was crucial, Jarecki's documentary is possibly the most innately chilling dissection of a political machine I've ever seen. Focusing on the military-industrial complex and its importance in the last fifty years of American history, Why We Fight's bracing conclusions are evidence-based, logical and not for the pacifist of heart.

L'Enfant (The Child) - The Dardenne Bros.

It's hard not to steel yourself for the Dardennes' Worst Social Worker Stories Ever verve: Unforgivable acts laced with tiny (read: real-life) size doses of redemption. That said, L'Enfant features a great, cold central performance by Jérémie Renier, who zig-zags in and out of dire poverty and criminal focus when he's not busy meeting the responsibility of family life - his girlfriend (the equally remarkable Déborah François) has just had his baby - with a deafening indifference.
There are great, improvisational moments (Bruno and Sonia embracing parenthood by chasing each other around the car, Bruno and a boy ducking into the freezing cold river to elude police). The centerpiece of the film - Bruno's Big, Lousy Decision, we'll call it - goes a long way to cement his reputation and character, but goes even further when we question ourselves: Maybe it was the right decision? Why are we rooting for him to score? (Do we want to see how much he scores?) Later, to repay the even worse bad guys, why are we rooting for him to harness his criminal mind to make ends meet?

Half Nelson - Ryan Fleck

Gosling owns this role as a crack-addicted teacher attempting to make a difference in one of his student's lives. It's one of those turns plied of pure, unadulterated absorption: Every tick and tock of his being is invested in trying to pull off both of these lives and it becomes truly horrifying to watch them bleed into each other. Part of this is how sympathetic the film is towards him. It roots for him. It cheers him on. And while, occasionally, it feels all too inspirational, all too familiar to watch the thing continue to flirt with MOW stylings, you can't help but return to its desheveled, half-charming anchor. (Would make a great double feature with the similiarly warts-and-all social outcast epic Sherrybaby.)

Cars - John Lasseter and Joe Ranft

Cars is middling Pixar (too template-laden to reach Toy Story or The Incredibles greatness, I'm afraid), but I'm still stuck on the semi-moving big second act moment where all things old timey are briefly seen in retrospect and my eyes suddenly get dull. In addition, because its transplant (cars, instead of animals, have human adventures) is so outlandish, the minute, in-joke details are almost more prominent than the lessons we're supposed to be learning.

the first 1/3 of Three Times - Hou Hsiao-hsien

I just had to speak up, here: The first segment (1969) packs a genuine, classical romantic exhiliration, blending a fluidity, an optimistic side stare at the free floating body language of flirtation and, dare I say, a palpable poetry - all set, beautifully, to Aphrodite's Child's "Rain and Tears". I would highly reccomend renting the film and snapping it shut after the first 1/3 ends.

Miami Vice - Michael Mann

Imagine the same now-beautiful, now-ugly, now-indistinguishable, now-strangely real quality of Collateral's mesh of HD and 35mm photography, amped through
the dancy, musical bliss of Michael Mann and lacking a single attempt at depth. Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx play some strange version of all-knowing cops who carry themselves with a badass disconnect that's almost cool indifference. In addition to their explosive tendencies, the drug dealing storyline gets as carried away with itself as anything in Heat, but becomes almost too complicated to bother with inside something this constantly stimulating. It's like trying to taste the nuance in your third cup of coffee: You're too jittery to focus on drinking the stuff, let alone how many shades of hazelnut your palette can distinguish.

Five Worst

The Devil Wears Prada - David Frankel

There is not a single, solitary moment of humanity that isn't clouded by materialistic, accessory worship or shallow representations of "relationships". Streep's turn is fine, particularly when she goes into the long, in-depth moments of insight, but her cold-bitch mentoring of the completely misfired Anne Hathaway continually reminds you what you're celebrating: Unnecessary cruelty for the sake of fame and money.

Idiocracy - Mike Judge

If you can heft - and I mean LIFT - your disbelief and not pass out under the weight, you still have to get past how unfunny the thing is. But you can't. There's no
way you can ignore the fatal flaw in its eager-to-zing premise: How could there have been a shred of organization in this future that Judge has dreamed up if everyone is, as it is immediately and clearly pointed out, dumb as a pile of rocks. Not only does it not make sense, but it also doesn't make me chuckle.

Hard Candy - David Slade

Despite the premise, Slade's film never transcends its high concept, possibly because the dialogue melts all over itself before getting sharp (when you can predict
every plot point, every disturbing story the characters tell, every "gotcha" moment - - the air leaves the balloon) and every scene not containing dialogue is,
inexplicably, shot at fast speed and played back at normal speed. There is never a moment where suspicion leaves the piece and, therefore, there never seems to be
a moment of sincerity.

Art School Confidential - Terry Zwigoff

Holy bleak. A film that seems to hold with the worldview that ambition in art is foolhardy and those who truck with ambition will almost certainly do something as evil as passing off another's paintings as their own. In the film's only real moment of conviction, it stands by, smirking as we watch the punishment (mistaken identity gone awry! and unchallenged!) fit the crime. The rest is tired clichedom at best, lazy retread at worst. How could a duo that created a film like Ghost World possibly have veered so far from the graceful social critique, warm embrace of obsessive niche and emotional investment that made that film so damn special?

The Wild Blue Yonder - Werner Herzog

Because I wondered if this technique could duplicate the gracious and haunting effect of Herzog's 1992 film Lessons of Darkness, I tried and failed to watch a little film called The Wild Blue Yonder. I enjoyed watching the people in space, but found the raving lunatic to be superficial and derivative. Fusion of the two scenarios into some sort of Eisensteinian commentary fails miserably; I'm not sure it's even possible for me to make the leap to connect the two.

Prior Years

Celine and Julie Go Boating - Jacques Rivette (1974)

What's interesting about Rivette's films (Ben says having seen exactly two) is the substance of his theory, not necessarily the substance of the film (as the substance is largely a depiction of the theory). Here, he investigates the interchangability of the way we live in stories and the ways that stories live in us. The nature of cinema - your interpretation drifting past concrete image - is that of malleable imagination; Rivette's commentary on the way in which we experience film, its singular communicatory power to the individual and the staleness of passive absorption fires likely the most relevant round in all of the French New Wave. Cinema as fragile as the stem of a champagne glass and as permanent as existence itself.

Eternity and a Day - Theo Angeloupolous (1998)

Angelopoulos models his film - its pacing, its flavor, its worldview - after the reverance of poems shown by the film's subject and its subtext. It flows crisply, harnessing a symbiotic past and present with such aplomb, with such a convincing transition, its almost admirable simply for its craftwork. He's the short story version of Terence Malick.

The Fallen Idol - Carol Reed (1948)

Reed's terrifically suspenseful take on Graham Green's novella "The Basement Room", The Fallen Idol is spartan and efficient, masterfully crisscrossing the confused loyalties of an ambassador's son (who was raised by servants) and the marital derailing of the housekeeper and the butler (complete with infidelity, espionage and a corpse). Its a sharp little number (particularly for its time - look at how taboo the word "intimate" is made to seem), and Ralph Richardson is a pleasure to watch in it.

I Am Cuba - Mikheil Kalatozishvili (1964)

Easy contender for Top Five cinematography efforts; The propoganda is extremely interesting, but its the intricately planned, beyond-elaborate capability of the photography that drives the film.

My Neighbors the Yamadas - Isao Takahata (1999)

So light it floats, so delightful as to intoxicate. I have called to mind this collection of vignettes quite often: Takahata invests them with the delicacy of the everyday, the universality of the human experience and the comedy of circumstance.

Pandora's Box - G.W. Pabst (1929)

Pabst's trolley ride through the tragic flapperdom of 1920s Weimar is as unflinching as his gravitation towards Louise Brooks' perpetually naive mug. Both beautiful and immensely sad, Brooks seemed to have half a dozen smiles on hand at any given moment, all of them capable of penetrating that mythic black bob she vollies in and out of man after man; She glows with a carefree, almost childlike enthusiasm for life, balancing the cold cruelty of her situations with such aplomb, such a measure of hope - it becomes almost impossible to give yourself over to the wretched bleakness.

Playtime - Jacques Tati (1967)

Porn for people watchers. What more could I say that Jonathan Rosenbaum hasn't already said?

The Seventh Continent/Benny's Video/71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance - Michael Haneke (1989, 1992, 1994, resp.)

Haneke's bracing trilogy of sorts is a terrific framework for his Great Films (Funny Games, Code Unknown, Caché), but these films surely stand on their own as well: 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance uses nuance to entangle a societal error into a thriller, The Seventh Continent pinpoints the hopelessness in society's "success" tag and links it to the necessity of losing individuality and, finally, in self-destructing; Benny's Video blends a specific treatise on the alienation wealth dumps into the lap of a boy who substitutes with surveillance and sudden, bracing violence.

Ugetsu - Kenji Mizoguchi (1953)

It rides the zinger pretty hard on both counts, dumping the garbage on both of Mizoguchi's women - one is forced into prostitution by her husband's fanatical ambition, the other forced to survive while awaiting her myopically greedy, philandering better half - and punishing their men with a future lifetime of moral echoes. Because they have no control over the civil war that engulfs their village, the film seems to carry an even weightier agenda in suggesting that control of his fate is not man's to possess. A very disquieting contrast: Even if you're decisions are good, you are still a slave to the inhumanity of human nature.

Werckmeister Harmonies -Béla Tarr (2000)

Stringing a thematic slang, if you will, through some of the most amazing set pieces ever constructed - a poetic, physical recreation of the solar system's mysteries in a pub, sliding into what Randy helped self describe as "the hospital scene" and, later, the magnificent tracking shots of souls peering through post-communist Hungary's buildings, the whale rotting in its trailer - Werckmeister Harmonies stares, unblinking, at desolation and the imbalanced social structure of the community tensely perched on the brink of upheaval at nearly every moment.