2008

01. Silent Light - Carlos Reygadas

The most technically stunning film in recent years, Silent Light takes its cues from both Dreyer and David Lynch, parceling out the moral crisis of an adultering family man with a hypnotic, deeply memorable collection of elaborate, self-conscious camera setups. Its molassess-paced opening shot appears to reveal the first rays of sunrise all at once (it's probably the single most thrilling thing to happen in the cinema all year). There's a graceful, otherworldly bathing ritual cribbed from Terence Malick. There's this hair-blown-back dolly into a garage, below to a work-pit and, finally, retracted back to its original position (in harsh sunlight!) with three distinctly different  lighting arrangements. I'm salivating just thinking about it.

02. Rachel Getting Married - Jonathan Demme

In what I'm actually going to be pretentious enough to call The Return Of Jonathan Demme, The Black Sheep returns for her sister's wedding only to find all the skeletons still lingering in the closet. On paper, it probably seems almost crass in its familiarity. No so. Make no mistake: This is one of the most effective marriages of an impeccably-realized script and a detached riff of improvisation I've seen. The verite disassociation gives the film's nerve-elbowing charms such room to breathe. All those comparisons to The Celebration are warranted. I'll stand back and let that sink in.

03. Funny Games - Michael Haneke

The movie where the director shames us for our own bloodlust is still tight as a snare drum in what's tantamount to a shot-for-shot remake. Before I became deeply cynical again, I remember stating that this film "completely restores my faith in cinema". What's so unbelievably mind-blowing to me is that this seems so right. Funny Games playing to exactly the audience - had it found an audience, I mean - that it should play to: Unsuspecting American art-house crowds (or just unsuspecting American crowds - seriously, I saw THIS FILM AT A 24 THEATER MULTIPLEX).

04. A Christmas Tale - Arnaud Desplechin

This is a scrambling madhouse of an ensemble complete with forked plot points brimming and intertwining in a grand tradition of grim idiosyncrasy and fey jubilance. Set-up in their tallways French home, the relatives here must all give blood to find a match for the matriarch's rare cancer, skulking about in fits of confrontation, fueling a constant state of great, nostalgic observation. The momentum is held for an achingly long time, barely sputtering out at close and never veering into a familiar or simple set of emotional farewells. It seems reflexive as to its purpose: A comfort film of the absurd.

05. Flight of the Red Balloon - Hou Hsiao-hsien

For some reason, I found it immensely inviting and inexplicably relatable in the warm embrace of Hou's tale of a French Puppet Troupe Singer (Juliette Binoche), her moppet son Simon, his Chinese nanny Song and a reoccuring Red Balloon. The slice of life rhythms have a cozy feel that's impossible not to get caught up in: We're instantly drawn to the gentle pace of life, the bubbles of happiness, glee in everyday routines, and that sense of wonder Hou draws out of practically nothing using only mise-en-scene and a lazy piano score. I want to live inside this film.

06. WALL•E - Andrew Stanton

Impressive-looking as much as it is old fashioned. The independent instincts of Pixar continue to drive great works; Here, they're working for nearly thirty minutes without dialogue as a robotic character who doesn't speak dazzles us with his humanity. There's no moment where we leave its grasp - despite the somewhat stale trappings of its techno-cynicism - and no moment where its commentary on our consumer culture feels anything more than fodder for slapstick follies and fuzzy, metallic romance.

07. 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days - Cristian Mungiu

Remarkable in its sobriety, Mungiu's film is conceived in outstanding long takes rigged to capture the removed headspace of Otilia (stunningly played by Anamaria Marinca). The distinct period flavor (1987 communist Romania) and its unspooling details of etiquette and survival are completely engrossing, complementing Otilia's desperate loyalty and the subtleties of her weighted conscience.

08. Paranoid Park - Gus Van Sant

Hovering freely in multiple moments over its disjointed chronology, Paranoid Park always appears grounded enough that it could be taking place at any moment in its chronology.  It is a genuinely probing scratch at adolescent erosion and its many irritants. In a gasp of stunned sincerity, I'm going to say this: It's flat out mesmerizing to watch..

09. The Dark Knight - Christopher Nolan

Constructed sans boneheaded exposition - and, admittedly, a tad on the confusing side - The Dark Knight holds a looming dread with the very mist of a haunted world that casually evokes the grandiose imagination of comic books. But nevermind all that: The dominating force of Ledger's Joker is so genuinely compelling, we're actively awaiting his presence onscreen with impatience and trepidation. The largely successful attempt at multiple perspective (and, therefore, a sincerely more informed worldview) confirms what is already obvious about Christopher Nolan: This man can do no wrong.

10. Milk - Gus Van Sant

Gushy memorializing aside, Milk works because it never seems the solid biopic flavor, opting instead to free-flow on contact high from Penn's best performance - in my estimation - to date. Everything revolves around him and he's consistently human, very close to the Harvey Milk of The Times of Harvey Milk: Stubborn, very real, very incontrevertible, very funny and very loving. My concerns about Van Sant were more closely associated with mourning - I hated to see him leave the Tarr homage factory - but Milk keeps the director, largely, out of the picture.

Five more

Doubt - John Patrick Shanley

The banter and semantics are a delight to listen to - both Hoffman and Streep have a crackling appeal - and Shanley's probing What is Right and From Whose Eyes culminates in a muted, deeply thrilling tête-à-tête that practically requires further debate.

Wendy and Lucy - Kelly Reichardt

Though it is more message-focused and a bit more mannered than Old Joy - admittedly a looming achievement that no next film could live up to - Wendy and Lucy still bears that soft, flowing tone of simplicity and rough hewn documentary-style riff. Michelle Williams is all dim to the bigger picture and lost in the order of things, and the performance is terrific.

Happy-Go-Lucky - Mike Leigh

More precisely constructed than other Leigh efforts, but endlessly giving; I thought I'd get tired of Poppy pretty early on, but she sidesteps an urgency to require a tolerance filter amidst her tirelessly energetic positivity. Its flat-out exhilirating in spots to see Sally Hawkins parading around with the film on her shoulders. The message (a la Bill Hicks) is loud and clear: "Try waking up and enjoying the life you've chosen".

Burn After Reading - Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

Riffing itself tired, Burn After Reading presents a world of goobers, each more outrageously quirky than the last, prancing about in the great, unending circle of cynical topicality. Only Hilarious. Although its whole world seems bracingly conscious of itself, its easily the Coens' best and most quotable comedy since The Big Lebowski.

Vicky Christina Barcelona - Woody Allen

Vicky Christina Barcelona makes out well when the narration is the prevailing spice and the whole thing seems a light, literary My Greatest Summer Ever sort of tale. Although its actresses seem glamorously empty, Allen seems deeply sympathetic of Penelope Cruz's flipout Art Pscyho. All of it, however, is precluded by debonair bohemian Juan Antonio Gonzalo, a bold and wily painter played by Javier Bardem. He turns one of Allen's most enjoyable alter egos.

Three Worst

Eagle Eye - DJ Caruso

HAL-like computer controls everything through technology (traffic lights change, it could derail a train, it breaks into government storehouses) as its been programmed by the US Government who wouldn't listen to it - the computer - when it - the computer - told them not to blow up some important terrorists. It kept putting me in mind of a ADD-addled, quick-shot attempt to update 'The Fugitive'. And now I'm going to go be sick.

Revolutionary Road - Sam Mendes
 

Mendes' overheated, distractingly blasé comment on 50s gender and societal roles plays out as a series of arguments which gradually tease out each character's ALREADY COMPLETELY OBVIOUS inner turmoils. I kept wishing they would just be quiet and figure out where their kids were (this is another film that presupposes that we'll buy tales of family strife yet relegates the children to sub-cameos). Occasionally, Michael Shannon shows up and blows everyone off the screen with that severely creepy Lucid Tick he seems to have.

The Counterfeiters - Stefan Ruzowitzky

Salomon Sorowitsch's fine performance aside, 'The Counterfeiters' is told broadly, with cliches, contrivances and all of the compromises it can muster within its soft worldview. That the film treats us as a filmgoing audience that needs to be coddled on the subject of brutality and genocide (it seems to posit a Holocaust of complete and utter convenience), it is little wonder that it scarcely touches on the far more interesting idea at hand: How precisely Germany was planning to topple both the British and American economies.
 

Prior Years

Le Million
Rene Clair, 1931

What's really remarkable is the way it seems to draw from the greatness of silent slapstick while also demonstrating an exceptional, entirely professional flair for the sound era.

It Happened Tomorrow
Rene Clair, 1944.

Delightful, and chock full of Clair's mind-blowing staging. Dick Powell is just splendid.

Daisy Kenyon
Otto Preminger, 1947.

Joan Crawford just wants a moment's peace to consider her options, a moment practically denied her by her suitors, each pushing a float in the reoccuring metaphor parade of shipbuilding shop talk, unpopular charity lawsuits and bleeding ears. The dialogue alone makes it remarkable - all sharp wit and catchphrases - but its the casually, candidly fearless bent that gives it a muscular quality possessed of precious few American films released in 1947 (or 57, for that matter).

Thieves' Highway
Jules Dassin, 1949.

Dassin steeps the pot with episode after episode of plainly disturbing injustice, much of it at the hands of Mike Figlia (Lee J. Cobb), the uber-brash top dog in the fruit game. Cobb's snide, ego-on-his-sleeve turn is perfectly aligned with the film's weird generalizing. There isn't a speck of topicality or soapbox preaching: The whole thing successfully microscopes human nature.

The Small Back Room
Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1949.

Sure, it's typical wartime Powell and Pressburger (50% propoganda and 50% melodrama), but who cares - - I could have listened to these characters talk all day long.

Where the Sidewalk Ends
Otto Preminger, 1950.

Dana Andrews' face is a chiseled, hardened thing; He's a brick wall walkin'. Karl Malden's wet-behind-the-ears/detective prodigy who figures the scheme out and still finds himself out-proved by circumstance is terrific. So complicit in its expertly-staged procedural setpieces (of which there are many), but also pitch black from the word "go", with only its bizarre morality play conclusion seeming out of place, as if tacked-on out of fear that the good guy's white hat might have too many black smudges for a comfortable night's sleep.

Sleeping Beauty
Clyde Geronomi, 1959.

Shocks me that I'd never seen it; Visually arresting in a grand, dominant-color scheme that appears to have been cast from the imagination of some storybook
character. The tale itself is told with the typical aplomb of this time: Silly, physical cartooning with a penchant for the balance of Disney-minted sterility and the perversion and darkness of Grimm.

Le Doulos
Jean-Pierre Melville, 1962.

Melville's characters are just simultaneously fascinating and execrable. These are men you just can't read: The filmmakers POV is only heightened by this. I love when Belmondo turns off suspenseful music that is revealed to be on the radio later in the scene, as if the fatalism of noir was the soft medium Melville was working in: Cold, cruel paint.

A Room With a View
James Ivory, 1985.

Effortlessly spry, trickling its way through the wide generation gaps in early 1900s richies. Everyone is spectacular – particularly Day-Lewis, whose Cecil lives up to
the implications of the name and then some – but it’s the fact that the film is so accessible, so funny, so full of genuine lightness; Merchant Ivory would never again be
so damn cool.

The Ten
David Wain, 2007.

Consistently hilarious send-ups of the deeply arcane are Wain's forte and The Ten, for using The Commandments as its skeleton, pretty much makes with the obtuse mockery, rarely checking in on context or even thematic relevance of these universally acknowledged "rules". Clearly, its all designed as an excuse for the jokes. Paul Rudd remains one of the funniest men working today.