The Most Promising Films of 2023
When Mission: Impossible is your main reason to maintain hope for cinema through 2024, you know moviegoing’s in pretty sorry shape. Not to slight Mr. Cruise, he’s somehow capable of resting the fate of the popular medium on his shoulders, it’s just that the works of art seem to pan out to deteriorating, discouraging numbers year by year.
As usual, done in enough time to be relevant can leave us too far ahead to confirm when some of the year’s best will surely plant their late-year release dates — I’m looking at you Terrence Malick’s The Way of the Wind.
Looking back I was just grateful release dates stopped shifting in the wake of the VID and, by a year and half ago, just glad that all my denied pleasures were finally within grasp. All the cultural returns to normalcy have made me complacent, and pretty sad about what returning to a regular movie calendar really entails. Ha, I almost appreciated things for a moment — but without the breadth of cinema’s potential at maximum, our standards would dip deeply and our forgiveness would be the only respite.
All that to say, It ain’t pretty but here are the most enticing motion pictures I can spot from here.
John Wick: Chapter 4
March 24th
Given how exponentially popular the humble franchise has become with each passing entry, the next installment of assassin antics may confidently evolve into its mightiest (and hardly final) form. Chapter 3 really did it for me and the original is already a cute li'l classic. If they keep the story even vaguely in check and action revelry continuing to max out around 11, hopefully 4 just provides the hard-R Americanized martial arts pleasures as organically as its predecessors. Chad Stahelski has proven his potential so I’m eager to see how the freshest action/man-with-a-gun franchise keeps interest and thrills thriving. Just give me some sweet kills, could ya?
The Super Mario Bros. Movie
April 5th
I don’t even have to see the old 90s version to know there’s a shitload to be desired. Is Chris Pratt’s stupid voice the answer? I don’t know but since Sonic generally broke in the era of doable video game movies (aping on the CG main character gimmick in Scooby Doos and Garfields of old) there’s more hope than usual to spare for Illumination that this could be OK, or at least closer to satisfaction than something barely resembling its inspiration. It will make a shitzillion and I won’t even be too mad if they just calculate the zaniness for more than toddlers and don’t waste too much of the IP in one installment. Illumination can’t be trusted (maybe I’ll work in a Minon movie or two beforehand) but I’ll be damned if this doesn’t look at least eager to entertain. Kelly Reichardt’s new a24 comedy following her masterpiece First Cow, Showing Up, comes just after in case palettes are in need of a deep clean.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
June 2nd
This is the only multiverse worth all the fuss — if this film isn’t good, if not great, I’ll be quite surprised. But maybe not as surprised as I was witnessing the first Spider-Verse rightfully take the world by storm. This was not some random Mask of the Phantasm-esque separate, superfluous fare, it was the best Spider-Man movie in ages and there’s no reason to assume this won’t automatically outclass and outstrip the latest Tom Holland webslinger just like last time — is it bad that I really want it to? If Phil Lord and Chris Miller are involved the best can be reasonably expected.
Asteroid City, Elemental and The Flash
June 16th
Big for Wes means there’s some new bent, presumably sci-fi I dearly hope! He’s stylistically dug his own grave recently but I believe he hasn’t shed a morsel of his talent. As long as his robotic speed doesn’t get so fast the characters start sounding like they have a lung full of helium, his measured madness in Asteroid City will be another detail-littered joy. Plus, Pixar has just about jack shit on the horizon except for this new allegorical fantasy Elemental. I’d be glad if this indistint, Sausage Party meets Inside Out anthropomorphizing (from what I gather from the premise) actually lived up to some situational, high-concept ingeniousness, but there’s too few details of now to tell. But either Anderson or Pixar is a more reliable risk than DC.
But I’ll admit, The Flash always seemed like a character worth an origin tale to precede Justice League. In a post-Snyder world we’ll just have to hope Warner Brothers' strategic prudence pays off yet again with another late stand-alone endeavor — despite a DC restart set in James Gunn’s new direction, where the fuck could all this possibly lead to, especially after the underperformance of both Black Adam and Shazam! Fury of the Gods? Ezra Miller is a weirdo who at least once deserved the leading spotlight and if Flashpoint’s storyline is in store (by the looks of it almost undoubtedly) then there’ll be a decent time-turning plot to pair with the hopefully decadent blockbuster shenanigans. A little Batman Generations on the side couldn’t make things any less interesting.
Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One
July 12th
The first of what is to be assumed the two-part finale of Tom Cruise’s long run with the Mission: Impossible film franchise has faced a number of setbacks from pandemic-related production interruptions due to COVID-19 restrictions, breakouts on set, freak outs from the Mission man himself to controversies over trying to practically blow up a Polish bridge and soaring insurance costs ballooning the budget.
Besides welcome newcomers to the cast including Cruise’s apparent new and already former squeeze Hayley Atwell, a new villain (formerly Nicolas Hoult) in Esai Morales, the most interesting returning player is Henry Czerny as Kittridge from Brian De Palma’s 1996 original film, including recurring players like Rebecca Ferguson, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Vanessa Kirby and of course the only director of multiple Missions Christopher McQuarrie. There’s nothing left to expect but considered insanity and there is no reason to speculate with any semblance of pessimism or hold back from getting ridiculously excited over the most ripe and unerring spy movie series of the age, SUCK IT 007!!
McQuarrie’s Rogue Nation may not quite be worthy of its highlight sequences but Fallout was a modern classic for the franchise and action movies at large. After a film that good it's literally impos- I mean unthinkable to not be giddy just speculating about McQuarrie bringing the excellently escalating series to its bitter, stunt-drenched, overlong and, God-willing, jaw-droppingly extravagant end. The bike stunt is, of course, impressive, but if that train sequence isn’t the one of the best of all time then damn me to hell.
Barbie and Oppenheimer
July 21st
I can’t imagine Barbie won’t be one of the year’s biggest surprises — if Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig can agree to work together through marriage and kids and all to craft a worthwhile blockbuster out the most popular doll of the popular era, it could be quite the transgressive, possibly transcendent, cultural moment. All I have to go off is a clever teaser and their combined written history, only including contemporary screwball masterpieces Frances Ha and Mistress America, exemplary, exceptional entertainment in either case. This and Oppenheimer are shoo-in for most intriguing movies of the year — one for how sensationally they’re dressing their cast up on an apparently daily basis (may Ryan Gosling live a long, full life), the other just for how absolutely goddamn huge the cast is in general.
The first movie on the heels of Chris Nolan’s breakup with Warner Brothers, Universal’s J. Robert Oppenheimer biopic, should be, uh, good right? After Tenet probably got fucked the hardest of the pandemic sacrifices (I mean Nolan, you probably shouldn’t have pushed that hard at the height of baby-plague), his 200 million original projects are an extravagance of the past. At half that, Oppenheimer doesn’t have to appeal too hard to the mainstream, so maybe the legendary modern moviemaker will grow while becoming even more insular — this strikes one of Dunkirk above anything else in the past, as he seldom touches on real life outside of allusion.
Killers of the Flower Moon
October 20th
It’s hard not to want check out another Martin Scorsese late Hail Mary, another three and a half hour behemoth. At least this one looks like some actual new ground broken, free from digital de-aging, so it has an edge on the character study calculus of The Irishman. Leo hasn't partnered with Marty since 2013, and Wolf of Wall Street was basically a wonderfully two-handed masterpiece. The fact that our fabled director's two best boys Robert De Niro and DiCaprio are finally together onscreen is a mythical match equal to Heat (or at least Righteous Kill). The historical dynamic between European immigrants and the Native American people is such rich soil and decadent tapestry for a revisionist Western historical epic of rare might, making this look like Scorsese’s most important movie in a long time, if not his most entertaining.
The Killer and The Holdovers
October 27th
David Fincher is back baby and not for any Oscar-fondling via fulfilling late papa’s wishes. He’s doing what I imagine will be a straight, sharp as silk thriller to match his most grooved-in niche, a wonderful set of his filmography in Seven, Panic Room, Zodiac, Gone Girl, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (I’m gonna pretend The Game doesn’t exist) and now The Killer. There’s not a weak one in the bunch and I doubt he’s starting to suck now. The premise is pretty played out but with Michael Fassbender front and center, my doubts are few. As long as I can see it in a theater free of blocky, Netlixy chunks in my darkly lit scenes, we’ll be golden.
Otherwise Alexander Payne has also made a return, apparently needing quite the hiatus to recover from an artistic pitfall as deep as Downsizing. With silly premises and Matt Damon’s face out of the picture, and Paul Giamatti reuniting with Payne for the first time in two decades following his arguable apex Sideways, I have an inkling of a feeling The Holdovers will be a cloud-nine level comedy-drama.
The Boy and the Heron and Poor Things
December 8th
Hayao Miyazaki makes one final victory lap in The Boy and the Heron, formerly titled How Do You Live?, that will eclipse his former swan song one decade ago, the admirably humanist The Wind Rises. This actually (possibly) career-concluding feature is supposedly the adaptation to his favorite book, the 1937 novel by Genzaburo Yoshino in what on paper seemed like a tirelessly animated Ozu-like feature, but with a loose, minimal relationship to the text, Miyazaki's twelth feature will not outstrip the best works of grounded, largely fantasy-absent Isao Takahata like Only Yesterday, another Ghibli mile marker. If 2023 has any guaranteed masterworks around the corner, despite whatever reception by Japanese viewers, most stateside bets would be on this is one.
And as if this day were not blessed by the movie gods to begin with, it's been five years since The Favourite, and The Lobster would be enough to make anyone excited about the future of Yorgos Lanthimos. Now with The Favourite’s agreeable Academy magnetism just in the rearview, it’s nice he can now return with something that looks truly bizarre, like one of Terry Gilliam’s fever dreams, and make the most of his awards clout and A24 partnership. He’s already got another in the arsenal with a further Emma Stone/Willem Dafoe collaboration in the anthology film And. Whatever steampunked, sexually liberated, sensationally black comic, Frankenstein-funneled fantasy awaits, it’s sure to be one of 2023’s most memorable episodes.
Aquaman: The Lost Kingdom
December 20th
James Wan’s Aquaman was just such a superhero movie worth keeping the studio system alive for. It’s probably the most underrated film of its kind to emerge this past decade or longer, so undyingly devoted to unflinching, straitlaced camp it becomes hard not to abandon your faculties in its hypnagogic visual style, fluid action (hehe) and old school adventure charm. A sequel is the last thing I’d be hyping but with Wan back (and Amber Heard, my God who cares about the rest? Let’s just hope she’s in it enough to matter) I have not entirely unfounded hopes this will be at least a serviceable, sensationally staged sequel, a singular swan song for the DCEU as we know it.
As usual, done in enough time to be relevant can leave us too far ahead to confirm when some of the year’s best will surely plant their late-year release dates — I’m looking at you Terrence Malick’s The Way of the Wind.
Looking back I was just grateful release dates stopped shifting in the wake of the VID and, by a year and half ago, just glad that all my denied pleasures were finally within grasp. All the cultural returns to normalcy have made me complacent, and pretty sad about what returning to a regular movie calendar really entails. Ha, I almost appreciated things for a moment — but without the breadth of cinema’s potential at maximum, our standards would dip deeply and our forgiveness would be the only respite.
All that to say, It ain’t pretty but here are the most enticing motion pictures I can spot from here.
John Wick: Chapter 4
March 24th
Given how exponentially popular the humble franchise has become with each passing entry, the next installment of assassin antics may confidently evolve into its mightiest (and hardly final) form. Chapter 3 really did it for me and the original is already a cute li'l classic. If they keep the story even vaguely in check and action revelry continuing to max out around 11, hopefully 4 just provides the hard-R Americanized martial arts pleasures as organically as its predecessors. Chad Stahelski has proven his potential so I’m eager to see how the freshest action/man-with-a-gun franchise keeps interest and thrills thriving. Just give me some sweet kills, could ya?
The Super Mario Bros. Movie
April 5th
I don’t even have to see the old 90s version to know there’s a shitload to be desired. Is Chris Pratt’s stupid voice the answer? I don’t know but since Sonic generally broke in the era of doable video game movies (aping on the CG main character gimmick in Scooby Doos and Garfields of old) there’s more hope than usual to spare for Illumination that this could be OK, or at least closer to satisfaction than something barely resembling its inspiration. It will make a shitzillion and I won’t even be too mad if they just calculate the zaniness for more than toddlers and don’t waste too much of the IP in one installment. Illumination can’t be trusted (maybe I’ll work in a Minon movie or two beforehand) but I’ll be damned if this doesn’t look at least eager to entertain. Kelly Reichardt’s new a24 comedy following her masterpiece First Cow, Showing Up, comes just after in case palettes are in need of a deep clean.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
June 2nd
This is the only multiverse worth all the fuss — if this film isn’t good, if not great, I’ll be quite surprised. But maybe not as surprised as I was witnessing the first Spider-Verse rightfully take the world by storm. This was not some random Mask of the Phantasm-esque separate, superfluous fare, it was the best Spider-Man movie in ages and there’s no reason to assume this won’t automatically outclass and outstrip the latest Tom Holland webslinger just like last time — is it bad that I really want it to? If Phil Lord and Chris Miller are involved the best can be reasonably expected.
Asteroid City, Elemental and The Flash
June 16th
Big for Wes means there’s some new bent, presumably sci-fi I dearly hope! He’s stylistically dug his own grave recently but I believe he hasn’t shed a morsel of his talent. As long as his robotic speed doesn’t get so fast the characters start sounding like they have a lung full of helium, his measured madness in Asteroid City will be another detail-littered joy. Plus, Pixar has just about jack shit on the horizon except for this new allegorical fantasy Elemental. I’d be glad if this indistint, Sausage Party meets Inside Out anthropomorphizing (from what I gather from the premise) actually lived up to some situational, high-concept ingeniousness, but there’s too few details of now to tell. But either Anderson or Pixar is a more reliable risk than DC.
But I’ll admit, The Flash always seemed like a character worth an origin tale to precede Justice League. In a post-Snyder world we’ll just have to hope Warner Brothers' strategic prudence pays off yet again with another late stand-alone endeavor — despite a DC restart set in James Gunn’s new direction, where the fuck could all this possibly lead to, especially after the underperformance of both Black Adam and Shazam! Fury of the Gods? Ezra Miller is a weirdo who at least once deserved the leading spotlight and if Flashpoint’s storyline is in store (by the looks of it almost undoubtedly) then there’ll be a decent time-turning plot to pair with the hopefully decadent blockbuster shenanigans. A little Batman Generations on the side couldn’t make things any less interesting.
Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One
July 12th
The first of what is to be assumed the two-part finale of Tom Cruise’s long run with the Mission: Impossible film franchise has faced a number of setbacks from pandemic-related production interruptions due to COVID-19 restrictions, breakouts on set, freak outs from the Mission man himself to controversies over trying to practically blow up a Polish bridge and soaring insurance costs ballooning the budget.
Besides welcome newcomers to the cast including Cruise’s apparent new and already former squeeze Hayley Atwell, a new villain (formerly Nicolas Hoult) in Esai Morales, the most interesting returning player is Henry Czerny as Kittridge from Brian De Palma’s 1996 original film, including recurring players like Rebecca Ferguson, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Vanessa Kirby and of course the only director of multiple Missions Christopher McQuarrie. There’s nothing left to expect but considered insanity and there is no reason to speculate with any semblance of pessimism or hold back from getting ridiculously excited over the most ripe and unerring spy movie series of the age, SUCK IT 007!!
McQuarrie’s Rogue Nation may not quite be worthy of its highlight sequences but Fallout was a modern classic for the franchise and action movies at large. After a film that good it's literally impos- I mean unthinkable to not be giddy just speculating about McQuarrie bringing the excellently escalating series to its bitter, stunt-drenched, overlong and, God-willing, jaw-droppingly extravagant end. The bike stunt is, of course, impressive, but if that train sequence isn’t the one of the best of all time then damn me to hell.
Barbie and Oppenheimer
July 21st
I can’t imagine Barbie won’t be one of the year’s biggest surprises — if Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig can agree to work together through marriage and kids and all to craft a worthwhile blockbuster out the most popular doll of the popular era, it could be quite the transgressive, possibly transcendent, cultural moment. All I have to go off is a clever teaser and their combined written history, only including contemporary screwball masterpieces Frances Ha and Mistress America, exemplary, exceptional entertainment in either case. This and Oppenheimer are shoo-in for most intriguing movies of the year — one for how sensationally they’re dressing their cast up on an apparently daily basis (may Ryan Gosling live a long, full life), the other just for how absolutely goddamn huge the cast is in general.
The first movie on the heels of Chris Nolan’s breakup with Warner Brothers, Universal’s J. Robert Oppenheimer biopic, should be, uh, good right? After Tenet probably got fucked the hardest of the pandemic sacrifices (I mean Nolan, you probably shouldn’t have pushed that hard at the height of baby-plague), his 200 million original projects are an extravagance of the past. At half that, Oppenheimer doesn’t have to appeal too hard to the mainstream, so maybe the legendary modern moviemaker will grow while becoming even more insular — this strikes one of Dunkirk above anything else in the past, as he seldom touches on real life outside of allusion.
Killers of the Flower Moon
October 20th
It’s hard not to want check out another Martin Scorsese late Hail Mary, another three and a half hour behemoth. At least this one looks like some actual new ground broken, free from digital de-aging, so it has an edge on the character study calculus of The Irishman. Leo hasn't partnered with Marty since 2013, and Wolf of Wall Street was basically a wonderfully two-handed masterpiece. The fact that our fabled director's two best boys Robert De Niro and DiCaprio are finally together onscreen is a mythical match equal to Heat (or at least Righteous Kill). The historical dynamic between European immigrants and the Native American people is such rich soil and decadent tapestry for a revisionist Western historical epic of rare might, making this look like Scorsese’s most important movie in a long time, if not his most entertaining.
The Killer and The Holdovers
October 27th
David Fincher is back baby and not for any Oscar-fondling via fulfilling late papa’s wishes. He’s doing what I imagine will be a straight, sharp as silk thriller to match his most grooved-in niche, a wonderful set of his filmography in Seven, Panic Room, Zodiac, Gone Girl, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (I’m gonna pretend The Game doesn’t exist) and now The Killer. There’s not a weak one in the bunch and I doubt he’s starting to suck now. The premise is pretty played out but with Michael Fassbender front and center, my doubts are few. As long as I can see it in a theater free of blocky, Netlixy chunks in my darkly lit scenes, we’ll be golden.
Otherwise Alexander Payne has also made a return, apparently needing quite the hiatus to recover from an artistic pitfall as deep as Downsizing. With silly premises and Matt Damon’s face out of the picture, and Paul Giamatti reuniting with Payne for the first time in two decades following his arguable apex Sideways, I have an inkling of a feeling The Holdovers will be a cloud-nine level comedy-drama.
The Boy and the Heron and Poor Things
December 8th
Hayao Miyazaki makes one final victory lap in The Boy and the Heron, formerly titled How Do You Live?, that will eclipse his former swan song one decade ago, the admirably humanist The Wind Rises. This actually (possibly) career-concluding feature is supposedly the adaptation to his favorite book, the 1937 novel by Genzaburo Yoshino in what on paper seemed like a tirelessly animated Ozu-like feature, but with a loose, minimal relationship to the text, Miyazaki's twelth feature will not outstrip the best works of grounded, largely fantasy-absent Isao Takahata like Only Yesterday, another Ghibli mile marker. If 2023 has any guaranteed masterworks around the corner, despite whatever reception by Japanese viewers, most stateside bets would be on this is one.
And as if this day were not blessed by the movie gods to begin with, it's been five years since The Favourite, and The Lobster would be enough to make anyone excited about the future of Yorgos Lanthimos. Now with The Favourite’s agreeable Academy magnetism just in the rearview, it’s nice he can now return with something that looks truly bizarre, like one of Terry Gilliam’s fever dreams, and make the most of his awards clout and A24 partnership. He’s already got another in the arsenal with a further Emma Stone/Willem Dafoe collaboration in the anthology film And. Whatever steampunked, sexually liberated, sensationally black comic, Frankenstein-funneled fantasy awaits, it’s sure to be one of 2023’s most memorable episodes.
Aquaman: The Lost Kingdom
December 20th
James Wan’s Aquaman was just such a superhero movie worth keeping the studio system alive for. It’s probably the most underrated film of its kind to emerge this past decade or longer, so undyingly devoted to unflinching, straitlaced camp it becomes hard not to abandon your faculties in its hypnagogic visual style, fluid action (hehe) and old school adventure charm. A sequel is the last thing I’d be hyping but with Wan back (and Amber Heard, my God who cares about the rest? Let’s just hope she’s in it enough to matter) I have not entirely unfounded hopes this will be at least a serviceable, sensationally staged sequel, a singular swan song for the DCEU as we know it.
The Most Promising Films of 2022
As I reel from the latest delay of surely the greatest action movie the world has yet to see — the now subtitled seventh Mission: Impossible feature Dead Reckoning Part One — the roster of anticipated 2022 movies now looks unforgivably scant.
By the final months of 2020 we were just praying 2021 was an improvement seeing as any and all of our anticipated movies had retreated further into a future of postponements; by the final months of 2021 we could finally get a rinse of relief when we laid our eyes on all the features that were stripped from us long ago (No Time to Die, Dune) rightfully and mostly exclusively sent back to the big screen. COVID’s grip hardly got any looser but 2022 has a brilliant chance of being the first year of the 2020s where the movie year in reality equates to what we see from afar.
Even since Omicron made things all the more challenging, serving as a a sharp reminder that COVID could never be roped down to one year, one season or one strain, theaters are still kickin’ and the flicks are still flickin’. My breath will remain bated and my eyes will still be wide open while we count our blessings and find a reason to look forward to the virulent void that is our future.
Of course the pitfall of these speculative, excitable, ever-changing lists is that often the best films of any year aren’t decided or even announced until well into the current year. Should I hear anything about Richard Linklater’s upcoming rotoscoped Netflix project Apollo 10½, Noah Baumbach’s first film adaptation in the postmodern novel White Noise or Terrence Malick’s new spiritual slice of sublimity The Way of the Wind, the scope of the following entries will be skewed.
The Batman
March 4
Wait a second; so last year there was the Snyder Cut of Justice League despite being a joke for so long, a new Suicide Squad with some of the old Suicide Squad and now both Ben Affleck and Michael Keaton are in the new Flash movie? And now you want to redo Batman, again? Whatever.
Before there was footage aplenty to obsess over during a long anticipation, this reboot still had all the prescribed elements for success. Robert Pattinson stepped as far away from his Twilight stardom long ago — with films like Good Time, High Life, The Lighthouse and Tenet in the recent rearview, he doesn’t even need two Cronenberg movies for credibility — RPats has the chops and the disposition for the legendary role. But then there’s Paul Dano as The Riddler, an unrecognizable Colin Farrell as The Penguin, Andy Serkis as Alfred Pennyworth, Jeffrey Wright as Jim Gordon, Zoë Kravitz as Selina Kyle and John Turturro as Carmine Falconi — nothing less than bold, inspired casting choices in the bunch.
Director Matt Reeves also has skill with hefty budgets and technical hurdles since rounding out an unexpectedly great prequel trilogy with Dawn and War of the Planet of the Apes. The emo, warm-toned, close-up-heavy feature will hopefully have a contrary sheen to Zack Snyder’s self-righteous stupefaction and Christopher Nolan’s self-serious semi-realism. But this is really the biggest tossup of Warner Brothers' 2022 output and superhero movies at large — it’s possibly the most unpredictable piece of media in 2022.
The Northman
April 22
Out of any other filmmaker to emerge this past decade, Robert Eggers has the most palpable promise — which is no easy thing when your competition is his A24 partner in hipster horror Ari Aster, Jordan Peele or, more intimidatingly, Damien Chazelle. His third feature follows up his two folk-horror feasts for the senses (the achingly authentic femifable The Witch and his Gothic-comic pièce de resistance The Lighthouse) and there’s literally not one reason to assume The Northman will be anything less than incredible.
Eggers is operating with a comparatively sizable budget (I’m sure he’ll wring that 60 million for all it's worth) and a superb acting spread — a reunion with Anya Taylor-Joy and Willem Dafoe as well as Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke and, most interest-piquing, Björk, whose frequent artistic partner Sjön is a co-writer — while he continues his own tradition of revivifying filmmaking where the mythical and historical meet, in this particular case Nordic vikings. Greatness awaits, surely.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
May 6
Marvel can squeeze four movies into a six month window but it doesn’t mean I’ll be anything other than dutifully in attendance for them. Black Widow, Shang-Chi, Eternals and some Spider-Man Super Friends episode tried to be diverting and refreshing following the uberclimax of Phase Three, Avengers: Endgame, and the giant gap in releases between Spider-Man: Far From Home and Black Widow, almost two years, *gasp*! It was no real dry spell for nerds though since Disney’s already pumped out numerous irrelevant TV show spinoffs. Apparently I’ll have to watch WandaVision in order to get everything out of Doctor Strange 2, but with Sam Raimi at the helm, even I can’t get upset at such soul-plumbing corporate bamboozling.
Strange seems the character and conceit most rife with cinematic potential in the Marvel Universe, and 2022 is loaded with superhero fare that actually makes me wish the trend wouldn’t die just yet, Multiverse of Madness sitting pretty as the primary pick. Now what’s really ironic is the good Dr. is a huge factor of the newest Spider-Man No Way Home, which is scaffolded by elements from Raimi’s original trilogy. Whatever synchronicities and coincidences occur, please just give me the psychedelic, mystical, fantastical goods, if you don’t mind.
Men
May 20
I was afraid that we might have lost Alex Garland to television’s strong signal, but the man behind three novels, three solid sci-fi screenplays and the acclaimed FX miniseries Devs is back for his third film.
The title is about as enigmatic as the trailer which emits a simple psychological horror twinge removed from his wheelhouse of near-future peeks. Garland seems more reserved than ever, but both of his features thus far have been deceptively ambitious meaning Men may be mightier than it looks. Also Jessie Buckley (I’m Thinking of Ending Things, The Lost Daughter) is the finest actor to emerge this decade, and a fresh prestige lead should advance her steady roll to a reputation among her generation's most appreciable performers.
Top Gun: Maverick
May 27
After numerous delays, there’s not too much reason to be excited about Top Gun: Maverick other than as a means to celebrate Tom Cruise’s prolonged, profuse insanity. Even if this is just an appeteaser for the forthcoming Mission: Impossible installments, the new 35-years-removed sequel still has a Bruckheimer stamp of dumb fun, a visually adept big-budget director in Joseph Kosinski (TRON: Legacy, Oblivion) and Cruise’s continued fervor for advancing practical action, stuntwork and spectacle.
If the second Top Gun is a corny, cringy Hollywood movie on top of it all, it will, if nothing else, live up to the exact notoriety of Tony Scott’s 1986 ‘classic.’ I couldn't be less excited for a movie I am most assuredly going to see.
Jurassic World: Dominion
June 10
The footage so far is enough to get you a little excited — Fallen Kingdom seemed to tease the exact sort of Jurassic Worlds Collide bait and switch that they never follow up on, a blueballs trick akin to The Lost World. But now they’ve got no way out and the whole of Dominion, Jurassic World 3, Jurassic Park 6, the EPIC CONCLUSION TO THE JURASSIC ERA better be bursting with dinos in the real-life situations, otherwise literally what is the point?
I don’t even care about seeing Chris Pratt’s stupid face or Bryce Dallas Howard’s impossible figure. Make this regurgitated sequel worth it and you’ll have made sitting through 2015’s Jurassic World a little less regrettable — I have a soft spot for Fallen Kingdom’s inanities. Though they had only nabbed Jeff Goldblum so far, Sam Neill and Laura Dern’s return is no small thing, and will make this a legacyquel for the ages or as perfunctory as Independence Day: Resurgence.
Elvis
June 24
Baz Luhrmann hasn’t made a damn thing since The Great Gatsby — I’m all for the man getting back to the music, all I ask is for fewer JAY-Z verses this time. What really matters is outdoing the late 70s Elvis flick and making better on the sadly more cliché than cliché framework of musical biopics. Luhrmann is an audacious auteur so my hopes are higher, and casting an unknown (Austin Butler) as the legend himself is bound to help. Plus Tom Hanks in support, while no guarantee of quality, is delightful nonetheless.
For a man concerned with romance, bedazzlement and sound, Presley’s story should serve Luhrmann’s purposes. Let’s hope we’re dealing with more of a Rocketman than a Bohemian Rhapsody.
Thor: Love and Thunder
July 8
God, more capeshit already — look, I trust Taika Waititi to make a fun movie. But bringing back Natalie Portman? Eh. Like I’ve said before, this year’s lineup looks leagues lovelier than the onset of Phase Four. Endgame made it seem like Thor was crossing over with the Guardians of the Galaxy, but we’ll have to see how that plays out as it could have been just another disappointing blind alley, the teasing nonsense the post-credit wastes of time were designed for.
I don’t have much more to say but I’ll be there. If Waititi unlocks more of Chris Hemsworth’s previously undervalued comic dexterity, it’ll be a pleasure.
Nope
July 22
America’s golden boy of elevated horror better have another ace up his sleeve. Any details thus far about Nope are as hushed up as the title, and that Super Bowl trailer spoiled none of the film’s cryptic qualities, which must be far less high concept that his former career.
Lately Jordan Peele has been fooling around with touching up a new, unfulfilled Candyman and trying to make Twilight Zone relevant. Back in auteur mode, I hope he’s got something as earnest and exciting as Get Out or at least as bold and shrewd as Us. Probably no other director has as much present pressure on himself directly due to past success.
Bullet Train
August 5
David Leicht is a modern action master, so him steering Brad Pitt and an impressive ensemble cast (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Michael Shannon, Sandra Bullock, Logan Lerman, Brian Tyree Henry) through some Japanese-inspired assassination feature (based on Maria Beetle by Kōtarō Isaka) sounds like a new slice of gnarly escapism in waiting. After Atomic Blonde surreptitiously scaled a sense of awe at staged skirmishes, I will follow this guy’s eye for the slam-bang-pow stuff to wherever his testosterone takes us.
TÁR
October 7th
Well I don’t know where Todd Field has been but his two-installment track record is so far spotless. 2001’s In the Bedroom is yesterday’s Oscar drama perfected, suffused with romance and haunting moments of violence — and 2006’s Little Children is more literary, bleakly comic, somehow more profusely shocking account of his same penchant for adapting grippingly believable and unpredictable modern American stories.
All this praise to say the details of his new feature, entitled TÁR, have been kept quiet, although it’s confirmed to be an original feature from the reclusive writer-director — Cate Blanchett, Mark Strong and Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s Noémie Merlant will take part in what may very likely be a left-field mystery-flavor masterpiece.
The Fabelmans
November 23rd
Spielberg should never stop ’til they rip the camera right from his cold, dead, Jewish fingers. But the brilliant director has never been too touted for his writing, which has only really reccured in his filmography a couple of times, the most recent of which being 2001's A.I. Artificial Intelligence — whether you’re unconvinced of that film’s brilliance or not, you can look at that very personal, Kubrick-inspired project and see how an auteur feature about his own childhood might fare.
Straight from the horse's mouth is not how he works — I imagine Spielberg spending his off-days sifting through scripts and scrambling for projects that will awaken his inner youth. After inserting so many broken families into his films, I wonder how the real inspiration will play out in The Fabelmans, just like I’m curious how Janusz Kaminski will make his autobiographical past so dusty, washed out and unforgettably beautiful. Spielberg so seldom dabbles in the introspective, let alone the realistic, that I imagine this is a box he could only check off his filmographic bucket list in his advanced years.
Avatar: The Way of Water
December 16
Wait, this isn’t really coming out is it? Like for real? I’m pretty sure this movie’s first release date was 2014 but no matter how long it takes, what will count is what mold-breaking technology James Cameron misuses this time. He’s apparently all about the underwater endeavors this time — The Abyss, let alone Titanic, should be practice enough.
But seriously, the honest question isn’t whether it’s good or not — after all this time it better be alright, which is as much praise as I can heap on the original 2009 film — but whether the lightning strikes twice (or is that 3 times for Cameron given Titanic?) for those popular blue people. I have so little faith in Cameron’s writing abilities that I wouldn’t be surprised if this planned five-part series doesn’t end up just as lame, stretchy, jumbled and convoluted as J. K. Rowling’s scripts for the Fantastic Beasts film series. But even I have to admit Avatar 2 is the event movie of an era, and Cameron’s creations will be worth the fuss until we get sick of the tsunami of follow-ups.
Babylon
December 25
Attention! Damien Chazelle has a new movie entitled Babylon set in 1920s Hollywood with leads in Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie with support by Olivia Wilde, Katherine Waterston, Samara Weaving, Tobey Maguire and many others. Recently he directed the first few episodes of the Netflix miniseries The Eddy but he’s officially back to filmmaking after the formidable First Man underperformed a few years prior.
The youngest Best Director winner in history came up the way any self-respecting filmmaker would aspire to. At the end of his college days he made a prototype for his dream project La La Land entitled Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, a modest musical offering. After freelance screenwriting around Hollywood doing punch-ups for The Last Exorcism Part II and 10 Cloverfield Lane, he turned his originally undervalued script for Whiplash into a feature film after a successful preliminary short. Whiplash was rightfully an enormous critical and awards darling and ensured La La Land would become the sensational near-Best Picture winner it was. First Man didn’t garner much attention from anyone and was nonetheless one of 2018’s most meritorious films.
Point being the wonderful, still-freshfaced auteur's return to filmmaking, enraptured in former golden ages of cinema, should be something marvelous to behold when it eventually comes to fruition. Again, there’s not much to anticipate save greatness. This young man’s grasp of the form remarkably rivals his reach.
By the final months of 2020 we were just praying 2021 was an improvement seeing as any and all of our anticipated movies had retreated further into a future of postponements; by the final months of 2021 we could finally get a rinse of relief when we laid our eyes on all the features that were stripped from us long ago (No Time to Die, Dune) rightfully and mostly exclusively sent back to the big screen. COVID’s grip hardly got any looser but 2022 has a brilliant chance of being the first year of the 2020s where the movie year in reality equates to what we see from afar.
Even since Omicron made things all the more challenging, serving as a a sharp reminder that COVID could never be roped down to one year, one season or one strain, theaters are still kickin’ and the flicks are still flickin’. My breath will remain bated and my eyes will still be wide open while we count our blessings and find a reason to look forward to the virulent void that is our future.
Of course the pitfall of these speculative, excitable, ever-changing lists is that often the best films of any year aren’t decided or even announced until well into the current year. Should I hear anything about Richard Linklater’s upcoming rotoscoped Netflix project Apollo 10½, Noah Baumbach’s first film adaptation in the postmodern novel White Noise or Terrence Malick’s new spiritual slice of sublimity The Way of the Wind, the scope of the following entries will be skewed.
The Batman
March 4
Wait a second; so last year there was the Snyder Cut of Justice League despite being a joke for so long, a new Suicide Squad with some of the old Suicide Squad and now both Ben Affleck and Michael Keaton are in the new Flash movie? And now you want to redo Batman, again? Whatever.
Before there was footage aplenty to obsess over during a long anticipation, this reboot still had all the prescribed elements for success. Robert Pattinson stepped as far away from his Twilight stardom long ago — with films like Good Time, High Life, The Lighthouse and Tenet in the recent rearview, he doesn’t even need two Cronenberg movies for credibility — RPats has the chops and the disposition for the legendary role. But then there’s Paul Dano as The Riddler, an unrecognizable Colin Farrell as The Penguin, Andy Serkis as Alfred Pennyworth, Jeffrey Wright as Jim Gordon, Zoë Kravitz as Selina Kyle and John Turturro as Carmine Falconi — nothing less than bold, inspired casting choices in the bunch.
Director Matt Reeves also has skill with hefty budgets and technical hurdles since rounding out an unexpectedly great prequel trilogy with Dawn and War of the Planet of the Apes. The emo, warm-toned, close-up-heavy feature will hopefully have a contrary sheen to Zack Snyder’s self-righteous stupefaction and Christopher Nolan’s self-serious semi-realism. But this is really the biggest tossup of Warner Brothers' 2022 output and superhero movies at large — it’s possibly the most unpredictable piece of media in 2022.
The Northman
April 22
Out of any other filmmaker to emerge this past decade, Robert Eggers has the most palpable promise — which is no easy thing when your competition is his A24 partner in hipster horror Ari Aster, Jordan Peele or, more intimidatingly, Damien Chazelle. His third feature follows up his two folk-horror feasts for the senses (the achingly authentic femifable The Witch and his Gothic-comic pièce de resistance The Lighthouse) and there’s literally not one reason to assume The Northman will be anything less than incredible.
Eggers is operating with a comparatively sizable budget (I’m sure he’ll wring that 60 million for all it's worth) and a superb acting spread — a reunion with Anya Taylor-Joy and Willem Dafoe as well as Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke and, most interest-piquing, Björk, whose frequent artistic partner Sjön is a co-writer — while he continues his own tradition of revivifying filmmaking where the mythical and historical meet, in this particular case Nordic vikings. Greatness awaits, surely.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
May 6
Marvel can squeeze four movies into a six month window but it doesn’t mean I’ll be anything other than dutifully in attendance for them. Black Widow, Shang-Chi, Eternals and some Spider-Man Super Friends episode tried to be diverting and refreshing following the uberclimax of Phase Three, Avengers: Endgame, and the giant gap in releases between Spider-Man: Far From Home and Black Widow, almost two years, *gasp*! It was no real dry spell for nerds though since Disney’s already pumped out numerous irrelevant TV show spinoffs. Apparently I’ll have to watch WandaVision in order to get everything out of Doctor Strange 2, but with Sam Raimi at the helm, even I can’t get upset at such soul-plumbing corporate bamboozling.
Strange seems the character and conceit most rife with cinematic potential in the Marvel Universe, and 2022 is loaded with superhero fare that actually makes me wish the trend wouldn’t die just yet, Multiverse of Madness sitting pretty as the primary pick. Now what’s really ironic is the good Dr. is a huge factor of the newest Spider-Man No Way Home, which is scaffolded by elements from Raimi’s original trilogy. Whatever synchronicities and coincidences occur, please just give me the psychedelic, mystical, fantastical goods, if you don’t mind.
Men
May 20
I was afraid that we might have lost Alex Garland to television’s strong signal, but the man behind three novels, three solid sci-fi screenplays and the acclaimed FX miniseries Devs is back for his third film.
The title is about as enigmatic as the trailer which emits a simple psychological horror twinge removed from his wheelhouse of near-future peeks. Garland seems more reserved than ever, but both of his features thus far have been deceptively ambitious meaning Men may be mightier than it looks. Also Jessie Buckley (I’m Thinking of Ending Things, The Lost Daughter) is the finest actor to emerge this decade, and a fresh prestige lead should advance her steady roll to a reputation among her generation's most appreciable performers.
Top Gun: Maverick
May 27
After numerous delays, there’s not too much reason to be excited about Top Gun: Maverick other than as a means to celebrate Tom Cruise’s prolonged, profuse insanity. Even if this is just an appeteaser for the forthcoming Mission: Impossible installments, the new 35-years-removed sequel still has a Bruckheimer stamp of dumb fun, a visually adept big-budget director in Joseph Kosinski (TRON: Legacy, Oblivion) and Cruise’s continued fervor for advancing practical action, stuntwork and spectacle.
If the second Top Gun is a corny, cringy Hollywood movie on top of it all, it will, if nothing else, live up to the exact notoriety of Tony Scott’s 1986 ‘classic.’ I couldn't be less excited for a movie I am most assuredly going to see.
Jurassic World: Dominion
June 10
The footage so far is enough to get you a little excited — Fallen Kingdom seemed to tease the exact sort of Jurassic Worlds Collide bait and switch that they never follow up on, a blueballs trick akin to The Lost World. But now they’ve got no way out and the whole of Dominion, Jurassic World 3, Jurassic Park 6, the EPIC CONCLUSION TO THE JURASSIC ERA better be bursting with dinos in the real-life situations, otherwise literally what is the point?
I don’t even care about seeing Chris Pratt’s stupid face or Bryce Dallas Howard’s impossible figure. Make this regurgitated sequel worth it and you’ll have made sitting through 2015’s Jurassic World a little less regrettable — I have a soft spot for Fallen Kingdom’s inanities. Though they had only nabbed Jeff Goldblum so far, Sam Neill and Laura Dern’s return is no small thing, and will make this a legacyquel for the ages or as perfunctory as Independence Day: Resurgence.
Elvis
June 24
Baz Luhrmann hasn’t made a damn thing since The Great Gatsby — I’m all for the man getting back to the music, all I ask is for fewer JAY-Z verses this time. What really matters is outdoing the late 70s Elvis flick and making better on the sadly more cliché than cliché framework of musical biopics. Luhrmann is an audacious auteur so my hopes are higher, and casting an unknown (Austin Butler) as the legend himself is bound to help. Plus Tom Hanks in support, while no guarantee of quality, is delightful nonetheless.
For a man concerned with romance, bedazzlement and sound, Presley’s story should serve Luhrmann’s purposes. Let’s hope we’re dealing with more of a Rocketman than a Bohemian Rhapsody.
Thor: Love and Thunder
July 8
God, more capeshit already — look, I trust Taika Waititi to make a fun movie. But bringing back Natalie Portman? Eh. Like I’ve said before, this year’s lineup looks leagues lovelier than the onset of Phase Four. Endgame made it seem like Thor was crossing over with the Guardians of the Galaxy, but we’ll have to see how that plays out as it could have been just another disappointing blind alley, the teasing nonsense the post-credit wastes of time were designed for.
I don’t have much more to say but I’ll be there. If Waititi unlocks more of Chris Hemsworth’s previously undervalued comic dexterity, it’ll be a pleasure.
Nope
July 22
America’s golden boy of elevated horror better have another ace up his sleeve. Any details thus far about Nope are as hushed up as the title, and that Super Bowl trailer spoiled none of the film’s cryptic qualities, which must be far less high concept that his former career.
Lately Jordan Peele has been fooling around with touching up a new, unfulfilled Candyman and trying to make Twilight Zone relevant. Back in auteur mode, I hope he’s got something as earnest and exciting as Get Out or at least as bold and shrewd as Us. Probably no other director has as much present pressure on himself directly due to past success.
Bullet Train
August 5
David Leicht is a modern action master, so him steering Brad Pitt and an impressive ensemble cast (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Michael Shannon, Sandra Bullock, Logan Lerman, Brian Tyree Henry) through some Japanese-inspired assassination feature (based on Maria Beetle by Kōtarō Isaka) sounds like a new slice of gnarly escapism in waiting. After Atomic Blonde surreptitiously scaled a sense of awe at staged skirmishes, I will follow this guy’s eye for the slam-bang-pow stuff to wherever his testosterone takes us.
TÁR
October 7th
Well I don’t know where Todd Field has been but his two-installment track record is so far spotless. 2001’s In the Bedroom is yesterday’s Oscar drama perfected, suffused with romance and haunting moments of violence — and 2006’s Little Children is more literary, bleakly comic, somehow more profusely shocking account of his same penchant for adapting grippingly believable and unpredictable modern American stories.
All this praise to say the details of his new feature, entitled TÁR, have been kept quiet, although it’s confirmed to be an original feature from the reclusive writer-director — Cate Blanchett, Mark Strong and Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s Noémie Merlant will take part in what may very likely be a left-field mystery-flavor masterpiece.
The Fabelmans
November 23rd
Spielberg should never stop ’til they rip the camera right from his cold, dead, Jewish fingers. But the brilliant director has never been too touted for his writing, which has only really reccured in his filmography a couple of times, the most recent of which being 2001's A.I. Artificial Intelligence — whether you’re unconvinced of that film’s brilliance or not, you can look at that very personal, Kubrick-inspired project and see how an auteur feature about his own childhood might fare.
Straight from the horse's mouth is not how he works — I imagine Spielberg spending his off-days sifting through scripts and scrambling for projects that will awaken his inner youth. After inserting so many broken families into his films, I wonder how the real inspiration will play out in The Fabelmans, just like I’m curious how Janusz Kaminski will make his autobiographical past so dusty, washed out and unforgettably beautiful. Spielberg so seldom dabbles in the introspective, let alone the realistic, that I imagine this is a box he could only check off his filmographic bucket list in his advanced years.
Avatar: The Way of Water
December 16
Wait, this isn’t really coming out is it? Like for real? I’m pretty sure this movie’s first release date was 2014 but no matter how long it takes, what will count is what mold-breaking technology James Cameron misuses this time. He’s apparently all about the underwater endeavors this time — The Abyss, let alone Titanic, should be practice enough.
But seriously, the honest question isn’t whether it’s good or not — after all this time it better be alright, which is as much praise as I can heap on the original 2009 film — but whether the lightning strikes twice (or is that 3 times for Cameron given Titanic?) for those popular blue people. I have so little faith in Cameron’s writing abilities that I wouldn’t be surprised if this planned five-part series doesn’t end up just as lame, stretchy, jumbled and convoluted as J. K. Rowling’s scripts for the Fantastic Beasts film series. But even I have to admit Avatar 2 is the event movie of an era, and Cameron’s creations will be worth the fuss until we get sick of the tsunami of follow-ups.
Babylon
December 25
Attention! Damien Chazelle has a new movie entitled Babylon set in 1920s Hollywood with leads in Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie with support by Olivia Wilde, Katherine Waterston, Samara Weaving, Tobey Maguire and many others. Recently he directed the first few episodes of the Netflix miniseries The Eddy but he’s officially back to filmmaking after the formidable First Man underperformed a few years prior.
The youngest Best Director winner in history came up the way any self-respecting filmmaker would aspire to. At the end of his college days he made a prototype for his dream project La La Land entitled Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, a modest musical offering. After freelance screenwriting around Hollywood doing punch-ups for The Last Exorcism Part II and 10 Cloverfield Lane, he turned his originally undervalued script for Whiplash into a feature film after a successful preliminary short. Whiplash was rightfully an enormous critical and awards darling and ensured La La Land would become the sensational near-Best Picture winner it was. First Man didn’t garner much attention from anyone and was nonetheless one of 2018’s most meritorious films.
Point being the wonderful, still-freshfaced auteur's return to filmmaking, enraptured in former golden ages of cinema, should be something marvelous to behold when it eventually comes to fruition. Again, there’s not much to anticipate save greatness. This young man’s grasp of the form remarkably rivals his reach.
The Most Promising Films of 2021
Well, the year hasn't kicked into overdrive yet but the return seems to have been in progress since the release dates stopped shifting so damn much (this isn't my twentieth draft of this or anything). The suspended soft reopening of the United States will probably stay in motion even as the state of the world moves through some more fearful fluctuations.
Two Marches past it was unthinkable that cinemas would be crippled for 14 months but at the turn of last year we couldn't even be hopeful for some overdue renaissance. The announcement of Warner Brothers' 2021 platform was an industry-altering, paradigm-shifting move, though they've said it's a transitory decision to have theatrical releases unveiled on HBOMAX the same day. It seemed panicky at first but it turned out profitable — hopefully the promise to be a temporary band-aid, um, sticks. Disney, as one could expect, is scrounging for every skekel available, opting for a same day release with steep online price tags separate from monthly services, save for Pixar releases for some reason. Universal has taken the deep dive with F9 and Old as theater exclusives with no digital options in sight; somehow the studio behind Minions has the most faith in the box office. Paramount is just behind in decent intentions, allowing films 45 days in theaters before they arrive on their joke of a streaming service.
Regardless of when we get to a more homogeneous state of domestic immunity, the majority of us should be healthy enough for the most mouth-watering, considerably appealing releases on the horizon. October feels like the first month to feature actual financial gambles without hesitancy. It's amusing now to remember that, by the end of last summer, it already seemed Hollywood had hit the imperative moment, with major exhibition chains looking to reopen by late August 2020 after an attempted return was put off when cases spiked in July. AMC was announcing 15 cent tickets and the company hoped to have approximately two-thirds of its locations open for the early September release of Tenet. As fall moseyed along there was no chance for safe, successful turnout and interest, rightly so most things considered. Instead of a 2020 cinematic calendar we had a vast void.
Summer 2021 has been the real rebound moment, with A Quiet Place, F9 and Black Widow putting up numbers that could make you consider we're nearing that post-COVID part of the 2020s. With Warner Brothers striking up a deal with AMC to feature their future films, beginning in 2022, exclusively in theaters for 45 days and Disney experimenting with a theatrical-only run for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, streaming may have won the last few battles but the war of cinematic release strategies has only just begun.
With variants floating around we can only be so certain of this steady ascent back to the old life we knew (those unrecoverable good times) so obviously these films are still prone to further delay after delay... and ORD means original release date btw (and btw means...)
And sorry, the untitled fourth Matrix film and Spider-Man: No Way Home might be guilty holiday fun in theory but these December mysteries only excite my most morbid curiosity.
Respect
(August 13 / ORD: August 14, October 9, December 25, 2020)
Television and theater director Liesl Tommy is making her directorial debut in what could easily amount to one of the best music biopics of the last decade. Respect will be a big deal no matter when it’s released, but it's too bad the 2020 holiday date didn't stick, since I doubt there would be a better year to remember and cherish the Queen of Soul than in one of more racial unrest than we’ve seen in 50 years. At least we can be grateful for Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and The United States vs. Billie Holiday.
Tommy also has another biopic lined up in adapting Trevor Noah’s autobiography Born a Crime, but the Aretha Franklin story should amount to a film dramatization to match meritorious takes on great black musicians (Ray, Get On Up, Straight Outta Compton). With Jennifer Hudson in the decisive role, every hesitation should cease — Forest Whitaker and Mary J. Blige join her among an estimable ensemble. With women of color penning the script (Tracey Scott Wilson) and behind the camera, there’s little to no risk of any sort of Bohemian Rhapsody-esque calamity.
Annette
(August 20)
For being active across four decades, Leos Carax has taken his time developing his tendencies. To compress his characteristics, his spirit seems like some conglomeration of Jean-Luc Godard’s direct deconstructionism and Luis Buñuel’s satirical surreality, with maybe a touch of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s supple disillusionment. The postmodern French filmmaker, cinematic poet and unabashed provocateur has been on a nine-year hiatus since his astonishing avant-garde film Holy Motors became one of the world’s most acclaimed films of the decade past.
The first trailer for Annette promised nothing less than ‘cinema absolue,’ so he must be pretty confident in his awaited return. This is his first English language film, though that’s probably the only concession he’ll make for domestic audiences since I doubt his insistence on a cavalier formal experimentation isn’t going anywhere. Adam Driver is just adding another reputable notch in his already illustrious repertoire and basically the same goes for Marion Cotillard, though she’s been making smart career moves way longer. This Amazon-backed musical fantasia should be an introspective visual feast — if it can at least match the vehemently romantic ruminations of his 80s classics Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais Sang, then the opening film of Cannes 2021 could be an international artistic proclamation for the age.
No Time to Die
(October 8 / ORD: April 2, November 20, November 12, 2020, April 2)
Delayed thrice by the length of a year and a half after the longest break between Craig’s Bond films already, 007 has had ages in the editing room and MGM has been helpless in rebuilding all the expended anticipation. Remember that Super Bowl TV spot and the Billie Eilish theme song? The previous hype mounted in early 2020 was for naught once the prudence of health concerns regarding COVID-19 took hold — No Time to Die was the first of countless movies to succumb to more than one stark release date shift.
By October its far more reasonable to suggest the pandemic will be a lesser burden on moviegoing domestically and abroad. Bond is the vein of escapism that implies grand, loud exhibition, and Craig has earned a proper farewell. Casino Royale is the most admired anti-Bond film and a high-water mark for the franchise. Quantum of Solace has a palatable efficiency but too many era-specific clichés. Skyfall was a nice, artistically fashioned stand-alone ode to the brand — Roger Deakins' cinematography is better than the film itself. The same could be said of Hoyte Van Hoytema’s work on Spectre, wherein Sam Mendes was trying to once again capture that Christopher Nolan-inspired pseudo-intellectual glaze, to lousy end results.
The continuity of the franchise has been utterly buggered over time, so even though this film contains annoying crossover threads for Lea Seydoux and Christoph Waltz’ characters from Spectre, fresh director Cary Joji Fukunaga (Sin Nombre, Jane Eyre, Beasts of No Nation) has a divergent temperament that will be neat to behold. If Craig is gone for good, the goodbye will be interesting to stack against infamous partings like Pierce Brosnan’s Die Another Day, Roger Moore’s A View to a Kill and Sean Connery’s Diamonds Are Forever. With an insanely long runtime and a toss-up new villain in Rami Malek to go along with Waltz’ Blofeld, No Time To Die is also tied with Spectre for the highest budget of the franchise. Hopefully this time the 250 million dollars will be spent coaxing us out of boredom rather than into it. Craig is sneaking out as the biggest mainstay Bond since Moore, so it should be an epic sendoff, quality notwithstanding.
The Last Duel
(October 15 / ORD: December 25, 2020)
Ridley Scott’s luck with historical epics has only diminished with each passing attempt, no matter how inspired they may be. Gladiator’s got some gravity but then Kingdom of Heaven (the director’s cut is decent), Robin Hood and Exodus: Gods and Kings seemed to map out a downward slope. Their receding quality might have been enough for you to justify leaving the antiquated if potentially powerful genre in the past for good.
But with a script apparently penned by the good boys behind Good Will Hunting — Ben Affleck and Matt Damon who, just like in that film, star in The Last Duel as well — Scott directs Adam Driver in what should have shaped up into an Academy Awards player in the year of COVID and likely will now in 2021 as Disney strategically pushed back this inherited 20th Century Fox production. If all else fails Scott has a backup Driver collaboration House of Gucci due out the following month.
Dune
(October 22 / ORD: December 18, 2020, October 1, 2021)
There's not enough time or energy to get as hype as we should about Denis Villeneuve’s next expensive sci-fi endeavor, especially from the looks of its stellar footage. Somehow after Blade Runner 2049 flopped on its face financially in 2017 despite iridescent cinematic virtues, Warner Brothers have handed Villeneuve the keys to what could become the next Lord of the Rings — or at least the next Star Wars — if handled correctly and received enthusiastically.
Alejandro Jodorowsky notably attempted to adapt Dune in the 70s to no avail, his 10 to 12-hour vision laid out in the 2013 documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune. David Lynch tried out the Frank Herbert text back in the 80s to iffy results — it's probably the worst movie in an otherwise staggeringly impressive career and the director's admitted as much. Villeneuve’s film is only the first of a supposed two-part adaption of the famously ambitious 1965 novel, the first in a six-part series. I would say Villenueve is in over his head but the Blade Runner sequel could've been a fantastic failure and instead was in the ballpark of all-time classic sci-fi.
There’s quite the cast — Timothée Chalamat stands right where Kyle MacLachlan did 36 years ago as Paul Atreides. He’s working alongside Oscar Isaac, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista, Charlotte Rampling, Jason Momoa and Javier Bardem. Although Roger Deakins couldn’t return to work his cinematographic magic as he did with 2049, Hans Zimmer skipped out on a regular collaboration with Christopher Nolan to score Dune. But the critical component will likely be Villeneuve’s ability to take his silky, macabre auteurism and realize everything practically and introspectively.
The French Dispatch
(October 22 / ORD: July 24, October 16 2020)
Wes Anderson returns to live-action after Isle of Dogs — his second stop-motion feature, clearly lesser than Fantastic Mr. Fox — came and went quietly. The Grand Budapest Hotel persists as a beloved quintessential work, although the film just before, 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom, should be considered his unequivocal masterwork seeing as the quirkster, in rare form, fully embraced his most honestly nostalgic sensibilities and let us past all the kitschy irony, ornamental mise-en-scène and Kinks songs — only The Royal Tenenbaums came as close to sincere ingenuity.
We can surely expect the director’s fastidious orderliness and dry wit will remain intact as he operates with a typically monstrous cast — featuring regulars like Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson, Willem Dafoe, Bob Balaban and Frances McDormand as well as at least a dozen other recognizable names. With conventional peculiarity, the full title of the film about the presumed comedic chaos of 20th century journalism is The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun. Let's pray for an swift rebound back to picture show prominence.
Last Night in Soho
(October 29 / ORD: September 25, 2020, April 23, October 22)
Edgar Wright has always known how to get dark even though he constantly operates in the light. No piece in his filmography could be labeled anything other than comedy despite dominant valleys of horror coursing throughout the whole Cornetto trilogy. I'll leave out Scott Pilgrim and Baby Driver, which don’t really have the zombies, townsfolk cult of serial killers or robot apocalypses to justify the argument.
But psychological horror is another racket and the director’s penchant for speed and shrewdness will be tested in contrasting fashion. Now with a fantastically eerie, Giallo-adjacent trailer to pore over, Last Night in Soho is full of promise. The time-twisting story also has the most auspicious Millennial talent available in young actresses Thomasin McKenzie and Anya-Taylor Joy. Add the cinematic influences — Wright claims to be channeling a Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, a favorite of his, as well as Roman Polanski’s Repulsion — and it looks like we’ve got a horror fantasy to savor. He’s also been attached to yet another cool project entitled Stage 13 concerning a ghostly silent movie set.
Eternals
(November 5 / ORD: November 6, 2020, February 12)
If Black Widow seemed just a touch overdue for you, it was the general novelty surrounding Eternals compelling me to pray Marvel could turn over a new leaf, but for real this time. Next to the studio other gamble Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, one of four prospective 2021 releases including ScarJo's pity outing and a third, generationally stuffed Tom Holland Spider-Man flick, this one seems the most promising. Anyone should be down for a new one-off cinematic superhero team up, so long as they ignore the worst aspects of something like Guardians of the Galaxy (80s nostalgia, tiresome humor, nonexistent stakes) and try to live up to the best of the X-Men films... if that would even make sense because who has ever heard of Eternals?
As always with these lesser know caped characters, comic-book acolytes have all the expectations and Disney’s slew of new diversity hires will have the job of making the silly stuff palatable for all, again. Director Chloé Zhao, whose credits include the acclaimed The Rider and of course her sort of unassuming Best Picture winner Nomadland, is an inspired choice who will hopefully reap the rewards of her blockbuster freedom even more than the identifiable indie marks of Taika Waititi and Ryan Coogler.
Licorice Pizza
(November 26)
If I had to choose, the one person alive I would say is most capable of delivering cinema of the highest order no matter what is Paul Thomas Anderson. There are plenty other domestic geniuses kicking about — Martin Scorsese, the Coens, Terry Malick, my boy Richard Linklater — but Anderson is all too worthy of stooping on his godly, towering perch.
But with scraps to go off of, the best we can do is speculate whether Licorice Pizza (formerly titled Soggy Bottom) will be great or amazing. If he’s smart, Anderson will lift from Linklater’s brand of unfettered nostalgia while retaining his personal, perfectionist quirks. Anderson clearly adores the 70s, as he’s already set two of his West Coast tales in the time period (Inherent Vice, Boogie Nights). Including Punch-Drunk Love, whenever PTA gets light(er), things still go very right and the results are no less classic. So far and so little as we know the film could be a mainstream romp but more than likely there’ll be some thematic unrest that Anderson’s bound to unearth. I have virtually no doubt Licorice Pizza will be another excellent cut of cultivated Californian cinema — and it expands just in time for Christmas.
Nightmare Alley
(December 17)
He’s been all over the place this decade (beautific Gothic horror, giant robots fighting giant monsters, winning his Oscars for a sweet Creature from the Black Lagoon revival) but a turn toward essentially remaking a noir no one as seen, or more specifically adapting the 1946 novel Nightmare Alley, unfortunately won’t play out like the Stephen King story the name conjures up, but will still be of interest to any self-respecting cinephile.
Leonardo DiCaprio was attached to star in the Best Director winner’s follow-up to The Shape of Water. Instead I'll take Bradley Cooper at the center of a great cast — Cate Blanchett, Willem Dafoe, Toni Collette, Richard Jenkins, Rooney Mara, David Straithairn, Tim Blake Nelson and of course Ron Perlman. The film’s carnival of performative joys should be inexhaustible. After so many striking, singular one-offs in Pacific Rim, Crimson Peak and the Hellboy films, I'm interested to see how much elaborate set and make-up design fit into a genre built on cigarettes and shadows.
West Side Story
(December 10 / ORD: December 18, 2020)
So if Spielberg wants to be a genre completist, he needs a musical right? Remaking a cherished classic like West Side Story, itself based on a stage production inspired by Romeo and Juliet, is supposedly justified for sticking closer to the original theater shows rather than one of the finest features of its class and the Best Picture winner of 1961. I don’t know how anyone should feel about it, especially with an odd choice like Ansel Elgort in the lead role. At least Spielberg’s still comfortable casting plenty of unknowns and his screenplay is by Tony Kushner, the reliable writer behind a few of his strongest dramatic pictures since the 1990s like Lincoln and Munich.
But since this is fairly new terrain for the more than seasoned filmmaker, one can only assume West Side Story will showcase a better use of big budgets than The BFG or Ready Player One, and sustain some energy and feeling unlike War Horse or Bridge of Spies. No one wants to say he’s past his prime, but for better or worse this is the beginning of a new late era for Spielberg. Nevertheless, with his right-hand man/director of photography extraordinaire Janusz Kaminski still shooting every one of Spielberg's films, West Side Story will undoubtedly be visually impeccable.
The King's Man
(December 22 / ORD: February 14, September 18, 2020, February 26, February 12, March 12, August 20)
Few directors have as much consistent fun as Matthew Vaughn, who traipsed through Guy Ritchie-lite crime movies (Layer Cake), modern fantasy (Stardust) and superhero stories both subversive (Kick-Ass) and classical (X-Men: First Class) before settling down with the insanity of the Kingsman franchise. For a director with such a giddy niche, chasing the success of Kingsman: The Secret Service for all its diet-Bond cheekiness is a worthwhile enough enterprise in entertainment. The Golden Circle was honestly underrated, a fine sequel if ever there was one, but fortunately instead of pushing through to some overblown trilogy capper, Vaughn is moving backward with a period prequel. Ralph Fiennes in Colin Firth’s place? Sure. Some retroactive rule-writing and steampunk-flavored action should serve as a bracing palette for this brand of madcap, violent spy fare. Maybe there’ll be a decent origin story somewhere too.
Two Marches past it was unthinkable that cinemas would be crippled for 14 months but at the turn of last year we couldn't even be hopeful for some overdue renaissance. The announcement of Warner Brothers' 2021 platform was an industry-altering, paradigm-shifting move, though they've said it's a transitory decision to have theatrical releases unveiled on HBOMAX the same day. It seemed panicky at first but it turned out profitable — hopefully the promise to be a temporary band-aid, um, sticks. Disney, as one could expect, is scrounging for every skekel available, opting for a same day release with steep online price tags separate from monthly services, save for Pixar releases for some reason. Universal has taken the deep dive with F9 and Old as theater exclusives with no digital options in sight; somehow the studio behind Minions has the most faith in the box office. Paramount is just behind in decent intentions, allowing films 45 days in theaters before they arrive on their joke of a streaming service.
Regardless of when we get to a more homogeneous state of domestic immunity, the majority of us should be healthy enough for the most mouth-watering, considerably appealing releases on the horizon. October feels like the first month to feature actual financial gambles without hesitancy. It's amusing now to remember that, by the end of last summer, it already seemed Hollywood had hit the imperative moment, with major exhibition chains looking to reopen by late August 2020 after an attempted return was put off when cases spiked in July. AMC was announcing 15 cent tickets and the company hoped to have approximately two-thirds of its locations open for the early September release of Tenet. As fall moseyed along there was no chance for safe, successful turnout and interest, rightly so most things considered. Instead of a 2020 cinematic calendar we had a vast void.
Summer 2021 has been the real rebound moment, with A Quiet Place, F9 and Black Widow putting up numbers that could make you consider we're nearing that post-COVID part of the 2020s. With Warner Brothers striking up a deal with AMC to feature their future films, beginning in 2022, exclusively in theaters for 45 days and Disney experimenting with a theatrical-only run for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, streaming may have won the last few battles but the war of cinematic release strategies has only just begun.
With variants floating around we can only be so certain of this steady ascent back to the old life we knew (those unrecoverable good times) so obviously these films are still prone to further delay after delay... and ORD means original release date btw (and btw means...)
And sorry, the untitled fourth Matrix film and Spider-Man: No Way Home might be guilty holiday fun in theory but these December mysteries only excite my most morbid curiosity.
Respect
(August 13 / ORD: August 14, October 9, December 25, 2020)
Television and theater director Liesl Tommy is making her directorial debut in what could easily amount to one of the best music biopics of the last decade. Respect will be a big deal no matter when it’s released, but it's too bad the 2020 holiday date didn't stick, since I doubt there would be a better year to remember and cherish the Queen of Soul than in one of more racial unrest than we’ve seen in 50 years. At least we can be grateful for Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and The United States vs. Billie Holiday.
Tommy also has another biopic lined up in adapting Trevor Noah’s autobiography Born a Crime, but the Aretha Franklin story should amount to a film dramatization to match meritorious takes on great black musicians (Ray, Get On Up, Straight Outta Compton). With Jennifer Hudson in the decisive role, every hesitation should cease — Forest Whitaker and Mary J. Blige join her among an estimable ensemble. With women of color penning the script (Tracey Scott Wilson) and behind the camera, there’s little to no risk of any sort of Bohemian Rhapsody-esque calamity.
Annette
(August 20)
For being active across four decades, Leos Carax has taken his time developing his tendencies. To compress his characteristics, his spirit seems like some conglomeration of Jean-Luc Godard’s direct deconstructionism and Luis Buñuel’s satirical surreality, with maybe a touch of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s supple disillusionment. The postmodern French filmmaker, cinematic poet and unabashed provocateur has been on a nine-year hiatus since his astonishing avant-garde film Holy Motors became one of the world’s most acclaimed films of the decade past.
The first trailer for Annette promised nothing less than ‘cinema absolue,’ so he must be pretty confident in his awaited return. This is his first English language film, though that’s probably the only concession he’ll make for domestic audiences since I doubt his insistence on a cavalier formal experimentation isn’t going anywhere. Adam Driver is just adding another reputable notch in his already illustrious repertoire and basically the same goes for Marion Cotillard, though she’s been making smart career moves way longer. This Amazon-backed musical fantasia should be an introspective visual feast — if it can at least match the vehemently romantic ruminations of his 80s classics Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais Sang, then the opening film of Cannes 2021 could be an international artistic proclamation for the age.
No Time to Die
(October 8 / ORD: April 2, November 20, November 12, 2020, April 2)
Delayed thrice by the length of a year and a half after the longest break between Craig’s Bond films already, 007 has had ages in the editing room and MGM has been helpless in rebuilding all the expended anticipation. Remember that Super Bowl TV spot and the Billie Eilish theme song? The previous hype mounted in early 2020 was for naught once the prudence of health concerns regarding COVID-19 took hold — No Time to Die was the first of countless movies to succumb to more than one stark release date shift.
By October its far more reasonable to suggest the pandemic will be a lesser burden on moviegoing domestically and abroad. Bond is the vein of escapism that implies grand, loud exhibition, and Craig has earned a proper farewell. Casino Royale is the most admired anti-Bond film and a high-water mark for the franchise. Quantum of Solace has a palatable efficiency but too many era-specific clichés. Skyfall was a nice, artistically fashioned stand-alone ode to the brand — Roger Deakins' cinematography is better than the film itself. The same could be said of Hoyte Van Hoytema’s work on Spectre, wherein Sam Mendes was trying to once again capture that Christopher Nolan-inspired pseudo-intellectual glaze, to lousy end results.
The continuity of the franchise has been utterly buggered over time, so even though this film contains annoying crossover threads for Lea Seydoux and Christoph Waltz’ characters from Spectre, fresh director Cary Joji Fukunaga (Sin Nombre, Jane Eyre, Beasts of No Nation) has a divergent temperament that will be neat to behold. If Craig is gone for good, the goodbye will be interesting to stack against infamous partings like Pierce Brosnan’s Die Another Day, Roger Moore’s A View to a Kill and Sean Connery’s Diamonds Are Forever. With an insanely long runtime and a toss-up new villain in Rami Malek to go along with Waltz’ Blofeld, No Time To Die is also tied with Spectre for the highest budget of the franchise. Hopefully this time the 250 million dollars will be spent coaxing us out of boredom rather than into it. Craig is sneaking out as the biggest mainstay Bond since Moore, so it should be an epic sendoff, quality notwithstanding.
The Last Duel
(October 15 / ORD: December 25, 2020)
Ridley Scott’s luck with historical epics has only diminished with each passing attempt, no matter how inspired they may be. Gladiator’s got some gravity but then Kingdom of Heaven (the director’s cut is decent), Robin Hood and Exodus: Gods and Kings seemed to map out a downward slope. Their receding quality might have been enough for you to justify leaving the antiquated if potentially powerful genre in the past for good.
But with a script apparently penned by the good boys behind Good Will Hunting — Ben Affleck and Matt Damon who, just like in that film, star in The Last Duel as well — Scott directs Adam Driver in what should have shaped up into an Academy Awards player in the year of COVID and likely will now in 2021 as Disney strategically pushed back this inherited 20th Century Fox production. If all else fails Scott has a backup Driver collaboration House of Gucci due out the following month.
Dune
(October 22 / ORD: December 18, 2020, October 1, 2021)
There's not enough time or energy to get as hype as we should about Denis Villeneuve’s next expensive sci-fi endeavor, especially from the looks of its stellar footage. Somehow after Blade Runner 2049 flopped on its face financially in 2017 despite iridescent cinematic virtues, Warner Brothers have handed Villeneuve the keys to what could become the next Lord of the Rings — or at least the next Star Wars — if handled correctly and received enthusiastically.
Alejandro Jodorowsky notably attempted to adapt Dune in the 70s to no avail, his 10 to 12-hour vision laid out in the 2013 documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune. David Lynch tried out the Frank Herbert text back in the 80s to iffy results — it's probably the worst movie in an otherwise staggeringly impressive career and the director's admitted as much. Villeneuve’s film is only the first of a supposed two-part adaption of the famously ambitious 1965 novel, the first in a six-part series. I would say Villenueve is in over his head but the Blade Runner sequel could've been a fantastic failure and instead was in the ballpark of all-time classic sci-fi.
There’s quite the cast — Timothée Chalamat stands right where Kyle MacLachlan did 36 years ago as Paul Atreides. He’s working alongside Oscar Isaac, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista, Charlotte Rampling, Jason Momoa and Javier Bardem. Although Roger Deakins couldn’t return to work his cinematographic magic as he did with 2049, Hans Zimmer skipped out on a regular collaboration with Christopher Nolan to score Dune. But the critical component will likely be Villeneuve’s ability to take his silky, macabre auteurism and realize everything practically and introspectively.
The French Dispatch
(October 22 / ORD: July 24, October 16 2020)
Wes Anderson returns to live-action after Isle of Dogs — his second stop-motion feature, clearly lesser than Fantastic Mr. Fox — came and went quietly. The Grand Budapest Hotel persists as a beloved quintessential work, although the film just before, 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom, should be considered his unequivocal masterwork seeing as the quirkster, in rare form, fully embraced his most honestly nostalgic sensibilities and let us past all the kitschy irony, ornamental mise-en-scène and Kinks songs — only The Royal Tenenbaums came as close to sincere ingenuity.
We can surely expect the director’s fastidious orderliness and dry wit will remain intact as he operates with a typically monstrous cast — featuring regulars like Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson, Willem Dafoe, Bob Balaban and Frances McDormand as well as at least a dozen other recognizable names. With conventional peculiarity, the full title of the film about the presumed comedic chaos of 20th century journalism is The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun. Let's pray for an swift rebound back to picture show prominence.
Last Night in Soho
(October 29 / ORD: September 25, 2020, April 23, October 22)
Edgar Wright has always known how to get dark even though he constantly operates in the light. No piece in his filmography could be labeled anything other than comedy despite dominant valleys of horror coursing throughout the whole Cornetto trilogy. I'll leave out Scott Pilgrim and Baby Driver, which don’t really have the zombies, townsfolk cult of serial killers or robot apocalypses to justify the argument.
But psychological horror is another racket and the director’s penchant for speed and shrewdness will be tested in contrasting fashion. Now with a fantastically eerie, Giallo-adjacent trailer to pore over, Last Night in Soho is full of promise. The time-twisting story also has the most auspicious Millennial talent available in young actresses Thomasin McKenzie and Anya-Taylor Joy. Add the cinematic influences — Wright claims to be channeling a Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, a favorite of his, as well as Roman Polanski’s Repulsion — and it looks like we’ve got a horror fantasy to savor. He’s also been attached to yet another cool project entitled Stage 13 concerning a ghostly silent movie set.
Eternals
(November 5 / ORD: November 6, 2020, February 12)
If Black Widow seemed just a touch overdue for you, it was the general novelty surrounding Eternals compelling me to pray Marvel could turn over a new leaf, but for real this time. Next to the studio other gamble Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, one of four prospective 2021 releases including ScarJo's pity outing and a third, generationally stuffed Tom Holland Spider-Man flick, this one seems the most promising. Anyone should be down for a new one-off cinematic superhero team up, so long as they ignore the worst aspects of something like Guardians of the Galaxy (80s nostalgia, tiresome humor, nonexistent stakes) and try to live up to the best of the X-Men films... if that would even make sense because who has ever heard of Eternals?
As always with these lesser know caped characters, comic-book acolytes have all the expectations and Disney’s slew of new diversity hires will have the job of making the silly stuff palatable for all, again. Director Chloé Zhao, whose credits include the acclaimed The Rider and of course her sort of unassuming Best Picture winner Nomadland, is an inspired choice who will hopefully reap the rewards of her blockbuster freedom even more than the identifiable indie marks of Taika Waititi and Ryan Coogler.
Licorice Pizza
(November 26)
If I had to choose, the one person alive I would say is most capable of delivering cinema of the highest order no matter what is Paul Thomas Anderson. There are plenty other domestic geniuses kicking about — Martin Scorsese, the Coens, Terry Malick, my boy Richard Linklater — but Anderson is all too worthy of stooping on his godly, towering perch.
But with scraps to go off of, the best we can do is speculate whether Licorice Pizza (formerly titled Soggy Bottom) will be great or amazing. If he’s smart, Anderson will lift from Linklater’s brand of unfettered nostalgia while retaining his personal, perfectionist quirks. Anderson clearly adores the 70s, as he’s already set two of his West Coast tales in the time period (Inherent Vice, Boogie Nights). Including Punch-Drunk Love, whenever PTA gets light(er), things still go very right and the results are no less classic. So far and so little as we know the film could be a mainstream romp but more than likely there’ll be some thematic unrest that Anderson’s bound to unearth. I have virtually no doubt Licorice Pizza will be another excellent cut of cultivated Californian cinema — and it expands just in time for Christmas.
Nightmare Alley
(December 17)
He’s been all over the place this decade (beautific Gothic horror, giant robots fighting giant monsters, winning his Oscars for a sweet Creature from the Black Lagoon revival) but a turn toward essentially remaking a noir no one as seen, or more specifically adapting the 1946 novel Nightmare Alley, unfortunately won’t play out like the Stephen King story the name conjures up, but will still be of interest to any self-respecting cinephile.
Leonardo DiCaprio was attached to star in the Best Director winner’s follow-up to The Shape of Water. Instead I'll take Bradley Cooper at the center of a great cast — Cate Blanchett, Willem Dafoe, Toni Collette, Richard Jenkins, Rooney Mara, David Straithairn, Tim Blake Nelson and of course Ron Perlman. The film’s carnival of performative joys should be inexhaustible. After so many striking, singular one-offs in Pacific Rim, Crimson Peak and the Hellboy films, I'm interested to see how much elaborate set and make-up design fit into a genre built on cigarettes and shadows.
West Side Story
(December 10 / ORD: December 18, 2020)
So if Spielberg wants to be a genre completist, he needs a musical right? Remaking a cherished classic like West Side Story, itself based on a stage production inspired by Romeo and Juliet, is supposedly justified for sticking closer to the original theater shows rather than one of the finest features of its class and the Best Picture winner of 1961. I don’t know how anyone should feel about it, especially with an odd choice like Ansel Elgort in the lead role. At least Spielberg’s still comfortable casting plenty of unknowns and his screenplay is by Tony Kushner, the reliable writer behind a few of his strongest dramatic pictures since the 1990s like Lincoln and Munich.
But since this is fairly new terrain for the more than seasoned filmmaker, one can only assume West Side Story will showcase a better use of big budgets than The BFG or Ready Player One, and sustain some energy and feeling unlike War Horse or Bridge of Spies. No one wants to say he’s past his prime, but for better or worse this is the beginning of a new late era for Spielberg. Nevertheless, with his right-hand man/director of photography extraordinaire Janusz Kaminski still shooting every one of Spielberg's films, West Side Story will undoubtedly be visually impeccable.
The King's Man
(December 22 / ORD: February 14, September 18, 2020, February 26, February 12, March 12, August 20)
Few directors have as much consistent fun as Matthew Vaughn, who traipsed through Guy Ritchie-lite crime movies (Layer Cake), modern fantasy (Stardust) and superhero stories both subversive (Kick-Ass) and classical (X-Men: First Class) before settling down with the insanity of the Kingsman franchise. For a director with such a giddy niche, chasing the success of Kingsman: The Secret Service for all its diet-Bond cheekiness is a worthwhile enough enterprise in entertainment. The Golden Circle was honestly underrated, a fine sequel if ever there was one, but fortunately instead of pushing through to some overblown trilogy capper, Vaughn is moving backward with a period prequel. Ralph Fiennes in Colin Firth’s place? Sure. Some retroactive rule-writing and steampunk-flavored action should serve as a bracing palette for this brand of madcap, violent spy fare. Maybe there’ll be a decent origin story somewhere too.
The Best December Releases
of the 21st Century
The curtain call of every cinematic year is so regularly teeming with the most textured escapism of the year and the most forceful Oscar campaigns that it can become a challenge to lay your eyes on every stimulating artifact studios have saved up for the annual grand finale. There are still late bloomers left to spread across the nation in January or February but usually legitimate contenders for the most talked about films of soon-to-be yesteryear arrive just as or right before winter blows through. It’s the most wonderful time of the year for more than one reason — as such there are countless equally blurb-worthy oversights.
Cold Mountain
If there’s one faded Hollywood trend that could use revivifying, it’s this — romantic tragedy with an epic historical backdrop. It’s the perfect unisex fare, an ideal that spawned the biggest films of all time like Gone With the Wind, Doctor Zhivago and Titanic. In the case of Cold Mountain it means a Southern Odyssey through last months of the Civil War — director Anthony Minghella already had Best Picture winner The English Patient for practice at the antiquated, elegant genre and The Talented Mr. Ripley is plenty enough proof of his composure concerning period pieces.
The appreciable production value, travelogue sweep and tasteful roster of earnest performances by Jude Law, Nicole Kidman and Renée Zellweger (plus a host of excellent supporters like Philip Seymour Hoffman, Natalie Portman, Brendan Gleeson, Cillian Murphy, Ray Winston and Garrett Hedland) elevate flash in the pan Oscar bait to uncommon heights for a modern literary adaptation. There’s a deal of corn to take with this meaty meal of a movie, which at least lets you have a grand opening battle and sunbaked, episodic adventuring to compensate for the potentially mucky romance. Take it at face value and you’ll come out the other side of Cold Mountain blissfully transported and returned. Plus Jack White sings AND acts, wow!
Peter Pan
2003’s Peter Pan is one of the most painfully unjustified flops our time and one of the most ill-respected fantasy film adaptations as well. I highly doubt even J. M. Barrie himself could have imagined a Hollywood production actualizing his tale as timelessly as it deserves. Remarkable visual effects, James Newton Howard’s heartrending score and extraordinary performances by talents new and old — Jeremy Sumpter and Rachel-Hurd Wood alongside Olivia Williams and Jason Isaacs — amount to one of those family films exceedingly worthy of repeat viewings. The Return of the King may have absorbed its wholesome glow back in December ‘03 but Peter Pan outdoes any and all takes on Barrie’s immaculate bedtime story, particularly Disney’s alleged 50s classic. Most people don’t even realize this adaptation exists (or fatally confuse it with Joe Wright abomination Pan) so it’s easy to undersell just how amazing this film really is. Hopefully some interest can be rekindled once Disney’s live action remake — directed by pretentious lapdog David Lowery — rears its familiar head.
King Kong
It’s ludicrous to think one could tackle arguably the biggest adaptative and economic gamble in film history and it isn’t your passion project. But, like Guillermo del Toro, Peter Jackson is as obsessed with the creatures meant to make your skin crawl as he is with the ones trying to extend your empathy. King Kong was a labor of love, Jackson’s homage to his favorite film and one of the last important epics to shake the foundations of the medium.
Between WETA’s magic tricks and Andy Serkis’ mastery of motion capture, as a character Kong became very human. At twice the length of the 1933 film, 2005’s King Kong is overblown, extravagant or any related word and yet, like a lesser Lord of the Rings, soul spills out of damn near every scene and every big movie moment shines. His heightened, wide-eyed sincerity and childlike cheek takes your imagination for an incredible spin. That nasty bug cavern centerpiece summarizes the visceral, repulsive gaudiness informing Jackson’s early horror films — he gleefully shakes you up and gets you spooked, but in total King Kong is a cornucopia of cinematic gratification.
The cast (chiefly Jack Black, Naomi Watts, Adrien Brody) takes on the blockbustery, golden aged pathos with unexpected purity. Director’s cut or no, the film is unfiltered, unafraid to take risk and take its time — even something as unrealized as the dinosaur stampede sequence doesn’t discredit Jackson’s forthright, enthusiastic formal gifts. As far as expensive everyman entertainment goes, there are few monster movies as luminous as this.
Catch Me If You Can/Munich
Steven Spielberg loves doubling up on film productions and the early millennia were littered with two sets of back-to-back masterpieces (that’s four modern classics altogether). On the summer side, the two Tom Cruise vehicles — unblemished, exhilarating Hollywood adaptions of Philip K. Dick and H. G. Wells — were for the crowds, too good for them honestly. But his two Oscar bids — 2002’s Catch Me If You Can and 2005’s Munich — are antithetical to each other and their year-in counterparts.
A Bostonian Tom Hanks tracking a debonair, radiantly boyish Leonardo DiCaprio in some Spielberg escapist exhibition is like a favorite stuffed animal — Catch Me If You Can is a reliable relief that sings and serenades like clockwork. Next to Schindler’s List, this is his most thoroughly thought through, dearly felt biographical exercise. The lighter than light verve of Catch Me If You Can is propelled by John Williams’ mischievous, slippery score and Spielberg’s straddles his sensibility for fun even when subjects he can’t avoid — mostly broken families — pop up more noticeably than usual. The caper biopic is antimatter holiday entertainment only Spielberg can make so smoothly pleasing and particularly unforgettable. Meanwhile, Munich has real, uncommon moral relativity for a Spielberg film, particularly one about murdered Jewish Olympians. Politically Spielberg would never again get his hands dirty — his cyclical, sprawling, unsettling, deeply thrilling semi-spy film was the swan song of the perhaps the director's greatest stretch of films or at least that of his post-2000s creations.
The Royal Tenenbaums
For some it was Rushmore that put Wes Anderson on the map — however The Royal Tenenbaums was more evident than anything else in his early career how talented a quirk-smith we were dealing with. In the hands of a new, idiosyncratic auteur worthy of a stylistic adjective and historical classification (though PTA’s assured legacy might make it a little confusing) it was a pleasure to bask in the first instance of his legitimate staples: storybook sensibilities, massively talented casts, visual peculiarities and humor so dry it was cracked and practically bleeding. His oeuvre has such classifiable artistic regularity there is almost no point is describing the director’s instincts since they’re essentially locked into place. Wes is one of the best — if you figure there’s little life underneath the deadpan ostentation, look closer or just watch Moonrise Kingdom.
Million Dollar Baby
Clint Eastwood’s role as filmmaker was seldom set on anything but repurposing the Western genre or other Baby boomer modes, but Million Dollar Baby made a point of reverting the sports genre toward rawer realism even if it relied upon an engaging, borderline recycled melodrama. But, sturdily, Hilary Swank, Eastwood and Morgan Freeman take the familiar, affecting tropes and deliberately point them in the direction of veracity. Not many underdog stories are steeped in our recognizable, unforgiving world, and the doggedly tragic scope is what still makes Million Dollar Baby a heartbreaker of unparalleled fire. Sad, stirring and uncompromising, the film can be fairly considered Eastwood’s last truly great film — sorry but Gran Torino, American Sniper and Sully do not qualify.
Pan's Labyrinth
Guillermo del Toro has never been so sure of his Gothic, even gonzo proclivities — the dichotomy of wartime turmoil and childhood daydreaming augments a most sinister Alice in Wonderland alteration to transcendent levels of surrealism, beauty and horror. In Pan’s Labyrinth, the ethereal extract is a respite in direct opposition to reality’s grimmer truths. Very few serious fantasy movies can let you take an unimaginable fairy tale at face value and even fewer films also have a justification for such dreamlike abstractions. The production design is divine and the creations are inspired and all too actual — Pan’s Labyrinth is del Toro’s clear, critically confirmed, completely classic masterpiece. This summit of Spanish cinema radiates its own wonderfully specific genius.
The Wolf of Wall Street
Martin Scorsese can say whatever he wants about Marvel movies because a man with as many masterstrokes — Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, After Hours, The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas, the list honestly goes on and on — should be entitled to comment on the populist tastes he helped forged before the common cinematic exchange became so base. He’s also doubly entitled to be a curmudgeon when he was releasing films as great as The Wolf of Wall Street at the same time the Marvel Cinematic Universe was proud to present Thor: The Dark World.
An absolute blend of satire, biography and pure mania, The Wolf of Wall Street pulls a mean trick in engorging you in hedonism’s all-consuming embrace, mathematically separating the bros who look at the film as the ultimate fantasy from the more cinematically literate witnessing a comprehensively arranged portrait of disgust. It’s an epic character study worthy of Citizen Kane, a three-hour rush to the senses like few films in its time or even Scorsese’s filmography. It’s a top five Leonardo DiCaprio performance no matter who you are — his zeal is the surefooted scaffolding of an assumed popular classic.
There Will Be Blood/Inherent Vice
Whether or not the public will admit it, Paul Thomas Anderson’s filmography will eventually become synonymous with the precipice of modern film history. From Hard Eight to Licorice Pizza, there are no outliers within his unparalleled contributions — as Anderson navigated an auspicious early career informed by Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman, every successive film became more distinct and undeniable in their power. Once you get to that filmographic sweet spot — There Will Be Blood, The Master and ultimately Inherent Vice — the relatively youthful craftsman’s mutating mastery bursts into an unwieldy marvel of formal conviction.
There Will Be Blood’s brutally pessimistic ideological war between tangible capital and waning spiritualism and Inherent Vice’s effervescent riff on the sentimental and sinister aspects of the misremembered 60s are seismic reflections on California’s role as the face of both the excrement and excess of America’s rich, recycled past. Loosely adapting Upton Sinclair and Thomas Pynchon respectively, the films are polar opposites in tone and entertainment value yet each are indispensible for their thematic substance, Johnny Greenwood’s postmodern music compositions and cinematographer Robert Elswit’s visual incision.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy
What is there to say about this trilogy anymore? Well, plenty, tons actually, although words of praise for Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings collective only adds to the choirs of adoration. Jackson has received every variation of celebration and flack for his massive cinematic undertaking — what matters most at this point is just how wonderfully the trilogy holds up to this day.
Despite preparations beginning in the mid-90s and post-production lasting up until the very minute The Return of the King had to be finished, there is no semblance of a rushed final product. Each chapter of the trilogy feels individually considered while still operating as one titanic high fantasy bender. It’s not enough to extol the film’s uniformly miraculous production value — sets, costumes, makeup and of course the graceful melding of practical and digital effects — it’s really the editing extravaganza, adaptative hurdles, feats of acting and perfectly realized aspects of Tolkien’s vision that still have the capacity to blow your mind and enflame your emotions no matter how many times you’ve seen them.
The Fellowship of the Ring’s classic composition and nearly perfect expository elaboration on the key narrative cornerstones of Tolkien’s vast Middle Earth mythology make it a grand introduction to the trilogy and the overwhelming fan favorite. By the adventurous exuberance of that transporting second half — you know, if wonderful visions of the Shire, Bree and Rivendell didn’t do it for ya — you’re either watching one of the best things you’ll likely ever see or you’re Richard Roeper. The entirety inside Moria is why movies were made, though the ancient aura of heartache and recuperation in Lothlórien is maybe the most otherworldly passage of the trilogy. It’s simply resplendent through and through.
The Two Towers alone was not anticipated when Jackson and company were selling their two-movie scripts. With the novel’s diverging storylines, the hopscotching editing and split script structure was a necessary practice round before the amount of characters and locations nearly doubles for the final film. Detrimentally, due to the chronology of events the film is forced to invent obstructions for Frodo and Sam as well as overplay the gravity of Helm’s Deep. It may be the weakest link (although it’s my favorite book, given the unique, radically different arrangement) but The Two Towers always surprises me. Arwen’s fate gets me every time — it’s the finest part of her magnified morsel of a story arc. Gollum is one of those VFX landmarks that have hardly aged a day. Howard Shore’s score continued to open up in glorious ways. Sam’s speech, the finest of Boyens, Walsh and Jackson’s imitations of Tolkien’s ethos and language, ties together a fairly awesome climax. Nonetheless the dialogue is the most unchanged of Tolkien’s dialect, offering fantastical feelings (“Láthspell I name him”) even if the film is somewhat narratively cumbersome.
The Return of the King is where things get dicey, receptively I mean. The hype was enormous, the outcome was magnificent and, at least to the Academy, they pulled it off. Nowadays people like to rag on it for the ghost army — back then (and for some impatient folk still) it was derided for its multipart conclusion. Though some say it’s inferior just for its greater necessity for visual effects, personally it exceeds even Fellowship in breadth, beauty and cinematic muscle. Each film has its excusable flaws and Return is no different. Especially with the clarity of the Extended Editions (an absolute must unless you breathe mouth), The Return of the King is an roadshow epic of old made measurable and majestic by cinema’s finest era for movie magic. So many moments are full of supreme imagination, splendor and passion — the lighting of the beacons, Shelob’s lair, Pippin’s song, the whole goddamn last hour — as a final third of a trilogy, as its own behemoth watermarking popular moviegoing, as just a movie… its just so effortlessly and effervescently enjoyable. For every part of Jackson’s inclinations – never better suited as the scholar of the sickening loves the dark, icky stuff, which ROTK has in spades — he never oversteps the virtue and dignity of Tolkien’s intentions, no matter how silly or crowd-pleasing the films became.
New Zealand’s always going to look beautiful and the cast will forever be one the most intelligently selected in history — but how do these classic films manage to reintroduce you to a world that you can have any newcomer tag along for? How in hell did they stitch together the Battle of Pelennor Fields? How does each film bear so much dramatic weight by the time you reach their respective end regardless of your age? How do I just know the Amazon Prime series will be soulless trash?
This one could be 50 entries long but the countless honorable mentions include Brokeback Mountain, The Wrestler, Cold War, A Separation, Inland Empire, The Aviator, The Illusionist, Cast Away, Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, Her, Phantom Thread, Macbeth (2015), Son of Saul, 20th Century Women, Paterson, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Russian Ark, Match Point, Gosford Park, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, A Tale of Two Sisters, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, Frost/Nixon, Hunger, Shame, The Adventures of Tintin, Traffic, Adaptation, Zero Dark Thirty, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Pianist, Django Unchained
Cold Mountain
If there’s one faded Hollywood trend that could use revivifying, it’s this — romantic tragedy with an epic historical backdrop. It’s the perfect unisex fare, an ideal that spawned the biggest films of all time like Gone With the Wind, Doctor Zhivago and Titanic. In the case of Cold Mountain it means a Southern Odyssey through last months of the Civil War — director Anthony Minghella already had Best Picture winner The English Patient for practice at the antiquated, elegant genre and The Talented Mr. Ripley is plenty enough proof of his composure concerning period pieces.
The appreciable production value, travelogue sweep and tasteful roster of earnest performances by Jude Law, Nicole Kidman and Renée Zellweger (plus a host of excellent supporters like Philip Seymour Hoffman, Natalie Portman, Brendan Gleeson, Cillian Murphy, Ray Winston and Garrett Hedland) elevate flash in the pan Oscar bait to uncommon heights for a modern literary adaptation. There’s a deal of corn to take with this meaty meal of a movie, which at least lets you have a grand opening battle and sunbaked, episodic adventuring to compensate for the potentially mucky romance. Take it at face value and you’ll come out the other side of Cold Mountain blissfully transported and returned. Plus Jack White sings AND acts, wow!
Peter Pan
2003’s Peter Pan is one of the most painfully unjustified flops our time and one of the most ill-respected fantasy film adaptations as well. I highly doubt even J. M. Barrie himself could have imagined a Hollywood production actualizing his tale as timelessly as it deserves. Remarkable visual effects, James Newton Howard’s heartrending score and extraordinary performances by talents new and old — Jeremy Sumpter and Rachel-Hurd Wood alongside Olivia Williams and Jason Isaacs — amount to one of those family films exceedingly worthy of repeat viewings. The Return of the King may have absorbed its wholesome glow back in December ‘03 but Peter Pan outdoes any and all takes on Barrie’s immaculate bedtime story, particularly Disney’s alleged 50s classic. Most people don’t even realize this adaptation exists (or fatally confuse it with Joe Wright abomination Pan) so it’s easy to undersell just how amazing this film really is. Hopefully some interest can be rekindled once Disney’s live action remake — directed by pretentious lapdog David Lowery — rears its familiar head.
King Kong
It’s ludicrous to think one could tackle arguably the biggest adaptative and economic gamble in film history and it isn’t your passion project. But, like Guillermo del Toro, Peter Jackson is as obsessed with the creatures meant to make your skin crawl as he is with the ones trying to extend your empathy. King Kong was a labor of love, Jackson’s homage to his favorite film and one of the last important epics to shake the foundations of the medium.
Between WETA’s magic tricks and Andy Serkis’ mastery of motion capture, as a character Kong became very human. At twice the length of the 1933 film, 2005’s King Kong is overblown, extravagant or any related word and yet, like a lesser Lord of the Rings, soul spills out of damn near every scene and every big movie moment shines. His heightened, wide-eyed sincerity and childlike cheek takes your imagination for an incredible spin. That nasty bug cavern centerpiece summarizes the visceral, repulsive gaudiness informing Jackson’s early horror films — he gleefully shakes you up and gets you spooked, but in total King Kong is a cornucopia of cinematic gratification.
The cast (chiefly Jack Black, Naomi Watts, Adrien Brody) takes on the blockbustery, golden aged pathos with unexpected purity. Director’s cut or no, the film is unfiltered, unafraid to take risk and take its time — even something as unrealized as the dinosaur stampede sequence doesn’t discredit Jackson’s forthright, enthusiastic formal gifts. As far as expensive everyman entertainment goes, there are few monster movies as luminous as this.
Catch Me If You Can/Munich
Steven Spielberg loves doubling up on film productions and the early millennia were littered with two sets of back-to-back masterpieces (that’s four modern classics altogether). On the summer side, the two Tom Cruise vehicles — unblemished, exhilarating Hollywood adaptions of Philip K. Dick and H. G. Wells — were for the crowds, too good for them honestly. But his two Oscar bids — 2002’s Catch Me If You Can and 2005’s Munich — are antithetical to each other and their year-in counterparts.
A Bostonian Tom Hanks tracking a debonair, radiantly boyish Leonardo DiCaprio in some Spielberg escapist exhibition is like a favorite stuffed animal — Catch Me If You Can is a reliable relief that sings and serenades like clockwork. Next to Schindler’s List, this is his most thoroughly thought through, dearly felt biographical exercise. The lighter than light verve of Catch Me If You Can is propelled by John Williams’ mischievous, slippery score and Spielberg’s straddles his sensibility for fun even when subjects he can’t avoid — mostly broken families — pop up more noticeably than usual. The caper biopic is antimatter holiday entertainment only Spielberg can make so smoothly pleasing and particularly unforgettable. Meanwhile, Munich has real, uncommon moral relativity for a Spielberg film, particularly one about murdered Jewish Olympians. Politically Spielberg would never again get his hands dirty — his cyclical, sprawling, unsettling, deeply thrilling semi-spy film was the swan song of the perhaps the director's greatest stretch of films or at least that of his post-2000s creations.
The Royal Tenenbaums
For some it was Rushmore that put Wes Anderson on the map — however The Royal Tenenbaums was more evident than anything else in his early career how talented a quirk-smith we were dealing with. In the hands of a new, idiosyncratic auteur worthy of a stylistic adjective and historical classification (though PTA’s assured legacy might make it a little confusing) it was a pleasure to bask in the first instance of his legitimate staples: storybook sensibilities, massively talented casts, visual peculiarities and humor so dry it was cracked and practically bleeding. His oeuvre has such classifiable artistic regularity there is almost no point is describing the director’s instincts since they’re essentially locked into place. Wes is one of the best — if you figure there’s little life underneath the deadpan ostentation, look closer or just watch Moonrise Kingdom.
Million Dollar Baby
Clint Eastwood’s role as filmmaker was seldom set on anything but repurposing the Western genre or other Baby boomer modes, but Million Dollar Baby made a point of reverting the sports genre toward rawer realism even if it relied upon an engaging, borderline recycled melodrama. But, sturdily, Hilary Swank, Eastwood and Morgan Freeman take the familiar, affecting tropes and deliberately point them in the direction of veracity. Not many underdog stories are steeped in our recognizable, unforgiving world, and the doggedly tragic scope is what still makes Million Dollar Baby a heartbreaker of unparalleled fire. Sad, stirring and uncompromising, the film can be fairly considered Eastwood’s last truly great film — sorry but Gran Torino, American Sniper and Sully do not qualify.
Pan's Labyrinth
Guillermo del Toro has never been so sure of his Gothic, even gonzo proclivities — the dichotomy of wartime turmoil and childhood daydreaming augments a most sinister Alice in Wonderland alteration to transcendent levels of surrealism, beauty and horror. In Pan’s Labyrinth, the ethereal extract is a respite in direct opposition to reality’s grimmer truths. Very few serious fantasy movies can let you take an unimaginable fairy tale at face value and even fewer films also have a justification for such dreamlike abstractions. The production design is divine and the creations are inspired and all too actual — Pan’s Labyrinth is del Toro’s clear, critically confirmed, completely classic masterpiece. This summit of Spanish cinema radiates its own wonderfully specific genius.
The Wolf of Wall Street
Martin Scorsese can say whatever he wants about Marvel movies because a man with as many masterstrokes — Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, After Hours, The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas, the list honestly goes on and on — should be entitled to comment on the populist tastes he helped forged before the common cinematic exchange became so base. He’s also doubly entitled to be a curmudgeon when he was releasing films as great as The Wolf of Wall Street at the same time the Marvel Cinematic Universe was proud to present Thor: The Dark World.
An absolute blend of satire, biography and pure mania, The Wolf of Wall Street pulls a mean trick in engorging you in hedonism’s all-consuming embrace, mathematically separating the bros who look at the film as the ultimate fantasy from the more cinematically literate witnessing a comprehensively arranged portrait of disgust. It’s an epic character study worthy of Citizen Kane, a three-hour rush to the senses like few films in its time or even Scorsese’s filmography. It’s a top five Leonardo DiCaprio performance no matter who you are — his zeal is the surefooted scaffolding of an assumed popular classic.
There Will Be Blood/Inherent Vice
Whether or not the public will admit it, Paul Thomas Anderson’s filmography will eventually become synonymous with the precipice of modern film history. From Hard Eight to Licorice Pizza, there are no outliers within his unparalleled contributions — as Anderson navigated an auspicious early career informed by Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman, every successive film became more distinct and undeniable in their power. Once you get to that filmographic sweet spot — There Will Be Blood, The Master and ultimately Inherent Vice — the relatively youthful craftsman’s mutating mastery bursts into an unwieldy marvel of formal conviction.
There Will Be Blood’s brutally pessimistic ideological war between tangible capital and waning spiritualism and Inherent Vice’s effervescent riff on the sentimental and sinister aspects of the misremembered 60s are seismic reflections on California’s role as the face of both the excrement and excess of America’s rich, recycled past. Loosely adapting Upton Sinclair and Thomas Pynchon respectively, the films are polar opposites in tone and entertainment value yet each are indispensible for their thematic substance, Johnny Greenwood’s postmodern music compositions and cinematographer Robert Elswit’s visual incision.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy
What is there to say about this trilogy anymore? Well, plenty, tons actually, although words of praise for Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings collective only adds to the choirs of adoration. Jackson has received every variation of celebration and flack for his massive cinematic undertaking — what matters most at this point is just how wonderfully the trilogy holds up to this day.
Despite preparations beginning in the mid-90s and post-production lasting up until the very minute The Return of the King had to be finished, there is no semblance of a rushed final product. Each chapter of the trilogy feels individually considered while still operating as one titanic high fantasy bender. It’s not enough to extol the film’s uniformly miraculous production value — sets, costumes, makeup and of course the graceful melding of practical and digital effects — it’s really the editing extravaganza, adaptative hurdles, feats of acting and perfectly realized aspects of Tolkien’s vision that still have the capacity to blow your mind and enflame your emotions no matter how many times you’ve seen them.
The Fellowship of the Ring’s classic composition and nearly perfect expository elaboration on the key narrative cornerstones of Tolkien’s vast Middle Earth mythology make it a grand introduction to the trilogy and the overwhelming fan favorite. By the adventurous exuberance of that transporting second half — you know, if wonderful visions of the Shire, Bree and Rivendell didn’t do it for ya — you’re either watching one of the best things you’ll likely ever see or you’re Richard Roeper. The entirety inside Moria is why movies were made, though the ancient aura of heartache and recuperation in Lothlórien is maybe the most otherworldly passage of the trilogy. It’s simply resplendent through and through.
The Two Towers alone was not anticipated when Jackson and company were selling their two-movie scripts. With the novel’s diverging storylines, the hopscotching editing and split script structure was a necessary practice round before the amount of characters and locations nearly doubles for the final film. Detrimentally, due to the chronology of events the film is forced to invent obstructions for Frodo and Sam as well as overplay the gravity of Helm’s Deep. It may be the weakest link (although it’s my favorite book, given the unique, radically different arrangement) but The Two Towers always surprises me. Arwen’s fate gets me every time — it’s the finest part of her magnified morsel of a story arc. Gollum is one of those VFX landmarks that have hardly aged a day. Howard Shore’s score continued to open up in glorious ways. Sam’s speech, the finest of Boyens, Walsh and Jackson’s imitations of Tolkien’s ethos and language, ties together a fairly awesome climax. Nonetheless the dialogue is the most unchanged of Tolkien’s dialect, offering fantastical feelings (“Láthspell I name him”) even if the film is somewhat narratively cumbersome.
The Return of the King is where things get dicey, receptively I mean. The hype was enormous, the outcome was magnificent and, at least to the Academy, they pulled it off. Nowadays people like to rag on it for the ghost army — back then (and for some impatient folk still) it was derided for its multipart conclusion. Though some say it’s inferior just for its greater necessity for visual effects, personally it exceeds even Fellowship in breadth, beauty and cinematic muscle. Each film has its excusable flaws and Return is no different. Especially with the clarity of the Extended Editions (an absolute must unless you breathe mouth), The Return of the King is an roadshow epic of old made measurable and majestic by cinema’s finest era for movie magic. So many moments are full of supreme imagination, splendor and passion — the lighting of the beacons, Shelob’s lair, Pippin’s song, the whole goddamn last hour — as a final third of a trilogy, as its own behemoth watermarking popular moviegoing, as just a movie… its just so effortlessly and effervescently enjoyable. For every part of Jackson’s inclinations – never better suited as the scholar of the sickening loves the dark, icky stuff, which ROTK has in spades — he never oversteps the virtue and dignity of Tolkien’s intentions, no matter how silly or crowd-pleasing the films became.
New Zealand’s always going to look beautiful and the cast will forever be one the most intelligently selected in history — but how do these classic films manage to reintroduce you to a world that you can have any newcomer tag along for? How in hell did they stitch together the Battle of Pelennor Fields? How does each film bear so much dramatic weight by the time you reach their respective end regardless of your age? How do I just know the Amazon Prime series will be soulless trash?
This one could be 50 entries long but the countless honorable mentions include Brokeback Mountain, The Wrestler, Cold War, A Separation, Inland Empire, The Aviator, The Illusionist, Cast Away, Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, Her, Phantom Thread, Macbeth (2015), Son of Saul, 20th Century Women, Paterson, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Russian Ark, Match Point, Gosford Park, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, A Tale of Two Sisters, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, Frost/Nixon, Hunger, Shame, The Adventures of Tintin, Traffic, Adaptation, Zero Dark Thirty, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Pianist, Django Unchained
The Best November Releases
of the 21st Century
This is the time to be actively aware of what the year in film has left in store – the late term blockbusters begin to emerge and the most critically anticipated moments of the year come and go weekend by weekend. No matter what the solstice says, winter arrives early cinema-wise — the beginning of November incites the scope of the holiday film calendar, spurring two months of copious entertainment options, for better or worse.
Nocturnal Animals
Fashion heavyweight and selective filmmaker Tom Ford debuted with the stylishly somber A Single Man, which makes sense, but Nocturnal Animals feels like it almost has its own voice. Those trashy, pretentious opening credits let you know you’re in for an uncomfortable time. However, whether your pleasure derives from the gorgeous compositions of bourgeoisie domestic prisons and brittle Texan landscapes, incredible performances from reliable talents (Jake Gyllenhaal, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon specifically) or the sort of nest narrative, fiction-within-fiction storytelling that informs theme and thrills like a charm, its worth getting over the pitiless, ugly center of Nocturnal Animals. The film is pulp-laden and eerily experimental, so harsh it doesn’t just get under your skin, it starts burrowing. Ford’s sophomore stunner is a near-masterpiece.
Tangentially, Todd Field is another loud moviemaking voice with a tiny résumé but In the Bedroom, another exceptional November release, is more than just a similarly devastating, unconventional revenge drama. But as sensitive and subtle as Field’s first is, Nocturnal Animals has so much going on — it’s a neo-noir, Neo Western, romantic-psychological thriller with a crime-horror angle and a dollop of social commentary to boot. It’s a souped-up Straw Dogs, a refined elegy to emasculation and powerlessness.
The Love Witch
There’s creative control and then there’s Anna Biller, the versatile woman behind damn near every aspect of her delicious horror-comedy-satire The Love Witch. Boiling down the dynamics of sexuality and gender roles to their most essential, meaningful parts, the fastidiously psychedelic framework of The Love Witch deftly entwines midnight movie ecstasy and fussy thematic insistence. This A+ college thesis is hilarious to soak in and consider after the fact and dazzlingly reminiscent of textured Technicolor in lovely 35mm. The lead Samantha Robinson is also indelible as the coven-queen of seduction. The occult so rarely has filmic witchcraft worthy of sacrament.
Casino Royale
Say what you will about where Daniel Craig’s era, or the trajectory of Bond in sum, has gone since this juggernaut shook up the enduring franchise in 2006 — individually Casino Royale is on par with 007’s finest hours and it’s not up for debate. Course correcting with even more reigniting combustion than Batman Begins, Martin Campbell’s second Bond outing is the definitive grounded reboot of its time — if you ask me his Brosnan breakout Goldeneye is the one that needs to be taken down a few pegs.
Eva Green is an all-timer, Mads Mikkelsen is arguably one as well, Chris Cornell’s theme song is tight, the tech is forgivingly tapered down and the most consequential choice (not the blonde hair) to actually bother giving Bond emotions — to the chagrin of traditional, testy fans — was ultimately wise. Did I mention it also exhibits two of the franchise’s best set pieces before the main plot even kicks in? That Madagascar opening chase is an awe-inducing stretch of practical, parkour-packed fun and the airport sequence is palpably gripping. Action aside, somehow Fleming’s adaptations were never so realist or romantic.
The Descendants
Alexander Payne has fallen off the deep end just based on Downsizing alone, but the follow-up to his bittersweet masterwork Sideways is nearly the same film in emotional clarity and understated hilarity. Maneuvering through soap opera plotting against a Hawaiian backdrop could’ve made The Descendants a weepie of obtuse, insufferable proportions. Instead George Clooney’s polished vitality, painfully recognizable characters and indispensible thoughts on familial heritage, grief and sympathy turn Payne’s paradise in hell into a tender, true treat. Drenching its depressive subject matter in detailed, dry humor, no melodramatics manage to strip away the unpretentious integrity of The Descendants.
The Favourite
Yorgos Lanthimos may have abruptly transitioned to English-language features following his early Greek efforts, yet his domestic evolution has been one smooth ascent. The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and most relevantly The Favourite congeal their respective expressive eccentricities into clinical considerations of human behavior and the futility of certain profound relationships. The juxtaposition of perfectionist craft and ignorant, almost wicked characters — Emma Stone, Rachel Weisz and Olivia Colman are a holy trilogy of performers — amounts to art house cinema of sensuous sublimity and thematic assurance. Even cute chapter titles can’t hinder the acidic cleverness and satirical insight of The Favourite. It’s a warts and all window to the past and a piquant, prickly parable on the pangs of anyone’s place from the proletariat to the top dog.
Manchester By the Sea
Manchester By the Sea’s contention with Moonlight and La La Land for the most universally praised films of 2016 solidified the year as one of the most exceptional of the decade, one where the Oscars felt closest to a meritocracy despite pity nominations for Lion, Hidden Figures and Hacksaw Ridge. Regardless the film was an acute, creepily funny, excruciatingly well-performed, inescapably sorrowful piece of work that looks at cinema as a space to reconcile and heal rather than as a means of escape. And problematic as he is, Casey Affleck's performance is the downtrodden apex of a quietly competent career, all while Lucas Hedges was just confirming his own young talent. It’s blunt moments of pathos — lines like “I can’t beat it” and “you can’t just die” get stuck in your mind’s recesses — utterly devastate. Director Kenneth Lonergan’s prudent selectiveness has paid off every time so far.
The Great Beauty
Paolo Sorrentino pays respects to Italian cinema’s rich history of epic, alienating, immortal filmmaking while engraving his own name in the books. The director may have a long way to go to acquire a similar notoriety to a Fellini or an Antonioni, especially when The Great Beauty is unpopular in its own country — still this film is emphatic evidence of comparably consummate ambition. The examination of geriatrics never seemed so simple, aching or glamorous, and the soundtrack backing it up is something else. Whether broken down to its surreal standout moments or appreciated for its full character study sweep, The Great Beauty possesses all the singular enchantment its title promises.
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
They literally don’t make them like this anymore. Historical fiction, in print or in cinema, doesn’t get much better than Patrick O’Brian’s output. In the new millennia, rarely were budgets so large turned over to directors as sophisticated as Peter Weir, who had proved himself for plenty long enough with a range of classics from Gallipoli to Dead Poet’s Society to The Truman Show.
Typical audiences found things a tad boring aboard the HMS Surprise, especially with Pirates of the Caribbean taking the sailing/swashbuckling fare back to its daftest place in the same month of the same year. But astonishing attention to detail, devoted, convincing performances (particularly the friendship between Russell Crowe’s Jack Aubrey and Paul Bettany’s Stephen Maturin) and a classically exploratory scope meant Master and Commander felt like an actual curtain had been pulled away from two centuries past. It’s also perhaps the most lamentable franchise non-starter in cinema history but an extra ration of grog says they never would have topped the sweaty, full-bodied exuberance of The Far Side of the World.
I'm Not There
The exemplar music biopic of the age is Todd Haynes’ slightly uncharacteristic and experimentally untethered I’m Not There, a better representation of one of the 20th century’s defining icons than the countless documentaries — Don’t Look Back, No Direction Home, Rolling Thunder — that have attempted to uncover the true self of the looming living legend singer-songwriter. Beyond the inspiration in multiple actors playing a riff on the ‘character’ of Bob Dylan, the film is just a head-trip of anthological detours synthesizing the artist’s biography and musical essence. Just as a collection of fine interpretations of Dylan’s most essential writings and thoughts, Haynes’ idea of Bob’s biggest themes is right on the money, accepting cultural and individual complexity at every stage.
Of all the song and dance men playing Bobby, Cate Blanchett and Heath Ledger are the most authentic of all. But even as much weirdness waits in the Richard Gere segments, the masked village funeral with Jim James wailing the Basement Tapes excerpt “Goin’ to Acapulco” is bewildering and moving as all hell. Haynes has more insight into the disposition and contour of Dylan’s music than any other filmmaker has ever realized in their musical subject — he puts biographical conventionality to shame and inadvertently makes you ponder how another avant-garde attempt might elucidate one of your favorites artist’s ethos.
No Country for Old Men
It’s the magnum opus of perhaps the most prolific domestic filmmakers of the last forty years, so yeah No Country for Old Men is pretty great. Before or after the uber-faithful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name, the eclectic brilliance of the Coen brother’s never found a more dramatically satisfying milieu for their pliable genre employment and black ‘n’ blue nihilistic comedy. Marrying Western and noir tastes impossibly well, No Country for Old Men feels as distinctive as any Coens feature — The Man Who Wasn’t There also deserves a nod as another masterly November Coen affair and their most underrated film to date, a genuine film noir seemingly stolen right from the era itself, so much so you almost don’t need that neo- prefix beforehand.
But No Country is a masterwork as lean and terse and they come, marked by towering, never-better performances by Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem, Roger Deakins’ ruggedly radiant cinematography, McCarthy’s modern-mythic tale-spinning and ambient, all but absent scoring. Crime thrillers are never this thought-provoking and the Coens’ characterization is so authoritative it makes for moments of scrumptious distress and hesitant hilarity. The script is both brutal and interpretative — in turn the dialogue is spotless. Some scenes are already so classic it’s almost unreasonable; it’s cinema at its most literary and most entertaining, Americana at its apogee, friendo.
Honorable mentions include The Incredibles, Borat, Call Me By Your Name, Lady Bird, The Fountain, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Arrival, Foxcatcher, Hugo, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Last Flag Flying, Doctor Strange, The Edge of Seventeen, A Dangerous Method, Monster’s Inc., Carol, Big Hero 6, Skyfall, Lincoln
Nocturnal Animals
Fashion heavyweight and selective filmmaker Tom Ford debuted with the stylishly somber A Single Man, which makes sense, but Nocturnal Animals feels like it almost has its own voice. Those trashy, pretentious opening credits let you know you’re in for an uncomfortable time. However, whether your pleasure derives from the gorgeous compositions of bourgeoisie domestic prisons and brittle Texan landscapes, incredible performances from reliable talents (Jake Gyllenhaal, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon specifically) or the sort of nest narrative, fiction-within-fiction storytelling that informs theme and thrills like a charm, its worth getting over the pitiless, ugly center of Nocturnal Animals. The film is pulp-laden and eerily experimental, so harsh it doesn’t just get under your skin, it starts burrowing. Ford’s sophomore stunner is a near-masterpiece.
Tangentially, Todd Field is another loud moviemaking voice with a tiny résumé but In the Bedroom, another exceptional November release, is more than just a similarly devastating, unconventional revenge drama. But as sensitive and subtle as Field’s first is, Nocturnal Animals has so much going on — it’s a neo-noir, Neo Western, romantic-psychological thriller with a crime-horror angle and a dollop of social commentary to boot. It’s a souped-up Straw Dogs, a refined elegy to emasculation and powerlessness.
The Love Witch
There’s creative control and then there’s Anna Biller, the versatile woman behind damn near every aspect of her delicious horror-comedy-satire The Love Witch. Boiling down the dynamics of sexuality and gender roles to their most essential, meaningful parts, the fastidiously psychedelic framework of The Love Witch deftly entwines midnight movie ecstasy and fussy thematic insistence. This A+ college thesis is hilarious to soak in and consider after the fact and dazzlingly reminiscent of textured Technicolor in lovely 35mm. The lead Samantha Robinson is also indelible as the coven-queen of seduction. The occult so rarely has filmic witchcraft worthy of sacrament.
Casino Royale
Say what you will about where Daniel Craig’s era, or the trajectory of Bond in sum, has gone since this juggernaut shook up the enduring franchise in 2006 — individually Casino Royale is on par with 007’s finest hours and it’s not up for debate. Course correcting with even more reigniting combustion than Batman Begins, Martin Campbell’s second Bond outing is the definitive grounded reboot of its time — if you ask me his Brosnan breakout Goldeneye is the one that needs to be taken down a few pegs.
Eva Green is an all-timer, Mads Mikkelsen is arguably one as well, Chris Cornell’s theme song is tight, the tech is forgivingly tapered down and the most consequential choice (not the blonde hair) to actually bother giving Bond emotions — to the chagrin of traditional, testy fans — was ultimately wise. Did I mention it also exhibits two of the franchise’s best set pieces before the main plot even kicks in? That Madagascar opening chase is an awe-inducing stretch of practical, parkour-packed fun and the airport sequence is palpably gripping. Action aside, somehow Fleming’s adaptations were never so realist or romantic.
The Descendants
Alexander Payne has fallen off the deep end just based on Downsizing alone, but the follow-up to his bittersweet masterwork Sideways is nearly the same film in emotional clarity and understated hilarity. Maneuvering through soap opera plotting against a Hawaiian backdrop could’ve made The Descendants a weepie of obtuse, insufferable proportions. Instead George Clooney’s polished vitality, painfully recognizable characters and indispensible thoughts on familial heritage, grief and sympathy turn Payne’s paradise in hell into a tender, true treat. Drenching its depressive subject matter in detailed, dry humor, no melodramatics manage to strip away the unpretentious integrity of The Descendants.
The Favourite
Yorgos Lanthimos may have abruptly transitioned to English-language features following his early Greek efforts, yet his domestic evolution has been one smooth ascent. The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and most relevantly The Favourite congeal their respective expressive eccentricities into clinical considerations of human behavior and the futility of certain profound relationships. The juxtaposition of perfectionist craft and ignorant, almost wicked characters — Emma Stone, Rachel Weisz and Olivia Colman are a holy trilogy of performers — amounts to art house cinema of sensuous sublimity and thematic assurance. Even cute chapter titles can’t hinder the acidic cleverness and satirical insight of The Favourite. It’s a warts and all window to the past and a piquant, prickly parable on the pangs of anyone’s place from the proletariat to the top dog.
Manchester By the Sea
Manchester By the Sea’s contention with Moonlight and La La Land for the most universally praised films of 2016 solidified the year as one of the most exceptional of the decade, one where the Oscars felt closest to a meritocracy despite pity nominations for Lion, Hidden Figures and Hacksaw Ridge. Regardless the film was an acute, creepily funny, excruciatingly well-performed, inescapably sorrowful piece of work that looks at cinema as a space to reconcile and heal rather than as a means of escape. And problematic as he is, Casey Affleck's performance is the downtrodden apex of a quietly competent career, all while Lucas Hedges was just confirming his own young talent. It’s blunt moments of pathos — lines like “I can’t beat it” and “you can’t just die” get stuck in your mind’s recesses — utterly devastate. Director Kenneth Lonergan’s prudent selectiveness has paid off every time so far.
The Great Beauty
Paolo Sorrentino pays respects to Italian cinema’s rich history of epic, alienating, immortal filmmaking while engraving his own name in the books. The director may have a long way to go to acquire a similar notoriety to a Fellini or an Antonioni, especially when The Great Beauty is unpopular in its own country — still this film is emphatic evidence of comparably consummate ambition. The examination of geriatrics never seemed so simple, aching or glamorous, and the soundtrack backing it up is something else. Whether broken down to its surreal standout moments or appreciated for its full character study sweep, The Great Beauty possesses all the singular enchantment its title promises.
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
They literally don’t make them like this anymore. Historical fiction, in print or in cinema, doesn’t get much better than Patrick O’Brian’s output. In the new millennia, rarely were budgets so large turned over to directors as sophisticated as Peter Weir, who had proved himself for plenty long enough with a range of classics from Gallipoli to Dead Poet’s Society to The Truman Show.
Typical audiences found things a tad boring aboard the HMS Surprise, especially with Pirates of the Caribbean taking the sailing/swashbuckling fare back to its daftest place in the same month of the same year. But astonishing attention to detail, devoted, convincing performances (particularly the friendship between Russell Crowe’s Jack Aubrey and Paul Bettany’s Stephen Maturin) and a classically exploratory scope meant Master and Commander felt like an actual curtain had been pulled away from two centuries past. It’s also perhaps the most lamentable franchise non-starter in cinema history but an extra ration of grog says they never would have topped the sweaty, full-bodied exuberance of The Far Side of the World.
I'm Not There
The exemplar music biopic of the age is Todd Haynes’ slightly uncharacteristic and experimentally untethered I’m Not There, a better representation of one of the 20th century’s defining icons than the countless documentaries — Don’t Look Back, No Direction Home, Rolling Thunder — that have attempted to uncover the true self of the looming living legend singer-songwriter. Beyond the inspiration in multiple actors playing a riff on the ‘character’ of Bob Dylan, the film is just a head-trip of anthological detours synthesizing the artist’s biography and musical essence. Just as a collection of fine interpretations of Dylan’s most essential writings and thoughts, Haynes’ idea of Bob’s biggest themes is right on the money, accepting cultural and individual complexity at every stage.
Of all the song and dance men playing Bobby, Cate Blanchett and Heath Ledger are the most authentic of all. But even as much weirdness waits in the Richard Gere segments, the masked village funeral with Jim James wailing the Basement Tapes excerpt “Goin’ to Acapulco” is bewildering and moving as all hell. Haynes has more insight into the disposition and contour of Dylan’s music than any other filmmaker has ever realized in their musical subject — he puts biographical conventionality to shame and inadvertently makes you ponder how another avant-garde attempt might elucidate one of your favorites artist’s ethos.
No Country for Old Men
It’s the magnum opus of perhaps the most prolific domestic filmmakers of the last forty years, so yeah No Country for Old Men is pretty great. Before or after the uber-faithful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name, the eclectic brilliance of the Coen brother’s never found a more dramatically satisfying milieu for their pliable genre employment and black ‘n’ blue nihilistic comedy. Marrying Western and noir tastes impossibly well, No Country for Old Men feels as distinctive as any Coens feature — The Man Who Wasn’t There also deserves a nod as another masterly November Coen affair and their most underrated film to date, a genuine film noir seemingly stolen right from the era itself, so much so you almost don’t need that neo- prefix beforehand.
But No Country is a masterwork as lean and terse and they come, marked by towering, never-better performances by Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem, Roger Deakins’ ruggedly radiant cinematography, McCarthy’s modern-mythic tale-spinning and ambient, all but absent scoring. Crime thrillers are never this thought-provoking and the Coens’ characterization is so authoritative it makes for moments of scrumptious distress and hesitant hilarity. The script is both brutal and interpretative — in turn the dialogue is spotless. Some scenes are already so classic it’s almost unreasonable; it’s cinema at its most literary and most entertaining, Americana at its apogee, friendo.
Honorable mentions include The Incredibles, Borat, Call Me By Your Name, Lady Bird, The Fountain, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Arrival, Foxcatcher, Hugo, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Last Flag Flying, Doctor Strange, The Edge of Seventeen, A Dangerous Method, Monster’s Inc., Carol, Big Hero 6, Skyfall, Lincoln
The Best October Releases
of the 21st Century
The sweet spot of the yearly film cycle comes just in time to distract us from the imposing holidays and all the undue stress they stir up. Usually the most direct and digestible of the year’s best releases can end up here, often outshining the run of horror flicks cropping up every weekend. As a moment for great movies before the blockbusters start diluting the finer choices, October is habitually a month made for cinematic excellence.
The Prestige
Christopher Nolan’s most lucid thesis on filmmaking (Inception is close behind) is also his sharpest early work, only playing second fiddle to the distinguished blockbuster bucks of The Dark Knight’s quintessence. But The Prestige has it all: intelligent drama, an all-time great twist, arguably Wally Pfister’s best camerawork and above par turns for everyone involved — Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall. The Christopher Priest adaptation finds Nolan favoring the nonlinear in the most breathtakingly cinematic fashion — the whole affair is masterfully edited.
Even with the high of the mystery gone after the first viewing, this is a film that doesn’t overstep its cleverness, even with David Bowie’s Tesla introducing sci-fi shenanigans. In the tradition of Memento and even traceable to Tenet, Nolan’s screenwriting talent is overshadowed by either his nearly parodic premises or his commendable showmanship. With his proclivities moderated, The Prestige stands as a crucial, potent piece of a prodigious career.
Sideways
Removed by nearly two decades or not, Alexander Payne’s highest brush with brilliance feels entirely like a stone cold comedy classic. The simple weeklong structure, wine movie cred and romantic dramedy stitching all go down smooth as a fine Pinot, but Sideways' hazy yearning and adult malaise is still so fun and revealing. I don’t think Paul Giamatti, Thomas Hayden Church, Virginia Madden or Sandra Oh ever found better-suited material. Payne’s almost always been operating in the same spot of midlife misfits and misfortune (if you can forget and forgive Downsizing) but even The Descendants doesn’t have anything on this film’s bitter delights. It’ll get you intoxicated no matter what you’re sipping on.
Good Night, and Good Luck
George Clooney hasn’t done terribly much with his directing career apart from this – Confessions of a Dangerous Mind gets by because of Charlie Kaufman’s writing and Sam Rockwell’s wiry charm, though The Ides of March was a strong one-off. Good Night, and Good Luck, however, is a pristine, indispensible instant for 2005 cinema, a lean, riveting historical drama populated with performers making the very most of Clooney’s cinema-vérité portrait of Edward R. Murrow’s ideological struggle with Joe McCarthy. David Strathairn was never more intense and imposing — his manner with the monologues is astonishing — and liberal-leaning Oscar bait was never so appetizing either.
Whiplash
After making an initial mark with his La La Land template Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, a separate short film would serve as the impetus for Whiplash, putting Damien Chazelle on the map for good. Spectacular editing, epic lighting, persuasive themes and an absolutely terrifying dynamic between J.K. Simmons and Miles Teller place Whiplash amidst the best of its decade regardless of how you feel about its meritocratic message. The climax is one of the more satisfying moments of recent filmmaking and as a springboard to more ambitious, equally excellent moments for Chazelle — La La Land, First Man — Whiplash, for all its modesties, is still a vigorous exercise in excellence. Since 2014 Chazelle has also never let us forget how much he worships jazz — as a fertile foundation for his creative inspiration I hope he never stops incorporating it.
Kill Bill: Volume 1
Love him hate him, Quentin Tarantino is still an American filmmaking force to be reckoned with — he challenges you not to be entertained (or at the very least discernably provoked) by exaggerated send-ups of his most cherished excerpts from film history. Gangsters dominated his early career, whereas Westerns and historical epics have dictated his most recent days in the director’s chair. Samurai films are the missing piece to his cinematic personality, a passion he only really expressed with his two-part feminist revenge saga Kill Bill. The second film would lean towards the elongated runtimes and Spaghetti Western traditions, but holy hell, Volume 1 remains perhaps his bloodiest and most thoroughly fun excerpt in escapism pound for pound. The sheer entertainment value for your time is absurd and his sensory-overloaded pageantry is composed with Olympic-worthy delicacy even if his aim is complete carnage.
12 Years a Slave
Steve McQueen’s first vehemently black film is not fooling around. About as essential as “essential viewing” gets in the 21st century, your kids will probably be watching it in school and telling you about it even if you slept on this in 2013. The movie is not cashing in on white guilt and arrived a little early for woke politics — truth be told 12 Years a Slave is just a masterful, purposeful work of art, an all too real triumph of undaunted, epic storytelling featuring some of the finest acting you’ve seen in your life. If Chiwetel Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong’o don’t leave you humbled I don’t know what could. 12 Years a Slave is remarkably framed and composed, full of such startling, horribly powerful moments that steal your soul, breath, belief — it’s an agonizingly well-realized story. The truest Best Picture winner of the last decade transcends every trapping of such an honor.
Synecdoche, New York
The contrast of black suffering may make the metropolitan anguish of Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut look even more self-pitying and pretentious than it already is, but make no mistake: Synecdoche, New York is one of art house cinema’s newfound benchmarks. Breaking away from the digestibly eccentric filters of Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, Kaufman’s postmodern firecracker is as depressing as movies get and about as candid and ambitious too. One of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s finest turns anchors a decades-spanning nightmare of the new future full of the anxieties of aging and teeming with contemplations on romantic and professional failure in the scope of a lifetime. It has so many storytelling and philosophical inquisitions to untangle by way of super-self-reflexive commentary, dream logic and an unsettling intuition toward time’s exponential quickening. Watching Kaufman nonchalantly outdo himself with I’m Thinking of Ending Things ironically makes me more optimistic for the next existential provocation from Hollywood’s brainiest curmudgeon.
The Social Network
One of the unquestionable modern classics is a story of and for our times, yet The Social Network will last as a timeless consideration of America’s aura of one-upmanship. The Kane-like structure feels like no accident, out to paint Mark Zuckerberg as a mechanically minded hypocrite nevertheless driven by intellect and idealism. Instead of a Rosebud investigation in the “present day” we have a legal drama like writer Aaron Sorkin has proven comfortable with.
It’s a goddamn tremendous picture — secured by the linchpin of Sorkin’s fantastically perfectionist career, David Fincher’s obsessive, overcast eye, a game-changing electro-ambient-metal score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (inspired by the dark daydreams of Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts I-IV) and performances by Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Armie Hammer and Justin Timberlake that are so good they could be easily overlooked. Had Zodiac not suited Fincher’s faculties so flawlessly, I could unreservedly declare The Social Network to be his high water mark. It’ll just have to be content as one of the most immaculate movies of the 2010s.
Mulholland Drive
David Lynch’s so-called poisonous valentine to Hollywood exceeds any kind of thematic relationship you could develop with it. That first hour will flip you upside down and send you perplexed into a Wilder/Hitchcock mystery-noir acid trip fueled by vexing exchanges, non-sequiturs and brain-bending bafflements. Naomi Watts ironically never got a more artistically rewarding break in Hollywood despite her Golden Age elegance, unless you want to count the weirdly relevant role in King Kong a few years later. The film’s midsection encompassing Betty’s acting audition, followed by that brief shared looked with Justin Theroux’s director character, is one of those cinematic passages that firms up the film’s critical fixture as essentially the greatest film of the 21st century.
It’s almost indescribably fascinating, enveloping, scintillating, spellbinding, insidiously hysterical, occasionally petrifying and just fucking peculiar. Lost Highway was in many ways a warm-up for Mulholland Dr. but as much as that exquisite enigma elevated the 90s, this film more dizzyingly realizes the contiguous premise, fortifying the would-be TV pilot with cinematic splendor and dreaminess rivaled by very, very few. To this day it remains Lynch’s penultimate feature film and his most unequivocal moment of surrealist sorcery.
Waking Life
One of those rivals would be Richard Linklater, who has an absolutely clear reality in mind when he conjures up his own impression of dreams. Linklater is the indie filmmaker’s ideal, a homespun Texas hippie who leans into Gen X disillusionment but will leave you with tender, comforting positivity by the credits. After Slacker experimented with the same rough concept a decade earlier, Waking Life was a modestly massive moment for art house movies, animation, and philosophically fixed, existentially engrossed screenwriting. Drawn through varied, vivid vignettes, the liminal limbo between life and death is blissfully, truthfully actualized through modern rotoscoping techniques and melodious monologues. It’s a call to higher living and wonderfully psychedelic without stooping to obvious counterculture draws. Linklater’s most virtuosic artistic moment is also one of the few truly consciousness-freeing film’s the medium has ever cultivated.
The more than honorable mentions include Holy Motors, Donnie Darko, A Serious Man, The Assassin, Moonlight, Blue is the Warmest Colour, Punch-Drunk Love, The Squid and the Whale, Seven Psychopaths, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Certain Women, Nightcrawler, John Wick, Force Majeure, Gone Girl, Steve Jobs, The Departed, Marie Antoinette, School of Rock, The Skin I Live In, Birth
The Prestige
Christopher Nolan’s most lucid thesis on filmmaking (Inception is close behind) is also his sharpest early work, only playing second fiddle to the distinguished blockbuster bucks of The Dark Knight’s quintessence. But The Prestige has it all: intelligent drama, an all-time great twist, arguably Wally Pfister’s best camerawork and above par turns for everyone involved — Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall. The Christopher Priest adaptation finds Nolan favoring the nonlinear in the most breathtakingly cinematic fashion — the whole affair is masterfully edited.
Even with the high of the mystery gone after the first viewing, this is a film that doesn’t overstep its cleverness, even with David Bowie’s Tesla introducing sci-fi shenanigans. In the tradition of Memento and even traceable to Tenet, Nolan’s screenwriting talent is overshadowed by either his nearly parodic premises or his commendable showmanship. With his proclivities moderated, The Prestige stands as a crucial, potent piece of a prodigious career.
Sideways
Removed by nearly two decades or not, Alexander Payne’s highest brush with brilliance feels entirely like a stone cold comedy classic. The simple weeklong structure, wine movie cred and romantic dramedy stitching all go down smooth as a fine Pinot, but Sideways' hazy yearning and adult malaise is still so fun and revealing. I don’t think Paul Giamatti, Thomas Hayden Church, Virginia Madden or Sandra Oh ever found better-suited material. Payne’s almost always been operating in the same spot of midlife misfits and misfortune (if you can forget and forgive Downsizing) but even The Descendants doesn’t have anything on this film’s bitter delights. It’ll get you intoxicated no matter what you’re sipping on.
Good Night, and Good Luck
George Clooney hasn’t done terribly much with his directing career apart from this – Confessions of a Dangerous Mind gets by because of Charlie Kaufman’s writing and Sam Rockwell’s wiry charm, though The Ides of March was a strong one-off. Good Night, and Good Luck, however, is a pristine, indispensible instant for 2005 cinema, a lean, riveting historical drama populated with performers making the very most of Clooney’s cinema-vérité portrait of Edward R. Murrow’s ideological struggle with Joe McCarthy. David Strathairn was never more intense and imposing — his manner with the monologues is astonishing — and liberal-leaning Oscar bait was never so appetizing either.
Whiplash
After making an initial mark with his La La Land template Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, a separate short film would serve as the impetus for Whiplash, putting Damien Chazelle on the map for good. Spectacular editing, epic lighting, persuasive themes and an absolutely terrifying dynamic between J.K. Simmons and Miles Teller place Whiplash amidst the best of its decade regardless of how you feel about its meritocratic message. The climax is one of the more satisfying moments of recent filmmaking and as a springboard to more ambitious, equally excellent moments for Chazelle — La La Land, First Man — Whiplash, for all its modesties, is still a vigorous exercise in excellence. Since 2014 Chazelle has also never let us forget how much he worships jazz — as a fertile foundation for his creative inspiration I hope he never stops incorporating it.
Kill Bill: Volume 1
Love him hate him, Quentin Tarantino is still an American filmmaking force to be reckoned with — he challenges you not to be entertained (or at the very least discernably provoked) by exaggerated send-ups of his most cherished excerpts from film history. Gangsters dominated his early career, whereas Westerns and historical epics have dictated his most recent days in the director’s chair. Samurai films are the missing piece to his cinematic personality, a passion he only really expressed with his two-part feminist revenge saga Kill Bill. The second film would lean towards the elongated runtimes and Spaghetti Western traditions, but holy hell, Volume 1 remains perhaps his bloodiest and most thoroughly fun excerpt in escapism pound for pound. The sheer entertainment value for your time is absurd and his sensory-overloaded pageantry is composed with Olympic-worthy delicacy even if his aim is complete carnage.
12 Years a Slave
Steve McQueen’s first vehemently black film is not fooling around. About as essential as “essential viewing” gets in the 21st century, your kids will probably be watching it in school and telling you about it even if you slept on this in 2013. The movie is not cashing in on white guilt and arrived a little early for woke politics — truth be told 12 Years a Slave is just a masterful, purposeful work of art, an all too real triumph of undaunted, epic storytelling featuring some of the finest acting you’ve seen in your life. If Chiwetel Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong’o don’t leave you humbled I don’t know what could. 12 Years a Slave is remarkably framed and composed, full of such startling, horribly powerful moments that steal your soul, breath, belief — it’s an agonizingly well-realized story. The truest Best Picture winner of the last decade transcends every trapping of such an honor.
Synecdoche, New York
The contrast of black suffering may make the metropolitan anguish of Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut look even more self-pitying and pretentious than it already is, but make no mistake: Synecdoche, New York is one of art house cinema’s newfound benchmarks. Breaking away from the digestibly eccentric filters of Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, Kaufman’s postmodern firecracker is as depressing as movies get and about as candid and ambitious too. One of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s finest turns anchors a decades-spanning nightmare of the new future full of the anxieties of aging and teeming with contemplations on romantic and professional failure in the scope of a lifetime. It has so many storytelling and philosophical inquisitions to untangle by way of super-self-reflexive commentary, dream logic and an unsettling intuition toward time’s exponential quickening. Watching Kaufman nonchalantly outdo himself with I’m Thinking of Ending Things ironically makes me more optimistic for the next existential provocation from Hollywood’s brainiest curmudgeon.
The Social Network
One of the unquestionable modern classics is a story of and for our times, yet The Social Network will last as a timeless consideration of America’s aura of one-upmanship. The Kane-like structure feels like no accident, out to paint Mark Zuckerberg as a mechanically minded hypocrite nevertheless driven by intellect and idealism. Instead of a Rosebud investigation in the “present day” we have a legal drama like writer Aaron Sorkin has proven comfortable with.
It’s a goddamn tremendous picture — secured by the linchpin of Sorkin’s fantastically perfectionist career, David Fincher’s obsessive, overcast eye, a game-changing electro-ambient-metal score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (inspired by the dark daydreams of Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts I-IV) and performances by Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Armie Hammer and Justin Timberlake that are so good they could be easily overlooked. Had Zodiac not suited Fincher’s faculties so flawlessly, I could unreservedly declare The Social Network to be his high water mark. It’ll just have to be content as one of the most immaculate movies of the 2010s.
Mulholland Drive
David Lynch’s so-called poisonous valentine to Hollywood exceeds any kind of thematic relationship you could develop with it. That first hour will flip you upside down and send you perplexed into a Wilder/Hitchcock mystery-noir acid trip fueled by vexing exchanges, non-sequiturs and brain-bending bafflements. Naomi Watts ironically never got a more artistically rewarding break in Hollywood despite her Golden Age elegance, unless you want to count the weirdly relevant role in King Kong a few years later. The film’s midsection encompassing Betty’s acting audition, followed by that brief shared looked with Justin Theroux’s director character, is one of those cinematic passages that firms up the film’s critical fixture as essentially the greatest film of the 21st century.
It’s almost indescribably fascinating, enveloping, scintillating, spellbinding, insidiously hysterical, occasionally petrifying and just fucking peculiar. Lost Highway was in many ways a warm-up for Mulholland Dr. but as much as that exquisite enigma elevated the 90s, this film more dizzyingly realizes the contiguous premise, fortifying the would-be TV pilot with cinematic splendor and dreaminess rivaled by very, very few. To this day it remains Lynch’s penultimate feature film and his most unequivocal moment of surrealist sorcery.
Waking Life
One of those rivals would be Richard Linklater, who has an absolutely clear reality in mind when he conjures up his own impression of dreams. Linklater is the indie filmmaker’s ideal, a homespun Texas hippie who leans into Gen X disillusionment but will leave you with tender, comforting positivity by the credits. After Slacker experimented with the same rough concept a decade earlier, Waking Life was a modestly massive moment for art house movies, animation, and philosophically fixed, existentially engrossed screenwriting. Drawn through varied, vivid vignettes, the liminal limbo between life and death is blissfully, truthfully actualized through modern rotoscoping techniques and melodious monologues. It’s a call to higher living and wonderfully psychedelic without stooping to obvious counterculture draws. Linklater’s most virtuosic artistic moment is also one of the few truly consciousness-freeing film’s the medium has ever cultivated.
The more than honorable mentions include Holy Motors, Donnie Darko, A Serious Man, The Assassin, Moonlight, Blue is the Warmest Colour, Punch-Drunk Love, The Squid and the Whale, Seven Psychopaths, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Certain Women, Nightcrawler, John Wick, Force Majeure, Gone Girl, Steve Jobs, The Departed, Marie Antoinette, School of Rock, The Skin I Live In, Birth
The Best September Releases
of the 21st Century
Summer ends, meaning many of Hollywood’s servings of stupidity have been exhausted. September is gratefully peaceful and often an occasion for exceptional films to emerge amidst such a meager month for movies. Fall can be just as unremarkably tame as the springtime — before the awards season blitz, you can often find Oscar snubs or the most unexpected winners.
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
The combined talents of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have an awesome place of origin. Children’s material can make for awful features but this food weather fable is rich with irresistible twists on sci-fi, satire and the potential of wholesome family entertainment. No unnecessary crudeness was used to elaborate on the breadth of Cloudy’s cleverness. Other Sony Picture Animation efforts have attempted to reclaim this film’s masterfully manic energy (The Mitchell’s vs. the Machines is a fine imitation of the Lord/Miller voice) but it’s hard to replace the funniest clean comedy of our times. Bill Hader and Anna Faris clock in extraordinarily dedicated voice work.
Shaun of the Dead
An American Werewolf in London, American Psycho — some movies are so iconic in their ability to disgust and delight that they exceed cult followings and become just regular old classics. It’s been long enough to say Shaun of the Dead is such a horror comedy, especially with copycats to this day in the form of Zombieland sequels and worse (*gags at the thought of Army of the Dead*). Edgar Wright has made better on his promise as a filmmaker but Shaun of the Dead is so confidently ramshackle and baffling novel that imitators can’t hold the tiniest candle to Wright’s mathematically screwy screenplay and economically electric direction.
A History of Violence/Eastern Promises
David Cronenberg didn’t need to reinvent himself but the director operates like a new man in the 21st century. Both Viggo Mortensen films A History of Violence and Eastern Promises offered blistering, conservative crime drama that few could match in psychological perplexity and uneasy mystery. Body horror was always his strong suit but with films like Spider, A Dangerous Method and lately his work with Robert Pattinson he seems inclined to remain a pretentious art house director like the rest. Maybe he warped anatomy so much that the mind was all that was left to mess with. In any mode — sexually investigative, culturally critical for a few others — he’s a master.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford feels like one of the final grandiose, commercially unconcerned, near futile grasps at a dead genre — what’s the last epic revisionist Western you can name? Festering with paranoia and jealousy, this strange, deconstructed historical exposé sought to demystify the politics of public favor more than the 19th century legends. Cinematographer Roger Deakins peaked hard in 2007 between this and No Country For Old Men — with now-iconic shots, the film feels like both a novel and painting sprung to life, supported by well-considered themes surging through the riddles of myth and America’s fickle obsession with reputation. The passages of recollected narration are even more poetic when Deakins tinkers with his camera to evoke the fish-eyed texture of old photographs. Nick Cave’s score is also memorably mysterious and director Andrew Dominik (Killing Them Softly) has been too selective to undo his credit.
Prisoners
As French-Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve was working on taking over Hollywood as he saw fit — which has brought him to a (hopefully) two-part adaptation of Dune — 2013’s Prisoners was the most essential stepping stone to films as excellent and risky as Blade Runner 2049. The same year Villeneuve and Jake Gyllenhaal also came together for Enemy, a doppelgänger psychological thriller that could give David Lynch pause. But Prisoners’ deceptive, procedural deliberation, tragic cliffhanger, surefire performances (exacting work from Gyllenhaal, Hugh Jackman and Paul Dano sells every turn) and a deft consideration of morality under extreme circumstances make it a crime thriller you don’t shake easily or relish halfheartedly. Roger Deakins tasteful camerawork renders dreariness into melancholic splendor — the whole affair feels like a ghost-directed David Fincher film, a great one at that.
Drive
Ryan Gosling has made it a habit of starring in some of the best films of his time — La La Land, Blade Runner 2049 — and Drive is no exception in his pivot toward collaborations with meticulous auteurs. Nicolas Winding Refn only ever really appealed to mainstream domestic viewers once, barely, and Drive is also the moment his garish, grindhouse ambitions met their zenith. It's stylistically rapturous, gently romantic, viscerally volatile — if only Johnny Jewel’s soundtrack made its way to the final cut, although Gosling must’ve been a fan because the producer/composer later scored his debut feature Lost River. Fortunately some of Jewel’s tracks still ended up filling out Refn’s perfectly retro-futuristic frames with the spacey synths of revived Italo-disco. Just in ambience, let alone storytelling, this aesthetic marvel is a singular work of entertainment.
Mandy
I could make fun of Beyond the Black Rainbow for its Kubrick-rip-off sensibilities, laughable antagonist, short-film-only premise and other equivalent pretensions. Still I knew Mandy had the makings of a mystifying cult film for the ages, though nothing can really prepare you for Panos Cosmatos magnificent, effervescent sophomore spectacular, a revenge head-trip so visually unfathomable and extremely enjoyable it’ll make you feel like someone slipped LSD in your beverage even if you’re stone cold sober. It's Nicolas Cage’s finest hour in decades and the parting tones of composer Jóhann Jóhannsson are indelible. Not one frame is unconsidered, nor can I think of a better visual home for King Crimson’s prog-rock diamond “Starless.”
Lost in Translation
Sofia Coppola didn’t take long to slip out from under accusations of Hollywood nepotism, which secured her undeniably hipster career. Her second film following the celebrated The Virgin Suicides is the existentialist comedy of the age, a film so tender, unobtrusive and meditative it’s easy to ignore the waves of wisdom and emotion running through the reliably funny fish out of water humor and neon-soaked, double-sided view of alienation. I’d even go so far as to say Lost in Translation lays claim to the best performances of Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson’s respective careers. And God almighty, Coppola may be the most nimble cinematic soundtrack-curator of this or any time — the film wouldn’t be such atmospheric bliss without her discriminating taste and perceptive ear.
Spirited Away
If you know one Hayao Miyazaki movie, it’s obviously this one — but as can be the case with any great artist, sometimes their most accepted work was not their most compromising. A beautiful effort of the imagination can transcend not only borders but more than three decades of some of the most incredible animated films conceived; Princess Mononoke, Kiki’s Delivery Service, The Castle of Cagliostro and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, like a vast majority of his filmography, are all near-perfect creations. But Spirited Away’s fearless fable is so lovingly illusory, so curiously disturbing and so unspeakably original it’s hard to pretend the film isn’t a gobsmacking monument of bottomless creativity.
The Master
Paul Thomas Anderson’s sixth film is somehow both his most enigmatic and the easiest to become obsessed with. The classically minded augmentations of his deified left-field period epic There Will Be Blood felt like an authentic artistic statement outdoing his earlier, more derivative creations. But with The Master, Anderson made it clear we were now dealing with an American original out to engrave his name above cinema’s most fastidious and inscrutable modern auteurs. Repurposing the story of L. Ron Hubbard’s church of scientology into a postwar scavenge for meaning, the notion of getting psychologically swindled by a soothsaying megalomaniac will provide Anderson’s critics an easy attack point.
With Inherent Vice and Phantom Thread since 2012, PTA has hardly obeyed anything resembling habit or routine. The magnificent 65 mm cinematography and the dual portrait, symbiotic character study (secured by some of the most superb acting of the century) lends The Master its appropriate status as a new, authoritative, exceptionally ingenious classic. The compositions, heavenly as they are, are nothing next to the implications of Anderson’s gonzo historical glance or the feelings fomented by the combined complementary force of Joaquin Phoenix and Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s uttermost powers.
Honorable mentions include Millennium Actress, Corpse Bride, Burn After Reading, Sicario, 50/50, Almost Famous, Mississippi Grind, Rush, Warrior, The Science of Sleep, 3:10 to Yuma, Weekend, Contagion
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
The combined talents of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have an awesome place of origin. Children’s material can make for awful features but this food weather fable is rich with irresistible twists on sci-fi, satire and the potential of wholesome family entertainment. No unnecessary crudeness was used to elaborate on the breadth of Cloudy’s cleverness. Other Sony Picture Animation efforts have attempted to reclaim this film’s masterfully manic energy (The Mitchell’s vs. the Machines is a fine imitation of the Lord/Miller voice) but it’s hard to replace the funniest clean comedy of our times. Bill Hader and Anna Faris clock in extraordinarily dedicated voice work.
Shaun of the Dead
An American Werewolf in London, American Psycho — some movies are so iconic in their ability to disgust and delight that they exceed cult followings and become just regular old classics. It’s been long enough to say Shaun of the Dead is such a horror comedy, especially with copycats to this day in the form of Zombieland sequels and worse (*gags at the thought of Army of the Dead*). Edgar Wright has made better on his promise as a filmmaker but Shaun of the Dead is so confidently ramshackle and baffling novel that imitators can’t hold the tiniest candle to Wright’s mathematically screwy screenplay and economically electric direction.
A History of Violence/Eastern Promises
David Cronenberg didn’t need to reinvent himself but the director operates like a new man in the 21st century. Both Viggo Mortensen films A History of Violence and Eastern Promises offered blistering, conservative crime drama that few could match in psychological perplexity and uneasy mystery. Body horror was always his strong suit but with films like Spider, A Dangerous Method and lately his work with Robert Pattinson he seems inclined to remain a pretentious art house director like the rest. Maybe he warped anatomy so much that the mind was all that was left to mess with. In any mode — sexually investigative, culturally critical for a few others — he’s a master.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford feels like one of the final grandiose, commercially unconcerned, near futile grasps at a dead genre — what’s the last epic revisionist Western you can name? Festering with paranoia and jealousy, this strange, deconstructed historical exposé sought to demystify the politics of public favor more than the 19th century legends. Cinematographer Roger Deakins peaked hard in 2007 between this and No Country For Old Men — with now-iconic shots, the film feels like both a novel and painting sprung to life, supported by well-considered themes surging through the riddles of myth and America’s fickle obsession with reputation. The passages of recollected narration are even more poetic when Deakins tinkers with his camera to evoke the fish-eyed texture of old photographs. Nick Cave’s score is also memorably mysterious and director Andrew Dominik (Killing Them Softly) has been too selective to undo his credit.
Prisoners
As French-Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve was working on taking over Hollywood as he saw fit — which has brought him to a (hopefully) two-part adaptation of Dune — 2013’s Prisoners was the most essential stepping stone to films as excellent and risky as Blade Runner 2049. The same year Villeneuve and Jake Gyllenhaal also came together for Enemy, a doppelgänger psychological thriller that could give David Lynch pause. But Prisoners’ deceptive, procedural deliberation, tragic cliffhanger, surefire performances (exacting work from Gyllenhaal, Hugh Jackman and Paul Dano sells every turn) and a deft consideration of morality under extreme circumstances make it a crime thriller you don’t shake easily or relish halfheartedly. Roger Deakins tasteful camerawork renders dreariness into melancholic splendor — the whole affair feels like a ghost-directed David Fincher film, a great one at that.
Drive
Ryan Gosling has made it a habit of starring in some of the best films of his time — La La Land, Blade Runner 2049 — and Drive is no exception in his pivot toward collaborations with meticulous auteurs. Nicolas Winding Refn only ever really appealed to mainstream domestic viewers once, barely, and Drive is also the moment his garish, grindhouse ambitions met their zenith. It's stylistically rapturous, gently romantic, viscerally volatile — if only Johnny Jewel’s soundtrack made its way to the final cut, although Gosling must’ve been a fan because the producer/composer later scored his debut feature Lost River. Fortunately some of Jewel’s tracks still ended up filling out Refn’s perfectly retro-futuristic frames with the spacey synths of revived Italo-disco. Just in ambience, let alone storytelling, this aesthetic marvel is a singular work of entertainment.
Mandy
I could make fun of Beyond the Black Rainbow for its Kubrick-rip-off sensibilities, laughable antagonist, short-film-only premise and other equivalent pretensions. Still I knew Mandy had the makings of a mystifying cult film for the ages, though nothing can really prepare you for Panos Cosmatos magnificent, effervescent sophomore spectacular, a revenge head-trip so visually unfathomable and extremely enjoyable it’ll make you feel like someone slipped LSD in your beverage even if you’re stone cold sober. It's Nicolas Cage’s finest hour in decades and the parting tones of composer Jóhann Jóhannsson are indelible. Not one frame is unconsidered, nor can I think of a better visual home for King Crimson’s prog-rock diamond “Starless.”
Lost in Translation
Sofia Coppola didn’t take long to slip out from under accusations of Hollywood nepotism, which secured her undeniably hipster career. Her second film following the celebrated The Virgin Suicides is the existentialist comedy of the age, a film so tender, unobtrusive and meditative it’s easy to ignore the waves of wisdom and emotion running through the reliably funny fish out of water humor and neon-soaked, double-sided view of alienation. I’d even go so far as to say Lost in Translation lays claim to the best performances of Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson’s respective careers. And God almighty, Coppola may be the most nimble cinematic soundtrack-curator of this or any time — the film wouldn’t be such atmospheric bliss without her discriminating taste and perceptive ear.
Spirited Away
If you know one Hayao Miyazaki movie, it’s obviously this one — but as can be the case with any great artist, sometimes their most accepted work was not their most compromising. A beautiful effort of the imagination can transcend not only borders but more than three decades of some of the most incredible animated films conceived; Princess Mononoke, Kiki’s Delivery Service, The Castle of Cagliostro and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, like a vast majority of his filmography, are all near-perfect creations. But Spirited Away’s fearless fable is so lovingly illusory, so curiously disturbing and so unspeakably original it’s hard to pretend the film isn’t a gobsmacking monument of bottomless creativity.
The Master
Paul Thomas Anderson’s sixth film is somehow both his most enigmatic and the easiest to become obsessed with. The classically minded augmentations of his deified left-field period epic There Will Be Blood felt like an authentic artistic statement outdoing his earlier, more derivative creations. But with The Master, Anderson made it clear we were now dealing with an American original out to engrave his name above cinema’s most fastidious and inscrutable modern auteurs. Repurposing the story of L. Ron Hubbard’s church of scientology into a postwar scavenge for meaning, the notion of getting psychologically swindled by a soothsaying megalomaniac will provide Anderson’s critics an easy attack point.
With Inherent Vice and Phantom Thread since 2012, PTA has hardly obeyed anything resembling habit or routine. The magnificent 65 mm cinematography and the dual portrait, symbiotic character study (secured by some of the most superb acting of the century) lends The Master its appropriate status as a new, authoritative, exceptionally ingenious classic. The compositions, heavenly as they are, are nothing next to the implications of Anderson’s gonzo historical glance or the feelings fomented by the combined complementary force of Joaquin Phoenix and Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s uttermost powers.
Honorable mentions include Millennium Actress, Corpse Bride, Burn After Reading, Sicario, 50/50, Almost Famous, Mississippi Grind, Rush, Warrior, The Science of Sleep, 3:10 to Yuma, Weekend, Contagion
The Best August Releases
of the 21st Century
The heat persists as the movie seasons change — summer’s last breath positions August as a comfortable nest for independent treats and unanticipated box office sensations. It’s not quite time to scatter the seeds of future Oscar campaigns but unpredictably sophisticated fare usually enters the public sphere just in time to wash off the studio stink of mid-year’s dumbest blockbuster releases.
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
As the seminal Judd Apatow film, Virgin is one of the most quotable, enjoyable and textured mainstream comedies of the millennia, allowing Steve Carell to locate his incredible potential and casually setting towering standards for R-rated sex comedies from then on out. The idea of ad-libbing in the pursuit of offhand brilliance has rarely paid off so well in the subsequent era, but back in 2005 The 40-Year-Old Virgin was aloof and diverting enough to make you think that with gifted enough performers and a decent situation, accidental masterpieces could be as easily achieved as they are clearly fun to make. And let's not forget Apatow ultimately doesn't thrive on mean humor but gingerly upholds traditional values while targeting and mocking the modern age's unbridled sexual depravity.
Superbad
Which brings us to the sweet and sour summer comedy to rule them all. The original screenplay of Seth Rogen and Even Goldberg — penned during and inspired by their own high school experiences — is not so iconic, hilarious and instinctively truthful by mistake. The buffoonery of teenhood has been captured with cultural self-awareness since the 80s but as a 21st century update on the code of coming-of-age antics, Superbad is a sometimes agonizingly accurate account of outsiders trying desperately to take advantage of the few social opportunities that befall them.
Timelessness gets harder to nail especially within a genre that relies on identifiably of-the-minute references and the contemporary youth's communal dynamics. Superbad still comfortably tackles every taboo that films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Dazed and Confused weren't keen to illustrate, handily getting all the coarse, often disgusting hijinks out of the way for future freewheeling bildungsroman efforts.
Planet of the Apes reboot series
As a staple of August’s place in the summer schedule, every Planet of the Apes prequel (2011's Rise, 2014's Dawn, 2017's War) found a way to dignify each season in question. Andy Serkis deserves trophies upon trophies for his critical role (physically, technologically, artistically) as Caesar and for indispensably furthering the state of motion capture performance with each chapter. Locating potent themes amidst post-apocalyptic scenarios in order to make every film a pressing, believable and challenging piece of escapism, the uniform quality of these new installments deservedly left the series in the good graces of audiences and critics, though whether this trilogy will last in the public's collective consciousness like the original 1968 inception remains to be seen. Of all the dormant cinematic properties due for resurrection, the new horizon of Planet of the Apes appeared ill-fated for sheer silliness, but it turns out monkey mayhem is just malleable and wacky enough to serve as some of the most splendid genre fare we’ve experienced this decade.
Inglourious Basterds
Tarantino’s postponed passion project upholds cinematic satire and nationalist propaganda to their utmost extremes. Inglourious Basterds is a compactly conceived war comedy so satiating in its most blistering moments of mouthwatering tension and a wallop of flawed, subversive fun in sum. It’s an overabundant send-up burnished with the director’s iconic ticks (indulgent discourse, gleeful gore, fragmented structuring) that, despite its cumbersome length, is perhaps the most confident iteration of his newest, mostly irresistible intentions. It’s also one of the richest thematic essays of Tarantino’s filmography, though Once Upon a Time in Hollywood already feels like a classic historical fiction companion competing for favor among his recent best. Basterds is nonetheless the gonzo flagship of his late career and at least damn close to earning the label of a smugly self-declared masterpiece.
Short Term 12
Before she sold out to our Disney overlords, Brie Larson had a habit of starring in the best indie weepies of the last decade. 2015’s Room earned every tear shed and every scrap of the Oscar attention received — especially that Best Actress trophy — but Short Term 12 was almost equal in unflinchingly raw, tactful melodrama. Writer-director Destin Daniel Cretton’s film was the first testament to Larson’s emotive abilities and the director has continuously collaborated with her in The Glass Castle and Just Mercy. The subject of at-risk teens and the group-home counselors looking after them could have been wasted on primetime television as an attractive soap opera situation. Instead, as a result of Cretton’s faultlessly expressive scripting, the plain-as-day characters and plausible conflicts inconspicuously access the blunt, revelatory power pain can provide.
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World/The World’s End
Thanks to a cultivated, all too devoted following, Edgar Wright’s privilege as an auteur is known to only a handful of filmmakers. The brash Brit has always poured tireless effort into his economizing comedy in order to wring out as much fun from his ideas as the screen will allow. His flagrantly film-school approach to the art of cinematic humor achieves a breakneck, reactive freshness through the unmitigated rapidity of editing and dense, spitfire setups and payoffs.
Whether he’s rounding out a spiritual trilogy of classic modern comedies with the alcoholic apocalypse of The World’s End or manically adapting the twink hipster’s most beloved manga, he never misses a beat or loses an ounce of accumulated momentum while putting immaculate casts to their best use. Scott Pilgrim is a euphoric musical misadventure full of subtext on the hypocrisy of courtship, and its energy is so compressed it’s as rewatchable as Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz. And The World’s End furthers the inside jokes and demented genre hybrids of its predecessors with its own absurd, if less blissful flavor.
ParaNorman/Kubo and the Two Strings
Laika has expended such a great deal of time and effort satisfying such a remote audience — if I wasn’t one of their eager consumers, I would have bet money the studio would be bankrupt by now. They relate so much exacting spirit into their painstaking creative endeavors that I doubt a single moment of the production process is spent on how to enhance profits. Missing Link enchanted the one or two people who came out to see the most recent proof of a studio generally unconcerned about securing its pricey, laborious investments. Laika would rather ensure that there’s appreciable art to begin with, particularly for a general, younger audience. All these adorations carry over to ParaNorman, the studio’s most ingenious to date — the Sixth Sense-amending masterpiece is already destined to secure a place in the family Halloween rotation. Separately, 2016’s Kubo and the Two Strings may be the most indelible original fantasy film we’ve seen this decade. Both examples boast some of the most magnificent stylistic employments of the molded medium's history.
Hero
Wuxia doesn’t exactly find its way to mainstream domestic audiences by accident. But legendary Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou (Red Sorghum, To Live), with the assistance of Quentin Tarantino convincing Miramax to bring the film to America, was able to have his rapturous vision appreciated by many more than expected. Whether he’s taking the wonderful genre to new, still historically epic places in 2018’s Shadow or patiently telling psychological, still gorgeously composed fables like 1991’s Raise the Red Lantern, Hero fits snugly within his prolific career — more peerless, poetic visual craft was mythically mirrored in his strong follow-up House of Flying Daggers. Even with a huge debt owed to Akira Kurosawa’s immortal Rashomon, outrageous duels, gaudy colors and all sorts of consummately ethereal cinematic fanfare propel Zhang’s apolitical, unreliable storytelling.
The Bourne Ultimatum
The premiere spy flick of its age — if Casino Royale didn’t exist — took the already laudable action franchise to spectacular new heights, even if muffled reinventions (The Bourne Legacy) and belated, bungled sequels (Jason Bourne) would nearly tarnish a sturdy legacy. Paul Greengrass’ aesthetic suited some of the best action sequences in recent times — the Waterloo assassination, the extensive Tangier chase and brawl — and Ultimatum brought some satisfactory answers to the series’ nagging questions. Matt Damon has rarely been worth taking so seriously while Joan Allen, David Strathairn, Albert Finney and Daniel Brühl dignify the gloriously grainy thriller in support. Especially considering how sensationalist the prospect of the modern action picture has become in order to satisfy the average viewer, Ultimatum has a preordained right to its place among the 21st century’s action classics as the proud peak of a grim, grounded and yet undeniably thrilling spy trilogy.
Mistress America
Noah Baumbach’s unrecognized masterwork is a diminutive diamond — the pocket-sized mirth of Mistress America has one of the most bountiful, brimming, bang for your buck comedy screenplays of the last twenty years. At a mere 84 minutes, Baumbach — along with his creative and romantic partner Greta Gerwig’s vital collaborative scripting following their fabulous pairing in Frances Ha — delves into subjects of sisterhood, college isolation, casual infidelity, the futility of ambition, the subjectivity of inspiration, the relativity of both social status and personal happiness — the list goes on and almost every exchange is tidily lined with truth and wit.
Recited with the same electrifying precision with which it is so discerningly, shrewdly and meticulously written, the dialogue of Mistress America percolates with purpose, irony, probing satire and cunningly multidimensional character development. Baumbach is one of the few directors with the capacity to compose authentic characters balanced by idiosyncratic flaws and redeemable humanity, mingling critique and exaltation into an intertextual work worthy of Ernst Lubitsch or Billy Wilder. I’ll end with an exchange, since the film is stocked with ageless perceptiveness.
Brooke: Sometimes I can’t tell if you’re a Zen master or a sociopath
Tracy: I’m just normal
Honorable mentions include Calvary, District 9, Good Time, Half Nelson, Cold Souls, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Taking Woodstock, Get On Up, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Straight Outta Compton, Logan Lucky, Searching, Red Eye, The Others, Cosmopolis
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
As the seminal Judd Apatow film, Virgin is one of the most quotable, enjoyable and textured mainstream comedies of the millennia, allowing Steve Carell to locate his incredible potential and casually setting towering standards for R-rated sex comedies from then on out. The idea of ad-libbing in the pursuit of offhand brilliance has rarely paid off so well in the subsequent era, but back in 2005 The 40-Year-Old Virgin was aloof and diverting enough to make you think that with gifted enough performers and a decent situation, accidental masterpieces could be as easily achieved as they are clearly fun to make. And let's not forget Apatow ultimately doesn't thrive on mean humor but gingerly upholds traditional values while targeting and mocking the modern age's unbridled sexual depravity.
Superbad
Which brings us to the sweet and sour summer comedy to rule them all. The original screenplay of Seth Rogen and Even Goldberg — penned during and inspired by their own high school experiences — is not so iconic, hilarious and instinctively truthful by mistake. The buffoonery of teenhood has been captured with cultural self-awareness since the 80s but as a 21st century update on the code of coming-of-age antics, Superbad is a sometimes agonizingly accurate account of outsiders trying desperately to take advantage of the few social opportunities that befall them.
Timelessness gets harder to nail especially within a genre that relies on identifiably of-the-minute references and the contemporary youth's communal dynamics. Superbad still comfortably tackles every taboo that films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Dazed and Confused weren't keen to illustrate, handily getting all the coarse, often disgusting hijinks out of the way for future freewheeling bildungsroman efforts.
Planet of the Apes reboot series
As a staple of August’s place in the summer schedule, every Planet of the Apes prequel (2011's Rise, 2014's Dawn, 2017's War) found a way to dignify each season in question. Andy Serkis deserves trophies upon trophies for his critical role (physically, technologically, artistically) as Caesar and for indispensably furthering the state of motion capture performance with each chapter. Locating potent themes amidst post-apocalyptic scenarios in order to make every film a pressing, believable and challenging piece of escapism, the uniform quality of these new installments deservedly left the series in the good graces of audiences and critics, though whether this trilogy will last in the public's collective consciousness like the original 1968 inception remains to be seen. Of all the dormant cinematic properties due for resurrection, the new horizon of Planet of the Apes appeared ill-fated for sheer silliness, but it turns out monkey mayhem is just malleable and wacky enough to serve as some of the most splendid genre fare we’ve experienced this decade.
Inglourious Basterds
Tarantino’s postponed passion project upholds cinematic satire and nationalist propaganda to their utmost extremes. Inglourious Basterds is a compactly conceived war comedy so satiating in its most blistering moments of mouthwatering tension and a wallop of flawed, subversive fun in sum. It’s an overabundant send-up burnished with the director’s iconic ticks (indulgent discourse, gleeful gore, fragmented structuring) that, despite its cumbersome length, is perhaps the most confident iteration of his newest, mostly irresistible intentions. It’s also one of the richest thematic essays of Tarantino’s filmography, though Once Upon a Time in Hollywood already feels like a classic historical fiction companion competing for favor among his recent best. Basterds is nonetheless the gonzo flagship of his late career and at least damn close to earning the label of a smugly self-declared masterpiece.
Short Term 12
Before she sold out to our Disney overlords, Brie Larson had a habit of starring in the best indie weepies of the last decade. 2015’s Room earned every tear shed and every scrap of the Oscar attention received — especially that Best Actress trophy — but Short Term 12 was almost equal in unflinchingly raw, tactful melodrama. Writer-director Destin Daniel Cretton’s film was the first testament to Larson’s emotive abilities and the director has continuously collaborated with her in The Glass Castle and Just Mercy. The subject of at-risk teens and the group-home counselors looking after them could have been wasted on primetime television as an attractive soap opera situation. Instead, as a result of Cretton’s faultlessly expressive scripting, the plain-as-day characters and plausible conflicts inconspicuously access the blunt, revelatory power pain can provide.
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World/The World’s End
Thanks to a cultivated, all too devoted following, Edgar Wright’s privilege as an auteur is known to only a handful of filmmakers. The brash Brit has always poured tireless effort into his economizing comedy in order to wring out as much fun from his ideas as the screen will allow. His flagrantly film-school approach to the art of cinematic humor achieves a breakneck, reactive freshness through the unmitigated rapidity of editing and dense, spitfire setups and payoffs.
Whether he’s rounding out a spiritual trilogy of classic modern comedies with the alcoholic apocalypse of The World’s End or manically adapting the twink hipster’s most beloved manga, he never misses a beat or loses an ounce of accumulated momentum while putting immaculate casts to their best use. Scott Pilgrim is a euphoric musical misadventure full of subtext on the hypocrisy of courtship, and its energy is so compressed it’s as rewatchable as Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz. And The World’s End furthers the inside jokes and demented genre hybrids of its predecessors with its own absurd, if less blissful flavor.
ParaNorman/Kubo and the Two Strings
Laika has expended such a great deal of time and effort satisfying such a remote audience — if I wasn’t one of their eager consumers, I would have bet money the studio would be bankrupt by now. They relate so much exacting spirit into their painstaking creative endeavors that I doubt a single moment of the production process is spent on how to enhance profits. Missing Link enchanted the one or two people who came out to see the most recent proof of a studio generally unconcerned about securing its pricey, laborious investments. Laika would rather ensure that there’s appreciable art to begin with, particularly for a general, younger audience. All these adorations carry over to ParaNorman, the studio’s most ingenious to date — the Sixth Sense-amending masterpiece is already destined to secure a place in the family Halloween rotation. Separately, 2016’s Kubo and the Two Strings may be the most indelible original fantasy film we’ve seen this decade. Both examples boast some of the most magnificent stylistic employments of the molded medium's history.
Hero
Wuxia doesn’t exactly find its way to mainstream domestic audiences by accident. But legendary Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou (Red Sorghum, To Live), with the assistance of Quentin Tarantino convincing Miramax to bring the film to America, was able to have his rapturous vision appreciated by many more than expected. Whether he’s taking the wonderful genre to new, still historically epic places in 2018’s Shadow or patiently telling psychological, still gorgeously composed fables like 1991’s Raise the Red Lantern, Hero fits snugly within his prolific career — more peerless, poetic visual craft was mythically mirrored in his strong follow-up House of Flying Daggers. Even with a huge debt owed to Akira Kurosawa’s immortal Rashomon, outrageous duels, gaudy colors and all sorts of consummately ethereal cinematic fanfare propel Zhang’s apolitical, unreliable storytelling.
The Bourne Ultimatum
The premiere spy flick of its age — if Casino Royale didn’t exist — took the already laudable action franchise to spectacular new heights, even if muffled reinventions (The Bourne Legacy) and belated, bungled sequels (Jason Bourne) would nearly tarnish a sturdy legacy. Paul Greengrass’ aesthetic suited some of the best action sequences in recent times — the Waterloo assassination, the extensive Tangier chase and brawl — and Ultimatum brought some satisfactory answers to the series’ nagging questions. Matt Damon has rarely been worth taking so seriously while Joan Allen, David Strathairn, Albert Finney and Daniel Brühl dignify the gloriously grainy thriller in support. Especially considering how sensationalist the prospect of the modern action picture has become in order to satisfy the average viewer, Ultimatum has a preordained right to its place among the 21st century’s action classics as the proud peak of a grim, grounded and yet undeniably thrilling spy trilogy.
Mistress America
Noah Baumbach’s unrecognized masterwork is a diminutive diamond — the pocket-sized mirth of Mistress America has one of the most bountiful, brimming, bang for your buck comedy screenplays of the last twenty years. At a mere 84 minutes, Baumbach — along with his creative and romantic partner Greta Gerwig’s vital collaborative scripting following their fabulous pairing in Frances Ha — delves into subjects of sisterhood, college isolation, casual infidelity, the futility of ambition, the subjectivity of inspiration, the relativity of both social status and personal happiness — the list goes on and almost every exchange is tidily lined with truth and wit.
Recited with the same electrifying precision with which it is so discerningly, shrewdly and meticulously written, the dialogue of Mistress America percolates with purpose, irony, probing satire and cunningly multidimensional character development. Baumbach is one of the few directors with the capacity to compose authentic characters balanced by idiosyncratic flaws and redeemable humanity, mingling critique and exaltation into an intertextual work worthy of Ernst Lubitsch or Billy Wilder. I’ll end with an exchange, since the film is stocked with ageless perceptiveness.
Brooke: Sometimes I can’t tell if you’re a Zen master or a sociopath
Tracy: I’m just normal
Honorable mentions include Calvary, District 9, Good Time, Half Nelson, Cold Souls, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Taking Woodstock, Get On Up, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Straight Outta Compton, Logan Lucky, Searching, Red Eye, The Others, Cosmopolis
The Best July Releases
of the 21st Century
In the thick of midsummer, July is customarily the last wave of the year’s most extravagant releases before things decrescendo into the bubbling Oscar hype of late fall. Midmonth is usually Warner Brothers’ stomping ground but with the lack of Potter and Batman flicks of late, it’s anyone’s turf. Whereas the mania of May is filled with fiscal question marks as tentpoles come week by week, July’s lineup is often selectively dispursed.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest/Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
We didn’t know what we had until it was gone with Gore Verbinski’s Pirates trilogy. The disastrous fourth and fifth entry served as a severe contrast to the bombastic energy of Verbinski’s swashbuckler reinvention. The Curse of the Black Pearl and its equally stupid, spectacular sequel Dead Man’s Chest possess the kind of adventure ingredients requiring either prime Steven Spielberg or some lavish adaptation of notable properties. The unlikely phenomenon of Pirates of the Caribbean wasn’t solely due to Johnny Depp’s legendary role as Jack Sparrow or because the films literally functioned like theme park rides come to life. The old school temperament of the original, the intricate visual effects in the second installment and Verbinski’s own steadily mounting madness add up to some of the most dependable diversions of the era, At World’s End included.
(500) Days of Summer
The optimum anti-romance of our time attracted all parts of the hipster crowd more than a decade ago but Marc Webb’s semiautobiographical comedy earns it cuteness and casual fans by the weight of its uncommonly restorative candor. Webb’s screenplay understands the actuality of relationships — the subjectivity of the individual, the frequency of miscommunication and the possibly painful disparity in depth of passion. Zooey Deschanel’s Summer is adorned and vilified with identical aching by Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s oneitis poster child Tom — her side of the story is shrouded in the unknown, as is often the case to the insecure, probably not so significant other.
Values defining courtship, love and monogamy become murkier generation after generation. For the present, the nonlinear memory maze of (500) Days of Summer most genuinely taps into the uncertainty, fragility and obsession of modern affairs of the heart, and all the sentimental infatuation and unchecked expectations that often come standard.
Atomic Blonde
David Leitch has developed his artillery as an action auteur at a stunning clip. As a longtime stuntman and stunt coordinator before turning ghost-director for John Wick, he’s set himself out to favor nimble, well-rehearsed choreography over quick-cut Hollywood fakery. While Chad Stokleski took exclusive grasp of the Wick franchise’s reigns — more than admirably at that — Leitch found his own fish to pan-sear with the Charlize Theron vehicle Atomic Blonde.
Wasting not a single frame of trashy perfectionism, Atomic Blonde sports beautiful action sequences, Cold War clichés, bisexual lighting and precisely tailored espionage escapism. Deadpool 2 and Hobbs and Shaw have fortuitously marked Leitch’s own meteoric directorial rise but Atomic Blonde found him excelling with moderate resources and augmenting the frequently inelegant art of summer action movies to their most pristine form. Theron’s physicality, that unforgettable one-take stairwell shot and Leitch’s confident maintenance of a stylized atmosphere advances Blonde to the level of bombshell.
Fruitvale Station
Before Creed put him on the map and Black Panther forever made sure he stays there, director Ryan Coogler was first tinkering with the most humble of independent features. Coogler would find Michael B. Jordan an imperative asset of his own ascending career but their robust combination was never more forceful than in the cathartic existential drama Fruitvale Station. With a complex yet unpretentious real-life portrait of the final day in the life of Oscar Grant before his tragic death by police shooting in 2009, Fruitvale Station is composed with the refinement and dignity of a classic tragedy. The film’s effect in realism, however, is harrowing and terribly moving — the thoughtfully melodramatic tactics at work here are too good to even call Oscar-worthy.
Eighth Grade
Bo Burnham was always a multitalented comic, musician and poet but his man-for-all-seasons persona dealt another suit with an iteration of the classic coming-of-age directorial debut. But where many of his auspicious contemporaries have done their best to enchant the more naïve consumers of A24 indie fare, Burnham’s raw relation of his own concerns about social media’s role in our social anxiety emanate truths almost always left unspoken in real life but particularly in cinema.
Many indie directors can pretend their films are for the unexpressed masses; Burnham has already mastered the empathetic tricks of moviemaking and flipped them on their head. Though his topics are decidedly of-the-minute, Eighth Grade is not meant to cater to middle-schoolers but rather anyone who feels the clammy grip of futile unease and apprehension at the worst moments. Burnham’s accomplishment isn’t easy to digest but it’s a cinch to appreciate.
Spider-Man 2
Into the Spider-Verse was a pearl while Far From Home and Homecoming were more like filler in the MCU cycle. After so many Spider-people in recent years it has become all too obvious how timeless and uncompromising Sam Raimi’s trilogy was and has become in retrospect. Even in its time Spider-Man 2 was an exceptional sequel by any stretch and a singular moment of comic book movie greatness. Tobey’s continued geek magnetism, Alfred Molina’s superb incarnation of Doctor Octopus, exquisitely composed set pieces and heartbreaking developments on the themes of relatable superhero responsibilities left Spider-Man 2 as much of a classic of camp and cinematic culture as the original film.
The Dark Knight/Inception
When Christopher Nolan came into his own — but before he let his tremendous resources and unimpeded aspirations get the better of him with The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar — the late 2000s was the sweet spot of his impossible Hollywood career. The Dark Knight is a zeitgeist encapsulation, one of the meatiest blockbusters ever and the most sensibly complex film of its class.
Inception was then an all-in gamble wisely rearing the mammoth success — espionage and sci-fi blended into cerebral action entertainment. With so much to explain it’s crazy Nolan managed to please as many viewers as he did, because even though it’s not quite as ingenious as IMDbers might think, Inception is also not as pseudo-intellectual as the haters insist. There’s a load of exposition but just as much imagination — Wally Pfister’s visual supplements on both fronts offered vibrant images to assist in positioning mainstream movie-going back to a more artistic realm of open-ended analysis and heated conversation.
Mission: Impossible – Fallout/War of the Worlds
Tom Cruise’s most exhilarating, spectacle-spearheading moments this century — Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and Christopher McQuarrie’s Fallout — are prototypical products of the potentially riveting authority of the blockbuster. Pragmatic in emotion, sparing in digital effects and mesmeric in terms of visual dynamics, each film is truly awe-inducing in the application of technical prowess. Even with two more Mission: Impossible films in store and myriad successes in the rearview, the swell of ludicrous stunts, spellbinding action and world-ending stakes in Fallout lived up to the series’ name in a fashion rarely before witnessed.
War of the Worlds — photographed to the precipice of precision by Janusz Kaminski — melded the action, horror, sci-fi and disaster genres into a modern medley of allegory and delectable panic. The individual quest for survival in the face of staggering annihilation was reaped for all its viscerally extraordinary possibilities. Event films this meticulously rendered are as rare as Cruise’s unparalleled zeal.
Boyhood/Before Sunset/A Scanner Darkly
Throughout the 21st century Richard Linklater has made a habit of transcending indie filmmaking and its role in summer escapes. Callous cynics enjoy dismissing Linklater’s 2014 masterpiece as a milestone merely in its unprecedented structure; it’s an almost inevitable reaction in the face of universal acclaim. As if the masterly director didn’t find meaning in his most novel narrative built around the passage of time — Boyhood is the coming-of-age movie to end them all and one of the only formally innovative films to emerge this decade. Linklater has played with plotless stories before but his exceedingly realist approach to the quotidian complications of advancing through grade school and coping with unseasoned parents is too universal to shrug off — the film’s progression through the fleeting joys of friendship and listless spells of boredom within the string of adolescent milestones resonates profoundly.
A decade earlier, Linklater furthered the prospect of sequels with Before Sunset, already an all-time great film romance. After the dreamlike enchantment of 1995’s Before Sunrise, nine years pass to reveal the massive emotional crater left behind by the brief encounter between Ethan Hawke’s Jesse and Julie Delpy’s Celine. Redemption, regret and the rekindling of feelings define the most deliciously taut installment of the Before trilogy. Sunset’s thrilling ascent to anticlimax, all in real time no less, is a ravishingly humanist pleasure.
And in 2006, Linklater put forth the most faithful Philip K. Dick adaptation cinema has ever seen. Unless Ridley Scott, Paul Verhoeven or Steven Spielberg was involved, it was damn near impossible for Dick’s world to become tangible without inflated budgets and an accessible weirdness. Reenacting the same shortcuts in rotoscoping technology he helped pioneer in his unsung masterpiece Waking Life, Linklater’s conception of A Scanner Darkly neatly exchanges the ethereal nature of dreams for the mind-warping lucidity of psychoactive drugs. Part neo-noir, part dystopian thriller, part slacker comedy and all brilliant sociological drama, Linklater’s crack at the cultural critique of drug wars was a dexterous cautionary tale.
Honorable mentions include Memories of Murder, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Road to Perdition, The Hunt, Sky High, The Guard, Only God Forgives, Ghost World, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, The Bourne Supremacy, In the Loop, Hellboy: The Golden Army, Dunkirk, Last Days, Phoenix, Detroit
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest/Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
We didn’t know what we had until it was gone with Gore Verbinski’s Pirates trilogy. The disastrous fourth and fifth entry served as a severe contrast to the bombastic energy of Verbinski’s swashbuckler reinvention. The Curse of the Black Pearl and its equally stupid, spectacular sequel Dead Man’s Chest possess the kind of adventure ingredients requiring either prime Steven Spielberg or some lavish adaptation of notable properties. The unlikely phenomenon of Pirates of the Caribbean wasn’t solely due to Johnny Depp’s legendary role as Jack Sparrow or because the films literally functioned like theme park rides come to life. The old school temperament of the original, the intricate visual effects in the second installment and Verbinski’s own steadily mounting madness add up to some of the most dependable diversions of the era, At World’s End included.
(500) Days of Summer
The optimum anti-romance of our time attracted all parts of the hipster crowd more than a decade ago but Marc Webb’s semiautobiographical comedy earns it cuteness and casual fans by the weight of its uncommonly restorative candor. Webb’s screenplay understands the actuality of relationships — the subjectivity of the individual, the frequency of miscommunication and the possibly painful disparity in depth of passion. Zooey Deschanel’s Summer is adorned and vilified with identical aching by Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s oneitis poster child Tom — her side of the story is shrouded in the unknown, as is often the case to the insecure, probably not so significant other.
Values defining courtship, love and monogamy become murkier generation after generation. For the present, the nonlinear memory maze of (500) Days of Summer most genuinely taps into the uncertainty, fragility and obsession of modern affairs of the heart, and all the sentimental infatuation and unchecked expectations that often come standard.
Atomic Blonde
David Leitch has developed his artillery as an action auteur at a stunning clip. As a longtime stuntman and stunt coordinator before turning ghost-director for John Wick, he’s set himself out to favor nimble, well-rehearsed choreography over quick-cut Hollywood fakery. While Chad Stokleski took exclusive grasp of the Wick franchise’s reigns — more than admirably at that — Leitch found his own fish to pan-sear with the Charlize Theron vehicle Atomic Blonde.
Wasting not a single frame of trashy perfectionism, Atomic Blonde sports beautiful action sequences, Cold War clichés, bisexual lighting and precisely tailored espionage escapism. Deadpool 2 and Hobbs and Shaw have fortuitously marked Leitch’s own meteoric directorial rise but Atomic Blonde found him excelling with moderate resources and augmenting the frequently inelegant art of summer action movies to their most pristine form. Theron’s physicality, that unforgettable one-take stairwell shot and Leitch’s confident maintenance of a stylized atmosphere advances Blonde to the level of bombshell.
Fruitvale Station
Before Creed put him on the map and Black Panther forever made sure he stays there, director Ryan Coogler was first tinkering with the most humble of independent features. Coogler would find Michael B. Jordan an imperative asset of his own ascending career but their robust combination was never more forceful than in the cathartic existential drama Fruitvale Station. With a complex yet unpretentious real-life portrait of the final day in the life of Oscar Grant before his tragic death by police shooting in 2009, Fruitvale Station is composed with the refinement and dignity of a classic tragedy. The film’s effect in realism, however, is harrowing and terribly moving — the thoughtfully melodramatic tactics at work here are too good to even call Oscar-worthy.
Eighth Grade
Bo Burnham was always a multitalented comic, musician and poet but his man-for-all-seasons persona dealt another suit with an iteration of the classic coming-of-age directorial debut. But where many of his auspicious contemporaries have done their best to enchant the more naïve consumers of A24 indie fare, Burnham’s raw relation of his own concerns about social media’s role in our social anxiety emanate truths almost always left unspoken in real life but particularly in cinema.
Many indie directors can pretend their films are for the unexpressed masses; Burnham has already mastered the empathetic tricks of moviemaking and flipped them on their head. Though his topics are decidedly of-the-minute, Eighth Grade is not meant to cater to middle-schoolers but rather anyone who feels the clammy grip of futile unease and apprehension at the worst moments. Burnham’s accomplishment isn’t easy to digest but it’s a cinch to appreciate.
Spider-Man 2
Into the Spider-Verse was a pearl while Far From Home and Homecoming were more like filler in the MCU cycle. After so many Spider-people in recent years it has become all too obvious how timeless and uncompromising Sam Raimi’s trilogy was and has become in retrospect. Even in its time Spider-Man 2 was an exceptional sequel by any stretch and a singular moment of comic book movie greatness. Tobey’s continued geek magnetism, Alfred Molina’s superb incarnation of Doctor Octopus, exquisitely composed set pieces and heartbreaking developments on the themes of relatable superhero responsibilities left Spider-Man 2 as much of a classic of camp and cinematic culture as the original film.
The Dark Knight/Inception
When Christopher Nolan came into his own — but before he let his tremendous resources and unimpeded aspirations get the better of him with The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar — the late 2000s was the sweet spot of his impossible Hollywood career. The Dark Knight is a zeitgeist encapsulation, one of the meatiest blockbusters ever and the most sensibly complex film of its class.
Inception was then an all-in gamble wisely rearing the mammoth success — espionage and sci-fi blended into cerebral action entertainment. With so much to explain it’s crazy Nolan managed to please as many viewers as he did, because even though it’s not quite as ingenious as IMDbers might think, Inception is also not as pseudo-intellectual as the haters insist. There’s a load of exposition but just as much imagination — Wally Pfister’s visual supplements on both fronts offered vibrant images to assist in positioning mainstream movie-going back to a more artistic realm of open-ended analysis and heated conversation.
Mission: Impossible – Fallout/War of the Worlds
Tom Cruise’s most exhilarating, spectacle-spearheading moments this century — Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and Christopher McQuarrie’s Fallout — are prototypical products of the potentially riveting authority of the blockbuster. Pragmatic in emotion, sparing in digital effects and mesmeric in terms of visual dynamics, each film is truly awe-inducing in the application of technical prowess. Even with two more Mission: Impossible films in store and myriad successes in the rearview, the swell of ludicrous stunts, spellbinding action and world-ending stakes in Fallout lived up to the series’ name in a fashion rarely before witnessed.
War of the Worlds — photographed to the precipice of precision by Janusz Kaminski — melded the action, horror, sci-fi and disaster genres into a modern medley of allegory and delectable panic. The individual quest for survival in the face of staggering annihilation was reaped for all its viscerally extraordinary possibilities. Event films this meticulously rendered are as rare as Cruise’s unparalleled zeal.
Boyhood/Before Sunset/A Scanner Darkly
Throughout the 21st century Richard Linklater has made a habit of transcending indie filmmaking and its role in summer escapes. Callous cynics enjoy dismissing Linklater’s 2014 masterpiece as a milestone merely in its unprecedented structure; it’s an almost inevitable reaction in the face of universal acclaim. As if the masterly director didn’t find meaning in his most novel narrative built around the passage of time — Boyhood is the coming-of-age movie to end them all and one of the only formally innovative films to emerge this decade. Linklater has played with plotless stories before but his exceedingly realist approach to the quotidian complications of advancing through grade school and coping with unseasoned parents is too universal to shrug off — the film’s progression through the fleeting joys of friendship and listless spells of boredom within the string of adolescent milestones resonates profoundly.
A decade earlier, Linklater furthered the prospect of sequels with Before Sunset, already an all-time great film romance. After the dreamlike enchantment of 1995’s Before Sunrise, nine years pass to reveal the massive emotional crater left behind by the brief encounter between Ethan Hawke’s Jesse and Julie Delpy’s Celine. Redemption, regret and the rekindling of feelings define the most deliciously taut installment of the Before trilogy. Sunset’s thrilling ascent to anticlimax, all in real time no less, is a ravishingly humanist pleasure.
And in 2006, Linklater put forth the most faithful Philip K. Dick adaptation cinema has ever seen. Unless Ridley Scott, Paul Verhoeven or Steven Spielberg was involved, it was damn near impossible for Dick’s world to become tangible without inflated budgets and an accessible weirdness. Reenacting the same shortcuts in rotoscoping technology he helped pioneer in his unsung masterpiece Waking Life, Linklater’s conception of A Scanner Darkly neatly exchanges the ethereal nature of dreams for the mind-warping lucidity of psychoactive drugs. Part neo-noir, part dystopian thriller, part slacker comedy and all brilliant sociological drama, Linklater’s crack at the cultural critique of drug wars was a dexterous cautionary tale.
Honorable mentions include Memories of Murder, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Road to Perdition, The Hunt, Sky High, The Guard, Only God Forgives, Ghost World, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, The Bourne Supremacy, In the Loop, Hellboy: The Golden Army, Dunkirk, Last Days, Phoenix, Detroit
The Best June Releases
of the 21st Century
By the time summer has officially set in, many of us abscond to the air-conditioned respite of our local theater to remove ourselves from the sweltering seasonal boredom. Blockbusters and indie releases alike find their footing in the free time of both working adults and kids on summer break while theaters are most congested with content. Without further ado, the optimum June releases of the past 20 plus years.
22 Jump Street
21 Jump Street was a paragon of the exceptional mainstream comedy and a relieving indication of how much there is to yield from respectably revamping past pop culture properties. Writer-director duo Phil Lord and Chris Miller have furthered their combined careers since — LEGO franchises, getting fired from that Han Solo movie — but 22 Jump Street was confirmation of their clairvoyant wit even though, from afar, the movie looked exactly like one of the rushed sequels they were skewering. With nearly as many classic, quotable moments as the first — the improv scene is gut-numbing brilliance in or out of context — 22 maintained the original’s calculated self-awareness, sprightly action comedy and strident satire of millennial culture. The end credits here are also some of the best in history — the Jump Street couplet is paved in nothing but the funny stuff.
Upgrade
While it made a minimal impression on moviegoers or critics, Upgrade is a film hipster’s wet dream, principally for sci-fi and action acolytes. An orderly, recognizable premise, some serviceably kinetic direction by Leigh Whannell and a devoted lead performance by Logan Marshall-Green operate beautifully within an airtight cyber-noir/body horror plot. Upgrade is superb in its bionic skirmishes and digestibly stimulating in its implications. The film was 2018’s blindsiding summer surprise capable of visceral cinematic thrills as enrapturing as Infinity War in spite of its thrifty production. It also climaxed with sequel prospects few films can rival or, more likely, just happens to leave you with an expertly open-ended finale.
Leave No Trace
This film literally came out of nowhere. Ben Foster had blown us away before, predominantly in supporting roles (3:10 to Yuma, Hell or High Water), but Leave No Trace was different — director Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone) bore this peculiar film’s removed set of curiosities, meditations and poignancies regarding the outsider condition with uncanny grace. She makes no fuss in turning the introspective premise and insular characters into a recipe for sympathy, managing to relate the film’s emotional complexities diligently and judiciously. Once seen, the movie’s exceptionally disquieting power is hard to ignore — not one critic has said nay to her vision according to Rotten Tomatoes. Relative newcomer Thomasin McKenzie is an extraordinarily adept young performer and the dynamics of the oddest father/daughter bond on the planet is a heartbreakingly transcendent journey from the wilderness to the new world.
Beginners
Mike Nichols’ minor masterwork 20th Century Women from 2016 was a surplus of evidence of the filmmakers’ objective human observations and soothing stance on social and familial dynamics. 2014’s Beginners is almost too wistful to move you — particularly with a depressed animator at the center — but every shred of preciousness is countered by direct disillusionment. Nichols is able to calmly take life’s more despondent truths and wrap them around you like a silk shawl. Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer and Mélanie Laurent have such a pleasant time with the matured material but this film is more than the sum of proficient actors or a sensitive script. Beginners is a tender treat by nearly any measure of spending time wisely.
The Hurt Locker
Just ask Boyhood director Richard Linklater — summer is not the ideal time for an Oscar campaign to begin. Still Kathryn Bigelow’s little war film that could beat out her ex-husband James Cameron’s Avatar (until recently the highest grossing film of all time) to far more deserved awards' glory. David and Goliath parallels aside, The Hurt Locker doesn’t look at all quaint when you see it firsthand, even back-to-back with Cameron’s innovative video game. It’s a brutally authentic, palpably exhilarating and sweepingly insightful look into the effect of modern war on individuality — Jeremy Renner’s star-making turn is an indispensible part of the elegant equation. The Hurt Locker is undoubtedly one of the most valuable combat films of the age.
Edge of Tomorrow
Tom Cruise did not sell Edge of Tomorrow to the masses as he might have in his prime. Doug Limon’s terrific manga adaptation is nonetheless representative of Cruise’s best talents and is furthermore the best action sci-fi blockbuster you could hope for among the comprehensive unoriginality defining summers this decade past. Overblown budgets and generic titles (and taglines that became titles) aside, Edge of Tomorrow is superlative entertainment for the masses, bundling together practically every escapist pleasure — spectacle, humor, romance, alien invasions — you could desire from mainstream genre fare. 2014’s purest moviegoing surprise measures up to the best of a strong cinematic year. Emily Blunt has never been better or more badass, the Groundhog Day structure never ventures past expiration and sequel possibilities are ever looming and acutely anticipated.
Inside Out/Ratatouille/Toy Story 3
Some of Pixar’s biggest gambles have been their surest successes. Toy Story 3 was avoidable yet became a model trilogy capper, or so we were led to believe up until 4’s unforeseen heart-tugging. Inside Out made the emotive obstacles of the mind’s mechanics fun for all ages. And best of all, Pixar took their biggest financial hit for the sake of a movie with a rat chef as protagonist. Ratatouille is a stunning inquiry into the idiosyncratic relationship between artist, art and critic, and its near-inexplicable joys are more delectable every time you return. Obviously Pixar’s catalogue at large, not just the three June releases in mention, add up to some of the most universally meaningful cultural contributions of the past 25 years. Those in question happen to paint the appropriately broad range of the studio’s undeterred creativity and sincere artistic inspiration.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
It’s hard to underpraise this episode of Potter’s story in celluloid — Chris Columbus may have started the show but Alfonso Cuarón made it art. Despite putting up the lowest total numbers of the franchise in their first summer slot, the series would always be striving to reaffirm the same unqualified critical adoration ever since the third year at Hogwarts. Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows – Part 1 would come close to the coziest of fantasy films but Prisoner of Azkaban is so wondrously lived in, so leanly adapted — not page for page like the first two — it felt like the Rowling’s wizarding world was about to give way to sustained cinematic potential.
And we were mostly right, Fantastic Beasts notwithstanding. Practical effects, street clothes and creeping adolescence separate Azkaban from its counterparts. The relatively small-scoped chapter plays very little into the narrative bulk of the entire franchise — by Mike Newell’s thoroughly English Goblet of Fire the true continuity set in, the serialized days were over and the newness of the series’ magic was soon diminished. Before David Yates placated some of the former film’s visual personality, the early rotation of directors never found a better creative match than Cuarón. And John Williams would design one of the most heavenly scores of his career in his parting contribution to the Wizarding world.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence/Minority Report
Not long ago there was little evidence to suggest Steven Spielberg had left his best days behind. Excluding the underappreciated virtuosity of War of the Worlds, the astonishing science fiction one-two punch of A.I. and Minority Report complimented each other in conceptual and visual ambition as well as the wonderment and mythmaking of cinematic storytelling.
Disturbing, fascinating, narratively unconfined, scorchingly sad — A.I. is many things. Although Kubrick ran the fairy tale show before his passing in 1999, Spielberg never lost sight of the fundamentally austere sentiments of Artificial Intelligence. Without the excruciatingly talented young Haley Joel Osment, the poignant follow-through wouldn’t pierce you right in the heart. The unwieldy structure — or lack thereof — takes you from a domestic horror show to a sensational, seedy odyssey and finally a resolution peering impossibly far into a frozen, mechanical future. Even with a host of curious vocal cameos by Ben Kingsley, Chris Rock, Robin William and Meryl Streep, all these disparate elements condense into the cinematic make-up of one of the most vivid, emotionally endearing and genuinely frightening glimpses at our tomorrows.
Meanwhile Minority Report brought Philip K. Dick to the big screen like Total Recall and yes, even the Blade Runner films, never could. It’s a powerful parable that does tonal hurdles through the many hats it wears — sci-fi thriller, whodunit, chase movie and the occassional moments of filth and terror offsetting Tom Cruise’s blockbuster face. The opening sequence is phenomenally procedural, organically incorporating prescient, cool as hell future-tech and the relevant pre-crime terminology. As a moral lesson or an escapist romp, Minority Report is as intelligent and near-perfect as summer movies get.
The sustained genius of Janusz Kaminski’s unparalleled cinematographic eye gave way to arrays of sweeping, awe-inspiring, uncanny and often introspective genre moments. Each film — A.I.’s dark Pinocchio do-over and Minority Report dystopian neo-noir — is an achievement in meaningful moviegoing worthy of an audience’s consideration many times over.
Coherence
If every microbudget film were as good as Coherence, everyone would need to drop their hobbies and set off searching sci-fi’s untried terrains. Coherence was mostly narrative spitballing and yet the film itself — a testament to the cinema vérité potential of poor man’s digital filmmaking — is full of confounding, cerebral choices which multiple viewings do not discredit. Reunited friends caught in your average cosmic multiverse-type dinner party find themselves mixing and matching within different parallel existences. The outcome is mind-tickling, transfixing and sometimes genuinely eerie — less is more was never more unmistakably summarized.
Often, in order for conceptually driven movies to sustain themselves, the storytelling is met with inevitable compromises. Countering the remunerations, Coherence is a lucid, prudent consideration of independent filmmaking and science fiction — the sparing, minimalist and breathlessly intellectual thriller is altogether unaffected perfection.
Honorable mentions include Submarine, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Magic Mike, Napoleon Dynamite, The Neon Demon, Surf’s Up, Cinderella Man, The Beguiled, The Bling Ring, Howl’s Moving Castle, Moon, The Bourne Identity, The Hunt for the Wilderpeople, X-Men: First Class, Dogtooth, World War Z, Ocean’s Thirteen
22 Jump Street
21 Jump Street was a paragon of the exceptional mainstream comedy and a relieving indication of how much there is to yield from respectably revamping past pop culture properties. Writer-director duo Phil Lord and Chris Miller have furthered their combined careers since — LEGO franchises, getting fired from that Han Solo movie — but 22 Jump Street was confirmation of their clairvoyant wit even though, from afar, the movie looked exactly like one of the rushed sequels they were skewering. With nearly as many classic, quotable moments as the first — the improv scene is gut-numbing brilliance in or out of context — 22 maintained the original’s calculated self-awareness, sprightly action comedy and strident satire of millennial culture. The end credits here are also some of the best in history — the Jump Street couplet is paved in nothing but the funny stuff.
Upgrade
While it made a minimal impression on moviegoers or critics, Upgrade is a film hipster’s wet dream, principally for sci-fi and action acolytes. An orderly, recognizable premise, some serviceably kinetic direction by Leigh Whannell and a devoted lead performance by Logan Marshall-Green operate beautifully within an airtight cyber-noir/body horror plot. Upgrade is superb in its bionic skirmishes and digestibly stimulating in its implications. The film was 2018’s blindsiding summer surprise capable of visceral cinematic thrills as enrapturing as Infinity War in spite of its thrifty production. It also climaxed with sequel prospects few films can rival or, more likely, just happens to leave you with an expertly open-ended finale.
Leave No Trace
This film literally came out of nowhere. Ben Foster had blown us away before, predominantly in supporting roles (3:10 to Yuma, Hell or High Water), but Leave No Trace was different — director Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone) bore this peculiar film’s removed set of curiosities, meditations and poignancies regarding the outsider condition with uncanny grace. She makes no fuss in turning the introspective premise and insular characters into a recipe for sympathy, managing to relate the film’s emotional complexities diligently and judiciously. Once seen, the movie’s exceptionally disquieting power is hard to ignore — not one critic has said nay to her vision according to Rotten Tomatoes. Relative newcomer Thomasin McKenzie is an extraordinarily adept young performer and the dynamics of the oddest father/daughter bond on the planet is a heartbreakingly transcendent journey from the wilderness to the new world.
Beginners
Mike Nichols’ minor masterwork 20th Century Women from 2016 was a surplus of evidence of the filmmakers’ objective human observations and soothing stance on social and familial dynamics. 2014’s Beginners is almost too wistful to move you — particularly with a depressed animator at the center — but every shred of preciousness is countered by direct disillusionment. Nichols is able to calmly take life’s more despondent truths and wrap them around you like a silk shawl. Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer and Mélanie Laurent have such a pleasant time with the matured material but this film is more than the sum of proficient actors or a sensitive script. Beginners is a tender treat by nearly any measure of spending time wisely.
The Hurt Locker
Just ask Boyhood director Richard Linklater — summer is not the ideal time for an Oscar campaign to begin. Still Kathryn Bigelow’s little war film that could beat out her ex-husband James Cameron’s Avatar (until recently the highest grossing film of all time) to far more deserved awards' glory. David and Goliath parallels aside, The Hurt Locker doesn’t look at all quaint when you see it firsthand, even back-to-back with Cameron’s innovative video game. It’s a brutally authentic, palpably exhilarating and sweepingly insightful look into the effect of modern war on individuality — Jeremy Renner’s star-making turn is an indispensible part of the elegant equation. The Hurt Locker is undoubtedly one of the most valuable combat films of the age.
Edge of Tomorrow
Tom Cruise did not sell Edge of Tomorrow to the masses as he might have in his prime. Doug Limon’s terrific manga adaptation is nonetheless representative of Cruise’s best talents and is furthermore the best action sci-fi blockbuster you could hope for among the comprehensive unoriginality defining summers this decade past. Overblown budgets and generic titles (and taglines that became titles) aside, Edge of Tomorrow is superlative entertainment for the masses, bundling together practically every escapist pleasure — spectacle, humor, romance, alien invasions — you could desire from mainstream genre fare. 2014’s purest moviegoing surprise measures up to the best of a strong cinematic year. Emily Blunt has never been better or more badass, the Groundhog Day structure never ventures past expiration and sequel possibilities are ever looming and acutely anticipated.
Inside Out/Ratatouille/Toy Story 3
Some of Pixar’s biggest gambles have been their surest successes. Toy Story 3 was avoidable yet became a model trilogy capper, or so we were led to believe up until 4’s unforeseen heart-tugging. Inside Out made the emotive obstacles of the mind’s mechanics fun for all ages. And best of all, Pixar took their biggest financial hit for the sake of a movie with a rat chef as protagonist. Ratatouille is a stunning inquiry into the idiosyncratic relationship between artist, art and critic, and its near-inexplicable joys are more delectable every time you return. Obviously Pixar’s catalogue at large, not just the three June releases in mention, add up to some of the most universally meaningful cultural contributions of the past 25 years. Those in question happen to paint the appropriately broad range of the studio’s undeterred creativity and sincere artistic inspiration.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
It’s hard to underpraise this episode of Potter’s story in celluloid — Chris Columbus may have started the show but Alfonso Cuarón made it art. Despite putting up the lowest total numbers of the franchise in their first summer slot, the series would always be striving to reaffirm the same unqualified critical adoration ever since the third year at Hogwarts. Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows – Part 1 would come close to the coziest of fantasy films but Prisoner of Azkaban is so wondrously lived in, so leanly adapted — not page for page like the first two — it felt like the Rowling’s wizarding world was about to give way to sustained cinematic potential.
And we were mostly right, Fantastic Beasts notwithstanding. Practical effects, street clothes and creeping adolescence separate Azkaban from its counterparts. The relatively small-scoped chapter plays very little into the narrative bulk of the entire franchise — by Mike Newell’s thoroughly English Goblet of Fire the true continuity set in, the serialized days were over and the newness of the series’ magic was soon diminished. Before David Yates placated some of the former film’s visual personality, the early rotation of directors never found a better creative match than Cuarón. And John Williams would design one of the most heavenly scores of his career in his parting contribution to the Wizarding world.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence/Minority Report
Not long ago there was little evidence to suggest Steven Spielberg had left his best days behind. Excluding the underappreciated virtuosity of War of the Worlds, the astonishing science fiction one-two punch of A.I. and Minority Report complimented each other in conceptual and visual ambition as well as the wonderment and mythmaking of cinematic storytelling.
Disturbing, fascinating, narratively unconfined, scorchingly sad — A.I. is many things. Although Kubrick ran the fairy tale show before his passing in 1999, Spielberg never lost sight of the fundamentally austere sentiments of Artificial Intelligence. Without the excruciatingly talented young Haley Joel Osment, the poignant follow-through wouldn’t pierce you right in the heart. The unwieldy structure — or lack thereof — takes you from a domestic horror show to a sensational, seedy odyssey and finally a resolution peering impossibly far into a frozen, mechanical future. Even with a host of curious vocal cameos by Ben Kingsley, Chris Rock, Robin William and Meryl Streep, all these disparate elements condense into the cinematic make-up of one of the most vivid, emotionally endearing and genuinely frightening glimpses at our tomorrows.
Meanwhile Minority Report brought Philip K. Dick to the big screen like Total Recall and yes, even the Blade Runner films, never could. It’s a powerful parable that does tonal hurdles through the many hats it wears — sci-fi thriller, whodunit, chase movie and the occassional moments of filth and terror offsetting Tom Cruise’s blockbuster face. The opening sequence is phenomenally procedural, organically incorporating prescient, cool as hell future-tech and the relevant pre-crime terminology. As a moral lesson or an escapist romp, Minority Report is as intelligent and near-perfect as summer movies get.
The sustained genius of Janusz Kaminski’s unparalleled cinematographic eye gave way to arrays of sweeping, awe-inspiring, uncanny and often introspective genre moments. Each film — A.I.’s dark Pinocchio do-over and Minority Report dystopian neo-noir — is an achievement in meaningful moviegoing worthy of an audience’s consideration many times over.
Coherence
If every microbudget film were as good as Coherence, everyone would need to drop their hobbies and set off searching sci-fi’s untried terrains. Coherence was mostly narrative spitballing and yet the film itself — a testament to the cinema vérité potential of poor man’s digital filmmaking — is full of confounding, cerebral choices which multiple viewings do not discredit. Reunited friends caught in your average cosmic multiverse-type dinner party find themselves mixing and matching within different parallel existences. The outcome is mind-tickling, transfixing and sometimes genuinely eerie — less is more was never more unmistakably summarized.
Often, in order for conceptually driven movies to sustain themselves, the storytelling is met with inevitable compromises. Countering the remunerations, Coherence is a lucid, prudent consideration of independent filmmaking and science fiction — the sparing, minimalist and breathlessly intellectual thriller is altogether unaffected perfection.
Honorable mentions include Submarine, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Magic Mike, Napoleon Dynamite, The Neon Demon, Surf’s Up, Cinderella Man, The Beguiled, The Bling Ring, Howl’s Moving Castle, Moon, The Bourne Identity, The Hunt for the Wilderpeople, X-Men: First Class, Dogtooth, World War Z, Ocean’s Thirteen
The Best May Releases
of the 21st Century
The month of May is the fruitful breeding ground for some of the movie year’s earliest event pictures and thus some principal box office profits. Nevertheless this time has also been fertile territory for myriad fine films, business notwithstanding. Forgettable Marvel flicks aside, here is a taste of what summer cinema can offer even the most crusted connoisseur — these are the best May releases so far this century.
Troy
What happened to the historical epic? Sure, the profitability of such an antiquated mode of film spectacle had become dubious even before 2004 — just after, Oliver Stone’s Alexander and Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven were just more dirt flung on this tradition’s grave. Wolfgang Petersen’s gallant gamble was the finest revival of his run of big-budget blockbuster risks, bookended by the duo of disaster sea-fare in The Perfect Storm and Poseidon. Troy is intermittently hokey to be certain and yet the opulent film evenly and enthusiastically imparts the mythic history within Homer’s account of the Trojan War. The production quality is magnificent and the casting (namely Brad Pitt and Eric Bana) is uniformly appropriate. Hoisted by its timeless source material, brazen hyper-masculinity, proficient combat choreography and appreciable dramatic staging, Troy was the deepest and mightiest of the dying breaths exhaled by the extinct breed of grand-scale, sword-and-sandal cinema.
Love & Friendship
Whit Stillman has a knack for spoken language and social commentary — as most celebrated writer-directors should — but adaptation is often indicative of creative indifference rather than artistic fervor. However Love & Friendship, based on the overlooked early Jane Austen novel Lady Susan, is as piquant as it is biting – its pleasures in comedy of manners are unmatched by stuffed-shirt fare of the same vein. Roping back Kate Beckinsdale and Chloë Sevigny — the leads of Stillman’s nostalgic masterpiece Last Days of the Disco — for perfectly suited roles, Love & Friendship unearths the delicacies of Austen’s tongue in ways even the persnickety author herself could have respected.
Before Midnight
The likelihood of a fourth installment in the Before series by summer of 2022 has just about waned, though another sequel is not altogether out of the question. As a trilogy capper for now, Before Midnight is the perfect comedown to a series priding itself on dissecting and in many ways celebrating the idealism of romance. In that sense, in order to balance the wonderful paperback novel qualities of Sunrise and Sunset, Midnight takes a nosedive into the hell of marital misfortune culminating in a climactic bout that could have made Jean-Luc Godard squirm. It’s a rude awakening and yet Linklater can’t resist imbuing the Greek vacation turned nuptial smackdown with his trademark philosophizing and wit. The bitter pill of Before Midnight is surprisingly easy to swallow and no less truthful for it.
Up
If not for Brad Bird’s indelible contributions to the former formidability of Pixar’s brand, Up would be the studio’s crowning achievement. On its own, it’s a masterpiece of emotion and character; Up is rich in mature humor, universal themes and astonishing animation. It does peak early with its classically heartbreaking opening — which must set some record for how fast a movie can break you down blubbering — but the rest of the film is just as gratifying because of Carl’s rejuvenating chance of redemption. Two movies later, Cars 2 would shatter the illusion of Pixar’s perfection and it wouldn’t be the last. But the stretch of originality from Ratatouille to Wall-E to Up made it seem like their esteem could never be unmade.
First Reformed
Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest — Paul Schrader is wearing his cinematic influences on his sleeve while tackling pressingly contemporary concerns. The left-leaning slant — the cynical view of faith and the emphatically dictated environmental topics — does not distract from the focus of First Reformed: coping with problems beyond our ability to influence and all the doubt those thoughts invoke. Some of the more experimental sequences, the ending in particular, provide just enough enigmatic curiosities to outweigh the soapboxing. Ethan Hawke also has never instilled one of his characters with more dramatic magnitude. Critical voices are adamantly on its side so if it’s not a new classic in a short time it’ll fall only just shy.
Mad Max: Fury Road
Mad Max: Fury Road has been hailed by audiences and critics alike as one of the best films of the past decade. If it weren’t for George Miller’s fastidious action mechanics operating perfectly in sync with a suitably straightforward story, there’d be more room to argue. Visually, this film doesn't waste a single frame, redressing the art of practical action in a blockbuster age brimming with green screen blues — save for the occasional Ethan Hunt or John Wick outing. Fury Road is summer escapism refined to blood, dust and wrath — it’s also possibly the choice selection of a classic franchise more than worthy of its legacy in pop culture.
Spider-Man
Back before the contemporary origin story had long been blueprinted, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man outlined a standard that will likely never be exceeded. The movie changed the face of pop culture and to this day holds together as an almost impossible pleasure. It’s scripting and themes are classic to the point of parody and Raimi’s absurdly campy orientation has served as the archetype for numerous comic book films. Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker is scrawny perfection whereas Willem Dafoe and J.K. Simmons are nothing less than iconic in their respective roles. A few dated effects can’t taint Spider-Man’s reputation — along with its own sequel and The Dark Knight, this is the kind of caped cinema that phases and cinematic universes cannot replicate.
Moonrise Kingdom
Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom is his supreme achievement full stop. The Royal Tenenbaums and Fantastic Mr. Fox are both excellent in their energy and creative precision but damn if his 2012 film isn’t everything Anderson is famous for and more. His robotic dialogue never quite registered properly until uttered from reckless adolescents. The cold humor, protracted sexual tension and adorable meticulousness of his typical screenplay have never been so engrossingly realized. And unlike his most pretentious, uninviting works (I’m looking at you Life Aquatic), Moonrise Kingdom arrives at a place of tender beauty the eclectic auteur so often shoos away. The film is uncharacteristically wholehearted and characterizes the peak of Anderson’s idiosyncratic, imaginative resplendence.
Midnight in Paris
Regardless of what you think about the man personally, Woody Allen has produced an abundant catalogue of comedy classics few can compete with. After countless misses and only a few hits, the casual sophistication of 2011’s Midnight in Paris made it his most impeccable communication in at least twenty years. Only Allen would bring his favorite historical influences to life and use them to populate the background of perhaps the most rewarding rom-com for bookworms ever conceived. A few literary references may be too obvious but the notion of evading the pangs of modern living to the perfection of the past is everlasting.
This is also one of Allen’s most gleefully meta turns — what if at the peak of his popularity he wanted to write an classic novel instead of formulate screenplay after screenplay? The sweet irony is only talents as irrefutable as Allen can crank out scripts as light on their feet as Midnight In Paris and make them function like a work of art. We all at least partly define ourselves based on the artists we admire — painters, poets, authors, musicians, filmmakers — and use them as a springboard to explain who we are. The textures of Midnight in Paris are exquisitely comedic and melodically melancholic, but the movie’s secret weapon is Owen Wilson, who embodies the neurotic meekness in every one of Allen’s painfully identifiable lead characters better than the director himself.
The Tree of Life
Terrence Malick went from prodigious, selective recluse to America’s most prominent, restless experimental filmmaker. Though different arguments can be made for the offhand brilliance — or lack thereof — within his new improvisational era (To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, Song to Song), The Tree of Life felt like the sharpest artistic pivot of his career and the epitome of his oeuvre's distinctive transcendence. Tracing the breadth of the cosmos and life itself from the primitive universe to the fractured wonder of infancy and childhood, few films in recent memory have succeeded so thoroughly in meeting unimaginable cinematic objectives. It may be difficult at first to peek through Malick’s prescribed pretensions, which are as thick in The Tree of Life as any of his films — but an open mind draws back the floodgates to a purifying surge of emotional, visual and existential clarity.
Honorable mentions include Speed Racer, Ida, Paprika, Finding Nemo, Shrek, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Heaven Knows What, The Double, X-Men: Days of Future Past, X2: X-Men United, The Lobster, The Immigrant, Slow West, When Marnie Was There, Star Trek, Layer Cake, Drag Me to Hell, Iron Man, The Avengers, Captain America: Civil War
Troy
What happened to the historical epic? Sure, the profitability of such an antiquated mode of film spectacle had become dubious even before 2004 — just after, Oliver Stone’s Alexander and Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven were just more dirt flung on this tradition’s grave. Wolfgang Petersen’s gallant gamble was the finest revival of his run of big-budget blockbuster risks, bookended by the duo of disaster sea-fare in The Perfect Storm and Poseidon. Troy is intermittently hokey to be certain and yet the opulent film evenly and enthusiastically imparts the mythic history within Homer’s account of the Trojan War. The production quality is magnificent and the casting (namely Brad Pitt and Eric Bana) is uniformly appropriate. Hoisted by its timeless source material, brazen hyper-masculinity, proficient combat choreography and appreciable dramatic staging, Troy was the deepest and mightiest of the dying breaths exhaled by the extinct breed of grand-scale, sword-and-sandal cinema.
Love & Friendship
Whit Stillman has a knack for spoken language and social commentary — as most celebrated writer-directors should — but adaptation is often indicative of creative indifference rather than artistic fervor. However Love & Friendship, based on the overlooked early Jane Austen novel Lady Susan, is as piquant as it is biting – its pleasures in comedy of manners are unmatched by stuffed-shirt fare of the same vein. Roping back Kate Beckinsdale and Chloë Sevigny — the leads of Stillman’s nostalgic masterpiece Last Days of the Disco — for perfectly suited roles, Love & Friendship unearths the delicacies of Austen’s tongue in ways even the persnickety author herself could have respected.
Before Midnight
The likelihood of a fourth installment in the Before series by summer of 2022 has just about waned, though another sequel is not altogether out of the question. As a trilogy capper for now, Before Midnight is the perfect comedown to a series priding itself on dissecting and in many ways celebrating the idealism of romance. In that sense, in order to balance the wonderful paperback novel qualities of Sunrise and Sunset, Midnight takes a nosedive into the hell of marital misfortune culminating in a climactic bout that could have made Jean-Luc Godard squirm. It’s a rude awakening and yet Linklater can’t resist imbuing the Greek vacation turned nuptial smackdown with his trademark philosophizing and wit. The bitter pill of Before Midnight is surprisingly easy to swallow and no less truthful for it.
Up
If not for Brad Bird’s indelible contributions to the former formidability of Pixar’s brand, Up would be the studio’s crowning achievement. On its own, it’s a masterpiece of emotion and character; Up is rich in mature humor, universal themes and astonishing animation. It does peak early with its classically heartbreaking opening — which must set some record for how fast a movie can break you down blubbering — but the rest of the film is just as gratifying because of Carl’s rejuvenating chance of redemption. Two movies later, Cars 2 would shatter the illusion of Pixar’s perfection and it wouldn’t be the last. But the stretch of originality from Ratatouille to Wall-E to Up made it seem like their esteem could never be unmade.
First Reformed
Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest — Paul Schrader is wearing his cinematic influences on his sleeve while tackling pressingly contemporary concerns. The left-leaning slant — the cynical view of faith and the emphatically dictated environmental topics — does not distract from the focus of First Reformed: coping with problems beyond our ability to influence and all the doubt those thoughts invoke. Some of the more experimental sequences, the ending in particular, provide just enough enigmatic curiosities to outweigh the soapboxing. Ethan Hawke also has never instilled one of his characters with more dramatic magnitude. Critical voices are adamantly on its side so if it’s not a new classic in a short time it’ll fall only just shy.
Mad Max: Fury Road
Mad Max: Fury Road has been hailed by audiences and critics alike as one of the best films of the past decade. If it weren’t for George Miller’s fastidious action mechanics operating perfectly in sync with a suitably straightforward story, there’d be more room to argue. Visually, this film doesn't waste a single frame, redressing the art of practical action in a blockbuster age brimming with green screen blues — save for the occasional Ethan Hunt or John Wick outing. Fury Road is summer escapism refined to blood, dust and wrath — it’s also possibly the choice selection of a classic franchise more than worthy of its legacy in pop culture.
Spider-Man
Back before the contemporary origin story had long been blueprinted, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man outlined a standard that will likely never be exceeded. The movie changed the face of pop culture and to this day holds together as an almost impossible pleasure. It’s scripting and themes are classic to the point of parody and Raimi’s absurdly campy orientation has served as the archetype for numerous comic book films. Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker is scrawny perfection whereas Willem Dafoe and J.K. Simmons are nothing less than iconic in their respective roles. A few dated effects can’t taint Spider-Man’s reputation — along with its own sequel and The Dark Knight, this is the kind of caped cinema that phases and cinematic universes cannot replicate.
Moonrise Kingdom
Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom is his supreme achievement full stop. The Royal Tenenbaums and Fantastic Mr. Fox are both excellent in their energy and creative precision but damn if his 2012 film isn’t everything Anderson is famous for and more. His robotic dialogue never quite registered properly until uttered from reckless adolescents. The cold humor, protracted sexual tension and adorable meticulousness of his typical screenplay have never been so engrossingly realized. And unlike his most pretentious, uninviting works (I’m looking at you Life Aquatic), Moonrise Kingdom arrives at a place of tender beauty the eclectic auteur so often shoos away. The film is uncharacteristically wholehearted and characterizes the peak of Anderson’s idiosyncratic, imaginative resplendence.
Midnight in Paris
Regardless of what you think about the man personally, Woody Allen has produced an abundant catalogue of comedy classics few can compete with. After countless misses and only a few hits, the casual sophistication of 2011’s Midnight in Paris made it his most impeccable communication in at least twenty years. Only Allen would bring his favorite historical influences to life and use them to populate the background of perhaps the most rewarding rom-com for bookworms ever conceived. A few literary references may be too obvious but the notion of evading the pangs of modern living to the perfection of the past is everlasting.
This is also one of Allen’s most gleefully meta turns — what if at the peak of his popularity he wanted to write an classic novel instead of formulate screenplay after screenplay? The sweet irony is only talents as irrefutable as Allen can crank out scripts as light on their feet as Midnight In Paris and make them function like a work of art. We all at least partly define ourselves based on the artists we admire — painters, poets, authors, musicians, filmmakers — and use them as a springboard to explain who we are. The textures of Midnight in Paris are exquisitely comedic and melodically melancholic, but the movie’s secret weapon is Owen Wilson, who embodies the neurotic meekness in every one of Allen’s painfully identifiable lead characters better than the director himself.
The Tree of Life
Terrence Malick went from prodigious, selective recluse to America’s most prominent, restless experimental filmmaker. Though different arguments can be made for the offhand brilliance — or lack thereof — within his new improvisational era (To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, Song to Song), The Tree of Life felt like the sharpest artistic pivot of his career and the epitome of his oeuvre's distinctive transcendence. Tracing the breadth of the cosmos and life itself from the primitive universe to the fractured wonder of infancy and childhood, few films in recent memory have succeeded so thoroughly in meeting unimaginable cinematic objectives. It may be difficult at first to peek through Malick’s prescribed pretensions, which are as thick in The Tree of Life as any of his films — but an open mind draws back the floodgates to a purifying surge of emotional, visual and existential clarity.
Honorable mentions include Speed Racer, Ida, Paprika, Finding Nemo, Shrek, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Heaven Knows What, The Double, X-Men: Days of Future Past, X2: X-Men United, The Lobster, The Immigrant, Slow West, When Marnie Was There, Star Trek, Layer Cake, Drag Me to Hell, Iron Man, The Avengers, Captain America: Civil War
The Best April Releases
of the 21st Century
April can be a most conducive time for getting eyeballs on the year's previous festival hits that never really had a chance to connect with critics and audiences by lack of distribution. However, no matter the month, it can be difficult to determine whether a film's genuine release date is its first premiere or first domestic debut — for that reason this list, and maybe a few others, missed a few fabulous films (You Were Never Really Here, Under the Skin, Kung Fu Hustle) that technically debuted for select audiences before their exposure to an unsuspecting public.
Lately April has been exploited as an early summer jumpstart for either Disney or Universal, but in the best of times it’s the quiet before the blockbuster storm season.
Avengers: Infinity War
Just when it looked like the flavors and fanfare of the MCU had placated, Infinity War was enough to unwittingly turn you back into a drooling Marvel devotee. Phase One had the high highs (Iron Man) and low lows (Iron Man 2, the Avengers-advertisement referred to as the first Captain America) and Phase Two awkwardly had to keep things busy and restrained simultaneously. Phase Three was an extended peak for sure save for the most easily discarded entries, but before the two-part Avengers finale even the good ones felt all too routine.
Infinity War is just such an excellent waste of time, boldly placing its villain front and center and never faltering as swimmingly satisfying entertainment and strategically mounted drama. With no ends to meet by the credits, this film was the precipice of the MCU, a reminder that sometimes even the most toxic corporate stratagem can instill actual blockbuster exhilaration and a deep feeling of fun. As Disney/Marvel digresses into multiple directions, they’ll be chasing the high of this cumulative astonishment for years.
Mean Girls
Every millennial girl’s favorite movie, whether they’re aware or not, is one of the best satires of the era. Yes, Mean Girls is unendingly quotable, the Clueless of the following generation. But if it weren’t for Tina Fey’s worthwhile messaging for teenagers who would eat this movie up regardless, this film would be a product of exactly the same noxious social superiority. Fey’s adaptation of Rosalind Wiseman’s self-help book Queen Bees and Wannabes shaped a tactful teen comedy Trojan horse out to rewrite high school’s stereotypical roles. Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Seyfried and Rachel McAdams were in charge of their powers as young comedic performers — Lacey Chabert (Gretchen Wieners), bless her, was good at the time. Mean Girls is one of those cultural touchstones (there’s a Broadway musical for Christ’s sake) you want to ignore but can’t and shouldn’t.
Green Room/Blue Ruin
Jeremy Saulnier has struggled his way to recognition, bringing collaborative actor Macon Blair along with him most everywhere. Most people probably missed Saulnier’s 2007 debut DYI horror-comedy Murder Party — Blue Ruin, which was budgeted by way of a crowdfunding campaign, transmuted the revenge thriller to its most raw, reduced, dangerous form. Green Room’s fatter cast (Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Patrick Stewart included) and straight-horror tinge earns it a little more respect but regardless, somehow Saulnier has already gotten real good at locating beauty in the gruesome. Both spring tonics proved brutally pleasing times, augmenting well-worn premises into sinister, gripping tales of survival. Also, Nazi punks fuck off.
Lean on Pete
A24 doesn’t always go for the bleak, bloody stuff though. This underseen gem is a little gift from Andrew Haigh’s quiet hot streak wherein he offered reserved, mature, masterful films like Weekend and 45 Years. I hesitate to over-explain this fable’s greatness, which is so delicate you could quickly, rashly take it for granted. I once referred to it as the cinematic equivalent of a tough, true folk song and that more than sums it up. Lean on Pete should be treasured, simplicity notwithstanding.
Only Lovers Left Alive
Jim Jarmusch is a primary steward of indie film hipster fare. But even with uniformly great performers (specifically Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, John Hurt, Mia Wasikowska and Anton Yelchin) and slick sounds (Primarily produced by Jarmusch’s band SQÜRL), Only Lovers Left Alive tapped into not only what’s left to unearth concerning vampiric cinema but how much cool the unflappable director has left to emit. Some people hate its airy aimlessness but I’d imagine that’s just how creatures that see decades like we see seasons might like it. The titular twosome Swinton and Hiddleston play perfectly into the atmospheric iciness Only Lovers Left Alive imparts so effortlessly. It’s right up there with his classics like Down By Law, Dead Man, and his radically divergent follow-up Paterson.
Everybody Wants Some!!
Richard Linklater quickly returned from the most ambitious, epically structured film of his legacy with possibly the most laid-back film to his name, which is saying a lot. Almost as if he wanted to showcase the college experience that cuts off at the end of Boyhood, this spiritual successor to Dazed and Confused has its own assured regard for the foibles of youth’s drifting search for gratification. With a period setting and an expansively enjoyable crowd of performances from our mirthlessly masculine baseball boys, this could have been a touchy testosterone overload but Linklater, as always, likes to keep things introspective. His superior knack for observation, and his penchant for carefree, casually discerning cinema, is as strong in Everybody Wants Some!! as anything else in his career.
United 93
Putting together the definitive 9/11 movie is not some big competition but Paul Greengrass did it right and did it first. Unlike Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, also released in 2006, Greengrass’ Bourne-popularized ‘gritty realism’ erases the sentiment many directors might feel inclined to exploit from the national disaster. United 93 doesn’t just make believable people out of the passengers – even the hijackers are afforded considerable depth.
The last act is a blur of blistering, white-knuckle intensity because it shies away from nothing — despite how pulse-pounding the results Greengrass rejects any obligation to fulfill some studio-backed climactic push. At its core United 93 is quick to solemnly honor those depicted. A few non-actors play themselves (most notably Ben Sliney whose fateful first day as operations manager of the US Federal Aviation Administration was September 11th, 2001), aiding the cinema-vérité style of the risky exercise in recent history. Greengrass unreservedly exhibits every perspective of the God-awful scramble with nerve-splitting panic and frustration.
Hot Fuzz
Parody is usually something that serves laughs rather than the state of the genre in question but Hot Fuzz has its respective place among both the best comedies and action movies of the millennia. Edgar Wright’s idiosyncratic, frenetic film-student approach reached its zenith of purpose and precision in Hot Fuzz, which sends up cop clichés with resolute revelry — none of the jokes are near lowbrow. It may not have quite as many belly laughs as Shaun of the Dead but probably just as many classic bits. The cleverness of Hot Fuzz spans multiple spectrums, each one satisfying your craving for bloody, boisterous British absurdity. If you can reference Bad Boys II and Point Break and ascend each with ease, maybe you’re actually superior to your stimuli — or maybe most studios take an audience’s susceptibility to ‘dumb’ entertainment for granted.
American Psycho
The best horror comedy to see the light of the 21st century is also the millennia’s most searing satire. Christian Bale has never superseded his famous performance as Patrick Bateman, the cast is otherwise stacked with other talent on their best day (Willem Dafoe, Jared Leto, Josh Lucas, Justin Theroux, Chloë Sevigny and Reese Witherspoon) and the film’s psyche-splitting ending is a tantalizing treat to re-experience. Add the fact that American Psycho has spawned countless memes and is furthermore worthy of knowingly parroting in amusement, and you’ve got an unassuming, untamable, shamelessly superb cult classic. Before you assume my sick male gaze is at the wheel, Mary Harron’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel is a resilient, noteworthy instance of female directors making their thoughtful, inconspicuous mark on the collective imprint of both cinema and shared consciousness.
Honorable mentions include Hanna, Upstream Colour, The Cabin in the Woods, The Pirates: Band of Misfits, Hellboy, Croupier, Adventureland, Bernie, Source Code, Meek’s Cutoff, State of Play, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Disturbia, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Kill Bill: Volume 2, The Lost City of Z
Lately April has been exploited as an early summer jumpstart for either Disney or Universal, but in the best of times it’s the quiet before the blockbuster storm season.
Avengers: Infinity War
Just when it looked like the flavors and fanfare of the MCU had placated, Infinity War was enough to unwittingly turn you back into a drooling Marvel devotee. Phase One had the high highs (Iron Man) and low lows (Iron Man 2, the Avengers-advertisement referred to as the first Captain America) and Phase Two awkwardly had to keep things busy and restrained simultaneously. Phase Three was an extended peak for sure save for the most easily discarded entries, but before the two-part Avengers finale even the good ones felt all too routine.
Infinity War is just such an excellent waste of time, boldly placing its villain front and center and never faltering as swimmingly satisfying entertainment and strategically mounted drama. With no ends to meet by the credits, this film was the precipice of the MCU, a reminder that sometimes even the most toxic corporate stratagem can instill actual blockbuster exhilaration and a deep feeling of fun. As Disney/Marvel digresses into multiple directions, they’ll be chasing the high of this cumulative astonishment for years.
Mean Girls
Every millennial girl’s favorite movie, whether they’re aware or not, is one of the best satires of the era. Yes, Mean Girls is unendingly quotable, the Clueless of the following generation. But if it weren’t for Tina Fey’s worthwhile messaging for teenagers who would eat this movie up regardless, this film would be a product of exactly the same noxious social superiority. Fey’s adaptation of Rosalind Wiseman’s self-help book Queen Bees and Wannabes shaped a tactful teen comedy Trojan horse out to rewrite high school’s stereotypical roles. Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Seyfried and Rachel McAdams were in charge of their powers as young comedic performers — Lacey Chabert (Gretchen Wieners), bless her, was good at the time. Mean Girls is one of those cultural touchstones (there’s a Broadway musical for Christ’s sake) you want to ignore but can’t and shouldn’t.
Green Room/Blue Ruin
Jeremy Saulnier has struggled his way to recognition, bringing collaborative actor Macon Blair along with him most everywhere. Most people probably missed Saulnier’s 2007 debut DYI horror-comedy Murder Party — Blue Ruin, which was budgeted by way of a crowdfunding campaign, transmuted the revenge thriller to its most raw, reduced, dangerous form. Green Room’s fatter cast (Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Patrick Stewart included) and straight-horror tinge earns it a little more respect but regardless, somehow Saulnier has already gotten real good at locating beauty in the gruesome. Both spring tonics proved brutally pleasing times, augmenting well-worn premises into sinister, gripping tales of survival. Also, Nazi punks fuck off.
Lean on Pete
A24 doesn’t always go for the bleak, bloody stuff though. This underseen gem is a little gift from Andrew Haigh’s quiet hot streak wherein he offered reserved, mature, masterful films like Weekend and 45 Years. I hesitate to over-explain this fable’s greatness, which is so delicate you could quickly, rashly take it for granted. I once referred to it as the cinematic equivalent of a tough, true folk song and that more than sums it up. Lean on Pete should be treasured, simplicity notwithstanding.
Only Lovers Left Alive
Jim Jarmusch is a primary steward of indie film hipster fare. But even with uniformly great performers (specifically Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, John Hurt, Mia Wasikowska and Anton Yelchin) and slick sounds (Primarily produced by Jarmusch’s band SQÜRL), Only Lovers Left Alive tapped into not only what’s left to unearth concerning vampiric cinema but how much cool the unflappable director has left to emit. Some people hate its airy aimlessness but I’d imagine that’s just how creatures that see decades like we see seasons might like it. The titular twosome Swinton and Hiddleston play perfectly into the atmospheric iciness Only Lovers Left Alive imparts so effortlessly. It’s right up there with his classics like Down By Law, Dead Man, and his radically divergent follow-up Paterson.
Everybody Wants Some!!
Richard Linklater quickly returned from the most ambitious, epically structured film of his legacy with possibly the most laid-back film to his name, which is saying a lot. Almost as if he wanted to showcase the college experience that cuts off at the end of Boyhood, this spiritual successor to Dazed and Confused has its own assured regard for the foibles of youth’s drifting search for gratification. With a period setting and an expansively enjoyable crowd of performances from our mirthlessly masculine baseball boys, this could have been a touchy testosterone overload but Linklater, as always, likes to keep things introspective. His superior knack for observation, and his penchant for carefree, casually discerning cinema, is as strong in Everybody Wants Some!! as anything else in his career.
United 93
Putting together the definitive 9/11 movie is not some big competition but Paul Greengrass did it right and did it first. Unlike Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, also released in 2006, Greengrass’ Bourne-popularized ‘gritty realism’ erases the sentiment many directors might feel inclined to exploit from the national disaster. United 93 doesn’t just make believable people out of the passengers – even the hijackers are afforded considerable depth.
The last act is a blur of blistering, white-knuckle intensity because it shies away from nothing — despite how pulse-pounding the results Greengrass rejects any obligation to fulfill some studio-backed climactic push. At its core United 93 is quick to solemnly honor those depicted. A few non-actors play themselves (most notably Ben Sliney whose fateful first day as operations manager of the US Federal Aviation Administration was September 11th, 2001), aiding the cinema-vérité style of the risky exercise in recent history. Greengrass unreservedly exhibits every perspective of the God-awful scramble with nerve-splitting panic and frustration.
Hot Fuzz
Parody is usually something that serves laughs rather than the state of the genre in question but Hot Fuzz has its respective place among both the best comedies and action movies of the millennia. Edgar Wright’s idiosyncratic, frenetic film-student approach reached its zenith of purpose and precision in Hot Fuzz, which sends up cop clichés with resolute revelry — none of the jokes are near lowbrow. It may not have quite as many belly laughs as Shaun of the Dead but probably just as many classic bits. The cleverness of Hot Fuzz spans multiple spectrums, each one satisfying your craving for bloody, boisterous British absurdity. If you can reference Bad Boys II and Point Break and ascend each with ease, maybe you’re actually superior to your stimuli — or maybe most studios take an audience’s susceptibility to ‘dumb’ entertainment for granted.
American Psycho
The best horror comedy to see the light of the 21st century is also the millennia’s most searing satire. Christian Bale has never superseded his famous performance as Patrick Bateman, the cast is otherwise stacked with other talent on their best day (Willem Dafoe, Jared Leto, Josh Lucas, Justin Theroux, Chloë Sevigny and Reese Witherspoon) and the film’s psyche-splitting ending is a tantalizing treat to re-experience. Add the fact that American Psycho has spawned countless memes and is furthermore worthy of knowingly parroting in amusement, and you’ve got an unassuming, untamable, shamelessly superb cult classic. Before you assume my sick male gaze is at the wheel, Mary Harron’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel is a resilient, noteworthy instance of female directors making their thoughtful, inconspicuous mark on the collective imprint of both cinema and shared consciousness.
Honorable mentions include Hanna, Upstream Colour, The Cabin in the Woods, The Pirates: Band of Misfits, Hellboy, Croupier, Adventureland, Bernie, Source Code, Meek’s Cutoff, State of Play, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Disturbia, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Kill Bill: Volume 2, The Lost City of Z
The Best March Releases
of the 21st Century
Spring breaks winter’s bitter bind and moviegoing’s biggest early treats are often popping up like daisies. While winter gets many months to dominate the calendar, spring barely gets more than eight weeks before summer technically has its own third of the succession to dominate. It’s anyone’s game this time of year — like appetizers before the big feast, sometimes the first bites are ultimately the best.
Rango
If you thought Pirates of the Caribbean sailed right off the rails, Rango was Gore Verbinski proclaiming without question that he cares little to conform to the commonplace — later A Cure for Wellness would confirm his cinematic iconoclasm completely. Johnny Depp’s voice work was funny, the character design was grotesque and inspired, Hans Zimmer’s score was extraordinarily exciting and the ode to Westerns was both bizarre and welcome. Rango is ruthlessly original — this is one of the few animated films that are difficult to suggest for youngsters because it’s so much better than what they’re used to. I pay respect to Nickelodeon for embracing the untested.
City Island
I don’t know how it has stuck with me so, but this diamond in the rough will make you wonder about any number of those Redbox movies you overlook as you exit the grocery store, all the great stuff below mainstream's surface you might be missing out on. Domestic foibles are easy to exploit and even easier to mess up, yet this story about the separate secrets of one family residing in the titular secluded Bronx neighborhood makes good on its modesty and finds identifiably substantive roles for its actors old and young (Ezra Miller, Steven Strait, Emily Mortimer, Julianna Margulies and Andy Garcia). City Island plays out with uncommon truth — by the revelatory climax you might not register how articulate and enlightening the script has become. At large it’s a rough-edged farce — Miller, playing a teenage fat fetishist, is hilarious, particularly in the dinner discourse: “Nothing but good times ahead, good, sweet breezy times.”
Memento
Christopher Nolan’s always held himself to a pretty perched standard. His breakthrough rests on a gimmick that no cinephile can resist: a narrative told in reverse, the usual pleasures of film story fed to the audience backwards. He found a big-budget beckoning two decades after in the similar, somehow miles more convoluted Tenet — but for costing less than 10 million dollars, you can’t really abuse your brain for any better purpose than putting together Memento. Nolan is formally upfront and almost stubbornly cheeky as he methodically endeavors to blow your mind. Despite its rigidity this is still one of the most original films of its era, easily placing you in the shoes (or near-sighted memory) of Guy Pearce’s handicapped protagonist.
The Ninth Gate
Roman Polanski makes movies so expertly you can almost slip into them — but even by such a standard The Ninth Gate is as comfortable as a freshly worn pair of sweatpants. It’s one elongated pleasure for Johnny Depp heads, mystery maniacs, lit lovers and occult weirdos. There are few neo-noirs centered on Satan himself that will make you succumb to a vision so gently and willingly. There’s not a heap to unpack but the formal fullness of The Ninth Gate makes it a tantalizing experience regardless of your feelings heading in. This is the only film technically released in the 90s that will be sneaking into these lists by the minutiae of distribution.
Mother/The Host
Before Parasite surprised everyone with its palpable mastery and incredible awards run, Bong Joon-ho was already a legend of South Korea’s cultural boom the last few decades. Both he and Park Chan-wook have spearheaded popular interest in essential modern Asian cinema — the two seemed to announce to the world their declarations of greatness in 2003 with Memories of Murder and Oldboy, both of which have influenced American filmmaking in some way — Park never burned out and clearly Bong didn’t either.
All this to say The Host is one of the finest monster/science fiction/disaster movies of our time, with sufficient special effects respectably elevating the committed B-movie fervor. Mother reeled things in and set a precedent for the kind of psychological deliberation that bleeds into Parasite, its Rashomon-like perspective informing absolutely devastating plot turns and dramatic conclusions. He’d turn toward attracting domestic attention more obviously in the far less subtle classism of Snowpiercer and the silly, sentimental Netflix pairing Okja. But the 2000’s were quite the sensational sweet spot for the South Korean savant.
Knight of Cups
Terrence Malick has become increasingly difficult to tolerate this past decade. After The Tree of Life earned such exaltation, his follow-ups (To the Wonder, the film in question and Song to Song) left most cold. However, Knight of Cups is one of his least predicated and yet among his most immaculate films, drenched in experimental excitement, luxuriant introspection and atmospheric sublimity. The editing, cinematography and thematic substance dissolve into one of the strangest cocktails of recent art films. The pretension can be a veil — just like the so-loose-it-holds-only-air storytelling — but if you’re willing to give in to one of Malick’s finest reflections on man’s displacement from nature, Knight of Cups shimmers with the extravagance of perpetual dysfunction, dissatisfaction and digression. Also hedonism is bad.
It Follows
Whether horror buffs like it or not, this one is for the books — It Follows is nothing more than a genius, inexplicably smart and deliciously simple premise played out to artistic perfection. It has enough thought and creativity to sustain a horrible slew of sequels, like Wes Craven numbers. The calm, calculating cinematography is almost as sumptuous as the iridescent retro-scoring by Disasterpeace, which probably made John Carpenter a wee bit jealous. But between the potent, pliable allegorical undercurrents, imagination-beguiling concepts and manageably underplayed performances there’s little room for It Follows to be anything other than a special, already antiquated modern classic.
21 Jump Street
This is, in fact, the best comedy of the 2010s. Ridiculously memorable, incisive and upheld by a worthwhile sequel to boot, 21 Jump Street is everything about the self-aware turn of the decade done right. It mastered meta before it became painfully overplayed by Deadpool just four years later. As a younger teen watching something as innocent and commendable as Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, I could register a reachable, heightened maturity, an inclination for crisp comic timing, dramatic irony and rewarding self-actualization. Devilish directing duo Phil Lord and Chris Miller do not pander, nor do they skimp when it comes to lining every moment with as many jokes as is necessary and feasible.
God, Dave Franco is so funny and so are Ice Cube, Rob Riggle, Chris Parnell, Brie Larson, Ellie Kemper and yes, Johnny Depp. You just never could’ve guessed Jonah Hill would hold together something so stellar or that he and Channing Tatum (bless his unqualified range) would turn out to be such a classic comedy duo, sincerely one for our age. Seldom do movies, let alone comedy’s disposable contemporary state, draw me in with such stupid promise and then reward me with tenacious, rewatchable greatness.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
It’s among of the most acclaimed movies of the 21st century, cited so often it might just be novel to figure out what’s wrong with the film, whatever little there is. But as soon as you reach for criticism, Charlie Kaufman’s morbid wit and Michel Gondry’s almost Terry Gilliam-like sense of the surreal squander any chance to be displeased by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, one of the best breakup movies. Eh, maybe the fringe Mark Ruffalo/Kirsten Dunst/Elijah Wood/Tom Wilkinson angle outside the memory hole of regret and reconciliation isn’t as strong as the film’s center? Nevertheless this peerless example of cerebral quasi-indie fare was worthy of the hipster cred and literary airs. Strip away all the homespun, illusionist production design and you’ve still got a damn good romantic comedy-drama — the meaningful finishing moments unquestioningly cement Eternal Sunshine’s timelessness.
Zodiac
Its Oscar snubbing is famous and its reputation precedes it. Zodiac is David Fincher’s singular masterpiece, completely illustrative of his inky oeuvre and perhaps the most deliberate and engrossing slice of true crime ever put to film. The directing is impeccable, the screenwriting is disciplined and the digital cinematography is a marvelous milestone of just what the technology can offer. Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr. have no choice but to offer career-best turns due to Fincher’s scrupulous repetition and particularity. The separate obsessions with the mystery madman are an unchanging thrill just like the pragmatic police/detective work the movie savors. Fincher rephrases everything presumably pointless and anticlimactic about the telling of its tale to unpredictably, inimitably cinematic conclusions.
Honorable mentions include Unsane, The Raid, The Piano Teacher, Raw, Us, Personal Shopper, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Stoker, While We’re Young, Enemy, The Place Beyond the Pines, Room 237, Dogville, Panic Room, Y Tu Mama También, Thank You For Smoking, Blade II, Spring Breakers, Certified Copy, The Kid With A Bike, The Death of Stalin, Brick, Logan, Oz the Great and Powerful, Thoroughbreds, V for Vendetta, Watchmen
Rango
If you thought Pirates of the Caribbean sailed right off the rails, Rango was Gore Verbinski proclaiming without question that he cares little to conform to the commonplace — later A Cure for Wellness would confirm his cinematic iconoclasm completely. Johnny Depp’s voice work was funny, the character design was grotesque and inspired, Hans Zimmer’s score was extraordinarily exciting and the ode to Westerns was both bizarre and welcome. Rango is ruthlessly original — this is one of the few animated films that are difficult to suggest for youngsters because it’s so much better than what they’re used to. I pay respect to Nickelodeon for embracing the untested.
City Island
I don’t know how it has stuck with me so, but this diamond in the rough will make you wonder about any number of those Redbox movies you overlook as you exit the grocery store, all the great stuff below mainstream's surface you might be missing out on. Domestic foibles are easy to exploit and even easier to mess up, yet this story about the separate secrets of one family residing in the titular secluded Bronx neighborhood makes good on its modesty and finds identifiably substantive roles for its actors old and young (Ezra Miller, Steven Strait, Emily Mortimer, Julianna Margulies and Andy Garcia). City Island plays out with uncommon truth — by the revelatory climax you might not register how articulate and enlightening the script has become. At large it’s a rough-edged farce — Miller, playing a teenage fat fetishist, is hilarious, particularly in the dinner discourse: “Nothing but good times ahead, good, sweet breezy times.”
Memento
Christopher Nolan’s always held himself to a pretty perched standard. His breakthrough rests on a gimmick that no cinephile can resist: a narrative told in reverse, the usual pleasures of film story fed to the audience backwards. He found a big-budget beckoning two decades after in the similar, somehow miles more convoluted Tenet — but for costing less than 10 million dollars, you can’t really abuse your brain for any better purpose than putting together Memento. Nolan is formally upfront and almost stubbornly cheeky as he methodically endeavors to blow your mind. Despite its rigidity this is still one of the most original films of its era, easily placing you in the shoes (or near-sighted memory) of Guy Pearce’s handicapped protagonist.
The Ninth Gate
Roman Polanski makes movies so expertly you can almost slip into them — but even by such a standard The Ninth Gate is as comfortable as a freshly worn pair of sweatpants. It’s one elongated pleasure for Johnny Depp heads, mystery maniacs, lit lovers and occult weirdos. There are few neo-noirs centered on Satan himself that will make you succumb to a vision so gently and willingly. There’s not a heap to unpack but the formal fullness of The Ninth Gate makes it a tantalizing experience regardless of your feelings heading in. This is the only film technically released in the 90s that will be sneaking into these lists by the minutiae of distribution.
Mother/The Host
Before Parasite surprised everyone with its palpable mastery and incredible awards run, Bong Joon-ho was already a legend of South Korea’s cultural boom the last few decades. Both he and Park Chan-wook have spearheaded popular interest in essential modern Asian cinema — the two seemed to announce to the world their declarations of greatness in 2003 with Memories of Murder and Oldboy, both of which have influenced American filmmaking in some way — Park never burned out and clearly Bong didn’t either.
All this to say The Host is one of the finest monster/science fiction/disaster movies of our time, with sufficient special effects respectably elevating the committed B-movie fervor. Mother reeled things in and set a precedent for the kind of psychological deliberation that bleeds into Parasite, its Rashomon-like perspective informing absolutely devastating plot turns and dramatic conclusions. He’d turn toward attracting domestic attention more obviously in the far less subtle classism of Snowpiercer and the silly, sentimental Netflix pairing Okja. But the 2000’s were quite the sensational sweet spot for the South Korean savant.
Knight of Cups
Terrence Malick has become increasingly difficult to tolerate this past decade. After The Tree of Life earned such exaltation, his follow-ups (To the Wonder, the film in question and Song to Song) left most cold. However, Knight of Cups is one of his least predicated and yet among his most immaculate films, drenched in experimental excitement, luxuriant introspection and atmospheric sublimity. The editing, cinematography and thematic substance dissolve into one of the strangest cocktails of recent art films. The pretension can be a veil — just like the so-loose-it-holds-only-air storytelling — but if you’re willing to give in to one of Malick’s finest reflections on man’s displacement from nature, Knight of Cups shimmers with the extravagance of perpetual dysfunction, dissatisfaction and digression. Also hedonism is bad.
It Follows
Whether horror buffs like it or not, this one is for the books — It Follows is nothing more than a genius, inexplicably smart and deliciously simple premise played out to artistic perfection. It has enough thought and creativity to sustain a horrible slew of sequels, like Wes Craven numbers. The calm, calculating cinematography is almost as sumptuous as the iridescent retro-scoring by Disasterpeace, which probably made John Carpenter a wee bit jealous. But between the potent, pliable allegorical undercurrents, imagination-beguiling concepts and manageably underplayed performances there’s little room for It Follows to be anything other than a special, already antiquated modern classic.
21 Jump Street
This is, in fact, the best comedy of the 2010s. Ridiculously memorable, incisive and upheld by a worthwhile sequel to boot, 21 Jump Street is everything about the self-aware turn of the decade done right. It mastered meta before it became painfully overplayed by Deadpool just four years later. As a younger teen watching something as innocent and commendable as Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, I could register a reachable, heightened maturity, an inclination for crisp comic timing, dramatic irony and rewarding self-actualization. Devilish directing duo Phil Lord and Chris Miller do not pander, nor do they skimp when it comes to lining every moment with as many jokes as is necessary and feasible.
God, Dave Franco is so funny and so are Ice Cube, Rob Riggle, Chris Parnell, Brie Larson, Ellie Kemper and yes, Johnny Depp. You just never could’ve guessed Jonah Hill would hold together something so stellar or that he and Channing Tatum (bless his unqualified range) would turn out to be such a classic comedy duo, sincerely one for our age. Seldom do movies, let alone comedy’s disposable contemporary state, draw me in with such stupid promise and then reward me with tenacious, rewatchable greatness.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
It’s among of the most acclaimed movies of the 21st century, cited so often it might just be novel to figure out what’s wrong with the film, whatever little there is. But as soon as you reach for criticism, Charlie Kaufman’s morbid wit and Michel Gondry’s almost Terry Gilliam-like sense of the surreal squander any chance to be displeased by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, one of the best breakup movies. Eh, maybe the fringe Mark Ruffalo/Kirsten Dunst/Elijah Wood/Tom Wilkinson angle outside the memory hole of regret and reconciliation isn’t as strong as the film’s center? Nevertheless this peerless example of cerebral quasi-indie fare was worthy of the hipster cred and literary airs. Strip away all the homespun, illusionist production design and you’ve still got a damn good romantic comedy-drama — the meaningful finishing moments unquestioningly cement Eternal Sunshine’s timelessness.
Zodiac
Its Oscar snubbing is famous and its reputation precedes it. Zodiac is David Fincher’s singular masterpiece, completely illustrative of his inky oeuvre and perhaps the most deliberate and engrossing slice of true crime ever put to film. The directing is impeccable, the screenwriting is disciplined and the digital cinematography is a marvelous milestone of just what the technology can offer. Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr. have no choice but to offer career-best turns due to Fincher’s scrupulous repetition and particularity. The separate obsessions with the mystery madman are an unchanging thrill just like the pragmatic police/detective work the movie savors. Fincher rephrases everything presumably pointless and anticlimactic about the telling of its tale to unpredictably, inimitably cinematic conclusions.
Honorable mentions include Unsane, The Raid, The Piano Teacher, Raw, Us, Personal Shopper, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Stoker, While We’re Young, Enemy, The Place Beyond the Pines, Room 237, Dogville, Panic Room, Y Tu Mama También, Thank You For Smoking, Blade II, Spring Breakers, Certified Copy, The Kid With A Bike, The Death of Stalin, Brick, Logan, Oz the Great and Powerful, Thoroughbreds, V for Vendetta, Watchmen
The Best February Releases
of the 21st Century
Hey, so at least it’s not January. Toward the end of the month, the Academy Awards usually put a pin in the previous year of movies just as we ideally witness the earliest gems start to crop up. The best situation is when at least one of the current year’s best films is released as a sturdy litmus test for the prescribed ‘finer’ movies as they eventually reveal themselves, though such instances are exceedingly rare — here are a handful of those exceptional examples.
The International
If there’s one recent enough, overlooked B-movie that is superior to the sum of its parts, it’s The International. Tom Tykwer, the director of the kinetic Run Lola Run, fashions the antithetically withdrawn albeit stylish action thriller with the assistance of the frequently misused talents of Clive Owen and Naomi Watts. Released in the wake of the housing market plummet of 2008, The International was a well-timed reflection on the inalterable financial powers that be, punctuated with classical, 70s-inspired instances of political paranoia. That central Guggenheim shootout sequence is a showstopper comparable to the best of them. Otherwise it’s a potentially sleep-inducing conspiracy thriller that engineers mid-budget mastery as coolly as it can.
Shutter Island
Leonardo DiCaprio played two mentally unsound widowers in 2010, the former being Scorsese’s break from an unusually long hiatus following his Oscar-nabbing The Departed. At the forefront of a decade in which the cinematic heavyweight finally started producing his own films, Shutter Island rewarded your tolerance for Leo’s ticks and spun your head harder than your average Fight Club-esque big time brain-scrambler. It’s a superbly constructed and acted psychological thriller that beckons you to pick through the pageantry of its storytelling, the sincerity of the supporting characters and what may or may not all be hallucinations in service of suppressing trauma. It’s not the sharpest Scorsese-DiCaprio pairing, but as one of those moments in which Marty was really serving the masses, the film is fittingly, comfortably traditional and confidently creepy.
The LEGO Movie/Coraline
Stop motion animation is an aristocrat’s flavor, an archaic process sometimes more pleasing to its ruthless, fastidious creators than to audiences at large. And while most works of Laika or Aardman rarely meet the properly wholehearted reception with which they’re mustered, with The LEGO Movie (the first film produced by Warner Animation Group) we could be happy the technology mingled with something as tactile, lively and mainstream as Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s densely hilariously yarn, which could have easily been some corporate calamity. More authentically, Coraline ruined a few childhoods in order to mount Neil Gaiman’s cautionary dark fantasy novella and incite Laika’s stunning standard. Lighter than air or bleak as purgatory, both The LEGO Movie and Coraline exacted just how relevant the devoted textures of stop motion are to the continual essence of animation and the art of filmmaking at large.
Be Kind Rewind
Michel Gondry’s most underrated movie is an oddball — previously the French freak was content to concoct his films as if they were amateur home movies (ironic, huh?) even when the foundation was something as existentially severe as a Charlie Kaufman screenplay. Suitably, Be Kind Rewind is of Gondry’s essence in the surest way — it’s sentimental without even considering schmaltz and shines a melancholic light on fading American cultures — mom and pop shops, in-store movie rentals, the less known greats of jazz (in this film’s affectionate case Fats Waller). The stupid premise of remaking (or should I say ‘sweding’) popular classics should exasperate but the execution is so beautifully slapdash and ostensibly improvisational. Jack Black and Mos Def were rarely met with more seemly substance for their outcast personas. Be Kind Rewind is absurdly quotable and actually unpredictable, the batty earnestness forgiving any surreal silliness that goes too far. It’s as misunderstood as movies get.
The Ghost Writer
The Ghost Writer may hide its controversial filmmaker’s resentment of criticism by slyly demonstrating what it’s like to be an exile under the public eye, but those are just tiny touches of Roman Polanski’s best effort of the new millennia. The film places Ewan McGregor’s nameless protagonist on an errand to sell a former Prime Minister’s autobiography, only to get caught up in one of the most unexpectedly soothing and inconspicuously believable film noirs of late. Pierce Brosnan, as the political pariah, is terrifying in sum and Olivia Williams, as the furtive femme fatale, has probably never been put to better use. Aided in part by Alexandre Desplat’s chillingly angelic score, The Ghost Writer is an eerie, entrancing rainy day movie of the highest caliber.
The Witch
While sitting down and watching The Lighthouse is its own reward, the bonus now is that we know The Witch is not the work of some one-hit wonder but an emerging, exciting auteur. There may be far more psychological puzzles to complete within the equally indelible craft of The Lighthouse, but as the far more transparent film The Witch is no cupcake of entertainment and no simple thing in theme. The opaque dialect, the sheer grayness (almost as little color as its successor), the religious reckonings — it’s all bordering on a Scary Movie sequel’s field day, but really it's just one of contemporary times’ best debuts and most unshakably brilliant horror flicks. Robert Eggers also ignited Anya Taylor-Joy’s career but whatever, she’s only one of the best of her generation.
In Bruges
Martin McDonough is three for three thus far, at least according to those able to relish the filmmaker’s first-rate comic dialogue and vividly bizarre scenarios. The meta-writer’s-block-manifesto of Seven Psychopaths and the rape-revenge riffs of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri offered their own evidence to McDonough’s ingenuity, but In Bruges is already a classic of its own kind for myriad reasons — the dark comic dexterity, the range-revealing roles for Colin Farrell, Brendon Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes, the existential weight of its parting thoughts. It’s the era’s most unassuming, grandly goofy masterpiece.
In the Mood for Love
In most circles, In the Mood for Love is the most acclaimed film of the 21st century — when viewed through the lens of Wong Kar-wai’s illustrious output, the film is just another notch in the Chinese filmmaker’s sweep of stylistic perfections and wonderfully true characters. For those of us on the mortal plane, In the Mood for Love is a devastatingly expressive, beautifully rendered platonic love story — sensuality is seldom so removed whilst retaining its pathos and direct loveliness. It feels like it’s been riffed on many times since inciting the 21st century with undeniable magnificence — Lost in Translation, Before Sunset, Certified Copy — but for as excellent as its derivations are, none exceed Wong’s masterly propensity for atmospheric tuning, which was at least rivaled in earlier masterworks like Chungking Express and Fallen Angels.
Honorable mentions include A Field in England, What We Do in the Shadows, Side Effects, Wild Tales, The Wind Rises, Kingsman: The Secret Service, Hail! Caesar, Ernest and Celestine, Kill List, Chronicle
The International
If there’s one recent enough, overlooked B-movie that is superior to the sum of its parts, it’s The International. Tom Tykwer, the director of the kinetic Run Lola Run, fashions the antithetically withdrawn albeit stylish action thriller with the assistance of the frequently misused talents of Clive Owen and Naomi Watts. Released in the wake of the housing market plummet of 2008, The International was a well-timed reflection on the inalterable financial powers that be, punctuated with classical, 70s-inspired instances of political paranoia. That central Guggenheim shootout sequence is a showstopper comparable to the best of them. Otherwise it’s a potentially sleep-inducing conspiracy thriller that engineers mid-budget mastery as coolly as it can.
Shutter Island
Leonardo DiCaprio played two mentally unsound widowers in 2010, the former being Scorsese’s break from an unusually long hiatus following his Oscar-nabbing The Departed. At the forefront of a decade in which the cinematic heavyweight finally started producing his own films, Shutter Island rewarded your tolerance for Leo’s ticks and spun your head harder than your average Fight Club-esque big time brain-scrambler. It’s a superbly constructed and acted psychological thriller that beckons you to pick through the pageantry of its storytelling, the sincerity of the supporting characters and what may or may not all be hallucinations in service of suppressing trauma. It’s not the sharpest Scorsese-DiCaprio pairing, but as one of those moments in which Marty was really serving the masses, the film is fittingly, comfortably traditional and confidently creepy.
The LEGO Movie/Coraline
Stop motion animation is an aristocrat’s flavor, an archaic process sometimes more pleasing to its ruthless, fastidious creators than to audiences at large. And while most works of Laika or Aardman rarely meet the properly wholehearted reception with which they’re mustered, with The LEGO Movie (the first film produced by Warner Animation Group) we could be happy the technology mingled with something as tactile, lively and mainstream as Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s densely hilariously yarn, which could have easily been some corporate calamity. More authentically, Coraline ruined a few childhoods in order to mount Neil Gaiman’s cautionary dark fantasy novella and incite Laika’s stunning standard. Lighter than air or bleak as purgatory, both The LEGO Movie and Coraline exacted just how relevant the devoted textures of stop motion are to the continual essence of animation and the art of filmmaking at large.
Be Kind Rewind
Michel Gondry’s most underrated movie is an oddball — previously the French freak was content to concoct his films as if they were amateur home movies (ironic, huh?) even when the foundation was something as existentially severe as a Charlie Kaufman screenplay. Suitably, Be Kind Rewind is of Gondry’s essence in the surest way — it’s sentimental without even considering schmaltz and shines a melancholic light on fading American cultures — mom and pop shops, in-store movie rentals, the less known greats of jazz (in this film’s affectionate case Fats Waller). The stupid premise of remaking (or should I say ‘sweding’) popular classics should exasperate but the execution is so beautifully slapdash and ostensibly improvisational. Jack Black and Mos Def were rarely met with more seemly substance for their outcast personas. Be Kind Rewind is absurdly quotable and actually unpredictable, the batty earnestness forgiving any surreal silliness that goes too far. It’s as misunderstood as movies get.
The Ghost Writer
The Ghost Writer may hide its controversial filmmaker’s resentment of criticism by slyly demonstrating what it’s like to be an exile under the public eye, but those are just tiny touches of Roman Polanski’s best effort of the new millennia. The film places Ewan McGregor’s nameless protagonist on an errand to sell a former Prime Minister’s autobiography, only to get caught up in one of the most unexpectedly soothing and inconspicuously believable film noirs of late. Pierce Brosnan, as the political pariah, is terrifying in sum and Olivia Williams, as the furtive femme fatale, has probably never been put to better use. Aided in part by Alexandre Desplat’s chillingly angelic score, The Ghost Writer is an eerie, entrancing rainy day movie of the highest caliber.
The Witch
While sitting down and watching The Lighthouse is its own reward, the bonus now is that we know The Witch is not the work of some one-hit wonder but an emerging, exciting auteur. There may be far more psychological puzzles to complete within the equally indelible craft of The Lighthouse, but as the far more transparent film The Witch is no cupcake of entertainment and no simple thing in theme. The opaque dialect, the sheer grayness (almost as little color as its successor), the religious reckonings — it’s all bordering on a Scary Movie sequel’s field day, but really it's just one of contemporary times’ best debuts and most unshakably brilliant horror flicks. Robert Eggers also ignited Anya Taylor-Joy’s career but whatever, she’s only one of the best of her generation.
In Bruges
Martin McDonough is three for three thus far, at least according to those able to relish the filmmaker’s first-rate comic dialogue and vividly bizarre scenarios. The meta-writer’s-block-manifesto of Seven Psychopaths and the rape-revenge riffs of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri offered their own evidence to McDonough’s ingenuity, but In Bruges is already a classic of its own kind for myriad reasons — the dark comic dexterity, the range-revealing roles for Colin Farrell, Brendon Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes, the existential weight of its parting thoughts. It’s the era’s most unassuming, grandly goofy masterpiece.
In the Mood for Love
In most circles, In the Mood for Love is the most acclaimed film of the 21st century — when viewed through the lens of Wong Kar-wai’s illustrious output, the film is just another notch in the Chinese filmmaker’s sweep of stylistic perfections and wonderfully true characters. For those of us on the mortal plane, In the Mood for Love is a devastatingly expressive, beautifully rendered platonic love story — sensuality is seldom so removed whilst retaining its pathos and direct loveliness. It feels like it’s been riffed on many times since inciting the 21st century with undeniable magnificence — Lost in Translation, Before Sunset, Certified Copy — but for as excellent as its derivations are, none exceed Wong’s masterly propensity for atmospheric tuning, which was at least rivaled in earlier masterworks like Chungking Express and Fallen Angels.
Honorable mentions include A Field in England, What We Do in the Shadows, Side Effects, Wild Tales, The Wind Rises, Kingsman: The Secret Service, Hail! Caesar, Ernest and Celestine, Kill List, Chronicle
The Best January Releases
of the 21st Century
The bottom of the barrel always rises to the top of the calendar. Of course, January isn’t completely clogged with subpar films or worse since late December carryovers are still trickling out and expanding in the afterglow of the previous year — even the most extensive cinematic drought can usually be endured. But when the last-minute Oscar gambits are drained, there are shiny new movies meant to alleviate winter’s seasonal deficiencies and those rare exceptions are something to cherish just for tiding us over until the more satiating moments of the unfolding movie year. As subsidies of our sanity when the coldest of months cycle through, here are the outstandingly less terrible January releases of the 21st century.
Grandma’s Boy
The stoner comedy is a microgenre with few actual masterpieces in its midst. Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle is alright, but actual cinema like The Big Lebowski and Inherent Vice is only part of the conversation if we stretch the scope to neo-noirs and crime comedies. But Grandma’s Boy is good enough to warrant the following it has collected since its 2006 debut. It’s tailored more for gamers who may take the premise nearer to heart, but with rather bland weed-centric ‘all-timers’ — lacking, although celebrated movies like Half Baked, Friday and Pineapple Express – Grandma’s Boy, along with Smiley Face the following year, are the most unrecognized toke-able comedies for those who might actually enjoy something mildly unexpected and far less broad — or at least a movie where the funnies don't exclusively derive from DUDE WEED LMAO ad nauseam — from their stoner flicks. It's also the exception to the rule that Happy Madison productions need to make you cringe at least five times before credits roll.
Taken/The Grey
Even though people were upset that the Liam Neeson vs Wolf showdown promised by the trailers was a cut to black parting scene, you couldn't say The Grey didn't surprise everyone as an uncommonly thoughtful, philosophical thriller. The wintry survival tale and stands next to Taken as the better times of his elder action star reinvention. Maybe Taken 2 or 3 were so reprehensible in their unintentional humor and amateurish editing they made you forget how much of a good time it was watching Neeson take down sex traffickers in a righteous, unmerciful crusade. Taken's shabby success was inspiring and The Grey's weighty suspense made up for his many similarly tinged fumbles like Unknown and Non-Stop. Nowadays he’s reaching Nic Cage levels of indifference toward where his next paycheck comes from.
Youth in Revolt
Although Michael Cera’s repertoire of sheepishness was just starting to shred people’s nerves, one of his most underappreciated and startlingly clever projects remains the sophisticatedly stupid Youth in Revolt. This was one part of the inciting weekend of the 2010s and the adaptation of C. D. Payne’s 1993 epistolary novel retains every hormonal outburst and cultural reference in the sly send-up of the coming-of-age formula. Both Cera's dexterous dual role and Portia Doubleday's exquisite manic pixie dream girl embody the movie’s hipster romance, which is coy enough to remind you how easy it is to mythologize the resplendent notion of 16-year-old love. Curious casting choices in Steven Buscemi, Zach Galifianakis, Ray Liotta, Justin Long and Fred Willard fill the edges of last decade’s weirdly winsome anti-mainstream comedy.
Final Destination 2
In respect to popular genre prototypes, most horror franchises should never venture past the original. The sequels to Scream, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween would all inevitably fail to match their forebears no matter how outlandish the attempt. Final Destination — which was initially pitched as a television pilot — is a far cry from classic in spite of a shrewd setup, leaving its absurdly well-tuned sequel to realize the first’s tasty ideas and become a substantially vulgar treat.
By 2 the inventive minds of the series already knew setting up the most creatively unpredictable kills was the way to expediently simplify and satisfy. Rather than continue to dress the invisible hand of fate with ghastly seriousness, death got the chance to have a little fun in this and, let’s say, the third entry before it all got wearisome and played out. The implementation of the rather irresistible Twilight Zone premise was never again so rewarding, though something tells me a trashy franchise restart, courtesy of Warner Brothers, is a certainty down the line.
Mary and the Witch’s Flower
Studio Ghibli is relatively synonymous with Hayao Miyazaki alone, and after his brief retirement following The Wind Rises in 2013 we can all eagerly await his decade-long return entitled How Do You Live?. But sometimes even the most unassuming feature tangentially connected to the studio's name can posit some overwhelmingly analogous inspiration.
Specifically Hiromasa Yonebayashi, a Ghibli alumni animator, producer and the director behind The Secret World of Arrietty and When Marnie Was There — after almost two decades he left Ghibli to establish his own animation Studio Ponoc, and Mary and the Witch’s Flower was the inciting new day for Japanese animation. It may come off like a predigested kids movie on the surface but the actual film boasts excellent voice work, expectedly vivid animation and clever variations on Harry Potter-esque mythology offering genuine bursts of danger and wonder. It’s no Spirited Away but its variation on magic and adventure is the superior sort of all ages entertainment that skillfully caters to everyone’s intelligence.
The Kid Who Would Be King
Joe Cornish’s light filmography has made the Englishman synonymous with wholesome all-ages entertainment that circumvents pandering and seeks out inventive ways to modernize timeworn tropes. 2011’s Attack the Block was alien invasion via Shaun of the Dead, but his contemporary King Arthur reworking The Kid Who Would Be King has the giddy passion of a lost children’s classic. Literally, anyone sorely hoping the 80s left one genuinely inspiring kid’s flick undiscovered will enjoy The Kid Who Would Be King all too much. It defiantly measures up close to John Boorman’s Excalibur and could make you forget Guy Ritchie’s Legend of the Sword ever existed. The film doesn’t dress up the darkness (Rebecca Ferguson makes for a terrifying villainess) nor is Cornish afraid to show off some solid visual effects, which are wisely incorporated into the modern setting — Brexit is the primary thematic excuse to dig up this backbone of Britain’s mythology.
Haywire
Steven Soderbergh’s seismic recent filmography has been a robotically proficient stretch of considerable breadth — biological apocalypse, psychological thriller, hunks stripping, and the flick in question, the tidiest little spy film of the decade. Matching Soderbergh’s cold hand with blows of combat, wrestler Gina Carano — who would go on to star in the Fast & Furious franchise — is an intimidating physical force and a fairly graceful actress too. Her fine supporting cast of seasoned male co-stars (Antonio Banderas, Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Bill Paxton, Channing Tatum) are there for an easy assist in the gravitas of humble espionage, wily humor and select paranoia. The in-camera skirmishes are elegant and brutal — Soderbergh’s sparing touch has seldom served better interests.
Paddington/Paddington 2
Any list of the few January films elevating their respective years would be incomplete without the inclusion of the Paddington films. The sequel is one of the most critically beloved movies ever if Rotten Tomatoes scores hold any real weight, but it would be unjust to not center praise around the original’s warming innocence. When you get around to the spotless sequel — after being utterly charmed by the unironic, old-fashioned nature of the first — you can be shocked that sometimes complete consensus can be reached and some harmless, wholesome things are too pure to activate your bellyaching instincts.
Ben Whishaw’s perfectly tame timbre brings the marmalade addict to life sufficiently and the supporters in live action — Sally Hawkins, Julie Walters, Jim Broadbent, Peter Capaldi, Brendan Gleeson and the respective scenery-gobbling villain roles for Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant — are all delightful as well; the further voice talents of Imelda Stuanton and Michael Gambon cannot be overlooked either. There’s only so much stake in adapting English children's books but the Paddington films consistently coast on compassionate tenderness without ever slipping into mawkishness.
Kung Pow! Enter the Fist
There are good comedies and then there are the treasured few capable of persistently turning our stomachs to leather. The borderline film-remix, quasi-parody Kung Pow! Enter the Fist is of a vein of such inspired idiocy it’s impossible not to get a little choked, or at least baffled, by the film’s insistent folly. Creator and lead acting insert Steve Oedekerk — the weirdo behind Jimmy Neutron and some Jim Carrey flicks — has such a savvy sensitivity for how great stupid comedy can be, especially in a postmodern age where cultural sampling manifests creativity impossible to imagine just decades prior.
Yes there’s a CGI kung fu cow and a couple outdated references but the mismatched voice-over dubbing almost never fails as a pressing, potent recurring joke. Outside of the obvious, lowest hanging gags are also so many laughs just from the demented editing and corny, thrifty, DIY visual effects. Especially with a stiff drink in hand, Kung Pow! is the good time so many farces pretend to promise. The fact that there's a forthcoming sequel entitled Tongue of Fury due in 2022 just makes it all a little funnier.
Cloverfield
The fiercest moment for found footage utilized the Internet’s unmistakable effect on cinematic intrigue nearly as well as The Blair Witch Project’s genre-inciting moment in 1999. A decade later we couldn’t really be bamboozled into thinking Cloverfield’s events actually occurred (oh you didn’t hear about the NYC monster attacks back in 2008?) although some saps may have been fooled by the first Paranormal Activity. That didn’t stop the severe cinema vérité of this genre from servicing a terrifying, idiosyncratic creature feature and one of the grimiest, most rewardingly panicked disaster movie of its time.
A few other films have strengthened the microgenre — Chronicle, [REC] — but everything else couldn't help reminding you of the inherent gimmickry. Film marketing has rarely been so ingenious and the serendipity of the same movie turning out great after such singular hype is even more precious. Cloverfield may bear the same idiotic characters that keep so many horror premises afloat but the film’s integrated verisimilitude is at times startlingly palpable. Next to Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds this is the defining post-9/11 blockbuster.
What few honorable mentions exist include Teeth, My Dog Skip, Predestination, Glory Road
Grandma’s Boy
The stoner comedy is a microgenre with few actual masterpieces in its midst. Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle is alright, but actual cinema like The Big Lebowski and Inherent Vice is only part of the conversation if we stretch the scope to neo-noirs and crime comedies. But Grandma’s Boy is good enough to warrant the following it has collected since its 2006 debut. It’s tailored more for gamers who may take the premise nearer to heart, but with rather bland weed-centric ‘all-timers’ — lacking, although celebrated movies like Half Baked, Friday and Pineapple Express – Grandma’s Boy, along with Smiley Face the following year, are the most unrecognized toke-able comedies for those who might actually enjoy something mildly unexpected and far less broad — or at least a movie where the funnies don't exclusively derive from DUDE WEED LMAO ad nauseam — from their stoner flicks. It's also the exception to the rule that Happy Madison productions need to make you cringe at least five times before credits roll.
Taken/The Grey
Even though people were upset that the Liam Neeson vs Wolf showdown promised by the trailers was a cut to black parting scene, you couldn't say The Grey didn't surprise everyone as an uncommonly thoughtful, philosophical thriller. The wintry survival tale and stands next to Taken as the better times of his elder action star reinvention. Maybe Taken 2 or 3 were so reprehensible in their unintentional humor and amateurish editing they made you forget how much of a good time it was watching Neeson take down sex traffickers in a righteous, unmerciful crusade. Taken's shabby success was inspiring and The Grey's weighty suspense made up for his many similarly tinged fumbles like Unknown and Non-Stop. Nowadays he’s reaching Nic Cage levels of indifference toward where his next paycheck comes from.
Youth in Revolt
Although Michael Cera’s repertoire of sheepishness was just starting to shred people’s nerves, one of his most underappreciated and startlingly clever projects remains the sophisticatedly stupid Youth in Revolt. This was one part of the inciting weekend of the 2010s and the adaptation of C. D. Payne’s 1993 epistolary novel retains every hormonal outburst and cultural reference in the sly send-up of the coming-of-age formula. Both Cera's dexterous dual role and Portia Doubleday's exquisite manic pixie dream girl embody the movie’s hipster romance, which is coy enough to remind you how easy it is to mythologize the resplendent notion of 16-year-old love. Curious casting choices in Steven Buscemi, Zach Galifianakis, Ray Liotta, Justin Long and Fred Willard fill the edges of last decade’s weirdly winsome anti-mainstream comedy.
Final Destination 2
In respect to popular genre prototypes, most horror franchises should never venture past the original. The sequels to Scream, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween would all inevitably fail to match their forebears no matter how outlandish the attempt. Final Destination — which was initially pitched as a television pilot — is a far cry from classic in spite of a shrewd setup, leaving its absurdly well-tuned sequel to realize the first’s tasty ideas and become a substantially vulgar treat.
By 2 the inventive minds of the series already knew setting up the most creatively unpredictable kills was the way to expediently simplify and satisfy. Rather than continue to dress the invisible hand of fate with ghastly seriousness, death got the chance to have a little fun in this and, let’s say, the third entry before it all got wearisome and played out. The implementation of the rather irresistible Twilight Zone premise was never again so rewarding, though something tells me a trashy franchise restart, courtesy of Warner Brothers, is a certainty down the line.
Mary and the Witch’s Flower
Studio Ghibli is relatively synonymous with Hayao Miyazaki alone, and after his brief retirement following The Wind Rises in 2013 we can all eagerly await his decade-long return entitled How Do You Live?. But sometimes even the most unassuming feature tangentially connected to the studio's name can posit some overwhelmingly analogous inspiration.
Specifically Hiromasa Yonebayashi, a Ghibli alumni animator, producer and the director behind The Secret World of Arrietty and When Marnie Was There — after almost two decades he left Ghibli to establish his own animation Studio Ponoc, and Mary and the Witch’s Flower was the inciting new day for Japanese animation. It may come off like a predigested kids movie on the surface but the actual film boasts excellent voice work, expectedly vivid animation and clever variations on Harry Potter-esque mythology offering genuine bursts of danger and wonder. It’s no Spirited Away but its variation on magic and adventure is the superior sort of all ages entertainment that skillfully caters to everyone’s intelligence.
The Kid Who Would Be King
Joe Cornish’s light filmography has made the Englishman synonymous with wholesome all-ages entertainment that circumvents pandering and seeks out inventive ways to modernize timeworn tropes. 2011’s Attack the Block was alien invasion via Shaun of the Dead, but his contemporary King Arthur reworking The Kid Who Would Be King has the giddy passion of a lost children’s classic. Literally, anyone sorely hoping the 80s left one genuinely inspiring kid’s flick undiscovered will enjoy The Kid Who Would Be King all too much. It defiantly measures up close to John Boorman’s Excalibur and could make you forget Guy Ritchie’s Legend of the Sword ever existed. The film doesn’t dress up the darkness (Rebecca Ferguson makes for a terrifying villainess) nor is Cornish afraid to show off some solid visual effects, which are wisely incorporated into the modern setting — Brexit is the primary thematic excuse to dig up this backbone of Britain’s mythology.
Haywire
Steven Soderbergh’s seismic recent filmography has been a robotically proficient stretch of considerable breadth — biological apocalypse, psychological thriller, hunks stripping, and the flick in question, the tidiest little spy film of the decade. Matching Soderbergh’s cold hand with blows of combat, wrestler Gina Carano — who would go on to star in the Fast & Furious franchise — is an intimidating physical force and a fairly graceful actress too. Her fine supporting cast of seasoned male co-stars (Antonio Banderas, Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Bill Paxton, Channing Tatum) are there for an easy assist in the gravitas of humble espionage, wily humor and select paranoia. The in-camera skirmishes are elegant and brutal — Soderbergh’s sparing touch has seldom served better interests.
Paddington/Paddington 2
Any list of the few January films elevating their respective years would be incomplete without the inclusion of the Paddington films. The sequel is one of the most critically beloved movies ever if Rotten Tomatoes scores hold any real weight, but it would be unjust to not center praise around the original’s warming innocence. When you get around to the spotless sequel — after being utterly charmed by the unironic, old-fashioned nature of the first — you can be shocked that sometimes complete consensus can be reached and some harmless, wholesome things are too pure to activate your bellyaching instincts.
Ben Whishaw’s perfectly tame timbre brings the marmalade addict to life sufficiently and the supporters in live action — Sally Hawkins, Julie Walters, Jim Broadbent, Peter Capaldi, Brendan Gleeson and the respective scenery-gobbling villain roles for Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant — are all delightful as well; the further voice talents of Imelda Stuanton and Michael Gambon cannot be overlooked either. There’s only so much stake in adapting English children's books but the Paddington films consistently coast on compassionate tenderness without ever slipping into mawkishness.
Kung Pow! Enter the Fist
There are good comedies and then there are the treasured few capable of persistently turning our stomachs to leather. The borderline film-remix, quasi-parody Kung Pow! Enter the Fist is of a vein of such inspired idiocy it’s impossible not to get a little choked, or at least baffled, by the film’s insistent folly. Creator and lead acting insert Steve Oedekerk — the weirdo behind Jimmy Neutron and some Jim Carrey flicks — has such a savvy sensitivity for how great stupid comedy can be, especially in a postmodern age where cultural sampling manifests creativity impossible to imagine just decades prior.
Yes there’s a CGI kung fu cow and a couple outdated references but the mismatched voice-over dubbing almost never fails as a pressing, potent recurring joke. Outside of the obvious, lowest hanging gags are also so many laughs just from the demented editing and corny, thrifty, DIY visual effects. Especially with a stiff drink in hand, Kung Pow! is the good time so many farces pretend to promise. The fact that there's a forthcoming sequel entitled Tongue of Fury due in 2022 just makes it all a little funnier.
Cloverfield
The fiercest moment for found footage utilized the Internet’s unmistakable effect on cinematic intrigue nearly as well as The Blair Witch Project’s genre-inciting moment in 1999. A decade later we couldn’t really be bamboozled into thinking Cloverfield’s events actually occurred (oh you didn’t hear about the NYC monster attacks back in 2008?) although some saps may have been fooled by the first Paranormal Activity. That didn’t stop the severe cinema vérité of this genre from servicing a terrifying, idiosyncratic creature feature and one of the grimiest, most rewardingly panicked disaster movie of its time.
A few other films have strengthened the microgenre — Chronicle, [REC] — but everything else couldn't help reminding you of the inherent gimmickry. Film marketing has rarely been so ingenious and the serendipity of the same movie turning out great after such singular hype is even more precious. Cloverfield may bear the same idiotic characters that keep so many horror premises afloat but the film’s integrated verisimilitude is at times startlingly palpable. Next to Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds this is the defining post-9/11 blockbuster.
What few honorable mentions exist include Teeth, My Dog Skip, Predestination, Glory Road
The Most Promising Films of 2020
Sometimes the major events of the film year — the super-flicks, franchise continuations and needless reboots — can overshadow the movies we’ll eventually be discussing and debating years from now. And far more rarely world-shaking events leave the idea of congregated escapism in the dirt, only to be recovered once the priorities of health and safety are not indefinitely at the forefront of our daily lives.
In what was poised to be a welcome year for female-fronted blockbusters (Emily Blunt in A Quiet Place Part II, Scarlett Johansson in Black Widow, Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman 1984, Liu Yifei in Mulan) the COVID-19 pandemic crept in then exploded worldwide, stomping on society’s brakes for what feels like ages by this point. With culture halted in essentially every facet for many months, some studios have desperately — whether ingeniously or recklessly — opted to save a few dollars by releasing their films via Video On Demand or certain streaming platforms — largely Hulu, Amazon, and Netflix (get outta here Peacock). Particularly in the case of Trolls World Tour — the first movie to bypass the long wait for theaters to reopen — this change left huge companies like AMC and Regal blindsided and threatening to never screen Universal films ever again. Oh wait, except AMC caved and now Universal is allowed to release their films digitally less than three weeks (rather than the usual three months) into a theatrical run.
After so much unprecedented destabilization, everyone in Hollywood has been forced to shuffle their schedules of ready releases and current productions several times over — the full scope of the industry has been held in a panicked, seemingly ceaseless state of anxiousness. Any attempt to reignite traditional moviegoing will be temperamental since the proper prescribed caution of both theaters and studios vs. the economically minded trigger finger in the back of everyone’s mind could result in a slightly catastrophic grand reopening.
During quarantine drive-ins, in-home experiences and Netflix binges became the only substitutes for the time-honored backbone of modern entertainment. Thanks to the escalating ruthlessness of the streaming wars, the new evolution in the media consumption was already equipped for a stay-at-home scenario. But for those of us who cherish moviemaking and moviegoing, TVs, laptops, phones or any other diminishing device is no substitute for the IMAX-specific treatment of Tenet and further potentially seismic cinematic events. The theater is where any self-respecting filmmaker deserves their work to be beheld for the first time.
Though as COVID-19 cases continue cropping up nationwide, there’s no certainty as to when cinephiles can regularly get their fix again. Back in March it was easy to believe that, in the span of what amounts to its own era, everyone could ultimately make their own choice as to whether certain entertainment options are worth the risk of exposure to strangers. Back in June these delusions were still plausible but considering ignorance and impatience are the major factors keeping America from overcoming this pandemic, caution really is the best defense — even if we leave a cornerstone of contemporary culture to collect more graffiti and dust.
Tenet
(Internationally August 26, Domestically September 3 / ORD: July 17, July 31, August 12)
The persistent query for the movie-minded since the pandemic’s effects set in has been about whether we will get the cinematic cycle back in sync once Tenet debuts. Nolan wanted to believe his mid-July slot would remain unmoved and anyone who cared did too. But after three delays, the question of the real release date of the most secretive, severely hyped film of the year has been more pressing than the inversion stuff. Overseas audience ultimately earned their right to see a huge Warner Brothers blockbuster before Americans did.
So after The Dark Knight altered the course of popular moviegoing, Inception cemented Nolan as the auteur for the people, a man who can map out a murky mind-melt and make sure no is left behind. However, who couldn’t be disappointed by the trajectory of his career once the uninhibited indulgence of The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar came around — no matter the passing instances of pure awe, both efforts were top-heavy blunders. Dunkirk was a new direction and a step up but something tells me this new merge of Memento and Inception will result in a motion picture event we aren’t even prepared for. With a minimum 200 million dollar price tag, 2 ½ hours of 70mm and IMAX footage by the talented Hoyte van Hoytema (his third collaboration with Nolan) and story details that are foggy at best — not to mention the choice casting and enticing trailers — Nolan’s most expensive original feature adds up to 2020's most intriguing enigma.
Considering, on top of everything, the film was once — and approximately remains — the flagship for all future cinema and we may have an ultramodern classic on our hands, especially since Nolan would rather die of COVID-19 himself than have Warner Brothers release Tenet online. That kind of passion will lead us to the linchpin of a cinematic resurgence or the nail in the coffin of theatrical entertainment. Unfortunately domestic affairs point toward the latter.
The Personal History of David Copperfield
(August 28 / ORD: May 8, August 14)
The whole “new spin on an old favorite” can be a wearisome way of borrowing another’s work to suit your own. However, after Armando Iannucci made Russian power struggles and the miscommunications of British government agencies into uproarious comedy feats (The Death of Stalin, In the Loop), somehow it’s believable that Charles Dickens is within his grasp to appreciate and reiterate as he sees fit.
You’ve got back Peter Capaldi and nabbed Tilda Swinton, Ben Wishaw and, as the titular Copperfield, Dev Patel, who has potential left especially with A24’s The Green Knight in the arsenal. It doesn’t matter that this is technically a 2019 film because of that TIFF debut — this holdover will more than likely deserve the present attention.
The New Mutants
(NRD: August 28 / ORD: so many)
After being delayed four times for various scheduling and pandemic-related conflicts, I don’t know if there’s ever been more fuss over a movie no one will see when it actually comes out. As much as the displeasing amateurishness of Dark Phoenix was enough to have you write off X-Men movies entirely, The New Mutants has been so vehemently labeled an ill-fated project — in production and release — it’s enough to pique your curiosity, or maybe just your pity. Who’s to say a mainstream superhero horror flick isn’t just the right kind of untapped genre territory to mine, especially when your benchmark is what, Blade II? The introduction of new Marvel X-heroes (never before seen on the silver screen!) is always a good time even in the silliest cases and The New Mutants has five unrealized characters (plus the reliable allure of Anya Taylor-Joy in the central cast) to sway at least a few interested outcasts.
Director Josh Boone has secured the film’s theatrical release but foolishly this will be one of the first movies to dip its toe in the waters of the public’s post-COVID moviegoing interest — it’s not a good litmus test seeing as another X-Men flop would be no bizarre thing even if the state of the world was peachy keen.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things
(September 4 through Netflix)
Charlie Kaufman decided recently that his movies didn’t give enough people clinical depression so he’s back for more! Except that his bleak brand of existentialism — whether in the towering, soul-crushing yearning of his revelatory debut Synecdoche, New York or the stop-motion moment of clarity and realistic one-night romance of Anomalisa — is about to get an overhaul. Starring Jesse Plemons, Jessie Buckley (who replaced Brie Larson), Toni Collette and David Thewlis, the film is not pulled straight from Kaufman’s unrestrained mind but from Canadian author Iain Reed’s 2016 novel of the same name. The new Netflix auteur feature is poised as another potential masterpiece for the streaming era in the vein of Marriage Story, Roma and a few other exceptional gems.
Within a simple premise of meet the parents, I’m Thinking of Ending Things sees Kaufman going for full psychological horror while operating in an antiquated aspect ratio. One could argue Synecdoche is a postmodern scary movie within its own kaleidoscopic lens, packed with the quotidian pain of everyday life and unfulfilled ambitions. But as his first real film adaptation — well, besides 2002 when he penned screenplays for Adaptation and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind — Kaufman’s third directorial feature should scope out freshly cerebral cinematic ground.
Mulan
(September 4 thru Disney+ for $29.99 / ORD: March 27, July 24, August 21)
With Craig Gillespie’s Cruella, Rob Marshall’s The Little Mermaid, David Lowery’s Peter Pan & Wendy, Marc Webb’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Robert Zemeckis’s Pinocchio (among others, somehow) on the next few horizons for Disney’s live action remakes, there is no end in sight for this money laundering ruse they’re pulling. Although a good Hercules redo is possible, the creative steam of this enterprise has spent whatever fumes were there to begin with. I guess Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella is ok?
As much as it might be oxymoronic to admit, 1998’s Mulan is the one live action revamp of a prized Disney animated movie that might actually be worth the derivative regurgitation and painful pandering. They’ve cut the songs and incorporated them into the score — sorry musical losers, this is a good thing — they’ve cast an Asian woman for the lead in Liu Yifei and Disney has shelled out the largest budget ever for a female filmmaker. Whale Rider director Niki Caro has 200 million dollars at her disposal, twice the sum Ava DuVernay had to direct A Wrinkle in Time.
From the footage the updates all feel positive, at least in scope and tonal adaptation. The further away as we can get from 1:1 remakes the better, though maybe it's finally time to try something new rather than set up a pointless sequel, eh?
The Trial of the Chicago 7
(September 25 theatrically / October 16 through Netflix / ORD: September 25)
Aaron Sorkin the screenwriter is a god among men — Sorkin the director has much to prove. Molly’s Game was strong but inessential next to his hand in scripting numerous celebrated works: A Few Good Men, Charlie Wilson’s War, The Social Network, Moneyball and Steve Jobs are all just a bit stronger because of distinct directors (Rob Reiner, Mike Nichols, David Fincher, Bennett Miller and Danny Boyle) realizing polished material.
With more real-life fascination for him to sink his teeth into, this new legal drama is most similar to Sorkin’s written debut A Few Good Men. The fat cast — Sacha Baron Cohen, Mark Rylance, Eddie Redmayne, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Frank Langella, William Hurt and Michael Keaton — is also good company to give voice to what will without doubt be some great dialogue. Steven Spielberg was in talks to direct this script over a decade ago, now he serves as producer. As a political-charged piece on the aftermath of anti-Vietnam demonstrations, the election season release and ongoing police brutality protests should make the film timely as all hell.
On the Rocks
(October 2 theatrically / October 23 through Apple TV+)
Part of A24’s ongoing tradition of producing and distributing the work of many superb independent filmmakers, Sofia Coppola’s surprise new movie is also the latest piece of Apple TV+'s new streaming strategy. The two companies have reached a multi-year agreement on new original films, On the Rocks being the first.
Reuniting with Bill Murray for the first time since Lost in Translation — unless you really want to count their 2015 Netflix collaboration A Very Murray Christmas — is enticing enough, but the premise of a playboy father-daughter relationship with Rashida Jones should carry on Coppola’s pressing predisposition for aristocratic satire. If she’s basically the mumblecore Jane Austen of modern cinema, keep laying out those social critiques Sofia — take advantage of that nepotism as far as it will take you.
Rebecca
(October 16 theatrically / October 21 through Netflix)
So it’s not quite a misguided redo of a Best Picture-crowned Alfred Hitchcock classic. However much it could pale in comparison, this is supposedly a new adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel. Lily James, Armie Hammer and Kristin Scott Thomas in the key roles and Clint Mansell to score sounds ducky, and the almost Poe-like tragic touches will hopefully adorn the new Netflix film.
At the very least Ben Wheatley is worth trusting to take chances with such a daunting project. Having seen Kill List, A Field in England or High-Rise, you wouldn’t hesitate to call him one of England’s more daring independent auteurs. Seems his less relevant material is that which skews towards comedy (Free Fire is more like prison), which any take on Rebecca should be a far cry from.
Mank
(November 13 theatrically / December 4 through Netflix)
If any movie has Oscar clout woven into its very pixels it’s David Fincher’s return to filmmaking and continued partnership with Netflix following House of Cards and Mindhunter. This past decade, apart from collaborating with Aaron Sorkin to color the zeitgeist of the last decade in the contemporary classic that is The Social Network, the imposing, scrupulous director opted to perfect pulp with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl. The mysteries, sex and violence fit right into his wheelhouse but next up in the impressive filmographic lineup is the closest thing to Oscar bait the morbid-minded director has helmed to date, exceeding Benjamin Button even.
With a script penned by Fincher’s late father, the dispute between Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles over the writing credit for Citizen Kane should flourish as some classic movie about movies material. Maybe it's excellence earns Fincher a spot in film history alongside François Truffaut’s Day for Night, Robert Altman’s The Player and Tim Burton’s Ed Wood.
The Croods: A New Age
(November 25 / ORD: September 18, December 23)
I’ll be damned if DreamWorks Animation wasn’t thriving for a hot minute while Pixar just started to flounder. Rise of the Guardians rounded out a significant stretch for the animation factory that included The Croods, a prehistoric family adventure that would have at least made Jim Henson smile a few times were he still alive.
Nicolas Cage, Emma Stone and Ryan Reynolds, the primary voice talent of the first Croods, are attached to the sequel, which has maintained its potential 2020 release. Although DreamWorks' lot is empty, the animators are supposedly working remotely from home. If this sequel can make for a better new studio franchise than the Madagascar films — because maybe the benchmark of How to Train Your Dragon is a little high — it will be an honest delight just like the 2013 film.
News of the World
(December 25th)
Paul Greengrass has had a more inconsistent decade than he might want to admit, but a Western starring Tom Hanks slated with potential awards magnetism in mind? Sure, that actually sounds like a treat and has the dramatic trappings to give us thrills closer to the taut Captain Phillips than perfunctory Bourne sequels. His last stint, the Norwegian true story 22 July, is part of Netflix’s artillery but Universal has the rights to News of the World, based on the 2016 Texas Western novel of the same name by Paulette Jiles.
The trailers strike me a tad mawkish but the genre perhaps needs a new mainstream jumpstart in the vein the Coen’s True Grit, Taylor Sheridan-crafted gems (Wind River, Hell or High Water) and new little classics like Slow West. It usually takes genre-melds like Rango, Logan and Tarantino turns (Django Unchained, The Hateful Eight) to succeed. Greengrass is untried at this world but with an actor as strong as Hanks the best can be reasonably hoped for.
Soul
(December 25th through Disney+ / ORD: June 19, November 20)
The 23rd Pixar Animation Studios film arrives far past the studio’s prime but Soul could be the new winner that manages to up their batting average. If one considers Toy Story 3 their swan song (for Cars 2 lay just ahead), then the only standout feature since has been Inside Out — though Incredibles 2 and Toy Story 4 were far superior sequels next to Finding Dory, Monsters University and especially Cars 3.
Soul seems to splice the bubblegum existentialism of Inside Out with the emotional fantasy angle that made Coco a hit, similarly seeking to incorporate non-white cultures into a broad commercial picture. Let's just hope it’s not as coddling or safe as Brave or Onward. Music credits by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and consultants like Herbie Hancock bode well for music-minded material, though I'm not thrilled Pixar's creations will be compressed to Disney+ alone. Though with Pete Doctor — whose flawless Pixar track record includes Monsters, Inc., Up and Inside Out — writing and directing, we could have a marvelous exception to the studio’s recent rule of mediocrity.
Wonder Woman 1984
(December 25 / ORD: June 5, August 14, October 2)
If Tenet is Warner Brothers’ 2020 juggernaut gamble, WW84 is intended to be their insurance, some guaranteed revenue even if the super-sequel is a guinea pig for a bold distrubution strategy. Little did Patty Jenkins or Gal Gadot know their prospective summer smash would be the first of many Christmas gifts for streaming devotees courtesy of AT&T and potentially the kiss of death for traditionalists of filmgoing.
The 2017 origin story was not only eagerly enjoyable but a huge hit, an inspiring superhero blockbuster for women as well as the universal audience. If the first Wonder Woman was a Thor-esque fish-out-of-water story, this one looks like we’ve skipped right to the rainbow-soaked revelry of Taika Waititi’s Ragnarok. 1984 may not break any molds of an overloaded genre but it will easily be more entertaining than whatever Birds of Prey was. Plus, whenever Black Widow comes out, bets are on WW84 to have a more distinct sheen than Marvel Movie 4.1 circa 2021.
In what was poised to be a welcome year for female-fronted blockbusters (Emily Blunt in A Quiet Place Part II, Scarlett Johansson in Black Widow, Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman 1984, Liu Yifei in Mulan) the COVID-19 pandemic crept in then exploded worldwide, stomping on society’s brakes for what feels like ages by this point. With culture halted in essentially every facet for many months, some studios have desperately — whether ingeniously or recklessly — opted to save a few dollars by releasing their films via Video On Demand or certain streaming platforms — largely Hulu, Amazon, and Netflix (get outta here Peacock). Particularly in the case of Trolls World Tour — the first movie to bypass the long wait for theaters to reopen — this change left huge companies like AMC and Regal blindsided and threatening to never screen Universal films ever again. Oh wait, except AMC caved and now Universal is allowed to release their films digitally less than three weeks (rather than the usual three months) into a theatrical run.
After so much unprecedented destabilization, everyone in Hollywood has been forced to shuffle their schedules of ready releases and current productions several times over — the full scope of the industry has been held in a panicked, seemingly ceaseless state of anxiousness. Any attempt to reignite traditional moviegoing will be temperamental since the proper prescribed caution of both theaters and studios vs. the economically minded trigger finger in the back of everyone’s mind could result in a slightly catastrophic grand reopening.
During quarantine drive-ins, in-home experiences and Netflix binges became the only substitutes for the time-honored backbone of modern entertainment. Thanks to the escalating ruthlessness of the streaming wars, the new evolution in the media consumption was already equipped for a stay-at-home scenario. But for those of us who cherish moviemaking and moviegoing, TVs, laptops, phones or any other diminishing device is no substitute for the IMAX-specific treatment of Tenet and further potentially seismic cinematic events. The theater is where any self-respecting filmmaker deserves their work to be beheld for the first time.
Though as COVID-19 cases continue cropping up nationwide, there’s no certainty as to when cinephiles can regularly get their fix again. Back in March it was easy to believe that, in the span of what amounts to its own era, everyone could ultimately make their own choice as to whether certain entertainment options are worth the risk of exposure to strangers. Back in June these delusions were still plausible but considering ignorance and impatience are the major factors keeping America from overcoming this pandemic, caution really is the best defense — even if we leave a cornerstone of contemporary culture to collect more graffiti and dust.
Tenet
(Internationally August 26, Domestically September 3 / ORD: July 17, July 31, August 12)
The persistent query for the movie-minded since the pandemic’s effects set in has been about whether we will get the cinematic cycle back in sync once Tenet debuts. Nolan wanted to believe his mid-July slot would remain unmoved and anyone who cared did too. But after three delays, the question of the real release date of the most secretive, severely hyped film of the year has been more pressing than the inversion stuff. Overseas audience ultimately earned their right to see a huge Warner Brothers blockbuster before Americans did.
So after The Dark Knight altered the course of popular moviegoing, Inception cemented Nolan as the auteur for the people, a man who can map out a murky mind-melt and make sure no is left behind. However, who couldn’t be disappointed by the trajectory of his career once the uninhibited indulgence of The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar came around — no matter the passing instances of pure awe, both efforts were top-heavy blunders. Dunkirk was a new direction and a step up but something tells me this new merge of Memento and Inception will result in a motion picture event we aren’t even prepared for. With a minimum 200 million dollar price tag, 2 ½ hours of 70mm and IMAX footage by the talented Hoyte van Hoytema (his third collaboration with Nolan) and story details that are foggy at best — not to mention the choice casting and enticing trailers — Nolan’s most expensive original feature adds up to 2020's most intriguing enigma.
Considering, on top of everything, the film was once — and approximately remains — the flagship for all future cinema and we may have an ultramodern classic on our hands, especially since Nolan would rather die of COVID-19 himself than have Warner Brothers release Tenet online. That kind of passion will lead us to the linchpin of a cinematic resurgence or the nail in the coffin of theatrical entertainment. Unfortunately domestic affairs point toward the latter.
The Personal History of David Copperfield
(August 28 / ORD: May 8, August 14)
The whole “new spin on an old favorite” can be a wearisome way of borrowing another’s work to suit your own. However, after Armando Iannucci made Russian power struggles and the miscommunications of British government agencies into uproarious comedy feats (The Death of Stalin, In the Loop), somehow it’s believable that Charles Dickens is within his grasp to appreciate and reiterate as he sees fit.
You’ve got back Peter Capaldi and nabbed Tilda Swinton, Ben Wishaw and, as the titular Copperfield, Dev Patel, who has potential left especially with A24’s The Green Knight in the arsenal. It doesn’t matter that this is technically a 2019 film because of that TIFF debut — this holdover will more than likely deserve the present attention.
The New Mutants
(NRD: August 28 / ORD: so many)
After being delayed four times for various scheduling and pandemic-related conflicts, I don’t know if there’s ever been more fuss over a movie no one will see when it actually comes out. As much as the displeasing amateurishness of Dark Phoenix was enough to have you write off X-Men movies entirely, The New Mutants has been so vehemently labeled an ill-fated project — in production and release — it’s enough to pique your curiosity, or maybe just your pity. Who’s to say a mainstream superhero horror flick isn’t just the right kind of untapped genre territory to mine, especially when your benchmark is what, Blade II? The introduction of new Marvel X-heroes (never before seen on the silver screen!) is always a good time even in the silliest cases and The New Mutants has five unrealized characters (plus the reliable allure of Anya Taylor-Joy in the central cast) to sway at least a few interested outcasts.
Director Josh Boone has secured the film’s theatrical release but foolishly this will be one of the first movies to dip its toe in the waters of the public’s post-COVID moviegoing interest — it’s not a good litmus test seeing as another X-Men flop would be no bizarre thing even if the state of the world was peachy keen.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things
(September 4 through Netflix)
Charlie Kaufman decided recently that his movies didn’t give enough people clinical depression so he’s back for more! Except that his bleak brand of existentialism — whether in the towering, soul-crushing yearning of his revelatory debut Synecdoche, New York or the stop-motion moment of clarity and realistic one-night romance of Anomalisa — is about to get an overhaul. Starring Jesse Plemons, Jessie Buckley (who replaced Brie Larson), Toni Collette and David Thewlis, the film is not pulled straight from Kaufman’s unrestrained mind but from Canadian author Iain Reed’s 2016 novel of the same name. The new Netflix auteur feature is poised as another potential masterpiece for the streaming era in the vein of Marriage Story, Roma and a few other exceptional gems.
Within a simple premise of meet the parents, I’m Thinking of Ending Things sees Kaufman going for full psychological horror while operating in an antiquated aspect ratio. One could argue Synecdoche is a postmodern scary movie within its own kaleidoscopic lens, packed with the quotidian pain of everyday life and unfulfilled ambitions. But as his first real film adaptation — well, besides 2002 when he penned screenplays for Adaptation and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind — Kaufman’s third directorial feature should scope out freshly cerebral cinematic ground.
Mulan
(September 4 thru Disney+ for $29.99 / ORD: March 27, July 24, August 21)
With Craig Gillespie’s Cruella, Rob Marshall’s The Little Mermaid, David Lowery’s Peter Pan & Wendy, Marc Webb’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Robert Zemeckis’s Pinocchio (among others, somehow) on the next few horizons for Disney’s live action remakes, there is no end in sight for this money laundering ruse they’re pulling. Although a good Hercules redo is possible, the creative steam of this enterprise has spent whatever fumes were there to begin with. I guess Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella is ok?
As much as it might be oxymoronic to admit, 1998’s Mulan is the one live action revamp of a prized Disney animated movie that might actually be worth the derivative regurgitation and painful pandering. They’ve cut the songs and incorporated them into the score — sorry musical losers, this is a good thing — they’ve cast an Asian woman for the lead in Liu Yifei and Disney has shelled out the largest budget ever for a female filmmaker. Whale Rider director Niki Caro has 200 million dollars at her disposal, twice the sum Ava DuVernay had to direct A Wrinkle in Time.
From the footage the updates all feel positive, at least in scope and tonal adaptation. The further away as we can get from 1:1 remakes the better, though maybe it's finally time to try something new rather than set up a pointless sequel, eh?
The Trial of the Chicago 7
(September 25 theatrically / October 16 through Netflix / ORD: September 25)
Aaron Sorkin the screenwriter is a god among men — Sorkin the director has much to prove. Molly’s Game was strong but inessential next to his hand in scripting numerous celebrated works: A Few Good Men, Charlie Wilson’s War, The Social Network, Moneyball and Steve Jobs are all just a bit stronger because of distinct directors (Rob Reiner, Mike Nichols, David Fincher, Bennett Miller and Danny Boyle) realizing polished material.
With more real-life fascination for him to sink his teeth into, this new legal drama is most similar to Sorkin’s written debut A Few Good Men. The fat cast — Sacha Baron Cohen, Mark Rylance, Eddie Redmayne, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Frank Langella, William Hurt and Michael Keaton — is also good company to give voice to what will without doubt be some great dialogue. Steven Spielberg was in talks to direct this script over a decade ago, now he serves as producer. As a political-charged piece on the aftermath of anti-Vietnam demonstrations, the election season release and ongoing police brutality protests should make the film timely as all hell.
On the Rocks
(October 2 theatrically / October 23 through Apple TV+)
Part of A24’s ongoing tradition of producing and distributing the work of many superb independent filmmakers, Sofia Coppola’s surprise new movie is also the latest piece of Apple TV+'s new streaming strategy. The two companies have reached a multi-year agreement on new original films, On the Rocks being the first.
Reuniting with Bill Murray for the first time since Lost in Translation — unless you really want to count their 2015 Netflix collaboration A Very Murray Christmas — is enticing enough, but the premise of a playboy father-daughter relationship with Rashida Jones should carry on Coppola’s pressing predisposition for aristocratic satire. If she’s basically the mumblecore Jane Austen of modern cinema, keep laying out those social critiques Sofia — take advantage of that nepotism as far as it will take you.
Rebecca
(October 16 theatrically / October 21 through Netflix)
So it’s not quite a misguided redo of a Best Picture-crowned Alfred Hitchcock classic. However much it could pale in comparison, this is supposedly a new adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel. Lily James, Armie Hammer and Kristin Scott Thomas in the key roles and Clint Mansell to score sounds ducky, and the almost Poe-like tragic touches will hopefully adorn the new Netflix film.
At the very least Ben Wheatley is worth trusting to take chances with such a daunting project. Having seen Kill List, A Field in England or High-Rise, you wouldn’t hesitate to call him one of England’s more daring independent auteurs. Seems his less relevant material is that which skews towards comedy (Free Fire is more like prison), which any take on Rebecca should be a far cry from.
Mank
(November 13 theatrically / December 4 through Netflix)
If any movie has Oscar clout woven into its very pixels it’s David Fincher’s return to filmmaking and continued partnership with Netflix following House of Cards and Mindhunter. This past decade, apart from collaborating with Aaron Sorkin to color the zeitgeist of the last decade in the contemporary classic that is The Social Network, the imposing, scrupulous director opted to perfect pulp with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl. The mysteries, sex and violence fit right into his wheelhouse but next up in the impressive filmographic lineup is the closest thing to Oscar bait the morbid-minded director has helmed to date, exceeding Benjamin Button even.
With a script penned by Fincher’s late father, the dispute between Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles over the writing credit for Citizen Kane should flourish as some classic movie about movies material. Maybe it's excellence earns Fincher a spot in film history alongside François Truffaut’s Day for Night, Robert Altman’s The Player and Tim Burton’s Ed Wood.
The Croods: A New Age
(November 25 / ORD: September 18, December 23)
I’ll be damned if DreamWorks Animation wasn’t thriving for a hot minute while Pixar just started to flounder. Rise of the Guardians rounded out a significant stretch for the animation factory that included The Croods, a prehistoric family adventure that would have at least made Jim Henson smile a few times were he still alive.
Nicolas Cage, Emma Stone and Ryan Reynolds, the primary voice talent of the first Croods, are attached to the sequel, which has maintained its potential 2020 release. Although DreamWorks' lot is empty, the animators are supposedly working remotely from home. If this sequel can make for a better new studio franchise than the Madagascar films — because maybe the benchmark of How to Train Your Dragon is a little high — it will be an honest delight just like the 2013 film.
News of the World
(December 25th)
Paul Greengrass has had a more inconsistent decade than he might want to admit, but a Western starring Tom Hanks slated with potential awards magnetism in mind? Sure, that actually sounds like a treat and has the dramatic trappings to give us thrills closer to the taut Captain Phillips than perfunctory Bourne sequels. His last stint, the Norwegian true story 22 July, is part of Netflix’s artillery but Universal has the rights to News of the World, based on the 2016 Texas Western novel of the same name by Paulette Jiles.
The trailers strike me a tad mawkish but the genre perhaps needs a new mainstream jumpstart in the vein the Coen’s True Grit, Taylor Sheridan-crafted gems (Wind River, Hell or High Water) and new little classics like Slow West. It usually takes genre-melds like Rango, Logan and Tarantino turns (Django Unchained, The Hateful Eight) to succeed. Greengrass is untried at this world but with an actor as strong as Hanks the best can be reasonably hoped for.
Soul
(December 25th through Disney+ / ORD: June 19, November 20)
The 23rd Pixar Animation Studios film arrives far past the studio’s prime but Soul could be the new winner that manages to up their batting average. If one considers Toy Story 3 their swan song (for Cars 2 lay just ahead), then the only standout feature since has been Inside Out — though Incredibles 2 and Toy Story 4 were far superior sequels next to Finding Dory, Monsters University and especially Cars 3.
Soul seems to splice the bubblegum existentialism of Inside Out with the emotional fantasy angle that made Coco a hit, similarly seeking to incorporate non-white cultures into a broad commercial picture. Let's just hope it’s not as coddling or safe as Brave or Onward. Music credits by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and consultants like Herbie Hancock bode well for music-minded material, though I'm not thrilled Pixar's creations will be compressed to Disney+ alone. Though with Pete Doctor — whose flawless Pixar track record includes Monsters, Inc., Up and Inside Out — writing and directing, we could have a marvelous exception to the studio’s recent rule of mediocrity.
Wonder Woman 1984
(December 25 / ORD: June 5, August 14, October 2)
If Tenet is Warner Brothers’ 2020 juggernaut gamble, WW84 is intended to be their insurance, some guaranteed revenue even if the super-sequel is a guinea pig for a bold distrubution strategy. Little did Patty Jenkins or Gal Gadot know their prospective summer smash would be the first of many Christmas gifts for streaming devotees courtesy of AT&T and potentially the kiss of death for traditionalists of filmgoing.
The 2017 origin story was not only eagerly enjoyable but a huge hit, an inspiring superhero blockbuster for women as well as the universal audience. If the first Wonder Woman was a Thor-esque fish-out-of-water story, this one looks like we’ve skipped right to the rainbow-soaked revelry of Taika Waititi’s Ragnarok. 1984 may not break any molds of an overloaded genre but it will easily be more entertaining than whatever Birds of Prey was. Plus, whenever Black Widow comes out, bets are on WW84 to have a more distinct sheen than Marvel Movie 4.1 circa 2021.
The 20 Most Underrated Films
of the 2010s
Although the second decade of the new millennium has revealed a slight devolution in the proven cinematic possibilities of the first wave of the 21st century, this passing era of film culture has nonetheless been worthy of scrutiny, discussion and appreciation. For the past ten years, the post-postmodern moviegoing zeitgeist has been an oscillating exhibition of the latest inadequacies and interminable potential of the medium.
For certain there are Best Picture winners and exalted critical darlings that will fill the margins of decade-in-review lists as the 2020’s come into focus. In this piece let’s acknowledge the films that attained a measure of grace, even greatness, and were unceremoniously left at the wayside in the ever-tightening spaces of the everyday spectator’s attention span. To stall no further, here are some of the most underrated, undervalued or, at the very least, underseen movies of the decade according to an unavoidable subjectivity.
20. A Cure for Wellness
Oftentimes it’s the harmless fun that has critics turning up their noses — newfangled examples include Venom, Godzilla: King of the Monsters and even The Rise of Skywalker — but with horror, the sheer volume of the genre’s excrement makes it tricky to single out any overlooked pearl. The disapproving reactions to A Cure for Wellness would have you assume Gore Verbinski’s last film is on par with an Annabelle sequel.
With a prodigious sense of paranoia, a severely striking milieu and an old-fashioned escalation into conceptual hysteria, Wellness is rife with psychological ploys and fantastic puzzles through its two and a half hours. The Swiss sanitarium saga (based on German literature) memorably slides into the category of intoxicating psychiatric-centric films like Shock Corridor, Shutter Island and even 2018’s Unsane. A Cure for Wellness should eventually curry cult potential and, next to Rango, emerge as Verbinski’s strangest creation.
19. World War Z
After an infamously troubled, tremendously expensive production, it seemed all too likely that World War Z would suck. The responses were mildly positive in the end despite zombie purists whining about how Paramount squandered the source material’s objective, encyclopedic scope. The direct, globetrotting configuration of the film’s narrative logically marries disaster movie elements to the minimum number of characters, reducing every instance of awe and dread to the individual level as such blockbusters ideally should.
Marc Forster has had some practice in shepherding 200 million dollar productions through their treacherous assembly as he did with Quantum of Solace in the wake of the Writer’s Guild of America strike of 2007-2008. Some sequences are worthy of Steven Spielberg or possibly even David Fincher, who for a while was attached to direct a now cancelled sequel. A revisitation to this apocalypse wouldn’t go unobserved since horror and action thriller are so seldom consolidated well — but because China bans all movies featuring zombies or ghosts, the financial conditions will likely never be favorable enough.
18. Somewhere
Sofia Coppola has found familiar footing in the bulk of her filmmaking endeavors following her obvious peak — 2003’s Lost in Translation — but her fourth film is especially true to her directorial temperament. She has strayed somewhat from her obsession with the disillusionment of the privileged with historical character studies (Marie Antoinette), real-life teen thieves (The Bling Ring) and 70s period remakes (The Beguiled), though her entire filmography is situated in the same meticulous meditations on isolation in all its variations.
Somewhere feels like a subsidiary companion to the dismantling of celebrity within Translation but it still possesses the calming command of her finest handiwork — Coppola’s intuition for soundtrack selections aids the tranquil ambiance she’s tinkered with since The Virgin Suicides. She captures a nimble, succinct snapshot of a rocky father-daughter relationship in Elle Fanning and Stephen Dorff’s introverted characters — the examination of everyday fame transforms aristocratic malaise into disenchanted still life.
17. Thoroughbreds
Promising indie debuts are a dime a dozen but Thoroughbreds found distinction by way of niches within a niche. The adolescent black comedy thriller piles on class critique, nihilistic satire and unsettling titillations — the crisp voice of writer-director Cory Finley delivers a slender, self-assured vision. Famous for featuring Anton Yelchin’s final role before his premature death in 2016, the film’s young talent is utilized accordingly — leads Olivia Cooke and Anya Taylor-Joy play ideologically contradictory high schoolers whose main extracurricular activity is the clandestine slaying of one wicked stepfather.
With evenly sown themes and a spirit of jaded rebelliousness, Thoroughbreds is efficiently scripted, scored and shot. Though not dissimilar to past Sundance selections — Cooke made a name for herself in the festival favorite Me and Earl and the Dying Girl — it’s the diabolically satisfying exception to the rule that flavor of the month independent films have to wither in worth after a fleeting moment in the sun.
16. Youth in Revolt
Youth in Revolt is one of the most unexpectedly savory and diverting comedies of its time. Debuting way back in January of 2010, this was among the first domestic releases of the decade — unlike nearly all January releases, however, it wasn’t trash and the Michael Cera comedy inaugurated the new era with atypical appeal. The faux-indie whimsy programmed Youth in Revolt to be generally disregarded by most everyone save for hipster teens so, in spite of riding Cera’s particularly self-conscious brand — the Juno and Nick and Norah kind — the coming-of-age adaptation is sporadically boisterous, precisely pretentious and regularly funny.
The dual performance let Cera unveil his range — his alter ego François Dillinger is a hilariously reckless foil to Nick Twisp’s inhibitions. With postmodern rom-com touches, bristling exchanges of dialogue and cult classic potential to spare, Youth in Revolt will remain buried treasure for any apathetic comedy enthusiasts that decides to take a chance on such twee upheaval.
15. The Neon Demon
Since this decade shifted over Nicolas Winding Refn has progressively sought to augment his cinematic experiments and further a now very distinguishable optical fastidiousness. The Neon Demon — and to nearly the same degree Only God Forgives just prior — forgoes conventional storytelling to arrive at artistic consequences that are far from conclusive. But the audiovisual scrupulousness is its own reward when gratifyingly garish glimmers of astonishment and sublimity are in store.
Some of the more soundtrack-reliant sections of The Neon Demon — provided by Cliff Martinez, former member of Captain Beefheart, Red Hot Chili Peppers and recurrent collaborator with Steven Soderbergh — douse you in electronic befuddlement, exaggerating every radiant image and accentuating the substantially shallow subtext. Demon is perplexing by its messier final act and maybe even a little disappointing in sum — but few films are so abnormally resplendent and even fewer filmmakers are so stylistically stubborn or futuristically frank.
14. Submarine
Richard Ayoade is a legitimately idiosyncratic actor, so it’s no shocker the despairingly droll quirks of his directorial debut Submarine — as well as his astutely macabre follow-up The Double — was only able to entice a finite fragment of moviegoers. Shaped by melancholic supporting players, an icy atmosphere and desert dry wittiness, the desolate Bildungsroman, Salinger-esque romance adaptation is nearly too singular and fussy for its own good just like its finicky writer-director.
The mischievous montage, self-aware script recitations and solemnly strange setups and callbacks all feel like authentically inspired reflections of Ayoade’s ticks — after all this is the guy who devoted an entire book to dissecting a forgotten 2003 Gwyneth Paltrow romantic comedy. Home to 100% more Arctic Monkeys than the average flick through Alex Turner’s original songwriting, Submarine is a perturbed rumination on pubescence, the present-day beatnik’s 400 Blows — Ayoade’s riff on Truffaut is caustic and cunning.
13. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
Before Taika Waititi took over the thrust of Thor’s cinematic journey with Ragnarok’s playful renovation but after he finally slipped into the mainstream with his breakthrough vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, Hunt for the Wilderpeople was an admirable stepping stone for the New Zealand actor, screenwriter and director. Despite collective critical approval, the public somehow slept on this one, yet the film merits as many acolytes as the average Marvel film. The largely undiscovered detour in the Kiwi’s career is daintily pleasing — it’s a survivalist farce brimming with hilarity, tenderness and some sumptuous panoramic vistas to boot.
Wilderpeople’s young star Julian Dennison — who would go on to claim his own super-powered position in Deadpool 2 — is delightfully confident and Sam Neill’s grizzly, gruff performance is his best this century; the two make up a merry combo of mismatched outlaws. Meanwhile Jojo Rabbit is twice as brazen and cheaper in sentiment, yet the Hitler youth parody has received the majority of Waititi’s accolades. The effervescent charm of Hunt for the Wilderpeople ensures its place as an unassumingly adorable adventure comedy-drama, ably synthesizing silliness and recognizably real emotions.
12. Hanna
Early on Joe Wright seemed decidedly destined for Oscar glory after his competent Jane Austen adaptation Pride & Prejudice and all the Academy spotlight spent on Atonement shortly thereafter. Since his foundational success Wright’s career has been a medley of messiness, from failed awards bait (The Soloist) to self-indulgently stylizing sad Russian literature (Anna Karenina) to futile flops (Pan) to better-dressed awards bait (Darkest Hour).
Between the stages of derailing his career, Hanna found Wright marshaling his savvy for unbroken takes and introverted protagonists in the interest of a wonderfully minimalist assassin story. Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana and Cate Blanchett live up to their essential archetypes, the Chemical Brothers obliterate the idea of the electronic music act turned film composers (take THAT Daft Punk) and the brief bouts of action are awesome accomplishments.
11. The Immigrant
Despite an assortment of noble efforts, James Gray can’t quite get his line of work to gel with Hollywood standards, as the relatively muted response to Ad Astra would seem to cement. After his collaborations with Joaquin Phoenix in We Own the Night and Two Lovers, Gray wrote The Immigrant explicitly with the Oscar-winning actor in mind. But what Gray admits as his most personal project is also an underscored pedestal for the unadulterated grace of Marion Cotillard (bestowing some of the most refined acting of her career along with Two Days, One Night) and another showcase for Jeremy Renner, who proves again to be a dependable supporting actor.
Contrary to the soft-focused haze, Gray’s luminescent flourishes stabilize the seediness of the 1920s setting with select embellishment — he never forgets the subjugation and exploitation at the story’s center. The Immigrant’s visual detail is akin to The Lost City of Z in weathered, period-specific tangibility — it’s a classically minded tragedy seemingly ripped and restored from some century-old film archive.
10. Contagion
Steven Soderbergh’s consistency can be scary. Any identifiable slump in his career has been corrected so promptly that you can never fault the proven director for the occasional weak link in the filmographic chain (ahem, Ocean’s Twelve). The man’s movies are so habitually silky that gems are as easy to stumble upon as choosing something from his oeuvre at random. Just from this past decade you could have your pick of the clinical creepiness of Unsane, Logan Lucky’s heist hijinks, Side Effects’ cryptic prescription or the stark espionage of Haywire as an unrecognized prize — recent streaming stints (High Flying Bird, The Laundromat, No Sudden Move) haven’t been too bad either.
But Contagion — with its pragmatic apocalyptic framework, luscious digital cinematography symptomatic of Soderbergh (who often serves as his own cameraman under the name Peter Andrews), a sprawling, surefire cast and a superbly gooey score by Cliff Martinez — is as plainly underappreciated as any film of his from this period. If Soderbergh’s concocted pandemic fiction weren’t so scientifically plausible, plucking the public panic over the H1N1 virus as a credible catalyst for the intelligent disaster movie would be tacky. Instead Contagion is disquietingly gripping — it’s also one of the few films to effectively utilize a splintered, diversified narrative without shortchanging the separated characters or unfolding like a TV movie. Now Contagion is quintessential COVID-core.
9. 20th Century Women
Mike Mills has retrieved the tragically outmoded art steeped in personal, anthropological relations from the past (1979 to be exact) and brought it back to a present in need of humanist cinema more than ever. As sincere in its scripting as it is in its collective of naturalist performers, 20th Century Women’s historical and autobiographical contemplations may have nabbed a nomination for Best Original Screenplay but its stature among cineastes is unduly inadequate. Movies that manage as much wholesomeness and confessional veracity as Mills’ output — his experientially airy Beginners is his most cherished to date — are too benign in essence to win properly unequivocal praise.
20th Century Women has no shortage of gifted, generationally scattered actors populating Mills’ formative memories — Annette Benning, Elle Fanning, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup and young Lucas Jade Zumann — nor romantic, familial, feminist, musical or philosophical queries to explore. It’s sad that folks aimlessly skimming Netflix indifferently leaf through movies as observationally nourishing as this. The reproduction of quotidian lifestyles as uncomplicated as 20th Century Women is all but extinct to in this modern world of ours, leaving Mills — for as much humble, steadfast integrity as he has — to be a crucial, understated advocate for soft-spoken cinema in the 21st century.
8. Spring Breakers
The expectedly divided reaction to The Beach Bum just reaffirmed Harmony Korine’s eminence as a flamboyant cult classic architect — the man kicked off his career with the remarkably gross Gummo, so his underground respect was insured from day one. But lately, consideration of the borderline between art and trash or lowbrow and highbrow has scarcely been debated as ingeniously as in the cultural inquiry that is Spring Breakers, which has more on its mind than the concerns of the garden-variety bimbo rapt in debauchery.
Conflating college fantasies with suffocating crime drama (need one mention James Franco at his most eccentric?), the film anticipates acrimonious responses. The decadent satire is not exactly incognito though, nor is its detached severity. Korine’s wife Rachel stars as one of the four lady troublemakers, suggesting a divergent twist on the film’s feminist deliberation, especially when Spring Breakers turns Disney Channel’s would-be prodigies — Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens — into impetuous ne’er-do-wells. There are so many subtleties subcutaneous to the sleek sultriness that the descent into hedonism becomes a menacing mixture of ecstasy and ennui. It’s from a different planet y’all.
7. Heaven Knows What
In a meritocratic world, The Safdie brothers would have had their dual pathway to awards adoration lined up with their celebrated thriller Uncut Gems. Several summer’s back the feverish fervor of Good Time afforded the team of directors their due clout but Heaven Knows What — more potent and less ostentatious than Trainspotting or Requiem for a Dream as far as obligatory heroin movies go — is sorely underseen by cinephiles and unfamiliar to everyone else.
Textured with vérité-raw realism even in the most dreamlike passages of its kaleidoscopic palette, Heaven Knows What takes a deeply detailed photograph of America’s addicted without a trace of judgment or condescension — it penetrates through the ramshackled function and parlance of the junkie sort to bluntly illuminate primitive, impulsive human desires. Amidst the momentary adrenaline and the ultimate atrophy, Heaven Knows What picks you up like a habit — it’s gloriously grim.
6. Calvary
The Guard was a smart point of origin for John Michael McDonough, locating the best in buddy cop clichés and fashioning a forceful farce of small town police. Calvary is another animal altogether — it’s a despondent existential fable, contrasting the callous nastiness of the world with one man’s desperately contested religious faith. Brendan Gleeson is indispensable to Calvary and to McDonough’s career — little of this film’s cheek or pathos would smack quite so profoundly if not for Gleeson’s crusted world-weariness.
With its self-declared “one parts humanism, nine parts gallows humor,” McDonough’s black-comic drama is both cynical and righteous, moderating the intuitive observations and deathly absurdity through sections of articulate, cerebral dialogues and diatribes. There are so many sour pills McDonough compels you to choke down — the chief subjects of Calvary include alcoholism, molestation, murder, and suicide — and yet he’s able to discreetly and tactfully tiptoe through both episodes of trenchant wit and dips into cheerless truth. In time the moderately neglected tale will be regarded as one of Ireland’s most special films.
5. Knight of Cups
The latest stretch of Terrence Malick’s career has been perhaps the most contentious topic in contemporary film criticism. After four selective projects in 25 years, Malick has reversed his work ethic into prolific unrest — he’s generated a surplus of productions (six films with the seventh entitled The Way of the Wind in progress) in less than a decade. The experimental demonstrations of this cycle has drawn out the reclusive auteur’s most emphatic detractors and secured his most zealous admirers. The Tree of Life is the impossibly divine exception to the polarization, considered by many to be his masterpiece. To the Wonder has integrity as romantic confession but by the vapidity of Song to Song and the cosmic tedium of Voyage of Time, it seemed like Malick had officially receded into aimlessness, though A Hidden Life has only just redeemed his dignity. In the mix Knight of Cups emerged as his most organic, fruitful improvisation — a sublimely arranged realization of dysfunction in paradise, an even spread of tarot-inspired divination, theological allegory and domestic discontent.
Like any Malick picture Knight of Cups dissolves into personal introspection as well as speculations on man’s place within both nature’s enormity and our own engineered environs. Christian Bale’s wandering Hollywood screenwriter progressively sharpens his solitude throughout six self-destructive sensual circumstances — Imogen Poots, Cate Blanchett, Freida Pinto, Teresa Palmer, Natalie Portman and Isabel Lucas elucidate the film’s heavenly hints and emotional anguish. Even enthusiasts have to concede Knight of Cups reeks of self-importance and — dare the word be used — pretension. The requisite of rich, white male melancholy exists on a plane of take it or leave it as do most of Malick’s inscrutable creations — either you reject the film altogether or give in to the universality of unquenchable longing. Nevertheless, naysayers must admit the probing, consummate expressions of Emmanuel Lubezki’s slipstream cinematography and the toothed, spatially untethered editing conveys an otherworldly sensation that most conventional narrative films cannot even remotely emulate.
4. Under the Silver Lake
After It Follows became one of the defining horror films of the age, A24’s failure of confidence in David Robert Mitchell’s surrealist neo-noir, the general public or both left Under the Silver Lake without an actual moviegoing audience. Given how often the independent distribution company has deliberately mismarketed anything for the sake of their art house interests, this was a hypocritical gaffe. The film in question, which was dishonorably released to the masses in the incorrect aspect ratio through Amazon Prime, is such a thoroughly bewitching text on voyeurism, LA’s insular culture and the absence of mystery in the postmodern world — it’s also irrefutable evidence of all the shadowy, sinuous angles left in noir’s noble urgency. Under the Silver Lake is so spellbinding it’s enough to shrivel what stock you might have left in studio executives and accepted critics.
Andrew Garfield’s lascivious, derelict drifter is a slacker protagonist in correspondingly great company — The Dude of The Big Lebowski, Doc Sportello in Inherent Vice — and the film wears these and its further myriad influences (David Lynch, Alfred Hitchcock, countless other cited cultural stimuli) proudly as Mitchell relishes and polishes the traditions of its genre. Under the Silver Lake keeps its skeptical, anti-conformist ideology at heart even if the subliminal meanings aren’t quite as camouflaged as intended. The film is still madly visionary and perpetually beguiling — Mitchell’s ambitious bedrock is built on red herrings, sexual spontaneity, technological distrust, methodical obscurity and enigmatic conspiracies. Borne out of the past — with special thanks to Disasterpeace’s antiquated scoring — and stimulated by new, unclouded creativity, Silver Lake’s scopophilic significance goes quite deep.
3. Mistress America
Not unlike other pivotal highlights of Noah Baumbach’s pointed legacy — The Squid and the Whale, Frances Ha — Mistress America is piquant, profound and abundant in ideas worth pondering for barely exceeding 80 minutes. This prickly screwball send-up could be the most airtight, exhaustive and disgracefully unheeded comedies of its time. As an immediate successor to While We’re Young in 2015, the quiet release of Mistress America made it seem like an underwhelming afterthought — but clearly with the invaluable assistance of his romantic and writing partner Greta Gerwig, the magic — the eloquent, revelatory exchanges, instinctively shifting character dynamics, mirthful editing stabs — flowed as effortlessly as it did in Frances, their first written collaboration and the apex of Baumbach’s filmography prior to Marriage Story. Dramatic irony and genuine wisdom rarely harmonize within the same lines of dialogue, let alone excerpts that bear their savvy even completely out of context.
Mistress America may seem minor on the exterior but the contents of its impeccably acerbic screenplay flourish with the intimacy of great theater. It’s all part of Baumbach’s unparalleled devotion to stressing customary social defects by holding a mirror up to human pettiness so that we too may address our own trivial, almost imperceptible pretense and solipsism. Gerwig and Lola Kirke offer lovely turns as the pair of spiritual sisters, the violet-suffused spectrum complements the lush synthwaves of the soundtrack and Baumbach’s themes, characters and propulsive satire has never been so vivacious. Incisive, frothy and achingly funny. Mistress America is an irreproachable movie and also an excellent feminist text in respect to Gerwig’s partial penmanship.
2. The Ghost Writer
If you can separate the art from the artist — and you really should, like how you can recognize Triumph of the Will as imperative documentary history without Heiling Hitler yourself — Roman Polanski is an authoritative, comprehensively accomplished auteur. And his gifts are not flagrant or imposing, which is precisely why the director’s less renowned strokes of genius — Knife in the Water, The Tenant, Frantic — can be so heedlessly unnoticed. The Ghost Writer is a movie you could casually watch on cable; it feels like that paperback novel you’ve been meaning to pick up and unexpectedly get engrossed in some lazy Sunday. The film’s palpable prowess as a prudent political thriller has yet to be topped within its class since debuting early in 2010.
Analogous to the underestimated gratifications of The Ninth Gate from 1999, this is a foreboding, literary-minded noir-mystery endowed with academic formalism and cheeky austerity even and especially within its most mundane moments — although apathy is inexcusable when Alexandre Desplat’s swirlingly symphonic score is so exquisitely eerie. Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Tom Wilkinson, Olivia Cooke and Jon Bernthal populate the richest afternoon-killer you could wish for — just make sure you locate the UK version titled simply The Ghost so the muffled expletives of the PG-13 reedit don’t impede on your complete contentment. Polanski’s late-career masterwork is a tutorial on the most elemental, enveloping aspects of directorial control — its subdued ethereal power is on par with Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown.
1. Inherent Vice
Transmuting the crucial characteristics of Thomas Pynchon’s decade-old, hyperbolic, 60s-afterglow detective novel, Paul Thomas Anderson judiciously abridges Inherent Vice to suit the groovy gusto of his most euphoric, lackadaisical and serpentine film. Ironically, Anderson’s seventh film is also one of practiced lucidity, propelled by narrative purpose no matter how many average, readily confounded moviegoers dismiss the film as “pointless” or “convoluted.” If the entangled compendium of doper discourse, bureaucratic secrecies and continuous character interludes within Inherent Vice feels roundabout, circuitous or self-defeating to you, maybe that’s the gist of Pynchon’s aggrandized, emphatically enjoyable acid-dipped neo-noir. Anderson has affectionately sized up the unadaptable 20th century literary giant (Inherent Vice remains Pynchon’s only screen version to date) while simultaneously satisfying the most relaxing leg of his unpredictable career trajectory.
After the aesthetic and dramatic fatigue following the laborious conception of 2012’s The Master — Anderson’s proudest opus and undoubtedly one of the decade’s most peerless pictures — crafting a superlatively casual distraction was probably an artistic sigh of relief and a liberating nosedive into auteurist freedom. With enough familiarity and understanding of the rambling, cascading investigative hangout movie, the hypnotizing amalgamation of Pynchon’s vernacular nonpareils, Jonny Greenwood’s original and selected vibrations, Robert Elswit’s practical, shimmering cinematography and the flawlessly cast, passionately dexterous performances by an immensely talented ensemble (led by Joaquin Phoenix as the dazed detective to end them all, without mentioning Josh Brolin, Benicio del Toro, Joanna Newson, Katherine Waterston, Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon, Eric Roberts, Martin Short, Jena Malone and Maya Rudolph) engulfs you in a whirlwind of hypnogogic delirium, at least once you’ve finally slipped past the pleb-filter.
Inherent Vice is one of the most unmistakable manifestations that movies — at least great ones — encourage indefinite revisitations, specifically when Anderson’s degree of dense, divine detail tastefully invokes Pynchon’s timelessly self-evident, era-eclipsing themes. Inherent Vice is a psychedelic watershed film, keeping noir rapturously alive in an unpredictable and exact stream of consciousness. The Long Goodbye of the new age has not accumulated the full acclamation of its deserved reappraisal since late 2014 in spite of imparting transcendent clairvoyance as eagerly as riotous escapism.
*Published at TheCinemaholic.com / January 3rd, 2020
For certain there are Best Picture winners and exalted critical darlings that will fill the margins of decade-in-review lists as the 2020’s come into focus. In this piece let’s acknowledge the films that attained a measure of grace, even greatness, and were unceremoniously left at the wayside in the ever-tightening spaces of the everyday spectator’s attention span. To stall no further, here are some of the most underrated, undervalued or, at the very least, underseen movies of the decade according to an unavoidable subjectivity.
20. A Cure for Wellness
Oftentimes it’s the harmless fun that has critics turning up their noses — newfangled examples include Venom, Godzilla: King of the Monsters and even The Rise of Skywalker — but with horror, the sheer volume of the genre’s excrement makes it tricky to single out any overlooked pearl. The disapproving reactions to A Cure for Wellness would have you assume Gore Verbinski’s last film is on par with an Annabelle sequel.
With a prodigious sense of paranoia, a severely striking milieu and an old-fashioned escalation into conceptual hysteria, Wellness is rife with psychological ploys and fantastic puzzles through its two and a half hours. The Swiss sanitarium saga (based on German literature) memorably slides into the category of intoxicating psychiatric-centric films like Shock Corridor, Shutter Island and even 2018’s Unsane. A Cure for Wellness should eventually curry cult potential and, next to Rango, emerge as Verbinski’s strangest creation.
19. World War Z
After an infamously troubled, tremendously expensive production, it seemed all too likely that World War Z would suck. The responses were mildly positive in the end despite zombie purists whining about how Paramount squandered the source material’s objective, encyclopedic scope. The direct, globetrotting configuration of the film’s narrative logically marries disaster movie elements to the minimum number of characters, reducing every instance of awe and dread to the individual level as such blockbusters ideally should.
Marc Forster has had some practice in shepherding 200 million dollar productions through their treacherous assembly as he did with Quantum of Solace in the wake of the Writer’s Guild of America strike of 2007-2008. Some sequences are worthy of Steven Spielberg or possibly even David Fincher, who for a while was attached to direct a now cancelled sequel. A revisitation to this apocalypse wouldn’t go unobserved since horror and action thriller are so seldom consolidated well — but because China bans all movies featuring zombies or ghosts, the financial conditions will likely never be favorable enough.
18. Somewhere
Sofia Coppola has found familiar footing in the bulk of her filmmaking endeavors following her obvious peak — 2003’s Lost in Translation — but her fourth film is especially true to her directorial temperament. She has strayed somewhat from her obsession with the disillusionment of the privileged with historical character studies (Marie Antoinette), real-life teen thieves (The Bling Ring) and 70s period remakes (The Beguiled), though her entire filmography is situated in the same meticulous meditations on isolation in all its variations.
Somewhere feels like a subsidiary companion to the dismantling of celebrity within Translation but it still possesses the calming command of her finest handiwork — Coppola’s intuition for soundtrack selections aids the tranquil ambiance she’s tinkered with since The Virgin Suicides. She captures a nimble, succinct snapshot of a rocky father-daughter relationship in Elle Fanning and Stephen Dorff’s introverted characters — the examination of everyday fame transforms aristocratic malaise into disenchanted still life.
17. Thoroughbreds
Promising indie debuts are a dime a dozen but Thoroughbreds found distinction by way of niches within a niche. The adolescent black comedy thriller piles on class critique, nihilistic satire and unsettling titillations — the crisp voice of writer-director Cory Finley delivers a slender, self-assured vision. Famous for featuring Anton Yelchin’s final role before his premature death in 2016, the film’s young talent is utilized accordingly — leads Olivia Cooke and Anya Taylor-Joy play ideologically contradictory high schoolers whose main extracurricular activity is the clandestine slaying of one wicked stepfather.
With evenly sown themes and a spirit of jaded rebelliousness, Thoroughbreds is efficiently scripted, scored and shot. Though not dissimilar to past Sundance selections — Cooke made a name for herself in the festival favorite Me and Earl and the Dying Girl — it’s the diabolically satisfying exception to the rule that flavor of the month independent films have to wither in worth after a fleeting moment in the sun.
16. Youth in Revolt
Youth in Revolt is one of the most unexpectedly savory and diverting comedies of its time. Debuting way back in January of 2010, this was among the first domestic releases of the decade — unlike nearly all January releases, however, it wasn’t trash and the Michael Cera comedy inaugurated the new era with atypical appeal. The faux-indie whimsy programmed Youth in Revolt to be generally disregarded by most everyone save for hipster teens so, in spite of riding Cera’s particularly self-conscious brand — the Juno and Nick and Norah kind — the coming-of-age adaptation is sporadically boisterous, precisely pretentious and regularly funny.
The dual performance let Cera unveil his range — his alter ego François Dillinger is a hilariously reckless foil to Nick Twisp’s inhibitions. With postmodern rom-com touches, bristling exchanges of dialogue and cult classic potential to spare, Youth in Revolt will remain buried treasure for any apathetic comedy enthusiasts that decides to take a chance on such twee upheaval.
15. The Neon Demon
Since this decade shifted over Nicolas Winding Refn has progressively sought to augment his cinematic experiments and further a now very distinguishable optical fastidiousness. The Neon Demon — and to nearly the same degree Only God Forgives just prior — forgoes conventional storytelling to arrive at artistic consequences that are far from conclusive. But the audiovisual scrupulousness is its own reward when gratifyingly garish glimmers of astonishment and sublimity are in store.
Some of the more soundtrack-reliant sections of The Neon Demon — provided by Cliff Martinez, former member of Captain Beefheart, Red Hot Chili Peppers and recurrent collaborator with Steven Soderbergh — douse you in electronic befuddlement, exaggerating every radiant image and accentuating the substantially shallow subtext. Demon is perplexing by its messier final act and maybe even a little disappointing in sum — but few films are so abnormally resplendent and even fewer filmmakers are so stylistically stubborn or futuristically frank.
14. Submarine
Richard Ayoade is a legitimately idiosyncratic actor, so it’s no shocker the despairingly droll quirks of his directorial debut Submarine — as well as his astutely macabre follow-up The Double — was only able to entice a finite fragment of moviegoers. Shaped by melancholic supporting players, an icy atmosphere and desert dry wittiness, the desolate Bildungsroman, Salinger-esque romance adaptation is nearly too singular and fussy for its own good just like its finicky writer-director.
The mischievous montage, self-aware script recitations and solemnly strange setups and callbacks all feel like authentically inspired reflections of Ayoade’s ticks — after all this is the guy who devoted an entire book to dissecting a forgotten 2003 Gwyneth Paltrow romantic comedy. Home to 100% more Arctic Monkeys than the average flick through Alex Turner’s original songwriting, Submarine is a perturbed rumination on pubescence, the present-day beatnik’s 400 Blows — Ayoade’s riff on Truffaut is caustic and cunning.
13. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
Before Taika Waititi took over the thrust of Thor’s cinematic journey with Ragnarok’s playful renovation but after he finally slipped into the mainstream with his breakthrough vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, Hunt for the Wilderpeople was an admirable stepping stone for the New Zealand actor, screenwriter and director. Despite collective critical approval, the public somehow slept on this one, yet the film merits as many acolytes as the average Marvel film. The largely undiscovered detour in the Kiwi’s career is daintily pleasing — it’s a survivalist farce brimming with hilarity, tenderness and some sumptuous panoramic vistas to boot.
Wilderpeople’s young star Julian Dennison — who would go on to claim his own super-powered position in Deadpool 2 — is delightfully confident and Sam Neill’s grizzly, gruff performance is his best this century; the two make up a merry combo of mismatched outlaws. Meanwhile Jojo Rabbit is twice as brazen and cheaper in sentiment, yet the Hitler youth parody has received the majority of Waititi’s accolades. The effervescent charm of Hunt for the Wilderpeople ensures its place as an unassumingly adorable adventure comedy-drama, ably synthesizing silliness and recognizably real emotions.
12. Hanna
Early on Joe Wright seemed decidedly destined for Oscar glory after his competent Jane Austen adaptation Pride & Prejudice and all the Academy spotlight spent on Atonement shortly thereafter. Since his foundational success Wright’s career has been a medley of messiness, from failed awards bait (The Soloist) to self-indulgently stylizing sad Russian literature (Anna Karenina) to futile flops (Pan) to better-dressed awards bait (Darkest Hour).
Between the stages of derailing his career, Hanna found Wright marshaling his savvy for unbroken takes and introverted protagonists in the interest of a wonderfully minimalist assassin story. Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana and Cate Blanchett live up to their essential archetypes, the Chemical Brothers obliterate the idea of the electronic music act turned film composers (take THAT Daft Punk) and the brief bouts of action are awesome accomplishments.
11. The Immigrant
Despite an assortment of noble efforts, James Gray can’t quite get his line of work to gel with Hollywood standards, as the relatively muted response to Ad Astra would seem to cement. After his collaborations with Joaquin Phoenix in We Own the Night and Two Lovers, Gray wrote The Immigrant explicitly with the Oscar-winning actor in mind. But what Gray admits as his most personal project is also an underscored pedestal for the unadulterated grace of Marion Cotillard (bestowing some of the most refined acting of her career along with Two Days, One Night) and another showcase for Jeremy Renner, who proves again to be a dependable supporting actor.
Contrary to the soft-focused haze, Gray’s luminescent flourishes stabilize the seediness of the 1920s setting with select embellishment — he never forgets the subjugation and exploitation at the story’s center. The Immigrant’s visual detail is akin to The Lost City of Z in weathered, period-specific tangibility — it’s a classically minded tragedy seemingly ripped and restored from some century-old film archive.
10. Contagion
Steven Soderbergh’s consistency can be scary. Any identifiable slump in his career has been corrected so promptly that you can never fault the proven director for the occasional weak link in the filmographic chain (ahem, Ocean’s Twelve). The man’s movies are so habitually silky that gems are as easy to stumble upon as choosing something from his oeuvre at random. Just from this past decade you could have your pick of the clinical creepiness of Unsane, Logan Lucky’s heist hijinks, Side Effects’ cryptic prescription or the stark espionage of Haywire as an unrecognized prize — recent streaming stints (High Flying Bird, The Laundromat, No Sudden Move) haven’t been too bad either.
But Contagion — with its pragmatic apocalyptic framework, luscious digital cinematography symptomatic of Soderbergh (who often serves as his own cameraman under the name Peter Andrews), a sprawling, surefire cast and a superbly gooey score by Cliff Martinez — is as plainly underappreciated as any film of his from this period. If Soderbergh’s concocted pandemic fiction weren’t so scientifically plausible, plucking the public panic over the H1N1 virus as a credible catalyst for the intelligent disaster movie would be tacky. Instead Contagion is disquietingly gripping — it’s also one of the few films to effectively utilize a splintered, diversified narrative without shortchanging the separated characters or unfolding like a TV movie. Now Contagion is quintessential COVID-core.
9. 20th Century Women
Mike Mills has retrieved the tragically outmoded art steeped in personal, anthropological relations from the past (1979 to be exact) and brought it back to a present in need of humanist cinema more than ever. As sincere in its scripting as it is in its collective of naturalist performers, 20th Century Women’s historical and autobiographical contemplations may have nabbed a nomination for Best Original Screenplay but its stature among cineastes is unduly inadequate. Movies that manage as much wholesomeness and confessional veracity as Mills’ output — his experientially airy Beginners is his most cherished to date — are too benign in essence to win properly unequivocal praise.
20th Century Women has no shortage of gifted, generationally scattered actors populating Mills’ formative memories — Annette Benning, Elle Fanning, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup and young Lucas Jade Zumann — nor romantic, familial, feminist, musical or philosophical queries to explore. It’s sad that folks aimlessly skimming Netflix indifferently leaf through movies as observationally nourishing as this. The reproduction of quotidian lifestyles as uncomplicated as 20th Century Women is all but extinct to in this modern world of ours, leaving Mills — for as much humble, steadfast integrity as he has — to be a crucial, understated advocate for soft-spoken cinema in the 21st century.
8. Spring Breakers
The expectedly divided reaction to The Beach Bum just reaffirmed Harmony Korine’s eminence as a flamboyant cult classic architect — the man kicked off his career with the remarkably gross Gummo, so his underground respect was insured from day one. But lately, consideration of the borderline between art and trash or lowbrow and highbrow has scarcely been debated as ingeniously as in the cultural inquiry that is Spring Breakers, which has more on its mind than the concerns of the garden-variety bimbo rapt in debauchery.
Conflating college fantasies with suffocating crime drama (need one mention James Franco at his most eccentric?), the film anticipates acrimonious responses. The decadent satire is not exactly incognito though, nor is its detached severity. Korine’s wife Rachel stars as one of the four lady troublemakers, suggesting a divergent twist on the film’s feminist deliberation, especially when Spring Breakers turns Disney Channel’s would-be prodigies — Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens — into impetuous ne’er-do-wells. There are so many subtleties subcutaneous to the sleek sultriness that the descent into hedonism becomes a menacing mixture of ecstasy and ennui. It’s from a different planet y’all.
7. Heaven Knows What
In a meritocratic world, The Safdie brothers would have had their dual pathway to awards adoration lined up with their celebrated thriller Uncut Gems. Several summer’s back the feverish fervor of Good Time afforded the team of directors their due clout but Heaven Knows What — more potent and less ostentatious than Trainspotting or Requiem for a Dream as far as obligatory heroin movies go — is sorely underseen by cinephiles and unfamiliar to everyone else.
Textured with vérité-raw realism even in the most dreamlike passages of its kaleidoscopic palette, Heaven Knows What takes a deeply detailed photograph of America’s addicted without a trace of judgment or condescension — it penetrates through the ramshackled function and parlance of the junkie sort to bluntly illuminate primitive, impulsive human desires. Amidst the momentary adrenaline and the ultimate atrophy, Heaven Knows What picks you up like a habit — it’s gloriously grim.
6. Calvary
The Guard was a smart point of origin for John Michael McDonough, locating the best in buddy cop clichés and fashioning a forceful farce of small town police. Calvary is another animal altogether — it’s a despondent existential fable, contrasting the callous nastiness of the world with one man’s desperately contested religious faith. Brendan Gleeson is indispensable to Calvary and to McDonough’s career — little of this film’s cheek or pathos would smack quite so profoundly if not for Gleeson’s crusted world-weariness.
With its self-declared “one parts humanism, nine parts gallows humor,” McDonough’s black-comic drama is both cynical and righteous, moderating the intuitive observations and deathly absurdity through sections of articulate, cerebral dialogues and diatribes. There are so many sour pills McDonough compels you to choke down — the chief subjects of Calvary include alcoholism, molestation, murder, and suicide — and yet he’s able to discreetly and tactfully tiptoe through both episodes of trenchant wit and dips into cheerless truth. In time the moderately neglected tale will be regarded as one of Ireland’s most special films.
5. Knight of Cups
The latest stretch of Terrence Malick’s career has been perhaps the most contentious topic in contemporary film criticism. After four selective projects in 25 years, Malick has reversed his work ethic into prolific unrest — he’s generated a surplus of productions (six films with the seventh entitled The Way of the Wind in progress) in less than a decade. The experimental demonstrations of this cycle has drawn out the reclusive auteur’s most emphatic detractors and secured his most zealous admirers. The Tree of Life is the impossibly divine exception to the polarization, considered by many to be his masterpiece. To the Wonder has integrity as romantic confession but by the vapidity of Song to Song and the cosmic tedium of Voyage of Time, it seemed like Malick had officially receded into aimlessness, though A Hidden Life has only just redeemed his dignity. In the mix Knight of Cups emerged as his most organic, fruitful improvisation — a sublimely arranged realization of dysfunction in paradise, an even spread of tarot-inspired divination, theological allegory and domestic discontent.
Like any Malick picture Knight of Cups dissolves into personal introspection as well as speculations on man’s place within both nature’s enormity and our own engineered environs. Christian Bale’s wandering Hollywood screenwriter progressively sharpens his solitude throughout six self-destructive sensual circumstances — Imogen Poots, Cate Blanchett, Freida Pinto, Teresa Palmer, Natalie Portman and Isabel Lucas elucidate the film’s heavenly hints and emotional anguish. Even enthusiasts have to concede Knight of Cups reeks of self-importance and — dare the word be used — pretension. The requisite of rich, white male melancholy exists on a plane of take it or leave it as do most of Malick’s inscrutable creations — either you reject the film altogether or give in to the universality of unquenchable longing. Nevertheless, naysayers must admit the probing, consummate expressions of Emmanuel Lubezki’s slipstream cinematography and the toothed, spatially untethered editing conveys an otherworldly sensation that most conventional narrative films cannot even remotely emulate.
4. Under the Silver Lake
After It Follows became one of the defining horror films of the age, A24’s failure of confidence in David Robert Mitchell’s surrealist neo-noir, the general public or both left Under the Silver Lake without an actual moviegoing audience. Given how often the independent distribution company has deliberately mismarketed anything for the sake of their art house interests, this was a hypocritical gaffe. The film in question, which was dishonorably released to the masses in the incorrect aspect ratio through Amazon Prime, is such a thoroughly bewitching text on voyeurism, LA’s insular culture and the absence of mystery in the postmodern world — it’s also irrefutable evidence of all the shadowy, sinuous angles left in noir’s noble urgency. Under the Silver Lake is so spellbinding it’s enough to shrivel what stock you might have left in studio executives and accepted critics.
Andrew Garfield’s lascivious, derelict drifter is a slacker protagonist in correspondingly great company — The Dude of The Big Lebowski, Doc Sportello in Inherent Vice — and the film wears these and its further myriad influences (David Lynch, Alfred Hitchcock, countless other cited cultural stimuli) proudly as Mitchell relishes and polishes the traditions of its genre. Under the Silver Lake keeps its skeptical, anti-conformist ideology at heart even if the subliminal meanings aren’t quite as camouflaged as intended. The film is still madly visionary and perpetually beguiling — Mitchell’s ambitious bedrock is built on red herrings, sexual spontaneity, technological distrust, methodical obscurity and enigmatic conspiracies. Borne out of the past — with special thanks to Disasterpeace’s antiquated scoring — and stimulated by new, unclouded creativity, Silver Lake’s scopophilic significance goes quite deep.
3. Mistress America
Not unlike other pivotal highlights of Noah Baumbach’s pointed legacy — The Squid and the Whale, Frances Ha — Mistress America is piquant, profound and abundant in ideas worth pondering for barely exceeding 80 minutes. This prickly screwball send-up could be the most airtight, exhaustive and disgracefully unheeded comedies of its time. As an immediate successor to While We’re Young in 2015, the quiet release of Mistress America made it seem like an underwhelming afterthought — but clearly with the invaluable assistance of his romantic and writing partner Greta Gerwig, the magic — the eloquent, revelatory exchanges, instinctively shifting character dynamics, mirthful editing stabs — flowed as effortlessly as it did in Frances, their first written collaboration and the apex of Baumbach’s filmography prior to Marriage Story. Dramatic irony and genuine wisdom rarely harmonize within the same lines of dialogue, let alone excerpts that bear their savvy even completely out of context.
Mistress America may seem minor on the exterior but the contents of its impeccably acerbic screenplay flourish with the intimacy of great theater. It’s all part of Baumbach’s unparalleled devotion to stressing customary social defects by holding a mirror up to human pettiness so that we too may address our own trivial, almost imperceptible pretense and solipsism. Gerwig and Lola Kirke offer lovely turns as the pair of spiritual sisters, the violet-suffused spectrum complements the lush synthwaves of the soundtrack and Baumbach’s themes, characters and propulsive satire has never been so vivacious. Incisive, frothy and achingly funny. Mistress America is an irreproachable movie and also an excellent feminist text in respect to Gerwig’s partial penmanship.
2. The Ghost Writer
If you can separate the art from the artist — and you really should, like how you can recognize Triumph of the Will as imperative documentary history without Heiling Hitler yourself — Roman Polanski is an authoritative, comprehensively accomplished auteur. And his gifts are not flagrant or imposing, which is precisely why the director’s less renowned strokes of genius — Knife in the Water, The Tenant, Frantic — can be so heedlessly unnoticed. The Ghost Writer is a movie you could casually watch on cable; it feels like that paperback novel you’ve been meaning to pick up and unexpectedly get engrossed in some lazy Sunday. The film’s palpable prowess as a prudent political thriller has yet to be topped within its class since debuting early in 2010.
Analogous to the underestimated gratifications of The Ninth Gate from 1999, this is a foreboding, literary-minded noir-mystery endowed with academic formalism and cheeky austerity even and especially within its most mundane moments — although apathy is inexcusable when Alexandre Desplat’s swirlingly symphonic score is so exquisitely eerie. Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Tom Wilkinson, Olivia Cooke and Jon Bernthal populate the richest afternoon-killer you could wish for — just make sure you locate the UK version titled simply The Ghost so the muffled expletives of the PG-13 reedit don’t impede on your complete contentment. Polanski’s late-career masterwork is a tutorial on the most elemental, enveloping aspects of directorial control — its subdued ethereal power is on par with Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown.
1. Inherent Vice
Transmuting the crucial characteristics of Thomas Pynchon’s decade-old, hyperbolic, 60s-afterglow detective novel, Paul Thomas Anderson judiciously abridges Inherent Vice to suit the groovy gusto of his most euphoric, lackadaisical and serpentine film. Ironically, Anderson’s seventh film is also one of practiced lucidity, propelled by narrative purpose no matter how many average, readily confounded moviegoers dismiss the film as “pointless” or “convoluted.” If the entangled compendium of doper discourse, bureaucratic secrecies and continuous character interludes within Inherent Vice feels roundabout, circuitous or self-defeating to you, maybe that’s the gist of Pynchon’s aggrandized, emphatically enjoyable acid-dipped neo-noir. Anderson has affectionately sized up the unadaptable 20th century literary giant (Inherent Vice remains Pynchon’s only screen version to date) while simultaneously satisfying the most relaxing leg of his unpredictable career trajectory.
After the aesthetic and dramatic fatigue following the laborious conception of 2012’s The Master — Anderson’s proudest opus and undoubtedly one of the decade’s most peerless pictures — crafting a superlatively casual distraction was probably an artistic sigh of relief and a liberating nosedive into auteurist freedom. With enough familiarity and understanding of the rambling, cascading investigative hangout movie, the hypnotizing amalgamation of Pynchon’s vernacular nonpareils, Jonny Greenwood’s original and selected vibrations, Robert Elswit’s practical, shimmering cinematography and the flawlessly cast, passionately dexterous performances by an immensely talented ensemble (led by Joaquin Phoenix as the dazed detective to end them all, without mentioning Josh Brolin, Benicio del Toro, Joanna Newson, Katherine Waterston, Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon, Eric Roberts, Martin Short, Jena Malone and Maya Rudolph) engulfs you in a whirlwind of hypnogogic delirium, at least once you’ve finally slipped past the pleb-filter.
Inherent Vice is one of the most unmistakable manifestations that movies — at least great ones — encourage indefinite revisitations, specifically when Anderson’s degree of dense, divine detail tastefully invokes Pynchon’s timelessly self-evident, era-eclipsing themes. Inherent Vice is a psychedelic watershed film, keeping noir rapturously alive in an unpredictable and exact stream of consciousness. The Long Goodbye of the new age has not accumulated the full acclamation of its deserved reappraisal since late 2014 in spite of imparting transcendent clairvoyance as eagerly as riotous escapism.
*Published at TheCinemaholic.com / January 3rd, 2020
Every A Star Is Born Film Ranked
What was once the longstanding frontrunner in the race for the 91st Academy Award for Best Picture later became just another movie amidst the strange assortment of 2019 Oscars nominees. The folks behind Green Book, Roma, Bohemian Rhapsody and Black Panther left Sunday night the 24th of February in cheerier dispositions, but the directorial debut of Bradley Cooper, Gaga’s first leading Lady role and the fourth remake of an 80-year-old Warner Brothers property won the accolades of a fresh generation of spectators back in October of 2018.
For anyone wondering if the three former A Star Is Born films are worth some appraisal, the answer is a resounding yes. Whether it’s the igniting spur of the sensation in the original 1937 movie or the rock star template adopted from the 1976 remake, everything about last year’s romantic musical phenomena is embedded in our culture’s apparently unalterable fascination with celebrity, self-destruction, nostalgic illustrations of love and the paradoxes of the American dream.
4. 1976
The most incontestably inferior A Star Is Born has aged like a summer potato. With just a glance at the Kris Kristofferson and Barbra Streisand-helmed remake, one could be convinced Bradley Cooper witnessed a failed depiction of superstar courtship and saw an opportunity to update the outline in style. The structure to stage “Shallow” was set up perfectly over 40 years ago by writer and director Frank Pierson.
But just like every grating aspect of the third Star, the story’s key beats are hollowed out, the attraction between our leads is stunted at best and the writing — in song and in dialogue — is either laughable or just awful all depending. At its worst the revivified take is a more refined stroke of the same corny dialogue and strained acting. However Cooper’s hand is deft when it comes to emotion and at least he and Gaga can dramatize on-screen with some passion.
Streisand produced her own project to showcase her singing abilities but she seemingly underestimated the amount of actual acting she’d need to undertake. She’s gifted with comic strengths but Streisand, even more that Gaga, appears to have too much to prove. Ridiculously overlong music performances — not of delightful show tunes or comfortable country pop mind you, but out-of-date arena rock — pad out the two and a half hours. The final scene is simply an unending shot of Streisand’s cheesy final performance — the barefaced ostentation is embarrassing and almost something to witness just to test your endurance.
3. 2018
40 years later — the longest gap between entries — the potency of this premise hasn’t waned in the slightest. In the initial response to the trailer for the 2018 version, any sensible person would say humanizing modern media idols is better left to people like Sofia Coppola and not the stars themselves. Yet something about Cooper’s forceful earnestness is impossible to resist.
Oscar buzz is nothing new for these films but it was the first time in over 65 years. Each A Star Is Born has been nominated for Best Actor and Best Actress except the obvious bad apple. But one thing transcending time in every film is melodrama, the crux of the tale. In theory this version is infuriatingly dishonest; despite the updated realism, natural performances and a few vital cinematic moments (the first half is littered with excellent music excerpts), the respective vanity of both Bradley and Lady remains the most consummate aspect of this remake.
The lead pair are proven entertainers but this specific film doesn’t exercise much that isn’t evident in the immortality of its borrowed story. The loser now will be later to win and the first now will later be last — it’s everlasting, immutable stuff. Cooper’s A Star Is Born is exalting, even cathartic in its highlight excerpts and furthermore a taut, emotionally extracting retelling of the story. It genuinely buys into the same structure and tastes of Old Hollywood. But the script foolishly follows the sullying precedence of the 70s take by telling it largely from the man’s perspective when it’s the rising star’s side that matters most.
Gaga – a pop idol ceaselessly extolled for her naturally resonant voice despite Billboard-primed subject matter — and Cooper — in a self-directed performance that’s a little less Clint Eastwood and a little more stroke my ego — are splendid in general but they don’t elevate the archetypes enough to exactly earn our sympathies. The tears are spent regardless but Ally’s struggles are too unquestionably overcome and Jack’s ill-fated end is in plain sight from frame one. As great a job as Cooper did all around, the work was laid out for him in all respects.
Based on the evolution of popular taste — or lack thereof — it’s inescapable that a story of this nature would feel the need to be told every couple decades. Two score removed from the most recent remake, Cooper at least found decent reasons to urgently and respectfully update the tale. But maybe after this it really is time to let the old ways die — admirable try Bradley, but you’re not quite as far from the shallow as you think.
2. 1954
With the first musical redo, Judy Garland was able to operate quite the vehicle with which to flaunt her renowned childlike countenance and stellar pipes. The 1954 A Star Is Born is visually exquisite, brandishing the finest embellishments of the films in question. Before My Fair Lady a decade later, George Cukor’s first classic in the genre also wielded some exceptional insight by exploring the themes through exciting music numbers.
As a fairly direct reworking of the 1937 script there aren’t many narrative surprises along the way but the luxuriant musical padding is an elegant progression of the Hollywood saga, although the performances by Garland and James Mason fall just short of those in the original. The second film fashions many ways to support the romance’s capacity for an epic three-hour running time, especially drawing pathos from the probing pacing. For instance the film’s standout musical number is able to depict the subtle details driving Norman and Vicki from each other’s comfort as the latter hits the peak of her career.
To the eye this is A Star Is Born done to perfection. This attempt also bridges the overarching transition from the star as actor to singer exclusively. Garland handles both the performance and vocals with measured grace, and Mason is keenly cast for his dangerously reflexive charms and borderline arrogant swagger. It’s not exactly Singin’ in the Rain and yet this Star reigns as one of the formative musicals of the era before the 1960s found some perfection in the popular craze.
1. 1937
The best and truest example of Hollywood on Hollywood was the 1937 original A Star Is Born starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March. The crowning Star bears the most innate aplomb and, most importantly, gives you plenty of time to understand the struggles, naiveté and tenaciousness of the girl who would become Vicky Lester before mediocre fortune turns in her favor. The Technicolor layers of the film — an exemplary work of early colorization long before B&W was all but abandoned — are admirable to this day. That said it’s still a hair shy of the opulent scope the subsequent remake.
It’s Gaynor’s believable meekness that sets this ahead of other incarnations and lends a classic shimmer to her eventual success. Unlike one trash bag flung into a dumpster, Esther Blodgett actually wrestles with rejection and obscurity exclusively for the entire first act. Her transformation into Vicky Lester is not definitive from the outset and the inadvertent consequences of realizing your dream are honestly examined.
As Esther engages in a montage of movie personalities while serving hors d’oeuvres at a Hollywood party, no movie will ever top the way her perseverance catches Norman’s eye. The toll of her happiness was never again so impressively investigated.
*Published at TheCinemaholic.com / March 23rd, 2019
For anyone wondering if the three former A Star Is Born films are worth some appraisal, the answer is a resounding yes. Whether it’s the igniting spur of the sensation in the original 1937 movie or the rock star template adopted from the 1976 remake, everything about last year’s romantic musical phenomena is embedded in our culture’s apparently unalterable fascination with celebrity, self-destruction, nostalgic illustrations of love and the paradoxes of the American dream.
4. 1976
The most incontestably inferior A Star Is Born has aged like a summer potato. With just a glance at the Kris Kristofferson and Barbra Streisand-helmed remake, one could be convinced Bradley Cooper witnessed a failed depiction of superstar courtship and saw an opportunity to update the outline in style. The structure to stage “Shallow” was set up perfectly over 40 years ago by writer and director Frank Pierson.
But just like every grating aspect of the third Star, the story’s key beats are hollowed out, the attraction between our leads is stunted at best and the writing — in song and in dialogue — is either laughable or just awful all depending. At its worst the revivified take is a more refined stroke of the same corny dialogue and strained acting. However Cooper’s hand is deft when it comes to emotion and at least he and Gaga can dramatize on-screen with some passion.
Streisand produced her own project to showcase her singing abilities but she seemingly underestimated the amount of actual acting she’d need to undertake. She’s gifted with comic strengths but Streisand, even more that Gaga, appears to have too much to prove. Ridiculously overlong music performances — not of delightful show tunes or comfortable country pop mind you, but out-of-date arena rock — pad out the two and a half hours. The final scene is simply an unending shot of Streisand’s cheesy final performance — the barefaced ostentation is embarrassing and almost something to witness just to test your endurance.
3. 2018
40 years later — the longest gap between entries — the potency of this premise hasn’t waned in the slightest. In the initial response to the trailer for the 2018 version, any sensible person would say humanizing modern media idols is better left to people like Sofia Coppola and not the stars themselves. Yet something about Cooper’s forceful earnestness is impossible to resist.
Oscar buzz is nothing new for these films but it was the first time in over 65 years. Each A Star Is Born has been nominated for Best Actor and Best Actress except the obvious bad apple. But one thing transcending time in every film is melodrama, the crux of the tale. In theory this version is infuriatingly dishonest; despite the updated realism, natural performances and a few vital cinematic moments (the first half is littered with excellent music excerpts), the respective vanity of both Bradley and Lady remains the most consummate aspect of this remake.
The lead pair are proven entertainers but this specific film doesn’t exercise much that isn’t evident in the immortality of its borrowed story. The loser now will be later to win and the first now will later be last — it’s everlasting, immutable stuff. Cooper’s A Star Is Born is exalting, even cathartic in its highlight excerpts and furthermore a taut, emotionally extracting retelling of the story. It genuinely buys into the same structure and tastes of Old Hollywood. But the script foolishly follows the sullying precedence of the 70s take by telling it largely from the man’s perspective when it’s the rising star’s side that matters most.
Gaga – a pop idol ceaselessly extolled for her naturally resonant voice despite Billboard-primed subject matter — and Cooper — in a self-directed performance that’s a little less Clint Eastwood and a little more stroke my ego — are splendid in general but they don’t elevate the archetypes enough to exactly earn our sympathies. The tears are spent regardless but Ally’s struggles are too unquestionably overcome and Jack’s ill-fated end is in plain sight from frame one. As great a job as Cooper did all around, the work was laid out for him in all respects.
Based on the evolution of popular taste — or lack thereof — it’s inescapable that a story of this nature would feel the need to be told every couple decades. Two score removed from the most recent remake, Cooper at least found decent reasons to urgently and respectfully update the tale. But maybe after this it really is time to let the old ways die — admirable try Bradley, but you’re not quite as far from the shallow as you think.
2. 1954
With the first musical redo, Judy Garland was able to operate quite the vehicle with which to flaunt her renowned childlike countenance and stellar pipes. The 1954 A Star Is Born is visually exquisite, brandishing the finest embellishments of the films in question. Before My Fair Lady a decade later, George Cukor’s first classic in the genre also wielded some exceptional insight by exploring the themes through exciting music numbers.
As a fairly direct reworking of the 1937 script there aren’t many narrative surprises along the way but the luxuriant musical padding is an elegant progression of the Hollywood saga, although the performances by Garland and James Mason fall just short of those in the original. The second film fashions many ways to support the romance’s capacity for an epic three-hour running time, especially drawing pathos from the probing pacing. For instance the film’s standout musical number is able to depict the subtle details driving Norman and Vicki from each other’s comfort as the latter hits the peak of her career.
To the eye this is A Star Is Born done to perfection. This attempt also bridges the overarching transition from the star as actor to singer exclusively. Garland handles both the performance and vocals with measured grace, and Mason is keenly cast for his dangerously reflexive charms and borderline arrogant swagger. It’s not exactly Singin’ in the Rain and yet this Star reigns as one of the formative musicals of the era before the 1960s found some perfection in the popular craze.
1. 1937
The best and truest example of Hollywood on Hollywood was the 1937 original A Star Is Born starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March. The crowning Star bears the most innate aplomb and, most importantly, gives you plenty of time to understand the struggles, naiveté and tenaciousness of the girl who would become Vicky Lester before mediocre fortune turns in her favor. The Technicolor layers of the film — an exemplary work of early colorization long before B&W was all but abandoned — are admirable to this day. That said it’s still a hair shy of the opulent scope the subsequent remake.
It’s Gaynor’s believable meekness that sets this ahead of other incarnations and lends a classic shimmer to her eventual success. Unlike one trash bag flung into a dumpster, Esther Blodgett actually wrestles with rejection and obscurity exclusively for the entire first act. Her transformation into Vicky Lester is not definitive from the outset and the inadvertent consequences of realizing your dream are honestly examined.
As Esther engages in a montage of movie personalities while serving hors d’oeuvres at a Hollywood party, no movie will ever top the way her perseverance catches Norman’s eye. The toll of her happiness was never again so impressively investigated.
*Published at TheCinemaholic.com / March 23rd, 2019
The 10 Best Christmas Film Alternatives
It’s the most wonderful time of the year — a month of finality to break out A Christmas Carol, A Christmas Story, Miracle on 34th Street, Rudolph, the animated Grinch, the list goes ever on. Once spent, or if considered too maudlin or overplayed, obvious alternatives can take the place of this period’s common classics. There’s Die Hard, Home Alone and then garbage like Love Actually if you can stomach something so sickly.
But some films, and a few masterpieces, have found a way to apply Christmas to a singular purpose — it becomes a detail meant to signify more than rosy cheeks and goodwill toward men, not that there’s anything wrong with that. For solid cinematic substitutes to the traditional holiday viewings you do every year, here are some of the best Christmas-contiguous options for merry movie nights.
10. Black Christmas
If you’ve seen Gremlins too many times or Krampus rubbed you the wrong way, the search for a reasonable holiday-horror crossover promptly leads you to Black Christmas. It’s a safe bet for a dreary wintertime watch if cheery isn’t your thing. Borrowing from Italian giallo films and serving as a prototype for Halloween and slasher movies years before the genre’s popularization, the film’s maddening murder mystery is worth getting wrapped up in. Just make sure to avoid the two laughable 21st century remakes.
9. When Harry Met Sally…
Though this is perhaps the film on this list with the least to do with Christmas, the most meaningful moments of Rob Reiner’s renowned romantic comedy are situated in a seasonal setting. When Harry Met Sally… owes just a little to Woody Allen but between Nora Ephron’s outstanding script and career-defining performances by Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, the movie goes down like hot cocoa. Its most iconic lines and funniest gags still have a way of imposing involuntary merriment nearly 30 years removed, and the film’s contemporary view on love is freshly sealed in timelessness.
8. The Thin Man
This holiday whodunit inspired five sequels and offered breathlessly jocular repartee for early audiences only just recently adjusted to the whole sound thing. The plot and character map become challenging to stay on top of but the respective lead performances by William Powell and Myrna Loy as an alcoholic wisecracking detective and his equally smarmy wife/heiress keep you tethered to the story and serve up a source of scintillating laughs. They’re a riotous screwball pair and their attitude, timing and mannerisms stand up to modern impatience. Especially with Powell on-screen, this Christmas puzzle recognizes the necessary gaiety in its guessing game.
7. Metropolitan
Whit Stillman has more than a passing interest in the composition of dialogue and social satire. Archived between Woody Allen’s forthright screenwriting style and romantic subjects and Noah Baumbach’s shrewd, misanthropic philosophy — influenced by films like The Last Days of Disco — Stillman’s technique is a lot to swallow if you’re not prepared for vehement pretension. The film’s clinically clever writing and abominably oblivious figures supply young liberals with fantasies of escorting cute girls to debutante balls. Still, Metropolitan is Stillman’s most celebrated film and a vibrant Christmas movie alternate, skewering elitist twenty-something New York socialites by way of heady banter, mathematical lusting and believably conceited characters.
6. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang/L.A. Confidential
Christmas movies were dearly missing a splash of neo-noir or maybe it’s the other way around. L.A. Confidential is the most critically lauded film of 1997 with a top-shelf cast but since warm, fuzzy feelings are much better suited to the comforting conclusion to the calendar year, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is where the lethal humor and unpredictable fun is at. You’ll likely get a bit confused by the California crime story and beguiled by sultry seductresses — nevertheless Shane Black’s uproarious debut is an ingeniously canny diversion and just one instance of the man’s absolute obsession with Christmas. Lethal Weapon and Iron Man 3 are fine but a long way off from substantial stand-ins.
5. La La Land
It has its haters but screw it — Damien Chazelle’s passion project is among the few mainstream films destined for canonization as one of last decade’s classics. La La Land radiated an unmistakable glow in the winter of 2016 and received many elated responses in return. The Christmas season prominently bookends the five-part narrative, emphasizing the most authentically stirring elements of cinematic courtship. The price of happiness or success is never a cost fully considered — so the story tells it at least. La La Land is worth cherishing though precisely because Chazelle paid the bill in tireless devotion and unflagging ardor for the genre he hoped to honor and revise. This marvelous musical romance is a rarity of filmmaking craft in every category — performances, songwriting, screenwriting, editing, cinematography, etc. You name it, La La Land did it brilliantly.
4. The Shop Around the Corner
Billy Wilder was in many ways a protégé of Ernst Lubitsch, even writing a few of his films, but it’s Lubitsch’s famous touch that would lay the bedrock for Wilder’s extraordinary filmmaking fertility. Lubitsch’s best work is unbeknownst to many but The Shop Around the Corner is the most integral feature of his filmography for its complete demonstration of his abilities. The film’s conscientious critique of the fundamentals of the romantic comedy resulted in a delightfully droll and methodically performed outcome, both an impeccable example of the genre’s potentiality and far above that classification altogether. James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan are each wonderful as two separately stubborn sales clerks too finicky to settle for each other despite their anonymously amorous correspondence. Though it spawned treacle like You’ve Got Mail, The Shop Around the Corner is a treasure of loveliness even outside of its Christmastime backdrop.
3. The Apartment
Billy Wilder’s last bona fide classic is one of his best and that is saying something. His second Best Picture winner has everything — wit, beautiful photography, immortal quotes and quintessential performances from Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine and Fred MacMurray. The film’s proportional lightheartedness is counteracted by its taboo strains of infidelity, depression and suicide. Yet Wilder’s eye locates the rapture in the quotidian and his buoyant hand, along with Lemmon's irresistibly intrinsic grace, stabilizes the sensitive topics. With a shroud of holiday festivities neatly balancing out the realism in relation to love, The Apartment is nothing other than a winsome, captivating experience, cinema-wise.
2. Eyes Wide Shut
Stanley Kubrick’s final spot of filmmaking, completed just days before his death, utilizes Christmas as luminous scenery and a thematic antidote to the essence of his parting project. The holidays are but a foil of innocence to ironically oppose the wanton, carnal aspects of one of Kubrick’s most overlooked film. Eyes Wide Shut is not a holiday option for the faint of heart but its incandescent, atmospheric perfectionism and labyrinthine, enigmatic intrigue makes it the coziest, creepiest Christmas film you can bargain for.
The surreal, sensual feast deflects its selling point as an “erotic thriller” to delve into cuckoldry, sexual secrecy, manipulation and cult rituals, but only in order to intensify such a lusciously provocative and absorbing parable on marriage. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s fictitious partnership is all the more fascinating in retrospect to their off-screen divorce afterward. This was the longest continuous film shoot of all time — at a record 400 days — and Kubrick’s meticulous nature, as it often did, reaped invaluable remunerations.
1. It’s a Wonderful Life
There’s no denying that Frank Capra’s greatest achievement is one of the most emotionally effective films of all time. It’s a Wonderful Life is a visionary victory of acting, screenwriting and meaning. The film is a true thematic reflection of the hardships and virtues of middle class America, a grandiose philosophical experiment and a full-bodied character study. Yes, it’s basically cheating not to list this alongside other outright yuletide favorites — there are guardian angels and a Christmas Eve climax but this is incidental considering over 90 minutes of film are devoted to George Bailey and the development of his dreams, motivations and disappointments as he navigates fate’s troublesome shifts. The sheer attention to character is so articulate it deepens every aspect of the eventual epiphany of the film’s finale.
It’s a Wonderful Life is powerful and persuasive enough to show you that you don’t have it so bad and in order to attain a state of bliss one must simply adjust their perspective. If the Christmas spirit is supposed to stay with us year-round, this movie’s tender luminosity could keep the most crusted curmudgeon from snuggling up with despair. It’s not just a Christmas staple but one of the most indelibel feats in American film.
*Published at TheCinemaholic.com / December 24th, 2018
But some films, and a few masterpieces, have found a way to apply Christmas to a singular purpose — it becomes a detail meant to signify more than rosy cheeks and goodwill toward men, not that there’s anything wrong with that. For solid cinematic substitutes to the traditional holiday viewings you do every year, here are some of the best Christmas-contiguous options for merry movie nights.
10. Black Christmas
If you’ve seen Gremlins too many times or Krampus rubbed you the wrong way, the search for a reasonable holiday-horror crossover promptly leads you to Black Christmas. It’s a safe bet for a dreary wintertime watch if cheery isn’t your thing. Borrowing from Italian giallo films and serving as a prototype for Halloween and slasher movies years before the genre’s popularization, the film’s maddening murder mystery is worth getting wrapped up in. Just make sure to avoid the two laughable 21st century remakes.
9. When Harry Met Sally…
Though this is perhaps the film on this list with the least to do with Christmas, the most meaningful moments of Rob Reiner’s renowned romantic comedy are situated in a seasonal setting. When Harry Met Sally… owes just a little to Woody Allen but between Nora Ephron’s outstanding script and career-defining performances by Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, the movie goes down like hot cocoa. Its most iconic lines and funniest gags still have a way of imposing involuntary merriment nearly 30 years removed, and the film’s contemporary view on love is freshly sealed in timelessness.
8. The Thin Man
This holiday whodunit inspired five sequels and offered breathlessly jocular repartee for early audiences only just recently adjusted to the whole sound thing. The plot and character map become challenging to stay on top of but the respective lead performances by William Powell and Myrna Loy as an alcoholic wisecracking detective and his equally smarmy wife/heiress keep you tethered to the story and serve up a source of scintillating laughs. They’re a riotous screwball pair and their attitude, timing and mannerisms stand up to modern impatience. Especially with Powell on-screen, this Christmas puzzle recognizes the necessary gaiety in its guessing game.
7. Metropolitan
Whit Stillman has more than a passing interest in the composition of dialogue and social satire. Archived between Woody Allen’s forthright screenwriting style and romantic subjects and Noah Baumbach’s shrewd, misanthropic philosophy — influenced by films like The Last Days of Disco — Stillman’s technique is a lot to swallow if you’re not prepared for vehement pretension. The film’s clinically clever writing and abominably oblivious figures supply young liberals with fantasies of escorting cute girls to debutante balls. Still, Metropolitan is Stillman’s most celebrated film and a vibrant Christmas movie alternate, skewering elitist twenty-something New York socialites by way of heady banter, mathematical lusting and believably conceited characters.
6. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang/L.A. Confidential
Christmas movies were dearly missing a splash of neo-noir or maybe it’s the other way around. L.A. Confidential is the most critically lauded film of 1997 with a top-shelf cast but since warm, fuzzy feelings are much better suited to the comforting conclusion to the calendar year, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is where the lethal humor and unpredictable fun is at. You’ll likely get a bit confused by the California crime story and beguiled by sultry seductresses — nevertheless Shane Black’s uproarious debut is an ingeniously canny diversion and just one instance of the man’s absolute obsession with Christmas. Lethal Weapon and Iron Man 3 are fine but a long way off from substantial stand-ins.
5. La La Land
It has its haters but screw it — Damien Chazelle’s passion project is among the few mainstream films destined for canonization as one of last decade’s classics. La La Land radiated an unmistakable glow in the winter of 2016 and received many elated responses in return. The Christmas season prominently bookends the five-part narrative, emphasizing the most authentically stirring elements of cinematic courtship. The price of happiness or success is never a cost fully considered — so the story tells it at least. La La Land is worth cherishing though precisely because Chazelle paid the bill in tireless devotion and unflagging ardor for the genre he hoped to honor and revise. This marvelous musical romance is a rarity of filmmaking craft in every category — performances, songwriting, screenwriting, editing, cinematography, etc. You name it, La La Land did it brilliantly.
4. The Shop Around the Corner
Billy Wilder was in many ways a protégé of Ernst Lubitsch, even writing a few of his films, but it’s Lubitsch’s famous touch that would lay the bedrock for Wilder’s extraordinary filmmaking fertility. Lubitsch’s best work is unbeknownst to many but The Shop Around the Corner is the most integral feature of his filmography for its complete demonstration of his abilities. The film’s conscientious critique of the fundamentals of the romantic comedy resulted in a delightfully droll and methodically performed outcome, both an impeccable example of the genre’s potentiality and far above that classification altogether. James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan are each wonderful as two separately stubborn sales clerks too finicky to settle for each other despite their anonymously amorous correspondence. Though it spawned treacle like You’ve Got Mail, The Shop Around the Corner is a treasure of loveliness even outside of its Christmastime backdrop.
3. The Apartment
Billy Wilder’s last bona fide classic is one of his best and that is saying something. His second Best Picture winner has everything — wit, beautiful photography, immortal quotes and quintessential performances from Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine and Fred MacMurray. The film’s proportional lightheartedness is counteracted by its taboo strains of infidelity, depression and suicide. Yet Wilder’s eye locates the rapture in the quotidian and his buoyant hand, along with Lemmon's irresistibly intrinsic grace, stabilizes the sensitive topics. With a shroud of holiday festivities neatly balancing out the realism in relation to love, The Apartment is nothing other than a winsome, captivating experience, cinema-wise.
2. Eyes Wide Shut
Stanley Kubrick’s final spot of filmmaking, completed just days before his death, utilizes Christmas as luminous scenery and a thematic antidote to the essence of his parting project. The holidays are but a foil of innocence to ironically oppose the wanton, carnal aspects of one of Kubrick’s most overlooked film. Eyes Wide Shut is not a holiday option for the faint of heart but its incandescent, atmospheric perfectionism and labyrinthine, enigmatic intrigue makes it the coziest, creepiest Christmas film you can bargain for.
The surreal, sensual feast deflects its selling point as an “erotic thriller” to delve into cuckoldry, sexual secrecy, manipulation and cult rituals, but only in order to intensify such a lusciously provocative and absorbing parable on marriage. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s fictitious partnership is all the more fascinating in retrospect to their off-screen divorce afterward. This was the longest continuous film shoot of all time — at a record 400 days — and Kubrick’s meticulous nature, as it often did, reaped invaluable remunerations.
1. It’s a Wonderful Life
There’s no denying that Frank Capra’s greatest achievement is one of the most emotionally effective films of all time. It’s a Wonderful Life is a visionary victory of acting, screenwriting and meaning. The film is a true thematic reflection of the hardships and virtues of middle class America, a grandiose philosophical experiment and a full-bodied character study. Yes, it’s basically cheating not to list this alongside other outright yuletide favorites — there are guardian angels and a Christmas Eve climax but this is incidental considering over 90 minutes of film are devoted to George Bailey and the development of his dreams, motivations and disappointments as he navigates fate’s troublesome shifts. The sheer attention to character is so articulate it deepens every aspect of the eventual epiphany of the film’s finale.
It’s a Wonderful Life is powerful and persuasive enough to show you that you don’t have it so bad and in order to attain a state of bliss one must simply adjust their perspective. If the Christmas spirit is supposed to stay with us year-round, this movie’s tender luminosity could keep the most crusted curmudgeon from snuggling up with despair. It’s not just a Christmas staple but one of the most indelibel feats in American film.
*Published at TheCinemaholic.com / December 24th, 2018
Every Jason Reitman Film Ranked
He has steadily fallen from his former favor with critics and audiences, but Jason Reitman has continuously updated his filmmaking purpose for every present moment as it passes. With his judicious maintenance in weighing comedy and drama, Reitman's never quite settled his search for new humanist or political philosophies to impart — this constant metamorphosis has made his career all the more intriguing to watch.
9. Ghostbuster: Afterlife
Is this how you honor your father Jason, with rehashed, nostalgia-baiting bullshit? I know Ivan was alive during the production of Ghostbusters: Afterlife but post his father’s death he wants to engage in sequel superfluousness even more? This flick wasn’t even that bad but its final reel is one of the most textbook moments for why modern sequels (especially ones that insist on pacifying it’s core base at all costs) are absolute tripe. Sorry but Ghostbusters couldn’t make me cry is if I was born in the mid 70s.
It’s hard to call the lowest of low but damn, this isn’t how the mainstream should be opening back up to you. But you really haven’t made a great movie without Diablo Cody other than Up in the Air so it seems that peak is long past. I can’t believe Jason is still penning a sequel, especially since Reitman is no longer here to live up to or whatever. I can't imagine what's next since Afterlife barely resembles a feature film by its mawkish, manufactured end.
8. Men, Women & Children
Though Reitman’s most agreeable characteristics are intact — sensibly arranged needle drops, nuanced performances, punchy one-liners – Men, Women & Children finds the director grasping so desperately at profundity that his Altman-imitative narrative operates with the refinement of daytime television. Reitman often prides himself on adapting recent fiction but the 2011 Chad Kultgen novel could’ve been left on the shelf.
Apart from a touching tidbit of teenage love with Ansel Elgort and Kaitlyn Dever, every storyline is either a sitcom premise or a Lifetime movie outtake. Adam Sandler, Rosemarie DeWitt, Judy Greer, Jennifer Garner and Dean Norris contribute decent enough acting but none can salvage some of Reitman’s most artificial, hammy dialogue. Men, Women & Children masquerades as an intellectual dramedy teeming with social insight but it’s little more than a listless stream of soap opera B-plots. But for Reitman’s most preposterously pretentious film, Men, Women & Children is an uncommonly ambitious and frequently funny failure.
7. Labor Day
Striving to regain the Oscar spotlight once again, Reitman’s fifth project Labor Day would become his most forgotten film. The ignorance isn’t entirely justified however — Labor Day is contrived and melodramatic in its flimsiest passages but the Douglas Sirk impression is gently arresting when Reitman manages to overcome the tonal distortion.
Kate Winslet as a distraught single mother and Josh Brolin as a kindhearted prison escapee form a great on-screen match — the acting caliber of the leads capably communicates the sweetest case of Stockholm syndrome ever fictionalized. Reitman clearly aspired for something classically Old Hollywood with tangential genres fusing into a versatile piece of entertainment. Though far too uneven to consider an underrated effort, Labor Day’s romantic thriller period piece cocktail prospers from the play-acting, tense exchanges and domestic idealism.
6. Young Adult
Reitman’s least likable protagonist makes for perhaps his most difficult film to appreciate. Young Adult serves as both a blueprint for writer Diablo Cody to vent her bleakest trepidations as an aging screenwriter scripting tales of adolescence and a perfect vehicle for Charlize Theron to flaunt her adaptable talents.
Reitman’s filmography is speckled with patches of black humor — even though Young Adult’s tint is his darkest to date, he handily locates the comedy in mid-life misery. The challenging character study fortunately never asks for too much sympathy and performances by Theron, Patton Oswalt and Patrick Wilson keep things digestible while Cody probes the prickliest facets of maturation.
5. Tully
The first half of Reitman’s 2018 one-two punch marked his second collaboration with Charlize Theron and third with screenwriter Diablo Cody. Despite treading familiar ground, Tully finds Cody fleshing out further sketches of lost innocence as Reitman proves his directorial aptitude remains intact.
Tully essentially amends the maternity comedy of Juno with something more traditionally mature and nearly as shrewd. The final twist is a bit of a blunder but it can be taken as the feminine Fight Club or ignored entirely. Reitman and Cody’s commentary on present-day parenting feels potent and perceptive — the middle-aged portrait painted here is the funniest and most accurate of the later leg of his career.
4. The Front Runner
His first crack at historical features was the second part of Reitman’s substantial return to form — The Front Runner boasts his standard in sharp-edged wit and an ability to elicit sincere performances. The film briefly outlines an overlooked political failing and kindles its own thorny ethical debate without even trying.
Hugh Jackman, Vera Farmiga, J. K. Simmons and the rest of the immensely sprawling cast do justice to their respective figures and their screen time. Like the real story, Gary Hart’s point of view gets a little lost amongst the scandalous hubbub that surrounded and ultimately dismantled his political and personal life, but Reitman’s intelligently designed fall from grace punctuated by anticlimax is intentionally devised with disappointment and broad deliberation. The Front Runner is relevant, informative and unconventionally stimulating.
3. Thank You For Smoking
His debut made him an overnight wunderkind before Juno and Up in the Air confirmed him as a connoisseur of indie-ish filmmaking. Thank You For Smoking bears all the tricks of his trade yet to be put to their fullest use — lean adaptation, distinctive pop soundtracks, first-person narration, droll satire and sociopolitical commentary.
Aaron Eckhart’s performance as an expertly contentious tobacco lobbyist is an extraordinary calling card to his acting skills not associated with that one caped crusader movie. The film is tightly shot, trimly edited, scripted with bite and primed for mass consumption despite its uninviting premise. Thank You For Smoking pales in comparison to how prosperous Reitman’s creative career would become in just a few years but the film is charming just the same as an energetic progenitor of the director’s sustained vitality.
2. Juno
The reputation of Juno speaks for itself — it didn’t become a box office hit and an Academy favorite for no reason. Diablo Cody’s debut screenplay is a miracle of pure wit as well as an acute examination of hipster culture and the teenage psyche. The nonchalant attitude the script takes toward teen pregnancy is exactly what makes Juno so vivid and unassumingly mature.
Ellen Page will be forever known for her exquisitely sardonic titular role and she sings a saucy symphony via Cody’s oft-quoted dialogue. And J. K. Simmons — who has starred in some way in every single Reitman film — turns in his best performance of this filmography. The bohemian banter is all but iconic at this point and the soundtrack is as memorable as any Reitman has put together. If there’s one definitive teen comedy classic this side of the year 2000, it’s Juno.
1. Up in the Air
His 2009 masterpiece demonstrated many times over that Reitman is truly a director worthy of serious contemplation. First, in offering a pertinent commentary on American life in the 21st century, Up in the Air was incredibly timely and remains an indelible document of its time over a decade removed from the stock market collapse of 2008. George Clooney — as comfortably in tune with his dramatic chops as he was able to incite effortless charm — was never better as Ryan Bingham. Anna Kendrick and Vera Farmiga more than merited their respective nominations for Best Supporting Actress, plus Reitman’s accompanying playlist was his best to date — nimble, soothing and rewardingly melancholic.
In its entirety, Up in the Air bravely endeavors to answer an age-old and oft-ignored question: does it or does it not serve one better to live independently? In an adaptation of Walter Kirn’s 2001 novel of the same name, Reitman’s consideration of the dichotomy of isolation and personal connection is exhaustive and dynamic, offering an overabundance of stinging humor and genuine wisdom. Reitman’s cogent comedy-drama presents checkmate arguments for and against commitment only to conclude with all the painful uncertainty its title implies. Up in the Air is an impeccably edited, precisely scripted and wholly innovative take on the intricacies of contemporary relationships.
*Published at TheCinemaholic.com / December 22nd, 2018
9. Ghostbuster: Afterlife
Is this how you honor your father Jason, with rehashed, nostalgia-baiting bullshit? I know Ivan was alive during the production of Ghostbusters: Afterlife but post his father’s death he wants to engage in sequel superfluousness even more? This flick wasn’t even that bad but its final reel is one of the most textbook moments for why modern sequels (especially ones that insist on pacifying it’s core base at all costs) are absolute tripe. Sorry but Ghostbusters couldn’t make me cry is if I was born in the mid 70s.
It’s hard to call the lowest of low but damn, this isn’t how the mainstream should be opening back up to you. But you really haven’t made a great movie without Diablo Cody other than Up in the Air so it seems that peak is long past. I can’t believe Jason is still penning a sequel, especially since Reitman is no longer here to live up to or whatever. I can't imagine what's next since Afterlife barely resembles a feature film by its mawkish, manufactured end.
8. Men, Women & Children
Though Reitman’s most agreeable characteristics are intact — sensibly arranged needle drops, nuanced performances, punchy one-liners – Men, Women & Children finds the director grasping so desperately at profundity that his Altman-imitative narrative operates with the refinement of daytime television. Reitman often prides himself on adapting recent fiction but the 2011 Chad Kultgen novel could’ve been left on the shelf.
Apart from a touching tidbit of teenage love with Ansel Elgort and Kaitlyn Dever, every storyline is either a sitcom premise or a Lifetime movie outtake. Adam Sandler, Rosemarie DeWitt, Judy Greer, Jennifer Garner and Dean Norris contribute decent enough acting but none can salvage some of Reitman’s most artificial, hammy dialogue. Men, Women & Children masquerades as an intellectual dramedy teeming with social insight but it’s little more than a listless stream of soap opera B-plots. But for Reitman’s most preposterously pretentious film, Men, Women & Children is an uncommonly ambitious and frequently funny failure.
7. Labor Day
Striving to regain the Oscar spotlight once again, Reitman’s fifth project Labor Day would become his most forgotten film. The ignorance isn’t entirely justified however — Labor Day is contrived and melodramatic in its flimsiest passages but the Douglas Sirk impression is gently arresting when Reitman manages to overcome the tonal distortion.
Kate Winslet as a distraught single mother and Josh Brolin as a kindhearted prison escapee form a great on-screen match — the acting caliber of the leads capably communicates the sweetest case of Stockholm syndrome ever fictionalized. Reitman clearly aspired for something classically Old Hollywood with tangential genres fusing into a versatile piece of entertainment. Though far too uneven to consider an underrated effort, Labor Day’s romantic thriller period piece cocktail prospers from the play-acting, tense exchanges and domestic idealism.
6. Young Adult
Reitman’s least likable protagonist makes for perhaps his most difficult film to appreciate. Young Adult serves as both a blueprint for writer Diablo Cody to vent her bleakest trepidations as an aging screenwriter scripting tales of adolescence and a perfect vehicle for Charlize Theron to flaunt her adaptable talents.
Reitman’s filmography is speckled with patches of black humor — even though Young Adult’s tint is his darkest to date, he handily locates the comedy in mid-life misery. The challenging character study fortunately never asks for too much sympathy and performances by Theron, Patton Oswalt and Patrick Wilson keep things digestible while Cody probes the prickliest facets of maturation.
5. Tully
The first half of Reitman’s 2018 one-two punch marked his second collaboration with Charlize Theron and third with screenwriter Diablo Cody. Despite treading familiar ground, Tully finds Cody fleshing out further sketches of lost innocence as Reitman proves his directorial aptitude remains intact.
Tully essentially amends the maternity comedy of Juno with something more traditionally mature and nearly as shrewd. The final twist is a bit of a blunder but it can be taken as the feminine Fight Club or ignored entirely. Reitman and Cody’s commentary on present-day parenting feels potent and perceptive — the middle-aged portrait painted here is the funniest and most accurate of the later leg of his career.
4. The Front Runner
His first crack at historical features was the second part of Reitman’s substantial return to form — The Front Runner boasts his standard in sharp-edged wit and an ability to elicit sincere performances. The film briefly outlines an overlooked political failing and kindles its own thorny ethical debate without even trying.
Hugh Jackman, Vera Farmiga, J. K. Simmons and the rest of the immensely sprawling cast do justice to their respective figures and their screen time. Like the real story, Gary Hart’s point of view gets a little lost amongst the scandalous hubbub that surrounded and ultimately dismantled his political and personal life, but Reitman’s intelligently designed fall from grace punctuated by anticlimax is intentionally devised with disappointment and broad deliberation. The Front Runner is relevant, informative and unconventionally stimulating.
3. Thank You For Smoking
His debut made him an overnight wunderkind before Juno and Up in the Air confirmed him as a connoisseur of indie-ish filmmaking. Thank You For Smoking bears all the tricks of his trade yet to be put to their fullest use — lean adaptation, distinctive pop soundtracks, first-person narration, droll satire and sociopolitical commentary.
Aaron Eckhart’s performance as an expertly contentious tobacco lobbyist is an extraordinary calling card to his acting skills not associated with that one caped crusader movie. The film is tightly shot, trimly edited, scripted with bite and primed for mass consumption despite its uninviting premise. Thank You For Smoking pales in comparison to how prosperous Reitman’s creative career would become in just a few years but the film is charming just the same as an energetic progenitor of the director’s sustained vitality.
2. Juno
The reputation of Juno speaks for itself — it didn’t become a box office hit and an Academy favorite for no reason. Diablo Cody’s debut screenplay is a miracle of pure wit as well as an acute examination of hipster culture and the teenage psyche. The nonchalant attitude the script takes toward teen pregnancy is exactly what makes Juno so vivid and unassumingly mature.
Ellen Page will be forever known for her exquisitely sardonic titular role and she sings a saucy symphony via Cody’s oft-quoted dialogue. And J. K. Simmons — who has starred in some way in every single Reitman film — turns in his best performance of this filmography. The bohemian banter is all but iconic at this point and the soundtrack is as memorable as any Reitman has put together. If there’s one definitive teen comedy classic this side of the year 2000, it’s Juno.
1. Up in the Air
His 2009 masterpiece demonstrated many times over that Reitman is truly a director worthy of serious contemplation. First, in offering a pertinent commentary on American life in the 21st century, Up in the Air was incredibly timely and remains an indelible document of its time over a decade removed from the stock market collapse of 2008. George Clooney — as comfortably in tune with his dramatic chops as he was able to incite effortless charm — was never better as Ryan Bingham. Anna Kendrick and Vera Farmiga more than merited their respective nominations for Best Supporting Actress, plus Reitman’s accompanying playlist was his best to date — nimble, soothing and rewardingly melancholic.
In its entirety, Up in the Air bravely endeavors to answer an age-old and oft-ignored question: does it or does it not serve one better to live independently? In an adaptation of Walter Kirn’s 2001 novel of the same name, Reitman’s consideration of the dichotomy of isolation and personal connection is exhaustive and dynamic, offering an overabundance of stinging humor and genuine wisdom. Reitman’s cogent comedy-drama presents checkmate arguments for and against commitment only to conclude with all the painful uncertainty its title implies. Up in the Air is an impeccably edited, precisely scripted and wholly innovative take on the intricacies of contemporary relationships.
*Published at TheCinemaholic.com / December 22nd, 2018
The 10 Most Rewatchable Horror Movies
There are classics and then there are favorites no matter the sort of style – some of most cherished films are usually both. The contour of horror has always adapted to the fears of the time and place, yet the best are oftentimes the result of filmmakers who don’t capitalize on transitory trends but rather take something silly seriously. A few spawns of the most berated genre — one nevertheless emerging out of necessity every decade — are popular because they suck. Great horror leaves subtleties for numerous revisitations long after the scares are fresh. Here are ten of the most rewatchable horror films ever made which was sadly not enough room to include Rosemary’s Baby.
10. The Witch
The Witch is the only horror film this decade that will without doubt become a modern classic, if it hasn’t already — Robert Eggers' diabolical New England folktale is also one of the most impressive debuts of recent times irrespective of type. The production and costume detail, perfectionist cinematography, period-accurate dialogue and plausible performances congregate into an elegant historical film, devil goats and all. Add strands of feminism, fanaticism and coming-of-age and the painterly potency of The Witch is easily appointed to cinematic prestige.
9. Possession
Possession, the all too unseen 1981 film by Andrzej Żuławski, has nevertheless been deemed a fundamental viewing among horror junkies with passing decades. Żuławski’s haunted drama is marvelously shot, assigning a forcefully fluid realism to Lovecraftian puzzlement — the camera’s every movement is grounded and glorious, even the most elaborately ostentatious shots. The film is both obvious — in reality it’s a caustic dissection of divorce at its most demanding — and beautifully baffling. Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill as the married couple from hell are utterly devoted to playing the discontented, progressively psychotic cheater and the shell-shocked cuckold respectively.
8. American Psycho
Horror comedies needs a seat at the table here. While flicks like Young Frankenstein and Shaun of the Dead have their own substantiated right to recognition, American Psycho is a bravura expression of a true niche genre. Mary Harron‘s film bears a bracingly dedicated performance from a never better Christian Bale and wields a ravenously biting commentary on capitalism, classism and every other facet of excess defining America now and thirty years ago. You’re bound to obsessively quote Patrick Bateman ("Do you like Huey Lewis and The News?"), chortle hysterically at the black humor or become nonplussed by its brain-bending ending every time — only one of the 21st century’s paramount horror features could have that effect.
7. Carnival of Souls
Herk Harvey’s one and only impact on horror has aged exceptionally well, retaining all of its mercilessly mysterious value — if you’re going to create but a single film, it’d better be good enough to merit an entire career. Carnival of Souls is captivatingly exact, its imprint of guerrilla filmmaking set to maintain the film’s significance past the praise of David Lynch and George Romero. The populist mode of horror back then had been primarily preoccupied with B-movie classics — few films had been too experimental or, least of all, ethereally scary. Carnival of Souls’ tightly disciplined fable is a foremost, near-forgotten example horror's artistic potentiality as it stood in the early 1960s.
6. Psycho
The master of suspense’s one true horror film — sorry but The Birds doesn’t quite count — is the progenitor of the slasher and furthermore a sublime benchmark for challenging an audience. Illustrated flawlessly with extraordinary chiaroscuro, Psycho grasps at the more audacious functions waiting in a widely colorized age — impractical structure, intelligent twists, distorted morals and bewildering performances. Even against the seminal classics of an indispensable period of Hitchcock’s filmmaking (North By Northwest, Vertigo and Rear Window) Psycho is the most modern and fundamental of the director’s essence.
5. The Thing
One way or another, John Carpenter helped mold the shape of contemporary horror. Countless Carpenter films could have qualified for this list and many meet mandatory requirements for must-watch October favorites — minor classics like In the Mouth of Madness and They Live spring to mind alongside the quintessence of Halloween. The Thing just happens to be his most exquisite work, traversing across several subgenres in horror (apocalyptic, psychological, body, sci-fi) with deliberate stimulation once the terrifying premise begins to unfurl. The practical effects are a beloved testament to the era’s success through constraints — the film is the most justifiably cited source arguing the superiority of tangible efforts over computer-generated monsters. The supernatural guessing game is a sinister challenge to keep track of every time and The Thing is superb filmmaking by any definition.
4. Suspiria
A few movies by Mario Bava and Sergio Martino might have been in the running, but Dario Argento’s 1977 film Suspiria is the pinnacle, lasting work of the Italian Giallos. It’s a Technicolor masterpiece as ravishing as it is removed, exuberantly composed of opulent sets and splendidly saturated hues. Not very much performance, witchcraft or murder really takes place at the deadly coven dance academy, but the film’s languid pace and cheesy dubbing are part of the charm upheld by the vibrant anamorphic visuals and Goblin’s ghostly electronic score. Suspiria is kind of scary in select scenes yet its capacity to live up to revisits is founded on Jessica Harper’s innocent magnetism and Argento’s “so absurd, so fantastic” sense of aesthetically dictated direction.
3. Jaws
It’s not a horror movie that jumps to mind at the mention of the genre but Steven Spielberg’s only real foray into fearful waters is a watershed film achievement. Jaws was deemed the first blockbuster and is still outstanding as an indispensable testament to high concept American cinema. Spielberg came into his own as a world-changing talent and has rarely been the worse for wear — Jaws will always be one of the surest displays of his engrossing virtuosity. Though it becomes an adventure film partway through the predatory bloodshed, the tactile terror of the 1975 film has not subsided for almost half a century and never will thanks to Spielberg’s classic sensibilities.
2. The Exorcist
The “scariest movie ever made” would assumedly fall short of such an overblown reputation but even upon an umpteenth viewing there’s little evidence to say otherwise about The Exorcist. William Friedkin’s daring follow-up to The French Connection was a formative moment for both horror and the genre’s steady reputation as a respected corner of cinematic art. It remains one of the highest grossing domestic releases of all time (the second of its breed next to Jaws when adjusted for inflation) and was the first horror film to score a Best Picture nomination — it also holds up to damn near every component of its stature. The special effects are timeless, the scares stay strangely disturbing and the dynamic realization has an evenly invested interest in character and tension. The Exorcist is one of the clearest communications of evil and crises of faith in all of film, and making it a masterpiece and more.
1. The Shining
Stanley Kubrick’s uncompromising piece de resistance stands aside the precipice of filmmaking achievements. Horror or no, The Shining is a masterwork by any known measure, equal to and exceeding anything else in Kubrick’s prestigious repertoire. It’s simply the finest fusion of psychological and supernatural terror ever filmed. The loose Stephen King adaptation is also one of the most analyzed movies of all time — Room 237, along with more widely accepted interpretations, are evidence enough of this. The impossible architecture, formalist, spectacularly controlled cinematography and Jack Nicholson's timeless, priceless performance define The Shining as more than some ghost story or hypnogogic head-trip — its atmospheric spell can’t be undone once it's cast and the ceaseless maze never forms the same path twice. It’s horror’s most immortal moment.
*Published at TheCinemaholic.com / October 30th, 2018
10. The Witch
The Witch is the only horror film this decade that will without doubt become a modern classic, if it hasn’t already — Robert Eggers' diabolical New England folktale is also one of the most impressive debuts of recent times irrespective of type. The production and costume detail, perfectionist cinematography, period-accurate dialogue and plausible performances congregate into an elegant historical film, devil goats and all. Add strands of feminism, fanaticism and coming-of-age and the painterly potency of The Witch is easily appointed to cinematic prestige.
9. Possession
Possession, the all too unseen 1981 film by Andrzej Żuławski, has nevertheless been deemed a fundamental viewing among horror junkies with passing decades. Żuławski’s haunted drama is marvelously shot, assigning a forcefully fluid realism to Lovecraftian puzzlement — the camera’s every movement is grounded and glorious, even the most elaborately ostentatious shots. The film is both obvious — in reality it’s a caustic dissection of divorce at its most demanding — and beautifully baffling. Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill as the married couple from hell are utterly devoted to playing the discontented, progressively psychotic cheater and the shell-shocked cuckold respectively.
8. American Psycho
Horror comedies needs a seat at the table here. While flicks like Young Frankenstein and Shaun of the Dead have their own substantiated right to recognition, American Psycho is a bravura expression of a true niche genre. Mary Harron‘s film bears a bracingly dedicated performance from a never better Christian Bale and wields a ravenously biting commentary on capitalism, classism and every other facet of excess defining America now and thirty years ago. You’re bound to obsessively quote Patrick Bateman ("Do you like Huey Lewis and The News?"), chortle hysterically at the black humor or become nonplussed by its brain-bending ending every time — only one of the 21st century’s paramount horror features could have that effect.
7. Carnival of Souls
Herk Harvey’s one and only impact on horror has aged exceptionally well, retaining all of its mercilessly mysterious value — if you’re going to create but a single film, it’d better be good enough to merit an entire career. Carnival of Souls is captivatingly exact, its imprint of guerrilla filmmaking set to maintain the film’s significance past the praise of David Lynch and George Romero. The populist mode of horror back then had been primarily preoccupied with B-movie classics — few films had been too experimental or, least of all, ethereally scary. Carnival of Souls’ tightly disciplined fable is a foremost, near-forgotten example horror's artistic potentiality as it stood in the early 1960s.
6. Psycho
The master of suspense’s one true horror film — sorry but The Birds doesn’t quite count — is the progenitor of the slasher and furthermore a sublime benchmark for challenging an audience. Illustrated flawlessly with extraordinary chiaroscuro, Psycho grasps at the more audacious functions waiting in a widely colorized age — impractical structure, intelligent twists, distorted morals and bewildering performances. Even against the seminal classics of an indispensable period of Hitchcock’s filmmaking (North By Northwest, Vertigo and Rear Window) Psycho is the most modern and fundamental of the director’s essence.
5. The Thing
One way or another, John Carpenter helped mold the shape of contemporary horror. Countless Carpenter films could have qualified for this list and many meet mandatory requirements for must-watch October favorites — minor classics like In the Mouth of Madness and They Live spring to mind alongside the quintessence of Halloween. The Thing just happens to be his most exquisite work, traversing across several subgenres in horror (apocalyptic, psychological, body, sci-fi) with deliberate stimulation once the terrifying premise begins to unfurl. The practical effects are a beloved testament to the era’s success through constraints — the film is the most justifiably cited source arguing the superiority of tangible efforts over computer-generated monsters. The supernatural guessing game is a sinister challenge to keep track of every time and The Thing is superb filmmaking by any definition.
4. Suspiria
A few movies by Mario Bava and Sergio Martino might have been in the running, but Dario Argento’s 1977 film Suspiria is the pinnacle, lasting work of the Italian Giallos. It’s a Technicolor masterpiece as ravishing as it is removed, exuberantly composed of opulent sets and splendidly saturated hues. Not very much performance, witchcraft or murder really takes place at the deadly coven dance academy, but the film’s languid pace and cheesy dubbing are part of the charm upheld by the vibrant anamorphic visuals and Goblin’s ghostly electronic score. Suspiria is kind of scary in select scenes yet its capacity to live up to revisits is founded on Jessica Harper’s innocent magnetism and Argento’s “so absurd, so fantastic” sense of aesthetically dictated direction.
3. Jaws
It’s not a horror movie that jumps to mind at the mention of the genre but Steven Spielberg’s only real foray into fearful waters is a watershed film achievement. Jaws was deemed the first blockbuster and is still outstanding as an indispensable testament to high concept American cinema. Spielberg came into his own as a world-changing talent and has rarely been the worse for wear — Jaws will always be one of the surest displays of his engrossing virtuosity. Though it becomes an adventure film partway through the predatory bloodshed, the tactile terror of the 1975 film has not subsided for almost half a century and never will thanks to Spielberg’s classic sensibilities.
2. The Exorcist
The “scariest movie ever made” would assumedly fall short of such an overblown reputation but even upon an umpteenth viewing there’s little evidence to say otherwise about The Exorcist. William Friedkin’s daring follow-up to The French Connection was a formative moment for both horror and the genre’s steady reputation as a respected corner of cinematic art. It remains one of the highest grossing domestic releases of all time (the second of its breed next to Jaws when adjusted for inflation) and was the first horror film to score a Best Picture nomination — it also holds up to damn near every component of its stature. The special effects are timeless, the scares stay strangely disturbing and the dynamic realization has an evenly invested interest in character and tension. The Exorcist is one of the clearest communications of evil and crises of faith in all of film, and making it a masterpiece and more.
1. The Shining
Stanley Kubrick’s uncompromising piece de resistance stands aside the precipice of filmmaking achievements. Horror or no, The Shining is a masterwork by any known measure, equal to and exceeding anything else in Kubrick’s prestigious repertoire. It’s simply the finest fusion of psychological and supernatural terror ever filmed. The loose Stephen King adaptation is also one of the most analyzed movies of all time — Room 237, along with more widely accepted interpretations, are evidence enough of this. The impossible architecture, formalist, spectacularly controlled cinematography and Jack Nicholson's timeless, priceless performance define The Shining as more than some ghost story or hypnogogic head-trip — its atmospheric spell can’t be undone once it's cast and the ceaseless maze never forms the same path twice. It’s horror’s most immortal moment.
*Published at TheCinemaholic.com / October 30th, 2018
Every Satoshi Kon Film Ranked
He had just a smattering of movies to his name by the time of his death but Satoshi Kon was nevertheless one of the most significant and treasured anime filmmakers ever to live. After working as a writer and animator in the early to mid 90s — most notably for his contributions to Katsuhiro Otomo’s anthology film Memories — he made his directorial debut in 1997 with his outstanding magnum opus Perfect Blue. In under a decade he had established himself as one of Japan’s most fertile creative minds.
His cinematic output is without a sour apple in the bunch — every one of his features could be referred to as a masterpiece, not to mention his celebrated experimental television series Paranoia Agent. Kon died in 2010 shortly after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer — this left Dreaming Machine, his fifth film project, incomplete. With less than half of the project finished, lack of continued financing and a suitable replacement director sealed the undertaking as perpetually unfulfilled. His short film Ohayo is Kon’s last complete work to date and a bittersweet farewell to his invaluable cultural offerings as a virtuoso of animation and filmmaking on the whole.
4. Tokyo Godfathers
The easiest feature of Kon’s to overlook is one of his most visually and perceptively sophisticated. While the rest of his work concentrates chiefly upon wholesome, conflicted heroines maintaining multiple lives, Tokyo Godfathers instead fixates on a band of derelict misfits and the foibles and synchronicities of their attempt to keep an abandoned newborn alive and returned safely to its mother at the turn of the New Year. Kon chooses a less plot-centric mode built on coincidence, aiding the themes of tragedy and familial relations in the process.
A gruff, aging alcoholic gambler, a transgender woman longing for a motherly role and a smart-mouthed runaway teenage girl make for a defective family unit, but their true temperaments come forth when faced with the responsibility of looking after the adorable foundling Kiyoko. Despite the dirty realism of their situation, humor is more prevalent here than in the rest of Kon’s filmography, stemming from the discordant personalities and heated hijinks. Even with the grim plight of homelessness as its focus, Tokyo Godfathers' unpredictable flippancy is not at all grating. All three main characters are aloof regarding both their path to destitution and their deficiencies, and they are all the more interesting to watch in turn.
3. Millennium Actress
Simultaneously his most heartfelt and heart-wrenching picture, Kon’s follow-up to his initial electrifying masterwork was a clean dive right back into the juxtaposition of entertainment and reality, albeit with an entirely altered attitude.
A documentary filmmaker and his cameraman are whisked through an aged starlet's autobiographical blur of melancholic memories and moving performances. Based partly on Japanese actresses Setsuko Hara and Hideko Takamine, Millennium Actress’s premise comfortably lends textbook opportunities for Kon to explore his most essential themes and employ some of his most clever cutting. The film twists the irony of experiencing hardship only to later pretend to onscreen into a knot nearly as tight as the one he tied in Perfect Blue, just with heightened tenderness and far less psychosomatic anguish.
Paprika would briefly touch on the power of movies through one character but Millennium Actress undoubtedly investigates and cherishes the role of cinema and the parallel it forms with our own lives — no matter if we are the rosy-cheeked heroine of the tale or a wide-eyed member of the audience, we all play a part somehow. The simplest of storytelling elements — a mysterious key belonging to an anonymous companion of our younger leading lady — drives the burning emotions of Kon’s most sympathetic, sentimental and quaintly delightful film.
2. Paprika
The final and most jubilantly vibrant film of Kon’s career was released four years before his untimely death at age 46, but Paprika remains a most exorbitantly visionary final fragment of a transient yet prolific filmography. Kon borrowed from The Matrix before Christopher Nolan took a big chunk out of the cinematic fibers of Paprika for his own dreamscape Inception.
The world of the dream in anime, however, is much more intuitively surrealist than Nolan’s logic-bound mind-heist flick. While not anywhere near the endless exposition of Nolan’s otherwise impressive blockbuster feat, Paprika is similarly a smidge too heavy on narrative for its own good, at least at first. Largely Paprika is exhilarating for the way the filmmaker’s unhinged imagination is permitted to burst forth into a borderless visual playground — as Kon’s feature length swan song, the film cemented his unshakable vision as well as career-defining themes.
Kon thoroughly examines his chosen proclivities — drawing characters living various lives, merging fantasy and verisimilitude together and trimming the fabric of cinema’s time and space to his own kinetic, psychedelic liking. But the final moments of Paprika concede an unmistakable love for moviegoing, explicitly communicating that the correlation between delving into our own imagination through our dreams and discerning the textures and sensations of a great film are synonymous. It is a lovely parting thought.
1. Perfect Blue
Kon’s debut is as close to flawlessness as its title implies. Strictly concerning technical prowess, Perfect Blue is a spectacular demonstration of his faultless editing and mind-boggling match cuts. It is also his darkest and most dynamically exhaustive film, weaving psychological drama and whodunit horror into a head-spinning character study of the highest order. Perfect Blue is a monumental achievement for modern anime, feminist studies, the genre of blistering thrillers and the scope of feature films in general. It’s no wonder Darren Aronofsky lifted many portions of the film for Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan.
Over the course of its fiercely sharp 80 minutes, Perfect Blue dissects the dangerous mania of celebrity obsession and the precariousness of career conversions through pop star turned actress Mima, which offers articulate subtext on the exploitation of women. And of course the film completely erases the line between actuality and fiction — the slow fracturing of Mima’s mental state vexes your brain more than the unfixed artistry presented in Paprika. Perfect Blue is a frightening film and a masterful mind game.
Meticulously designed meaning waits at the turn of each scene and every cut is a narrative idea in motion. Ingenious, scintillating and disquieting, Perfect Blue is an unforgettable display of precision and excellence from a diligent, irreplaceable filmmaking authority.
*Published at TheCinemaholic.com / October 17th, 2018
His cinematic output is without a sour apple in the bunch — every one of his features could be referred to as a masterpiece, not to mention his celebrated experimental television series Paranoia Agent. Kon died in 2010 shortly after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer — this left Dreaming Machine, his fifth film project, incomplete. With less than half of the project finished, lack of continued financing and a suitable replacement director sealed the undertaking as perpetually unfulfilled. His short film Ohayo is Kon’s last complete work to date and a bittersweet farewell to his invaluable cultural offerings as a virtuoso of animation and filmmaking on the whole.
4. Tokyo Godfathers
The easiest feature of Kon’s to overlook is one of his most visually and perceptively sophisticated. While the rest of his work concentrates chiefly upon wholesome, conflicted heroines maintaining multiple lives, Tokyo Godfathers instead fixates on a band of derelict misfits and the foibles and synchronicities of their attempt to keep an abandoned newborn alive and returned safely to its mother at the turn of the New Year. Kon chooses a less plot-centric mode built on coincidence, aiding the themes of tragedy and familial relations in the process.
A gruff, aging alcoholic gambler, a transgender woman longing for a motherly role and a smart-mouthed runaway teenage girl make for a defective family unit, but their true temperaments come forth when faced with the responsibility of looking after the adorable foundling Kiyoko. Despite the dirty realism of their situation, humor is more prevalent here than in the rest of Kon’s filmography, stemming from the discordant personalities and heated hijinks. Even with the grim plight of homelessness as its focus, Tokyo Godfathers' unpredictable flippancy is not at all grating. All three main characters are aloof regarding both their path to destitution and their deficiencies, and they are all the more interesting to watch in turn.
3. Millennium Actress
Simultaneously his most heartfelt and heart-wrenching picture, Kon’s follow-up to his initial electrifying masterwork was a clean dive right back into the juxtaposition of entertainment and reality, albeit with an entirely altered attitude.
A documentary filmmaker and his cameraman are whisked through an aged starlet's autobiographical blur of melancholic memories and moving performances. Based partly on Japanese actresses Setsuko Hara and Hideko Takamine, Millennium Actress’s premise comfortably lends textbook opportunities for Kon to explore his most essential themes and employ some of his most clever cutting. The film twists the irony of experiencing hardship only to later pretend to onscreen into a knot nearly as tight as the one he tied in Perfect Blue, just with heightened tenderness and far less psychosomatic anguish.
Paprika would briefly touch on the power of movies through one character but Millennium Actress undoubtedly investigates and cherishes the role of cinema and the parallel it forms with our own lives — no matter if we are the rosy-cheeked heroine of the tale or a wide-eyed member of the audience, we all play a part somehow. The simplest of storytelling elements — a mysterious key belonging to an anonymous companion of our younger leading lady — drives the burning emotions of Kon’s most sympathetic, sentimental and quaintly delightful film.
2. Paprika
The final and most jubilantly vibrant film of Kon’s career was released four years before his untimely death at age 46, but Paprika remains a most exorbitantly visionary final fragment of a transient yet prolific filmography. Kon borrowed from The Matrix before Christopher Nolan took a big chunk out of the cinematic fibers of Paprika for his own dreamscape Inception.
The world of the dream in anime, however, is much more intuitively surrealist than Nolan’s logic-bound mind-heist flick. While not anywhere near the endless exposition of Nolan’s otherwise impressive blockbuster feat, Paprika is similarly a smidge too heavy on narrative for its own good, at least at first. Largely Paprika is exhilarating for the way the filmmaker’s unhinged imagination is permitted to burst forth into a borderless visual playground — as Kon’s feature length swan song, the film cemented his unshakable vision as well as career-defining themes.
Kon thoroughly examines his chosen proclivities — drawing characters living various lives, merging fantasy and verisimilitude together and trimming the fabric of cinema’s time and space to his own kinetic, psychedelic liking. But the final moments of Paprika concede an unmistakable love for moviegoing, explicitly communicating that the correlation between delving into our own imagination through our dreams and discerning the textures and sensations of a great film are synonymous. It is a lovely parting thought.
1. Perfect Blue
Kon’s debut is as close to flawlessness as its title implies. Strictly concerning technical prowess, Perfect Blue is a spectacular demonstration of his faultless editing and mind-boggling match cuts. It is also his darkest and most dynamically exhaustive film, weaving psychological drama and whodunit horror into a head-spinning character study of the highest order. Perfect Blue is a monumental achievement for modern anime, feminist studies, the genre of blistering thrillers and the scope of feature films in general. It’s no wonder Darren Aronofsky lifted many portions of the film for Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan.
Over the course of its fiercely sharp 80 minutes, Perfect Blue dissects the dangerous mania of celebrity obsession and the precariousness of career conversions through pop star turned actress Mima, which offers articulate subtext on the exploitation of women. And of course the film completely erases the line between actuality and fiction — the slow fracturing of Mima’s mental state vexes your brain more than the unfixed artistry presented in Paprika. Perfect Blue is a frightening film and a masterful mind game.
Meticulously designed meaning waits at the turn of each scene and every cut is a narrative idea in motion. Ingenious, scintillating and disquieting, Perfect Blue is an unforgettable display of precision and excellence from a diligent, irreplaceable filmmaking authority.
*Published at TheCinemaholic.com / October 17th, 2018
Every Mission: Impossible Film Ranked
Often overshadowed by the likes of James Bond and Jason Bourne, Ethan Hunt isn’t generally thought of as a true icon of the spy thriller genre. But beyond Tom Cruise’s nonstop quest to quench his ego, he's produced and starred in one of the most consistently satisfying action film series of the past few decades.
Though they’ve evolved — or devolved, depending how you feel about it — from spy films to set-piece-invoking narratives that rival many a Fast & Furious movie in pure action revelry, Cruise has always had his sights on delivering lip-smacking blockbusters.
The series’ enduring popularity through its many gaps between entries has been pivotal for Cruise’s many career avenues. Early success led him to challenge himself with taxing roles in films by Stanley Kubrick and Paul Thomas Anderson. Mission: Impossible’s resurgence last decade also sustained his waning box office credibility — see underperformers like Oblivion, Edge of Tomorrow and The Mummy.
The man simply wants to entertain and that’s why he keeps it all going. Until the final two films are unmasked, here’s how the impossible missions stack up so far.
6. Mission: Impossible 2
If this otherwise solid series has one real stinker, it’s obviously John Woo’s Mission: Impossible 2. Never has Cruise been smugger, the romance more forced and the unintentional humor so prevalent.
Woo is a visually dynamic director but this surprisingly dull film doesn’t allow his indulgence to shine through until a most agreeably macho final act, which peaks out with a Cruise staple of gnarly motorcycle stunts. Robert Towne's script has nothing of consequence for Woo to go all-out and work where he thrives best — Hard-Boiled this is not. When Woo actually does get to employ his trademark show-stopping slow motion, we can really see how poorly this Mission has aged since the subsequent era of quick-cut action has made us very cognizant of the fakery of stunt fighting.
Hans Zimmer’s long-winded, guitar-laden score hardly works the way it does in The Dark Knight or Inception when the majority of the picture doesn’t feature anything intense or suspenseful. Despite selling his part in an insane Western standoff for the ending showdown, our villain, Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott), is a crudely undeveloped part of the story. Ambrose is the most prominent villain of the series and also one of the worst.
The dialogue is either dutiful or terribly uninspired, especially anything between Cruise and Thandie Newton, whose on-screen romance is rushed and utterly unconvincing. Newton, while still playing what appears to be a strong female character as thief Nyah Nordoff-Hall, is objectified more than any actress in the franchise and the script is startlingly sexist even when she’s off-camera. Nyah is a link of infatuation between Hunt and Ambrose — this story element may pay homage to Notorious rather slyly but it doesn’t have the complexity to suffice now in the new millennium.
Mission: Impossible III would only continue to prove that exploiting a stock love interest to heighten the stakes does not make Hunt noble or relatable. Hunt has always been much less sexually motivated for being otherwise Bond-like, and Ethan’s best entries have been the one’s with the fewest romantic threads. Cruise’s weak character motivations, discount Simon Pegg (actually John Polson in a thankless role) and the unwelcome establishment of Ving Rhames' Luther Stickell as a mainstay all help signal Mission: Impossible 2 as the clear low point for the franchise.
5. Mission: Impossible III
The directorial debut of J. J. Abrams is the most difficult Mission to evaluate — it has so much going for it, yet a number of frustrating detractors.
Foremost, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Owen Davian is the best villain ever to oppose Ethan Hunt — Hoffman is frankly too good for the material and his presence is superbly intimidating. The film is also feverishly frenetic once it gets going and it would be specious to say its energy doesn’t pay off quite a few times. From the Vatican mission to the big bad bridge sequence to Ethan’s detainment and escape from IMF, the second act of III is one of the most exciting portions of the series.
The film’s lightning-like pace is both an asset and a crutch. First, both the anticlimactic finale — in which Hunt, with an explosive charge in his brain, is comically brought down to Davian’s skill at fisticuffs — and the early Berlin extraction coast on choppy editing, Abram’s transfixing color saturation and Michael Giacchino’s amped score.
Not to mention the actual retrieval of the laziest MacGuffin in the franchise is a classic case of blue-balling an audience. There is a crescendo of tension when Hunt is about to attempt a maniacal skyscraper jump in order to nab the Rabbit’s Foot in time to save his new bride Julia (Michelle Monaghan) — but after he lands, the most important moment in the film happens off-screen. While a crazy heist occurs elsewhere, the completely expendable extra team members (Maggie Q and Jonathan Rhys Meyers) are given some worthless dialogue as we watch III essentially shrug off its narrative crux. For as much as III gives you, it’s always compensating for weaknesses in story and structure.
By straining to escalate a sense of danger by way of a serious love interest stuck in peril, the film doubles down on damsel-in-distress clichés. Mission: Impossible III thinks it can make Hunt more human with a wife to rescue but it’s an emotional folly just like with his ill-fated protégé (Keri Russell). The most interesting female roles can be found in all the superior entries specifically because they come off like actual people and not just helpless eye candy.
4. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation
The worst thing I can say about the fifth Mission: Impossible is it has no particular flavor. Although Robert Elswit’s carryover work from Ghost Protocol does not go amiss with his sleek, sumptuous cinematography, this is still the least visually idiosyncratic entry. It’s missing some identity but it’s still remarkable how much Rogue Nation gets right otherwise.
The opera scene is on par with the sensational heights the series has scaled to date. The second act double whammy of action — the underwater sequence followed by the high-speed car and motorcycle chases — is a fine execution of the formula laid down by the past two films. Cruise shows no real signs of wear and tear — in fact in those moments just mentioned it’s clear despite his age Cruise will never stop trying to top himself. It’s been an admirable obsession of his to watch play out and one that thankfully has never become embarrassing.
Pegg is fully locked in as an essential piece of the supporting cast (he’s practically second bill) and, most importantly, we were blessed with the franchise's strongest female character to date in Rebecca Ferguson as British Intelligence agent Ilsa Faust. The most shifty of Mission's femme fatales is a physical equal to Cruise as well as Hunt's most platonic leading female counterpart — her character only develops further in Fallout.
Director Christopher McQuarrie's script makes mostly smart choices but he doesn’t know what to do with certain actors like Jeremy Renner, whose role is unfortunately reduced after his substantial presence in Ghost Protocol. Alec Baldwin had some room to grow in this film’s sequel but before he’s finally deemed Secretary of the IMF his character is simply a roadblock for Hunt among a much more interesting plot, just like Laurence Fishburne was in M:i:III. Rhames also makes an unwelcome return to the main cast, huffing and puffing his way through these new movies — isn’t it curious that the stronger films are usually the ones with less Luther?
At worst, Rogue Nation plays like a greatest hits record while also unwisely blowing smoke with lines like “this could very well be our last mission” and “Hunt is the living manifestation of destiny.” But McQuarrie does a bang up job following the promising partnership with Cruise displayed in the old school actioner Jack Reacher. McQuarrie’s unprecedented and skillful return to the director’s chair in Fallout justified many of his choices here — with Rogue Nation alone, however, he gave us a worthwhile spy thriller update and a strong Mission: Impossible film to boot.
3. Mission: Impossible
Aged now to the point of seeming quaint to our altered blockbuster standards, Brian De Palma’s stimulating inception to the franchise in 1996 set a fine benchmark for future installments to try to surpass.
Cruise, a fan of the original television series as a young boy, worked with Paramount to get this project off the ground after thinking the property could make for a good film. This was the first feature for Cruise’s new production company — even though the road has been bumpy in developing sequels in the new millennia, the box office results of this film and its sequel would solidify Mission: Impossible’s place in modern pop culture.
In many ways this is the only film of the series that feels like an honest spy film, especially since stunts promptly replaced the sleuthing. Aside from the finale and the bloody opening mission wherein Hunt appears to have lost his whole team, the film plays out with calculated restraint. De Palma turns the tension up notch by notch with sparing but effective Dutch angles and flowing crane shots — there is a palpable sense of paranoia. The movie’s plot device almost seems like a cliché now that so many spy films — Bourne, Bond and even Atomic Blonde recently — have used a secret list of undercover agents for the routine MacGuffin. But the most famous scene of the franchise — the silent heist at CIA headquarters — still holds up as a classic sequence and brilliantly counterintuitive thriller moment. You can still feel yourself hold your breath as it unfolds.
Emmanuelle Béart makes for a fine femme fatale alongside respected actors like Jon Voight, Vanessa Redgrave and Kirsten Scott Thomas who all legitimize otherwise hokey dialogue. De Palma makes the most out of the appropriately convoluted material — like the best Mission: Impossible films, the storyline is dense enough to obscure how silly it is but not so impenetrable that audiences are lost in confusion. Some installments are more simply constructed depending on how much their action sequences consume the runtime, but the original Mission: Impossible uniquely utilizes neo-noir elements in order to beguile and titillate.
2. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
Streamlined enough for newcomers whilst signaling a culmination of the entire series thus far for devoted fans, Fallout is a perfect distillation of the Mission: Impossible blueprint.
McQuarrie marks the first director to come back for another Mission and he changes his tune accordingly for those anticipating the expected variation in style. A new cinematographer in Rob Hardy (Ex Machina, Annihilation) and a shift in composers with Lorne Balfe (right hand man of Hans Zimmer) lend momentous weightiness and epic scope to this sixth entry. Fallout is the darkest Mission yet — mostly due to a few effective dream sequences — but McQuarrie doesn’t compromise the grandiosity of the massive stakes by shortchanging the exhilaration, gadgetry and fun these films have become synonymous with.
Despite a loose overarching chronology, this is the first Mission film you could call a direct sequel, though Fallout neatly stands on its own merits. The connections to previous Mission: Impossible films are evident throughout, yet McQuarrie doesn’t lean heavily on homage or on Rogue Nation’s groundwork in order to justify the latest continuation of the 22-year-old series. The opening sting is a brilliant update of the franchise’s first scene and Vanessa Kirby’s White Widow is an intriguing take on a past character — the next generation of sensual, sinister arms dealers following Vanessa Redgrave’s Max. Certain stunts recall 2’s best moments (freehand rock-climbing, motorcycling) while Monaghan's return elevates the film’s emotional content far more than she was able to in III. The elongated set pieces and nuclear threats echo Ghost Protocol and our returning players from Rogue Nation — Sean Harris’ Solomon Lane, Ferguson’s Faust and Baldwin’s Alan Hunley — all flesh out their characters beyond types.
But who could deny Fallout’s distinct successes? Any one of the film’s visceral action sequences — the Halo Jump, the bathroom brawl, the extraction of Lane — rest aside the series’ best. The implementation of mask gimmicks has never been more respectable; for once the twists may have the capacity to fool you. Henry Cavill’s August Walker — sporting the mustache that was worth dismantling the DCEU for — provides a genuinely imposing physical foe for Cruise to square off against. Best of all, as M:I films typically lose steam by their final act, Fallout delivers arguably the most satisfying climax of the franchise. McQuarrie reportedly had trouble figuring out the ending to Rogue Nation but he assumes utter confidence everywhere in Fallout, particularly in the IMAX-shot helicopter-based finale. He manages to take worn out tropes — endless double crosses, Cruise’s affinity for sprinting and, most obviously, a ticking clock element — and churn out ludicrously pleasurable cinematic moments.
Fallout is so ambitiously unrestrained that it could easily make you long for the simplicity of earlier entries. Nevertheless the film’s passionate execution cements the series’ reputation as the gold standard in spy fare. The execution of practical action continues to be awe-inspiring and, though he’s nearly pushing 60, Cruise remains a wunderkind of adrenaline-starved recklessness.
1. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
Brad Bird’s live action directorial debut enriched what had previously been a mixed bag of Cruise vanity projects and justified the Mission: Impossible series through and through with its most outstanding installment. Along with its strong sequels, Ghost Protocol became the first evident proof that this franchise had somehow improved over time to stand as the most enjoyable action saga of our time.
Ghost Protocol, the fourth entry from 2011, is the most gratifying and stimulating enterainment you could ask from this genre. The film exhibits more humor than ever as Pegg’s always amusing Benji was wisely incorporated into the main cast. The gadgetry is perhaps at its most impulsive with hyper-modern spyware on display as much as unreliable tech. If not for several other reasons — like the use of vertigo-inducing IMAX cameras — the scaling of the Burj Khalifa becomes even more dizzying when Hunt’s adhesive gloves malfunction partway through his climb outside of the world’s tallest building.
The nuclear-era, Cold War throwback premise seemed old-fashioned several years ago, but amidst the U.S.’s currently tempestuous relationship with Eastern powers Ghost Protocol has become more contemporary than ever before. With a nuclear extremist in need of neutralization (the late Michael Nyqvist as the shadowy Kurt Hendricks), the plot is finally more or less believable and the stakes are crystal clear.
Renner and Paula Patton make for the best collaborators of the always-assembled team. The former disregard for active supporting players separates Ghost Protocol from the rest of the films — this is closest thing to a true ensemble film the Mission: Impossible movies have produced. For once, Cruise dials back his place at center frame to let the other characters serve a more vital role in the outcome of the plot. Of course Cruise takes care of the biggest scenes himself but for a series that almost always treats the supplemental cast as disposable, it’s so refreshing that we come to like every member individually and in their camaraderie.
Ghost Protocol revels in tampering with semi-self-awareness — the reliable comic relief and added cheek adjusts the underlying tone to a temperament consistent with how ridiculous these films actually are. Bird’s directorial tightrope walk between borderline cartoonish action spectacle and some level of realism coalesces in an entry that feels like everything a Moore-era Bond movie — or really any of those extremely corny, gizmo-fueled yarns — ever aspired to.
Ghost Protocol is the coolest mission to date and just another episode — it perfectly epitomizes the timeless appeal of this series and the strength of the genre Mission: Impossible has so nimbly augmented.
*Old version published at TasteofCinema.com
Though they’ve evolved — or devolved, depending how you feel about it — from spy films to set-piece-invoking narratives that rival many a Fast & Furious movie in pure action revelry, Cruise has always had his sights on delivering lip-smacking blockbusters.
The series’ enduring popularity through its many gaps between entries has been pivotal for Cruise’s many career avenues. Early success led him to challenge himself with taxing roles in films by Stanley Kubrick and Paul Thomas Anderson. Mission: Impossible’s resurgence last decade also sustained his waning box office credibility — see underperformers like Oblivion, Edge of Tomorrow and The Mummy.
The man simply wants to entertain and that’s why he keeps it all going. Until the final two films are unmasked, here’s how the impossible missions stack up so far.
6. Mission: Impossible 2
If this otherwise solid series has one real stinker, it’s obviously John Woo’s Mission: Impossible 2. Never has Cruise been smugger, the romance more forced and the unintentional humor so prevalent.
Woo is a visually dynamic director but this surprisingly dull film doesn’t allow his indulgence to shine through until a most agreeably macho final act, which peaks out with a Cruise staple of gnarly motorcycle stunts. Robert Towne's script has nothing of consequence for Woo to go all-out and work where he thrives best — Hard-Boiled this is not. When Woo actually does get to employ his trademark show-stopping slow motion, we can really see how poorly this Mission has aged since the subsequent era of quick-cut action has made us very cognizant of the fakery of stunt fighting.
Hans Zimmer’s long-winded, guitar-laden score hardly works the way it does in The Dark Knight or Inception when the majority of the picture doesn’t feature anything intense or suspenseful. Despite selling his part in an insane Western standoff for the ending showdown, our villain, Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott), is a crudely undeveloped part of the story. Ambrose is the most prominent villain of the series and also one of the worst.
The dialogue is either dutiful or terribly uninspired, especially anything between Cruise and Thandie Newton, whose on-screen romance is rushed and utterly unconvincing. Newton, while still playing what appears to be a strong female character as thief Nyah Nordoff-Hall, is objectified more than any actress in the franchise and the script is startlingly sexist even when she’s off-camera. Nyah is a link of infatuation between Hunt and Ambrose — this story element may pay homage to Notorious rather slyly but it doesn’t have the complexity to suffice now in the new millennium.
Mission: Impossible III would only continue to prove that exploiting a stock love interest to heighten the stakes does not make Hunt noble or relatable. Hunt has always been much less sexually motivated for being otherwise Bond-like, and Ethan’s best entries have been the one’s with the fewest romantic threads. Cruise’s weak character motivations, discount Simon Pegg (actually John Polson in a thankless role) and the unwelcome establishment of Ving Rhames' Luther Stickell as a mainstay all help signal Mission: Impossible 2 as the clear low point for the franchise.
5. Mission: Impossible III
The directorial debut of J. J. Abrams is the most difficult Mission to evaluate — it has so much going for it, yet a number of frustrating detractors.
Foremost, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Owen Davian is the best villain ever to oppose Ethan Hunt — Hoffman is frankly too good for the material and his presence is superbly intimidating. The film is also feverishly frenetic once it gets going and it would be specious to say its energy doesn’t pay off quite a few times. From the Vatican mission to the big bad bridge sequence to Ethan’s detainment and escape from IMF, the second act of III is one of the most exciting portions of the series.
The film’s lightning-like pace is both an asset and a crutch. First, both the anticlimactic finale — in which Hunt, with an explosive charge in his brain, is comically brought down to Davian’s skill at fisticuffs — and the early Berlin extraction coast on choppy editing, Abram’s transfixing color saturation and Michael Giacchino’s amped score.
Not to mention the actual retrieval of the laziest MacGuffin in the franchise is a classic case of blue-balling an audience. There is a crescendo of tension when Hunt is about to attempt a maniacal skyscraper jump in order to nab the Rabbit’s Foot in time to save his new bride Julia (Michelle Monaghan) — but after he lands, the most important moment in the film happens off-screen. While a crazy heist occurs elsewhere, the completely expendable extra team members (Maggie Q and Jonathan Rhys Meyers) are given some worthless dialogue as we watch III essentially shrug off its narrative crux. For as much as III gives you, it’s always compensating for weaknesses in story and structure.
By straining to escalate a sense of danger by way of a serious love interest stuck in peril, the film doubles down on damsel-in-distress clichés. Mission: Impossible III thinks it can make Hunt more human with a wife to rescue but it’s an emotional folly just like with his ill-fated protégé (Keri Russell). The most interesting female roles can be found in all the superior entries specifically because they come off like actual people and not just helpless eye candy.
4. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation
The worst thing I can say about the fifth Mission: Impossible is it has no particular flavor. Although Robert Elswit’s carryover work from Ghost Protocol does not go amiss with his sleek, sumptuous cinematography, this is still the least visually idiosyncratic entry. It’s missing some identity but it’s still remarkable how much Rogue Nation gets right otherwise.
The opera scene is on par with the sensational heights the series has scaled to date. The second act double whammy of action — the underwater sequence followed by the high-speed car and motorcycle chases — is a fine execution of the formula laid down by the past two films. Cruise shows no real signs of wear and tear — in fact in those moments just mentioned it’s clear despite his age Cruise will never stop trying to top himself. It’s been an admirable obsession of his to watch play out and one that thankfully has never become embarrassing.
Pegg is fully locked in as an essential piece of the supporting cast (he’s practically second bill) and, most importantly, we were blessed with the franchise's strongest female character to date in Rebecca Ferguson as British Intelligence agent Ilsa Faust. The most shifty of Mission's femme fatales is a physical equal to Cruise as well as Hunt's most platonic leading female counterpart — her character only develops further in Fallout.
Director Christopher McQuarrie's script makes mostly smart choices but he doesn’t know what to do with certain actors like Jeremy Renner, whose role is unfortunately reduced after his substantial presence in Ghost Protocol. Alec Baldwin had some room to grow in this film’s sequel but before he’s finally deemed Secretary of the IMF his character is simply a roadblock for Hunt among a much more interesting plot, just like Laurence Fishburne was in M:i:III. Rhames also makes an unwelcome return to the main cast, huffing and puffing his way through these new movies — isn’t it curious that the stronger films are usually the ones with less Luther?
At worst, Rogue Nation plays like a greatest hits record while also unwisely blowing smoke with lines like “this could very well be our last mission” and “Hunt is the living manifestation of destiny.” But McQuarrie does a bang up job following the promising partnership with Cruise displayed in the old school actioner Jack Reacher. McQuarrie’s unprecedented and skillful return to the director’s chair in Fallout justified many of his choices here — with Rogue Nation alone, however, he gave us a worthwhile spy thriller update and a strong Mission: Impossible film to boot.
3. Mission: Impossible
Aged now to the point of seeming quaint to our altered blockbuster standards, Brian De Palma’s stimulating inception to the franchise in 1996 set a fine benchmark for future installments to try to surpass.
Cruise, a fan of the original television series as a young boy, worked with Paramount to get this project off the ground after thinking the property could make for a good film. This was the first feature for Cruise’s new production company — even though the road has been bumpy in developing sequels in the new millennia, the box office results of this film and its sequel would solidify Mission: Impossible’s place in modern pop culture.
In many ways this is the only film of the series that feels like an honest spy film, especially since stunts promptly replaced the sleuthing. Aside from the finale and the bloody opening mission wherein Hunt appears to have lost his whole team, the film plays out with calculated restraint. De Palma turns the tension up notch by notch with sparing but effective Dutch angles and flowing crane shots — there is a palpable sense of paranoia. The movie’s plot device almost seems like a cliché now that so many spy films — Bourne, Bond and even Atomic Blonde recently — have used a secret list of undercover agents for the routine MacGuffin. But the most famous scene of the franchise — the silent heist at CIA headquarters — still holds up as a classic sequence and brilliantly counterintuitive thriller moment. You can still feel yourself hold your breath as it unfolds.
Emmanuelle Béart makes for a fine femme fatale alongside respected actors like Jon Voight, Vanessa Redgrave and Kirsten Scott Thomas who all legitimize otherwise hokey dialogue. De Palma makes the most out of the appropriately convoluted material — like the best Mission: Impossible films, the storyline is dense enough to obscure how silly it is but not so impenetrable that audiences are lost in confusion. Some installments are more simply constructed depending on how much their action sequences consume the runtime, but the original Mission: Impossible uniquely utilizes neo-noir elements in order to beguile and titillate.
2. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
Streamlined enough for newcomers whilst signaling a culmination of the entire series thus far for devoted fans, Fallout is a perfect distillation of the Mission: Impossible blueprint.
McQuarrie marks the first director to come back for another Mission and he changes his tune accordingly for those anticipating the expected variation in style. A new cinematographer in Rob Hardy (Ex Machina, Annihilation) and a shift in composers with Lorne Balfe (right hand man of Hans Zimmer) lend momentous weightiness and epic scope to this sixth entry. Fallout is the darkest Mission yet — mostly due to a few effective dream sequences — but McQuarrie doesn’t compromise the grandiosity of the massive stakes by shortchanging the exhilaration, gadgetry and fun these films have become synonymous with.
Despite a loose overarching chronology, this is the first Mission film you could call a direct sequel, though Fallout neatly stands on its own merits. The connections to previous Mission: Impossible films are evident throughout, yet McQuarrie doesn’t lean heavily on homage or on Rogue Nation’s groundwork in order to justify the latest continuation of the 22-year-old series. The opening sting is a brilliant update of the franchise’s first scene and Vanessa Kirby’s White Widow is an intriguing take on a past character — the next generation of sensual, sinister arms dealers following Vanessa Redgrave’s Max. Certain stunts recall 2’s best moments (freehand rock-climbing, motorcycling) while Monaghan's return elevates the film’s emotional content far more than she was able to in III. The elongated set pieces and nuclear threats echo Ghost Protocol and our returning players from Rogue Nation — Sean Harris’ Solomon Lane, Ferguson’s Faust and Baldwin’s Alan Hunley — all flesh out their characters beyond types.
But who could deny Fallout’s distinct successes? Any one of the film’s visceral action sequences — the Halo Jump, the bathroom brawl, the extraction of Lane — rest aside the series’ best. The implementation of mask gimmicks has never been more respectable; for once the twists may have the capacity to fool you. Henry Cavill’s August Walker — sporting the mustache that was worth dismantling the DCEU for — provides a genuinely imposing physical foe for Cruise to square off against. Best of all, as M:I films typically lose steam by their final act, Fallout delivers arguably the most satisfying climax of the franchise. McQuarrie reportedly had trouble figuring out the ending to Rogue Nation but he assumes utter confidence everywhere in Fallout, particularly in the IMAX-shot helicopter-based finale. He manages to take worn out tropes — endless double crosses, Cruise’s affinity for sprinting and, most obviously, a ticking clock element — and churn out ludicrously pleasurable cinematic moments.
Fallout is so ambitiously unrestrained that it could easily make you long for the simplicity of earlier entries. Nevertheless the film’s passionate execution cements the series’ reputation as the gold standard in spy fare. The execution of practical action continues to be awe-inspiring and, though he’s nearly pushing 60, Cruise remains a wunderkind of adrenaline-starved recklessness.
1. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
Brad Bird’s live action directorial debut enriched what had previously been a mixed bag of Cruise vanity projects and justified the Mission: Impossible series through and through with its most outstanding installment. Along with its strong sequels, Ghost Protocol became the first evident proof that this franchise had somehow improved over time to stand as the most enjoyable action saga of our time.
Ghost Protocol, the fourth entry from 2011, is the most gratifying and stimulating enterainment you could ask from this genre. The film exhibits more humor than ever as Pegg’s always amusing Benji was wisely incorporated into the main cast. The gadgetry is perhaps at its most impulsive with hyper-modern spyware on display as much as unreliable tech. If not for several other reasons — like the use of vertigo-inducing IMAX cameras — the scaling of the Burj Khalifa becomes even more dizzying when Hunt’s adhesive gloves malfunction partway through his climb outside of the world’s tallest building.
The nuclear-era, Cold War throwback premise seemed old-fashioned several years ago, but amidst the U.S.’s currently tempestuous relationship with Eastern powers Ghost Protocol has become more contemporary than ever before. With a nuclear extremist in need of neutralization (the late Michael Nyqvist as the shadowy Kurt Hendricks), the plot is finally more or less believable and the stakes are crystal clear.
Renner and Paula Patton make for the best collaborators of the always-assembled team. The former disregard for active supporting players separates Ghost Protocol from the rest of the films — this is closest thing to a true ensemble film the Mission: Impossible movies have produced. For once, Cruise dials back his place at center frame to let the other characters serve a more vital role in the outcome of the plot. Of course Cruise takes care of the biggest scenes himself but for a series that almost always treats the supplemental cast as disposable, it’s so refreshing that we come to like every member individually and in their camaraderie.
Ghost Protocol revels in tampering with semi-self-awareness — the reliable comic relief and added cheek adjusts the underlying tone to a temperament consistent with how ridiculous these films actually are. Bird’s directorial tightrope walk between borderline cartoonish action spectacle and some level of realism coalesces in an entry that feels like everything a Moore-era Bond movie — or really any of those extremely corny, gizmo-fueled yarns — ever aspired to.
Ghost Protocol is the coolest mission to date and just another episode — it perfectly epitomizes the timeless appeal of this series and the strength of the genre Mission: Impossible has so nimbly augmented.
*Old version published at TasteofCinema.com
The 12 Most Divisive Directors
of All Time
When is it decided that collective critical analysis becomes consensus? Though certain great directors — Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa and Jean-Luc Godard — are household names for their consistent catalogues of commendable work, few would consider the objectivity of their films up for much debate. But those filmmakers whose creations are bound to incite wildly varying responses from viewer to viewer are caught in a constant cycle of reassessment. Not every one of these divisive directors is necessarily a genius for what their filmographies foment, but they are some of the most brazenly determined filmmakers of all time.
12. David Cronenberg
The Godfather of body horror has justified his aptitudes many times over decade by decade. Aside from his numerous classics, several of his most famous films have yet to be entirely processed by audiences and critics. The opinions of works as particular as Crash, Scanners and Naked Lunch are still in fluctuation, with equal numbers calling these entries his best and his worst. More contemporary head-scratchers like Spider, Cosmopolis and his new iteration of Crimes of the Future have furthered his perplexing output enough to conclude that Cronenberg’s days as a polished provocateur are far from over.
11. Tim Burton
There are few modern directors with a style as singularly recognizable as Tim Burton. There are mild diversions from his milieu — Big Fish, Big Eyes — and numerous overindulgent misfires — Planet of the Apes, Alice in Wonderland — that have muddied his collective of creations. Still films as identifiable as Edward Scissorhands, Batman, Sleepy Hollow and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory all operate by his signature standard of take it or leave it. Burton is an oddity of film craft, his inalterable tendencies in visuals and casting so innate and habitual that indisputably good films like Ed Wood, Corpse Bride and Sweeney Todd seem almost brushed over in discussion.
10. Oliver Stone
No American film director has ever been so invariably apathetic toward the spectrum of liberal and conservative slants. Even though Oliver Stone is easily one of the most politically minded filmmakers ever, his movies are removed from common discourse, exhibiting his personal unhindered opinions rather than functioning as filmic mouthpieces for any party. Whether lampooning the Vietnam War (Platoon, Born of the Fourth of July) or painting portraits of presidents (Nixon, W.) and controversial individuals (The Doors, Snowden), Stone has foremost been a director fascinated by extraordinary events and notable figures of modern U.S. history. Stone’s refusal to be pinned down ideologically makes his stubborn brand of partiality capable of enraging literally anyone.
9. Zack Snyder
No mainstream moviemaker to emerge this century has been quite so polarizing as Zack Snyder. While the coveted Snyder Cut of the originally studio-skewered Justice League marginally redeemed his reputation, there is still plenty of discussion among superhero fans as to whether Man of Steel and Batman v Superman are murky trash or secret masterpieces. Even before his triptych of DCEU enterprises, films like 300 and Sucker Punch offered his standard of grotesque visual absurdity that resulted in a pop culture phenomenon and one of the more reviled films of the past decade, respectively. Even his most appreciated movies like Dawn of the Dead and Watchmen can’t quite be described as calling cards or striking failures — his directorial style offers no middle ground.
8. Darren Aronofsky
If mother! was in anyone else’s oeuvre, it alone would be cause for consideration for this list. As it stands, that Jennifer Lawrence showcase is just another fragment of Darren Aronofsky’s collection of severely troubling films. Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain and Noah all epitomize the psyche of a filmmaker that is utterly uncompromising and totally unsettled. Even when The Wrestler and Black Swan emerged as prime Oscar contenders, Aronofsky hardly softened his edge. mother! just happens to demonstrate his inclinations most vividly. It’s the film equivalent of cilantro — half the population will take it as is and the other half is bound to taste soap.
7. Nicolas Winding Refn
Following the footsteps of Kubrick, Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn prides himself on consummate pictorial craftsmanship composed by way of stark, accented colors and loads of visual symmetry. His breakthrough Drive is perhaps his only film that hasn’t drawn an enormous array of reactions from audiences. His most recent films Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon are perfect examples of his splashy, unwavering formal impulses and without a doubt remain some of the most critically dissonant films of recent memory.
6. John Waters
Dead set on pinpointing the subdued sickness within us all beneath the veneer of polite society, John Waters’ famous filmography is completely characterized by filth. His movies attempt to access the repressed desires and dormant repulsions inside his viewers, encouraging them to revel in the simple, disgusting realities of bodily functions and natural perversion. While Polyester works well as a relatively tame introduction to his eccentric repertoire, the contents of Pink Flamingos are enough to constitute him as recklessly, unapologetically original. How you feel about its slew of WTF moments doesn’t really matter as long as Waters gets any kind of response out of you at all.
5. Alejandro Jodorowsky
Teetering between profundity and insanity, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s films aren’t what you would call normal. Despite the accumulated critical appraisal with passing years, the jury is still very much out in regard to aggressively imposing films like the ludicrous satire The Holy Mountain, the acid Western El Topo or the psychic horror of Santa Sangre. His qualities as a director may invite the awe of stoners or the condemnation of classical film lovers, but no matter the audience there is nothing definitive about Jodorowsky’s breed of hypnagogic experimentation and his distaste for logic, structure and concrete storytelling.
4. Terrence Malick
Terrence Malick generated only four films over the course of the first 30 plus years of his career; then he created six films in only a decade. Needless to say there is no gauge for Malick’s inspiration or soundness in the circumstances of his creative process. Apart from his original three movies — Badlands, Days of Heaven and, post-hiatus, The Thin Red Line — there has been endless deliberation as to the eminence of his work since 2005’s The New World. The Tree of Life was booed at its Cannes debut; To the Wonder, Knight of Cups and Song to Song were created largely without proper scripts, each bearing an improvisational aesthetic that is difficult for many to grasp hold of. Though A Hidden Life was a return to greater rigidity and recognition, his spiritual philosophies and rapturous visuals are likely to continue to anger and bewilder in the upcoming The Way of the Wind and beyond.
3. Lars von Trier
Not only has the subject matter throughout his career rarely been anything but bleak, the directorial choices of Lars Von Trier are also often distressingly grim. The handheld digital cinematography he frequently employs would smack of amateurism if his narratives weren’t so often sprawling human dramas – his caustic quirks have nevertheless made him one of art house cinema's most vexing auteurs. The director’s penchant for powerless protagonists, tragic frameworks and psychosexual hysteria — see Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville and Melancholia — have solidified him as one of the most prickly, demanding filmmakers of the age.
2. David Lynch
His name is synonymous with surrealism, abstraction and red curtains. David Lynch’s cinematic senses and thematic implications vary from project to project, but his capacity to produce some of the most bafflingly esoteric films around has never waned once since his 1977 debut Eraserhead. His last film, Inland Empire, is an illusory, disorienting labyrinth — one would be incapable of comprehending its dense three hours in anything less than several viewings. Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr. are no picnics either but rather consummate psychedelic nightmares sure to puzzle even those who cherish them most. Even his most tame efforts — Elephant Man, Dune, Wild at Heart — are tossed back and forth in critical scrutiny to this day, except maybe The Straight Story. Renowned as he is, Lynch’s oeuvre is nearly impossible to wrap your head around. The 18 mystifying hours of Twin Peaks: The Return was more than enough proof that Lynch will never settle for artistic conventionality or stagnation.
1. Stanley Kubrick
Yes, he’s considered one of the greats. But it would be erroneous to say Kubrick is anything but an acquired taste. He was one of the most meticulous voices in film and although his pristine cinematic flavor is iconic in the present, nearly every project of his from the 60s onward began a new altercation. Notorious for imprinting his own vision on various adaptations — for instance the hypnotic nature of Stephen King's The Shining, the ultra-violence of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange or the classical opulence of William Makepeace Thackeray's (The Luck of) Barry Lyndon — his most famous films were destined to wedge a gap within the critical and popular masses, even beyond reconstructing certain source materials. Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut have had decades for digestion yet it hasn’t been nearly enough time to offer perfectly thorough judgments on their place in his filmography let alone cinema at large. He’s considered a master of the medium and yet his entry-level status for the budding cinephile places him right between ravished reverence and patrician disdain. There’s never been a director as discussed or dissected since his time.
*Published at TheCinemaholic.com / August 27th, 2018
12. David Cronenberg
The Godfather of body horror has justified his aptitudes many times over decade by decade. Aside from his numerous classics, several of his most famous films have yet to be entirely processed by audiences and critics. The opinions of works as particular as Crash, Scanners and Naked Lunch are still in fluctuation, with equal numbers calling these entries his best and his worst. More contemporary head-scratchers like Spider, Cosmopolis and his new iteration of Crimes of the Future have furthered his perplexing output enough to conclude that Cronenberg’s days as a polished provocateur are far from over.
11. Tim Burton
There are few modern directors with a style as singularly recognizable as Tim Burton. There are mild diversions from his milieu — Big Fish, Big Eyes — and numerous overindulgent misfires — Planet of the Apes, Alice in Wonderland — that have muddied his collective of creations. Still films as identifiable as Edward Scissorhands, Batman, Sleepy Hollow and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory all operate by his signature standard of take it or leave it. Burton is an oddity of film craft, his inalterable tendencies in visuals and casting so innate and habitual that indisputably good films like Ed Wood, Corpse Bride and Sweeney Todd seem almost brushed over in discussion.
10. Oliver Stone
No American film director has ever been so invariably apathetic toward the spectrum of liberal and conservative slants. Even though Oliver Stone is easily one of the most politically minded filmmakers ever, his movies are removed from common discourse, exhibiting his personal unhindered opinions rather than functioning as filmic mouthpieces for any party. Whether lampooning the Vietnam War (Platoon, Born of the Fourth of July) or painting portraits of presidents (Nixon, W.) and controversial individuals (The Doors, Snowden), Stone has foremost been a director fascinated by extraordinary events and notable figures of modern U.S. history. Stone’s refusal to be pinned down ideologically makes his stubborn brand of partiality capable of enraging literally anyone.
9. Zack Snyder
No mainstream moviemaker to emerge this century has been quite so polarizing as Zack Snyder. While the coveted Snyder Cut of the originally studio-skewered Justice League marginally redeemed his reputation, there is still plenty of discussion among superhero fans as to whether Man of Steel and Batman v Superman are murky trash or secret masterpieces. Even before his triptych of DCEU enterprises, films like 300 and Sucker Punch offered his standard of grotesque visual absurdity that resulted in a pop culture phenomenon and one of the more reviled films of the past decade, respectively. Even his most appreciated movies like Dawn of the Dead and Watchmen can’t quite be described as calling cards or striking failures — his directorial style offers no middle ground.
8. Darren Aronofsky
If mother! was in anyone else’s oeuvre, it alone would be cause for consideration for this list. As it stands, that Jennifer Lawrence showcase is just another fragment of Darren Aronofsky’s collection of severely troubling films. Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain and Noah all epitomize the psyche of a filmmaker that is utterly uncompromising and totally unsettled. Even when The Wrestler and Black Swan emerged as prime Oscar contenders, Aronofsky hardly softened his edge. mother! just happens to demonstrate his inclinations most vividly. It’s the film equivalent of cilantro — half the population will take it as is and the other half is bound to taste soap.
7. Nicolas Winding Refn
Following the footsteps of Kubrick, Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn prides himself on consummate pictorial craftsmanship composed by way of stark, accented colors and loads of visual symmetry. His breakthrough Drive is perhaps his only film that hasn’t drawn an enormous array of reactions from audiences. His most recent films Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon are perfect examples of his splashy, unwavering formal impulses and without a doubt remain some of the most critically dissonant films of recent memory.
6. John Waters
Dead set on pinpointing the subdued sickness within us all beneath the veneer of polite society, John Waters’ famous filmography is completely characterized by filth. His movies attempt to access the repressed desires and dormant repulsions inside his viewers, encouraging them to revel in the simple, disgusting realities of bodily functions and natural perversion. While Polyester works well as a relatively tame introduction to his eccentric repertoire, the contents of Pink Flamingos are enough to constitute him as recklessly, unapologetically original. How you feel about its slew of WTF moments doesn’t really matter as long as Waters gets any kind of response out of you at all.
5. Alejandro Jodorowsky
Teetering between profundity and insanity, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s films aren’t what you would call normal. Despite the accumulated critical appraisal with passing years, the jury is still very much out in regard to aggressively imposing films like the ludicrous satire The Holy Mountain, the acid Western El Topo or the psychic horror of Santa Sangre. His qualities as a director may invite the awe of stoners or the condemnation of classical film lovers, but no matter the audience there is nothing definitive about Jodorowsky’s breed of hypnagogic experimentation and his distaste for logic, structure and concrete storytelling.
4. Terrence Malick
Terrence Malick generated only four films over the course of the first 30 plus years of his career; then he created six films in only a decade. Needless to say there is no gauge for Malick’s inspiration or soundness in the circumstances of his creative process. Apart from his original three movies — Badlands, Days of Heaven and, post-hiatus, The Thin Red Line — there has been endless deliberation as to the eminence of his work since 2005’s The New World. The Tree of Life was booed at its Cannes debut; To the Wonder, Knight of Cups and Song to Song were created largely without proper scripts, each bearing an improvisational aesthetic that is difficult for many to grasp hold of. Though A Hidden Life was a return to greater rigidity and recognition, his spiritual philosophies and rapturous visuals are likely to continue to anger and bewilder in the upcoming The Way of the Wind and beyond.
3. Lars von Trier
Not only has the subject matter throughout his career rarely been anything but bleak, the directorial choices of Lars Von Trier are also often distressingly grim. The handheld digital cinematography he frequently employs would smack of amateurism if his narratives weren’t so often sprawling human dramas – his caustic quirks have nevertheless made him one of art house cinema's most vexing auteurs. The director’s penchant for powerless protagonists, tragic frameworks and psychosexual hysteria — see Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville and Melancholia — have solidified him as one of the most prickly, demanding filmmakers of the age.
2. David Lynch
His name is synonymous with surrealism, abstraction and red curtains. David Lynch’s cinematic senses and thematic implications vary from project to project, but his capacity to produce some of the most bafflingly esoteric films around has never waned once since his 1977 debut Eraserhead. His last film, Inland Empire, is an illusory, disorienting labyrinth — one would be incapable of comprehending its dense three hours in anything less than several viewings. Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr. are no picnics either but rather consummate psychedelic nightmares sure to puzzle even those who cherish them most. Even his most tame efforts — Elephant Man, Dune, Wild at Heart — are tossed back and forth in critical scrutiny to this day, except maybe The Straight Story. Renowned as he is, Lynch’s oeuvre is nearly impossible to wrap your head around. The 18 mystifying hours of Twin Peaks: The Return was more than enough proof that Lynch will never settle for artistic conventionality or stagnation.
1. Stanley Kubrick
Yes, he’s considered one of the greats. But it would be erroneous to say Kubrick is anything but an acquired taste. He was one of the most meticulous voices in film and although his pristine cinematic flavor is iconic in the present, nearly every project of his from the 60s onward began a new altercation. Notorious for imprinting his own vision on various adaptations — for instance the hypnotic nature of Stephen King's The Shining, the ultra-violence of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange or the classical opulence of William Makepeace Thackeray's (The Luck of) Barry Lyndon — his most famous films were destined to wedge a gap within the critical and popular masses, even beyond reconstructing certain source materials. Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut have had decades for digestion yet it hasn’t been nearly enough time to offer perfectly thorough judgments on their place in his filmography let alone cinema at large. He’s considered a master of the medium and yet his entry-level status for the budding cinephile places him right between ravished reverence and patrician disdain. There’s never been a director as discussed or dissected since his time.
*Published at TheCinemaholic.com / August 27th, 2018
The 10 Most Slyly Feminist Horror Films of the Decade
Horror has always been the bedrock for subversion and subtext in film. Contrary to typical thinking, bubbling beneath even the lowliest slasher is bound to be some statement on sexuality or similar ideas. Many think the objectification and marring of women on-screen is some sort of sick pleasure — granted it may be to some — instead of a reflection of the apprehensions of a male-dominated society.
Desire and disgust become mingled in the many refractions of horror, from C-movie sequels to art house, from Nosferatu to Midsommar. Horror is home to many concepts but chief among these is femininity — here are some recent films that have tapped into this theme most profoundly.
10. Crimson Peak
Guillermo del Toro’s return to Gothic horror was more than welcome after the comic book adaptations and Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots vs. giant aliens. With Crimson Peak his exercises in visual panache outweighed the potency of his storytelling, but that hardly stopped him from touching on topics of libido, not unlike his subsequent Oscar ticket The Shape of Water. Crimson Peak’s story of a bride to be caught between her fiancée and future sister-in-law follows the footsteps of traditional ghost stories, but disquieting domestic anxieties and a dash of incest make it an unexpected cautionary tale on marriage.
9. You’re Next
The best feminist reversal in horror movies is when the Final Girl — usually the most pure — doesn’t perish with a whimper but instead defends herself against the central monster or killer. Adam Wingard’s You’re Next was already a cheeky enough semi-self-aware slasher send-up, which cleverly sustains itself through a few transparent tropes. Our protagonist Erin (Sharni Vinson) is the most capable character in the mix and the film is refreshingly brutal and comic by the simple virtue of her competence.
8. Stoker
Park Chan-wook has made a name for himself many times over throughout three decades of filmmaking. Oldboy is a staple of modern world cinema but Stoker, the single English-language feature by the South Korean director, is infused with a kinetic, unresolved energy seldom witnessed stateside. Played against type, the characteristic gentile of Mia Wasikowska is ignored in favor of capturing the suspicions of a brooding, savvy teen caught in a Hitchcockian blunder — the film is more than a little reminiscent of Shadow of a Doubt, only our protagonist is far less passive than young Charlie was.
7. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Female vampires don’t get their fair share of screen time, apart from certain schlock on television. The horror-romance of the vampire Western A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is subtle and sensitive enough to call it a minor classic. Elegantly shot in black and white, the dreamy, dainty Iranian film locates something equally lovely and sinister at its story's core. Coloring The Girl (Sheila Vand) as the misunderstood “other” better than so many related cinematic works, this film is a visually, emotionally and thematically rewarding feast for the senses.
6. The Skin I Live In
Though it’s only aged a decade, if released today I doubt the trans community would let Pedro Almodóvar’s disturbing film The Skin I Live In come and go without disdain and criticism. In the most convoluted revenge scheme ever, Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) gets back at the young fool who raped his daughter by forcing him to undergo a sex change and serve as a prisoner of submission for years to come. The audacious psychological thriller reverts and reflects upon the unspeakable pain that rapists have so ignorantly inflicted upon their victims. This revenge fantasy is a troubling examination of a grim cycle of abuse on top of the surface level taboos — the total picture is potently perturbing.
5. It Follows
Calling any film a genre deconstruction is a cheap observation but It Follows does essentially break horror down to its basic components. The meaning behind the ‘it’ of the story can be interpreted many ways — some people jump straight to STDs yet moreover the film highlights the female fear of freely exercising her sexuality. It Follows internalizes the consequences of intimacy in order to give shape to a great premise. David Robert Mitchell’s breakthrough supernatural stalker movie doesn’t sacrifice invention or entertainment value in order to leave behind such a breadth of subtext.
4. The Neon Demon
No director this era has made a stronger case that style is in fact substance than Nicolas Winding Refn. While far from his strongest work, The Neon Demon is arguably his most daring and strikingly sublime. A cynical, hollow film about the shallowness of modeling better be as phenomenally ornate and sleekly modern as the state of the fashion industry itself — The Neon Demon’s themes are skin deep but for an appropriate purpose. The ultimate death of Elle Fanning’s angelic character by the hands of her jealous colleagues is a fitting albeit troublesome conclusion to a story about the dangers of cultural superficiality and the way it encourages the objectification of women, especially by members of the same sex.
3. The Love Witch
Crafted with meticulous love and care as director, producer, writer, editor, production designer, costume designer and composer, Anna Biller’s The Love Witch is what they call a gem. The horror-black-comedy is a fabulous brew of hilarity and psychedelic, satanic hijinks. Shot in 35mm and painstakingly arranged to emulate the look of old Technicolor features, the film works as a wonderfully deft examination of gender roles. Using irony and camp in order to shed a penetrative light on the fairer perspective, Samantha Robinson’s extraordinary character work as Elaine is overflowing with material primed for feminist studies.
2. Under the Skin
There’s more than a bit of arty pretentiousness going on in Jonathan Glazer’s third film Under the Skin. While it’s hard to take altogether, the film is superb in several parts — one cannot deny the thematic layer of feminism nestled neatly beneath the deliberate narrative of an alien’s incorporation into the human race and the remote, revelatory experiences that ensue. Scarlett Johansson’s body is a vessel for an otherworldly creature — as she consumes Scottish men in the trippy seduction sequences, the feminine becomes monstrous only before the character’s underlying humanity finally shapes the story into a muted tragedy. Beneath the mask of femininity the world appears distant, detached and unfamiliar.
1. The Witch
The Witch is the best horror movie of the decade and one of the most auspicious debuts in some time. Using patient, ambient, unsettling horror for a purpose — rather than as a hipster aesthetic like many A24 joints — Robert Eggers' thematically rich screenwriting outlines a modern classic. So even if the accurate tongue of the dialogue, fastidious costume and production design, magnificent camerawork and surreal progress of supernatural elements weren’t enough, the violent grapple with religious purity at the film’s center in Anya Taylor-Joy’s Thomasin pierces at the heart of feminine repression. Thomasin acts as a blameless innocent still somehow yearning for absolution by her Puritan faith, the flipside of the coin that bears the titular creature who feeds on youth to retain her own. Thomasin’s family accuses her of witchcraft and finally, after being forced to kill her deranged mother and watch her father die, selling her soul to the devil just to forget the god-awful life she once knew feels like long-awaited liberation. Once she’s chosen to live deliciously in the last moments of The Witch, the laugh Thomasin expels as she begins to ascend is a perfectly chilling punctuation to a densely rewarding fable and an intellectually invigorating horror masterpiece.
*Published at TheCinemaholic.com / July 19th, 2018
Desire and disgust become mingled in the many refractions of horror, from C-movie sequels to art house, from Nosferatu to Midsommar. Horror is home to many concepts but chief among these is femininity — here are some recent films that have tapped into this theme most profoundly.
10. Crimson Peak
Guillermo del Toro’s return to Gothic horror was more than welcome after the comic book adaptations and Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots vs. giant aliens. With Crimson Peak his exercises in visual panache outweighed the potency of his storytelling, but that hardly stopped him from touching on topics of libido, not unlike his subsequent Oscar ticket The Shape of Water. Crimson Peak’s story of a bride to be caught between her fiancée and future sister-in-law follows the footsteps of traditional ghost stories, but disquieting domestic anxieties and a dash of incest make it an unexpected cautionary tale on marriage.
9. You’re Next
The best feminist reversal in horror movies is when the Final Girl — usually the most pure — doesn’t perish with a whimper but instead defends herself against the central monster or killer. Adam Wingard’s You’re Next was already a cheeky enough semi-self-aware slasher send-up, which cleverly sustains itself through a few transparent tropes. Our protagonist Erin (Sharni Vinson) is the most capable character in the mix and the film is refreshingly brutal and comic by the simple virtue of her competence.
8. Stoker
Park Chan-wook has made a name for himself many times over throughout three decades of filmmaking. Oldboy is a staple of modern world cinema but Stoker, the single English-language feature by the South Korean director, is infused with a kinetic, unresolved energy seldom witnessed stateside. Played against type, the characteristic gentile of Mia Wasikowska is ignored in favor of capturing the suspicions of a brooding, savvy teen caught in a Hitchcockian blunder — the film is more than a little reminiscent of Shadow of a Doubt, only our protagonist is far less passive than young Charlie was.
7. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Female vampires don’t get their fair share of screen time, apart from certain schlock on television. The horror-romance of the vampire Western A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is subtle and sensitive enough to call it a minor classic. Elegantly shot in black and white, the dreamy, dainty Iranian film locates something equally lovely and sinister at its story's core. Coloring The Girl (Sheila Vand) as the misunderstood “other” better than so many related cinematic works, this film is a visually, emotionally and thematically rewarding feast for the senses.
6. The Skin I Live In
Though it’s only aged a decade, if released today I doubt the trans community would let Pedro Almodóvar’s disturbing film The Skin I Live In come and go without disdain and criticism. In the most convoluted revenge scheme ever, Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) gets back at the young fool who raped his daughter by forcing him to undergo a sex change and serve as a prisoner of submission for years to come. The audacious psychological thriller reverts and reflects upon the unspeakable pain that rapists have so ignorantly inflicted upon their victims. This revenge fantasy is a troubling examination of a grim cycle of abuse on top of the surface level taboos — the total picture is potently perturbing.
5. It Follows
Calling any film a genre deconstruction is a cheap observation but It Follows does essentially break horror down to its basic components. The meaning behind the ‘it’ of the story can be interpreted many ways — some people jump straight to STDs yet moreover the film highlights the female fear of freely exercising her sexuality. It Follows internalizes the consequences of intimacy in order to give shape to a great premise. David Robert Mitchell’s breakthrough supernatural stalker movie doesn’t sacrifice invention or entertainment value in order to leave behind such a breadth of subtext.
4. The Neon Demon
No director this era has made a stronger case that style is in fact substance than Nicolas Winding Refn. While far from his strongest work, The Neon Demon is arguably his most daring and strikingly sublime. A cynical, hollow film about the shallowness of modeling better be as phenomenally ornate and sleekly modern as the state of the fashion industry itself — The Neon Demon’s themes are skin deep but for an appropriate purpose. The ultimate death of Elle Fanning’s angelic character by the hands of her jealous colleagues is a fitting albeit troublesome conclusion to a story about the dangers of cultural superficiality and the way it encourages the objectification of women, especially by members of the same sex.
3. The Love Witch
Crafted with meticulous love and care as director, producer, writer, editor, production designer, costume designer and composer, Anna Biller’s The Love Witch is what they call a gem. The horror-black-comedy is a fabulous brew of hilarity and psychedelic, satanic hijinks. Shot in 35mm and painstakingly arranged to emulate the look of old Technicolor features, the film works as a wonderfully deft examination of gender roles. Using irony and camp in order to shed a penetrative light on the fairer perspective, Samantha Robinson’s extraordinary character work as Elaine is overflowing with material primed for feminist studies.
2. Under the Skin
There’s more than a bit of arty pretentiousness going on in Jonathan Glazer’s third film Under the Skin. While it’s hard to take altogether, the film is superb in several parts — one cannot deny the thematic layer of feminism nestled neatly beneath the deliberate narrative of an alien’s incorporation into the human race and the remote, revelatory experiences that ensue. Scarlett Johansson’s body is a vessel for an otherworldly creature — as she consumes Scottish men in the trippy seduction sequences, the feminine becomes monstrous only before the character’s underlying humanity finally shapes the story into a muted tragedy. Beneath the mask of femininity the world appears distant, detached and unfamiliar.
1. The Witch
The Witch is the best horror movie of the decade and one of the most auspicious debuts in some time. Using patient, ambient, unsettling horror for a purpose — rather than as a hipster aesthetic like many A24 joints — Robert Eggers' thematically rich screenwriting outlines a modern classic. So even if the accurate tongue of the dialogue, fastidious costume and production design, magnificent camerawork and surreal progress of supernatural elements weren’t enough, the violent grapple with religious purity at the film’s center in Anya Taylor-Joy’s Thomasin pierces at the heart of feminine repression. Thomasin acts as a blameless innocent still somehow yearning for absolution by her Puritan faith, the flipside of the coin that bears the titular creature who feeds on youth to retain her own. Thomasin’s family accuses her of witchcraft and finally, after being forced to kill her deranged mother and watch her father die, selling her soul to the devil just to forget the god-awful life she once knew feels like long-awaited liberation. Once she’s chosen to live deliciously in the last moments of The Witch, the laugh Thomasin expels as she begins to ascend is a perfectly chilling punctuation to a densely rewarding fable and an intellectually invigorating horror masterpiece.
*Published at TheCinemaholic.com / July 19th, 2018
Every Pirates of the Caribbean Film Ranked
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was destined to be the biggest flop of 2003. But as history showed us, the first Pirates — or more accurately, Johnny Depp’s career-defining performance — pleased many audiences. For slightly better and so much worse, Jack Sparrow has been holding the franchise together ever since. Gore Verbinski’s original trilogy is a unique triptych of blockbusters that are vitalizingly ambitious given their origin and unprofitable genre. The series has long overstayed its welcome, but a few of its entries remain some of the most enjoyable, freewheeling blockbusters of our time.
5. On Stranger Tides
Padded with lifeless action sequences and scarcely supported by its paltry collection of characters, On Stranger Tides foolishly places Jack Sparrow at the center of everything. The fourth and most superfluous Pirates film attempts to echo the tone of the first film with scaled back scope and simplicity, but there’s nothing remotely diverting about the most lethally dull and utterly forgettable piece of the franchise. Stranger Tides' painful mediocrity washes over you so feebly that upon rewatch it would be like you were seeing it for the first time, yet it oh so ironically remains one of the priciest films ever made.
4. Dead Men Tell No Tales
Barely a lick above the series’ worst, the fifth and hopefully final film in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is an exhaustingly insignificant entry and overcompensating proof that these movies should have been left as a trilogy. With completely shoehorned cameos by Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightly, Dead Men Tell No Tales tries desperately to make you care about anything at all by incorporating the son of Will and Elizabeth (Brenton Thwaites) and the daughter of Barbossa (Kaya Scodelario) as surrogates for their fictitious forebears. The very familiar concoction of ghost pirates led by Javier Bardem make for vaguely memorable villains and the set pieces recall Verbinski’s level of cartoonish delirium, but the execution involves an iota of the former inspiration.
3. At World's End
The most underrated Pirates film — and the most expensive film ever at the time of release — is still a severely cluttered one, though there are high highs offsetting many a misstep. The Davy Jones' Locker sequence is superbly strange and surprisingly surreal for a mainstream release. The Brethren Court and the ensuing epic finale are wildly entertaining passages, particularly in the maelstrom climax. But the addition of Chow Yun-fat’s Sao Feng to an already extensive cast tips the scales to pure excess and convolution. Writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio tripped themselves up in their own sprawling web of characters and endless slew of backstabbings and betrayals.
At World’s End becomes nigh incomprehensible as we’re left responsible for keeping track of the separately selfish motives of Jack, Beckett, Will, Barbossa and Feng, not to mention Jones. Facilitating the more fantastical elements of Dead Man’s Chest thankfully means the riskier creative choices come in further frequency, but at such a monstrous length the best moments are muddled and confused by the film’s countless conflicts. In wrapping up an epic trilogy, it’s quite a clunky closing — but since we’ve seen where the series has gone sans Verbinski, retrospectively At World’s End has a startling amount of attributes to admire within its near three-hour runtime. Disney should have taken after Jack and let things end here — “Gentlemen… I wash my hands of this weirdness.”
2. The Curse of the Black Pearl
No, this isn’t automatically at the top — while Depp’s iconic role was arguably the most classic and appealing in the first Pirates, it would take quite the pair of nostalgia goggles to say with any certainty that the rest of the film deserves a similar reputation. Many of the film’s special effects have not stood the test of time and the budgetary constraints are very noticeable when The Curse of the Black Pearl reuses the same set for both the second and final act. Even though their characters only get less identifiable as the trilogy wears on, Bloom’s Will Turner and Knightly’s Elizabeth Swan were still the monotonous marrow of a much more interesting story from the start.
Geoffrey Rush’s Barbossa on the other hand is a properly sweet and sinister villain, just as much of a watchable scoundrel as Sparrow. The film’s staginess and comparitively sober tone helped ground the old school action/adventure trappings in some manner of reality, but none of the Pirates of the Caribbean films are really worth taking this seriously. The series was begging for more animated reworkings of pirate lore — without a few sea monsters you might as well be watching a seafaring swashbuckler of actual substance like Master and Commander.
1. Dead Man's Chest
The first part of the twofold Pirates trilogy capper was the moment when Verbinski and company fully flexed their financial and imaginative freedom. The narrative zeal would dissolve soon after its closing cliffhanger but Dead Man’s Chest works on its own as a brawny and ballsy buccaneer blockbuster, grabbing at multiple influences from film history, mainstream mythology and setups from its predecessor. Echoing the likes of King Kong and Raiders of the Lost Ark, Dead Man’s Chest is never boring, congested or overdone — as escapism, its about as much as you can ask for from a tentpole summer blockbuster.
The revolutionary effects — especially in Bill Nighy’s remarkable motion capture performance, sporting his unique and quotable undersea dialect — doesn’t result in the cacophony of At World’s End yet improves upon nearly all of Curse of the Black Pearl. Tia Dalma (Naomie Harris), the dice game, the Kraken and even the cannibal natives feel like the real fun waiting in the wings of the original. Depp’s performance as Sparrow this time around was as hysterical and eccentric as ever, and the character’s climactic comeuppance was a smart choice. The highest grossing Pirates movie remains the most justifiably popular of the series.
*Published at TheCinemaholic.com / July 14th, 2018
5. On Stranger Tides
Padded with lifeless action sequences and scarcely supported by its paltry collection of characters, On Stranger Tides foolishly places Jack Sparrow at the center of everything. The fourth and most superfluous Pirates film attempts to echo the tone of the first film with scaled back scope and simplicity, but there’s nothing remotely diverting about the most lethally dull and utterly forgettable piece of the franchise. Stranger Tides' painful mediocrity washes over you so feebly that upon rewatch it would be like you were seeing it for the first time, yet it oh so ironically remains one of the priciest films ever made.
4. Dead Men Tell No Tales
Barely a lick above the series’ worst, the fifth and hopefully final film in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is an exhaustingly insignificant entry and overcompensating proof that these movies should have been left as a trilogy. With completely shoehorned cameos by Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightly, Dead Men Tell No Tales tries desperately to make you care about anything at all by incorporating the son of Will and Elizabeth (Brenton Thwaites) and the daughter of Barbossa (Kaya Scodelario) as surrogates for their fictitious forebears. The very familiar concoction of ghost pirates led by Javier Bardem make for vaguely memorable villains and the set pieces recall Verbinski’s level of cartoonish delirium, but the execution involves an iota of the former inspiration.
3. At World's End
The most underrated Pirates film — and the most expensive film ever at the time of release — is still a severely cluttered one, though there are high highs offsetting many a misstep. The Davy Jones' Locker sequence is superbly strange and surprisingly surreal for a mainstream release. The Brethren Court and the ensuing epic finale are wildly entertaining passages, particularly in the maelstrom climax. But the addition of Chow Yun-fat’s Sao Feng to an already extensive cast tips the scales to pure excess and convolution. Writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio tripped themselves up in their own sprawling web of characters and endless slew of backstabbings and betrayals.
At World’s End becomes nigh incomprehensible as we’re left responsible for keeping track of the separately selfish motives of Jack, Beckett, Will, Barbossa and Feng, not to mention Jones. Facilitating the more fantastical elements of Dead Man’s Chest thankfully means the riskier creative choices come in further frequency, but at such a monstrous length the best moments are muddled and confused by the film’s countless conflicts. In wrapping up an epic trilogy, it’s quite a clunky closing — but since we’ve seen where the series has gone sans Verbinski, retrospectively At World’s End has a startling amount of attributes to admire within its near three-hour runtime. Disney should have taken after Jack and let things end here — “Gentlemen… I wash my hands of this weirdness.”
2. The Curse of the Black Pearl
No, this isn’t automatically at the top — while Depp’s iconic role was arguably the most classic and appealing in the first Pirates, it would take quite the pair of nostalgia goggles to say with any certainty that the rest of the film deserves a similar reputation. Many of the film’s special effects have not stood the test of time and the budgetary constraints are very noticeable when The Curse of the Black Pearl reuses the same set for both the second and final act. Even though their characters only get less identifiable as the trilogy wears on, Bloom’s Will Turner and Knightly’s Elizabeth Swan were still the monotonous marrow of a much more interesting story from the start.
Geoffrey Rush’s Barbossa on the other hand is a properly sweet and sinister villain, just as much of a watchable scoundrel as Sparrow. The film’s staginess and comparitively sober tone helped ground the old school action/adventure trappings in some manner of reality, but none of the Pirates of the Caribbean films are really worth taking this seriously. The series was begging for more animated reworkings of pirate lore — without a few sea monsters you might as well be watching a seafaring swashbuckler of actual substance like Master and Commander.
1. Dead Man's Chest
The first part of the twofold Pirates trilogy capper was the moment when Verbinski and company fully flexed their financial and imaginative freedom. The narrative zeal would dissolve soon after its closing cliffhanger but Dead Man’s Chest works on its own as a brawny and ballsy buccaneer blockbuster, grabbing at multiple influences from film history, mainstream mythology and setups from its predecessor. Echoing the likes of King Kong and Raiders of the Lost Ark, Dead Man’s Chest is never boring, congested or overdone — as escapism, its about as much as you can ask for from a tentpole summer blockbuster.
The revolutionary effects — especially in Bill Nighy’s remarkable motion capture performance, sporting his unique and quotable undersea dialect — doesn’t result in the cacophony of At World’s End yet improves upon nearly all of Curse of the Black Pearl. Tia Dalma (Naomie Harris), the dice game, the Kraken and even the cannibal natives feel like the real fun waiting in the wings of the original. Depp’s performance as Sparrow this time around was as hysterical and eccentric as ever, and the character’s climactic comeuppance was a smart choice. The highest grossing Pirates movie remains the most justifiably popular of the series.
*Published at TheCinemaholic.com / July 14th, 2018
The 10 Best Billion Dollar Film Ranked
Only a decade and a half ago, there were three billion-dollar films – the second Pirates of the Caribbean, the third Lord of the Rings and Titanic. Now there are over 50 — that’s inflation for you folks. It’s safe to say the mantle of billion-dollar grosser doesn’t mean what it used to. But while some trash like Alice in Wonderland, Transformers: Age of Extinction and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides are supported by enormous percentages overseas, only a select few films were worth imprinting on the entirety of collective human consciousness. Here is the cream of the crop when it comes to the world’s highest grossing movies. And no Jurassic Park will not appear since re-releases have cheated the film to a billion-plus gross
10. Captain America: Civil War / Aquaman
$1,153,304,495 / $1,148,528,393
The Russo brothers have proven themselves worthy of directing massive-budgeted Marvel flicks since fan-favorite Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and now they’re in the midst of delivering the final Avengers film after Infinity War played out so magnificently. Going into Phase 3, Civil War was proof that no matter how episodic the Marvel Cinematic Universe became, regardless of how many heroes were stuffed in, the brand would deliver accessible and interesting feature films with hardly a hiccup. Civil War balanced the introduction of Black Panther (whose film which easily could have claimed this spot) and a young Spider-Man with a Hydra/Bucky-focused Captain America movie all while essentially delivering Avengers 2.5. The cinematic juggling act was just a warm-up for the two-part Avengers finale, yet the third Captain America remains an impressive work of harmonized chaos that at the very least equals the first Avengers.
Miraculously, Aquaman is the DCEU’s highest grosser, don’t ask me how. Personally, it’s also the best of its scattered universe, furnishing an old-fashioned action adventure escapade with the contemporary gloss. James Wan, who will return for Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, is so steady-handed with the ludicrous action and all too precise in handling the film’s tonal contortions. I hate to have more superheroes stuffed on this list (the genre makes up over 30% of the billions club) but Aquaman is exceptionally dynamic and pleasurable.
9. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
$1,341,511,219
Harry Potter was a bona fide cinematic success from day one — the first film came excruciatingly close to the billion-dollar mark and the rest of the series struggled to match that watermark, profitable as each was. It was only the finality of the eighth chapter of the fantasy film series that conjured enough nostalgia to secure Deathly Hallows Part 2 in the league of all time highest grossing blockbusters. Though it doesn’t have as many artistic flourishes as David Yates’ previous two entries — Part 1 and Half-Blood Prince stand with the finest of the franchise — the leanest of all Potter films still packs a wallop. The flaws of Deathly Hallows’ second half mostly stem from a few plot contrivances courtesy of Mrs. Rowling, but the flatlined structure and climactic flaws can be excused by some incredible nuggets of wisdom and vernacular veracity.
8. Titanic
$2,187,463,944
Before and since this age of inflation, Titanic served as the benchmark for how all future film phenomenon would be judged. Poetically, the only motion picture to top this legendary gross is Cameron himself in his disappointing if technologically envelope-pushing Avatar, at least before Endgame existed. As pure spectacle — some of the best and worst blockbusters — Titanic is a splendid achievement even if its dialogue, story and characters don’t match Cameron’s visual feat. He turned his own fascination with the 1912 disaster into a touchstone of pop culture history, and if the passion about the period detail and set design was also incorporated in the generically tragic love story, Titanic would be an indisputable classic.
7. Toy Story 3
$1,066,969,703
Pixar has almost exclusively enjoyed fat box office profits, but waiting 11 years to complete the Toy Story trilogy was enough to win the brand the box office milestone in question. As the last film in which the studio still bore its nearly flawless reputation — softened by Cars 2 the following year — Toy Story 3 was an excellent capper to a 15-year period of exceptional animated films, beginning with the first Toy Story mind you. You cried — you know you cried. Like some Godsend, fortunately the fate-tempting foruth entry was just as good if not a little better.
6. Top Gun: Maverick
$1,493,491,858
I don’t think any update of these selections would be complete without this new mammoth of box office history. Tom Cruise not only outdid himself literally by improving upon a film that has enjoyed decades of popularity, but then also topped an already staggering career with one of the 10 highest grossing films of all time, and at only like 5 million shy of the 25 highest earners ever EVEN ADJUSTING FOR INFLATION, leagues about over the original’s ticket sales, it’s just too much. I doubt even this Cruise resurgence will be enough to get Mission: Impossible past a billion, let alone these numbers. To say anything about the film, Joseph Kosinski's latest perfection of the legacy-quel is as wholesome and crowd-pleasing as the best American entertainment can provide, and to hell with anyone who equates it with #GOARMY ads.
5. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
$1,066,179,725
The third film to ever cross the billion-dollar mark was fortunately the most adventurous Pirates of the Caribbean movie we ever got. Dead Man’s Chest is without a doubt the best sequel the franchise ever produced at the very least, if you’re gung ho about The Curse of the Black Pearl standing high above the rest. Gore Verbinski steered the swashbuckling epic with Spielbergian effervescence and writers Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio let their imagination run free before they let it get away from them in the overstuffed At World’s End. Pirates 2 is a meaty, underrated blockbuster diversion.
4. Avengers: Infinity War
$2,033,213,649
Despite Iron Man's unassumingly awesome start to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Avengers: Infinity War reamins the remarkable apex of the now 30-plus-film franchise. The script is mathematical and wondrously childlike in its distribution of our various heroes into the most precious mix and matches one could hope for from a superhero crossover film of this size. Rocket Raccoon and Thor, Dr. Strange and Tony Stark — there’s so much nerdgasm fuel it’s astounding Thanos has enough room to be not just the series’ most formidable villain but also a sympathetic character. It’s about as much fun as a movie ticket and 2 ½ hours can get you. Iron Man 3, Age of Ultron and Endgame deserve mild shoutouts but none quite earn a place on this list, despite being the better of the MCU's offerings.
3. Skyfall
$1,108,561,013
It only took 50 years, but what was once the most profitable film franchise in history — the Mouse was gonna catch up eventually — finally attained that billion dollar landmark with one of the most artistically satisfying episodes in the never-ending saga of our immortal MI-6 agent. Visually fleshed out with Roger Deakins’ exceptional eye and Sam Mendes’ directorial control, the 23rd James Bond film set the rebooted Craig series back on track after Quantum of Solace almost undid the incredible trajectory Casino Royale had just carved out. Spectre ended up ruining Skyfall a bit just the same, but 2012 was a great moment to be a Bond fan and was also a good time for the average viewer of a new generation to see what all the fuss was about.
2. The Dark Knight
$1,004,558,444
His ambitions have gotten grander and more unwieldy with every project (although one might say Dunkirk saw him scaling things back in a good way), but The Dark Knight represents Christopher Nolan at the inception of wielding A-list directorial power – in the form of a 180 million dollar budget — as well as his most textured moments as an auteur. It may have only just snuck past the billion dollar mark many months after release — unlike many billion dollar grossers, more than half of that money was domestic earnings. Still The Dark Knight was and remains a seminal moment in 21st century film history, cementing superhero films as the blockbuster bread and butter of the age while legitimizing that fact simultaneously.
1. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
$1,119,929,521
Before Peter Jackson’s monstrous undertaking in adapting The Lord of the Rings trilogy, a film series had never earned more at the box office with each successive installment. By the time The Return of the King signaled the beginning of the end of a glorious rebirth for fantasy in the early aughts, the fanaticism was feverish enough to make the film just the second ever to cross one billion dollars worldwide. The Return of the King itself, as a beautiful capper to the trilogy or just the mother of all epics, earned every Oscar and all the ticket sales that came before. Its scope is mammoth and its achievement in both spectacle and emotional gravity is unparalleled this millennia.
*Published at TheCinemaholic.com / July 1st , 2018
10. Captain America: Civil War / Aquaman
$1,153,304,495 / $1,148,528,393
The Russo brothers have proven themselves worthy of directing massive-budgeted Marvel flicks since fan-favorite Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and now they’re in the midst of delivering the final Avengers film after Infinity War played out so magnificently. Going into Phase 3, Civil War was proof that no matter how episodic the Marvel Cinematic Universe became, regardless of how many heroes were stuffed in, the brand would deliver accessible and interesting feature films with hardly a hiccup. Civil War balanced the introduction of Black Panther (whose film which easily could have claimed this spot) and a young Spider-Man with a Hydra/Bucky-focused Captain America movie all while essentially delivering Avengers 2.5. The cinematic juggling act was just a warm-up for the two-part Avengers finale, yet the third Captain America remains an impressive work of harmonized chaos that at the very least equals the first Avengers.
Miraculously, Aquaman is the DCEU’s highest grosser, don’t ask me how. Personally, it’s also the best of its scattered universe, furnishing an old-fashioned action adventure escapade with the contemporary gloss. James Wan, who will return for Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, is so steady-handed with the ludicrous action and all too precise in handling the film’s tonal contortions. I hate to have more superheroes stuffed on this list (the genre makes up over 30% of the billions club) but Aquaman is exceptionally dynamic and pleasurable.
9. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
$1,341,511,219
Harry Potter was a bona fide cinematic success from day one — the first film came excruciatingly close to the billion-dollar mark and the rest of the series struggled to match that watermark, profitable as each was. It was only the finality of the eighth chapter of the fantasy film series that conjured enough nostalgia to secure Deathly Hallows Part 2 in the league of all time highest grossing blockbusters. Though it doesn’t have as many artistic flourishes as David Yates’ previous two entries — Part 1 and Half-Blood Prince stand with the finest of the franchise — the leanest of all Potter films still packs a wallop. The flaws of Deathly Hallows’ second half mostly stem from a few plot contrivances courtesy of Mrs. Rowling, but the flatlined structure and climactic flaws can be excused by some incredible nuggets of wisdom and vernacular veracity.
8. Titanic
$2,187,463,944
Before and since this age of inflation, Titanic served as the benchmark for how all future film phenomenon would be judged. Poetically, the only motion picture to top this legendary gross is Cameron himself in his disappointing if technologically envelope-pushing Avatar, at least before Endgame existed. As pure spectacle — some of the best and worst blockbusters — Titanic is a splendid achievement even if its dialogue, story and characters don’t match Cameron’s visual feat. He turned his own fascination with the 1912 disaster into a touchstone of pop culture history, and if the passion about the period detail and set design was also incorporated in the generically tragic love story, Titanic would be an indisputable classic.
7. Toy Story 3
$1,066,969,703
Pixar has almost exclusively enjoyed fat box office profits, but waiting 11 years to complete the Toy Story trilogy was enough to win the brand the box office milestone in question. As the last film in which the studio still bore its nearly flawless reputation — softened by Cars 2 the following year — Toy Story 3 was an excellent capper to a 15-year period of exceptional animated films, beginning with the first Toy Story mind you. You cried — you know you cried. Like some Godsend, fortunately the fate-tempting foruth entry was just as good if not a little better.
6. Top Gun: Maverick
$1,493,491,858
I don’t think any update of these selections would be complete without this new mammoth of box office history. Tom Cruise not only outdid himself literally by improving upon a film that has enjoyed decades of popularity, but then also topped an already staggering career with one of the 10 highest grossing films of all time, and at only like 5 million shy of the 25 highest earners ever EVEN ADJUSTING FOR INFLATION, leagues about over the original’s ticket sales, it’s just too much. I doubt even this Cruise resurgence will be enough to get Mission: Impossible past a billion, let alone these numbers. To say anything about the film, Joseph Kosinski's latest perfection of the legacy-quel is as wholesome and crowd-pleasing as the best American entertainment can provide, and to hell with anyone who equates it with #GOARMY ads.
5. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
$1,066,179,725
The third film to ever cross the billion-dollar mark was fortunately the most adventurous Pirates of the Caribbean movie we ever got. Dead Man’s Chest is without a doubt the best sequel the franchise ever produced at the very least, if you’re gung ho about The Curse of the Black Pearl standing high above the rest. Gore Verbinski steered the swashbuckling epic with Spielbergian effervescence and writers Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio let their imagination run free before they let it get away from them in the overstuffed At World’s End. Pirates 2 is a meaty, underrated blockbuster diversion.
4. Avengers: Infinity War
$2,033,213,649
Despite Iron Man's unassumingly awesome start to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Avengers: Infinity War reamins the remarkable apex of the now 30-plus-film franchise. The script is mathematical and wondrously childlike in its distribution of our various heroes into the most precious mix and matches one could hope for from a superhero crossover film of this size. Rocket Raccoon and Thor, Dr. Strange and Tony Stark — there’s so much nerdgasm fuel it’s astounding Thanos has enough room to be not just the series’ most formidable villain but also a sympathetic character. It’s about as much fun as a movie ticket and 2 ½ hours can get you. Iron Man 3, Age of Ultron and Endgame deserve mild shoutouts but none quite earn a place on this list, despite being the better of the MCU's offerings.
3. Skyfall
$1,108,561,013
It only took 50 years, but what was once the most profitable film franchise in history — the Mouse was gonna catch up eventually — finally attained that billion dollar landmark with one of the most artistically satisfying episodes in the never-ending saga of our immortal MI-6 agent. Visually fleshed out with Roger Deakins’ exceptional eye and Sam Mendes’ directorial control, the 23rd James Bond film set the rebooted Craig series back on track after Quantum of Solace almost undid the incredible trajectory Casino Royale had just carved out. Spectre ended up ruining Skyfall a bit just the same, but 2012 was a great moment to be a Bond fan and was also a good time for the average viewer of a new generation to see what all the fuss was about.
2. The Dark Knight
$1,004,558,444
His ambitions have gotten grander and more unwieldy with every project (although one might say Dunkirk saw him scaling things back in a good way), but The Dark Knight represents Christopher Nolan at the inception of wielding A-list directorial power – in the form of a 180 million dollar budget — as well as his most textured moments as an auteur. It may have only just snuck past the billion dollar mark many months after release — unlike many billion dollar grossers, more than half of that money was domestic earnings. Still The Dark Knight was and remains a seminal moment in 21st century film history, cementing superhero films as the blockbuster bread and butter of the age while legitimizing that fact simultaneously.
1. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
$1,119,929,521
Before Peter Jackson’s monstrous undertaking in adapting The Lord of the Rings trilogy, a film series had never earned more at the box office with each successive installment. By the time The Return of the King signaled the beginning of the end of a glorious rebirth for fantasy in the early aughts, the fanaticism was feverish enough to make the film just the second ever to cross one billion dollars worldwide. The Return of the King itself, as a beautiful capper to the trilogy or just the mother of all epics, earned every Oscar and all the ticket sales that came before. Its scope is mammoth and its achievement in both spectacle and emotional gravity is unparalleled this millennia.
*Published at TheCinemaholic.com / July 1st , 2018
Every Brad Bird Film Ranked
Brad Bird is a national treasure — from his succinct filmography you can tell his ambitions stand hand in hand with his directorial capabilities, leaving him with enough room to literally make his dreams come true. Bird’s beginnings in animation have taken him from crushing box office disappointments — his debut The Iron Giant was a flop in spite of the following it now has — to some of the most successful films of the age. Very recently he finds himself back on top after the overall disenchantment of 2015’s Tomorrowland as Incredibles 2 smashes away at numerous records related to animated films. Now that Bird has once again earned the Mouse’s favor he can hopefully set his sights on more daring efforts, either in animation or live action.
Bird is constantly battling a creative war between commercial viability and his own artistic authorship, but when it works out in his favor — as it often does — what we are left with is tantalizing.
6. Tomorrowland
Bird’s only true disappointment bears his signature traits of fluid action and relatable populist optimism, but his efforts were largely wasted in one of Disney’s biggest flops in recent memory. Tomorrowland has an interesting premise, good performances by George Clooney and Britt Robertson and obvious craftsmanship behind the camera. However the film’s paltry script is underwhelming in the most overwhelming sense. In terms of satisfying an audience, especially one primed for summer escapism, Tomorrowland purposely gives you exactly what you don’t want, which is admirable in regard to a thematic point of view and poison from a cinematic perspective.
5. Incredibles 2
When you steward of one of best animated films of the 21st century to fruition, the idea of trying to live up to your own expectations — let alone everybody else’s — with a sequel would be daunting to say the least. The concept of creating a third Incredibles reportedly makes Bird sick to ponder — even as Incredibles 2 puts up gangbuster numbers at the box office — which anyone can respect from a creative standpoint while one secretly prays he gets on that right away. Regrettably, this film doesn’t get nearly as dark or mature as the original, yet Incredibles 2 is still a remarkable Pixar film, abundant with superbly inventive storytelling decisions and beautifully directed action sequences.
The role reversal of Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl supplies plenty of humor and insight on the domestic front offset by spectacular heroics by way of thoroughly exciting set pieces, the Elasti-cycle sequence being the breathtaking chief of these. Bird doesn’t capture lightning in a bottle like he did back in 2004, but the new villain, updated social commentary and unfettered exuberance are all strong enough to call Incredibles 2 another unqualified success for Bird’s selective career.
4. The Iron Giant
Worthy of all the cult-garnered nostalgia people have for it, The Iron Giant is an emotionally poignant debut for Bird and one capable of summarizing exactly what he is best at. Compositing traditional and 3D animation, the film was a heartfelt warm-up for the visual delights Bird would dish up in his eventual work with Disney. His later pictures would draw inspiration from all sorts of 60s culture — and The Iron Giant fittingly pays reverence to the 50s with Sputnik and the Red Scare forming the backdrop to his redefinition of the old school creature feature. A tale of a boy and his gentle giant robot somehow has become an indispensible fairy tale for contemporary times, aging gracefully in the 20 years since Bird has been directing. He set a gold standard with The Iron Giant and has rarely failed to live up to it.
3. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
Though Tomorrowland sent him back to the drawing board in a very real sense, the fourth film in the Mission: Impossible franchise was exhilarating enough to suggest that live action was where Bird belonged all along. Though the script is not his own, Bird injects every ounce of his auteurist abilities we had only previously known through animation into every frame of Ghost Protocol. Sporting the sickest stunt Tom Cruise ever pulled, every set piece in the film — the Kremlin sequence, the parking garage finale and, of course, scaling the tallest building in the world — is up there with the best of Mission: Impossible films and action blockbusters in general.
Bird marries life or death stakes with the series’ cartoonish overtones to thrilling and seriously fun results. M:I movies never felt like ensemble efforts before this entry — more like ego trips for an adrenaline-starved Cruise — and Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner and Paula Patton make up a well-rounded team in both kicking ass and delivering the utilitarian dialogue with a healthy measure of aplomb. Also the old-fashioned Cold War throwback plot was a little hokey back in 2011 — just further evidence of Bird's obsession with a certain era — but now it all looks far from implausible.
2. Ratatouille
Ratatouille may have a weakness in its reliance on narration, but that screenwriting tool is more of a crutch than a defect. Regardless, Ratatouille is up there with Pixar’s most challenging fare, if not the most exemplary instance of the Disney-owned brand allowing a creative mind full control over a project no matter how many people might be turned off by the premise.
Sure, Ratatouille is about a rat that cooks, but the film’s simplicity sums up a great deal about the crucial relationship between the artist and the critic, the former being Patton Oswalt’s Remy and the latter the curmudgeon Anton Ego (deliciously voiced by Peter O’Toole). Remy works as an excellent stand-in for Bird — the character reflects his own insatiable passion to seek the beauty of experimenting with his own craft and the steadfast desire of any artist pursuing recognition for their talents in return. Ratatouille is deeply funny, astoundingly insightful and startlingly sweet, not to mention as exquisitely animated as any film Pixar has brought forth.
1. The Incredibles
The best of action, adventure and superhero genres, The Incredibles deserves its name and then some. Bird’s original two Pixar joints are basically the best the respected studio has to offer — though The Incredibles is Bird’s most accomplished work for how perfectly it exhibits his numerous influences as well as his own sprawling imagination. Bird magically created a film that can play to any audience without sacrificing any part of his vision in order to better serve a specific age group, be it the emotionally wrenching moments or the cute ones.
The voice over work is impeccable, the characterization is rich and memorable and, like the X-Men series, the film manages to discuss the reality of superheroes to unearth indisputable thematic depth before basking in comic book weirdness and greatness. Syndrome is unquestionably one of cinema’s best supervillains, and the character’s allegory for the pitfalls of super-fandom are fascinatingly prescient. Bird deconstructs the façade of the suburban lifestyle along with everything that falls under the fantastical, counterbalancing the film’s cartoonish vibrations with genuine stakes. The darkest moments of The Incredibles are very moving and the action as a result is that much more visceral and gripping. The scripting is also perfect — the exposition feels natural, all the humor hits and each philosophical contemplation is stimulating.
*Published at TheCinemaholic.com / June 26th, 2018
Bird is constantly battling a creative war between commercial viability and his own artistic authorship, but when it works out in his favor — as it often does — what we are left with is tantalizing.
6. Tomorrowland
Bird’s only true disappointment bears his signature traits of fluid action and relatable populist optimism, but his efforts were largely wasted in one of Disney’s biggest flops in recent memory. Tomorrowland has an interesting premise, good performances by George Clooney and Britt Robertson and obvious craftsmanship behind the camera. However the film’s paltry script is underwhelming in the most overwhelming sense. In terms of satisfying an audience, especially one primed for summer escapism, Tomorrowland purposely gives you exactly what you don’t want, which is admirable in regard to a thematic point of view and poison from a cinematic perspective.
5. Incredibles 2
When you steward of one of best animated films of the 21st century to fruition, the idea of trying to live up to your own expectations — let alone everybody else’s — with a sequel would be daunting to say the least. The concept of creating a third Incredibles reportedly makes Bird sick to ponder — even as Incredibles 2 puts up gangbuster numbers at the box office — which anyone can respect from a creative standpoint while one secretly prays he gets on that right away. Regrettably, this film doesn’t get nearly as dark or mature as the original, yet Incredibles 2 is still a remarkable Pixar film, abundant with superbly inventive storytelling decisions and beautifully directed action sequences.
The role reversal of Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl supplies plenty of humor and insight on the domestic front offset by spectacular heroics by way of thoroughly exciting set pieces, the Elasti-cycle sequence being the breathtaking chief of these. Bird doesn’t capture lightning in a bottle like he did back in 2004, but the new villain, updated social commentary and unfettered exuberance are all strong enough to call Incredibles 2 another unqualified success for Bird’s selective career.
4. The Iron Giant
Worthy of all the cult-garnered nostalgia people have for it, The Iron Giant is an emotionally poignant debut for Bird and one capable of summarizing exactly what he is best at. Compositing traditional and 3D animation, the film was a heartfelt warm-up for the visual delights Bird would dish up in his eventual work with Disney. His later pictures would draw inspiration from all sorts of 60s culture — and The Iron Giant fittingly pays reverence to the 50s with Sputnik and the Red Scare forming the backdrop to his redefinition of the old school creature feature. A tale of a boy and his gentle giant robot somehow has become an indispensible fairy tale for contemporary times, aging gracefully in the 20 years since Bird has been directing. He set a gold standard with The Iron Giant and has rarely failed to live up to it.
3. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
Though Tomorrowland sent him back to the drawing board in a very real sense, the fourth film in the Mission: Impossible franchise was exhilarating enough to suggest that live action was where Bird belonged all along. Though the script is not his own, Bird injects every ounce of his auteurist abilities we had only previously known through animation into every frame of Ghost Protocol. Sporting the sickest stunt Tom Cruise ever pulled, every set piece in the film — the Kremlin sequence, the parking garage finale and, of course, scaling the tallest building in the world — is up there with the best of Mission: Impossible films and action blockbusters in general.
Bird marries life or death stakes with the series’ cartoonish overtones to thrilling and seriously fun results. M:I movies never felt like ensemble efforts before this entry — more like ego trips for an adrenaline-starved Cruise — and Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner and Paula Patton make up a well-rounded team in both kicking ass and delivering the utilitarian dialogue with a healthy measure of aplomb. Also the old-fashioned Cold War throwback plot was a little hokey back in 2011 — just further evidence of Bird's obsession with a certain era — but now it all looks far from implausible.
2. Ratatouille
Ratatouille may have a weakness in its reliance on narration, but that screenwriting tool is more of a crutch than a defect. Regardless, Ratatouille is up there with Pixar’s most challenging fare, if not the most exemplary instance of the Disney-owned brand allowing a creative mind full control over a project no matter how many people might be turned off by the premise.
Sure, Ratatouille is about a rat that cooks, but the film’s simplicity sums up a great deal about the crucial relationship between the artist and the critic, the former being Patton Oswalt’s Remy and the latter the curmudgeon Anton Ego (deliciously voiced by Peter O’Toole). Remy works as an excellent stand-in for Bird — the character reflects his own insatiable passion to seek the beauty of experimenting with his own craft and the steadfast desire of any artist pursuing recognition for their talents in return. Ratatouille is deeply funny, astoundingly insightful and startlingly sweet, not to mention as exquisitely animated as any film Pixar has brought forth.
1. The Incredibles
The best of action, adventure and superhero genres, The Incredibles deserves its name and then some. Bird’s original two Pixar joints are basically the best the respected studio has to offer — though The Incredibles is Bird’s most accomplished work for how perfectly it exhibits his numerous influences as well as his own sprawling imagination. Bird magically created a film that can play to any audience without sacrificing any part of his vision in order to better serve a specific age group, be it the emotionally wrenching moments or the cute ones.
The voice over work is impeccable, the characterization is rich and memorable and, like the X-Men series, the film manages to discuss the reality of superheroes to unearth indisputable thematic depth before basking in comic book weirdness and greatness. Syndrome is unquestionably one of cinema’s best supervillains, and the character’s allegory for the pitfalls of super-fandom are fascinatingly prescient. Bird deconstructs the façade of the suburban lifestyle along with everything that falls under the fantastical, counterbalancing the film’s cartoonish vibrations with genuine stakes. The darkest moments of The Incredibles are very moving and the action as a result is that much more visceral and gripping. The scripting is also perfect — the exposition feels natural, all the humor hits and each philosophical contemplation is stimulating.
*Published at TheCinemaholic.com / June 26th, 2018
Every Matthew Vaughn Film Ranked
No matter if he’s working stateside or east of the Atlantic where he was raised, Matthew Vaughn’s keenly British sensibilities rarely falter in delivering the best in mid-budget entertainment. Though his accessible talents seem to have primed him for handing the biggest of blockbuster ventures, the financial disappointment of his biggest (and best) film X-Men: First Class left him with his current command of the Kingsman franchise, which itself has betrayed its own popularity of late.
7. The King's Man
If only he hadn’t wasted his time carving out new lows while he tries to draw something deeper from the Bond alternative that is the Kingsman series. I highly doubt he wants to hang his hat on this series for life, but damn there’s an ironically insistent directionless that this film forces on us and the whole series… why didn’t we just make Kingsman 3 again? Most would say this fledgling franchise already fumbled with The Golden Circle but I’ll be the first to defend that epic double down on the first’s foolish fun. Beside wanting to get lost in more period genre fare like he excelled at in X-Men First Class, the creative calculations here are off and maybe never made sense to begin with — the fun has been fucked with, and this movie’s MCU post credits moment just seals the more straight-faced stupidity. I used to think Vaughn was underrated but this sorry prequel basically evened out a now slightly less exceptional filmography.
6. Stardust
Based on the Neil Gaiman novel from 1999, Stardust softened the darker edges of its source material into something closely resembling The Princess Bride. Fantasy-light to a tee, Stardust is a yarn worth wasting an evening on thanks to the good-humored tone and a fairly stacked cast. Charlie Cox and Claire Danes make for decent romantic leads as they act opposite an impressive supporting cast that includes Mark Strong, Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer and Peter O’Toole. Stardust is the least characteristic of Vaughn’s overall style and yet the B-movie whimsy is mildly infectious in its own way. At best Stardust established the beginning of a fruitful screenwriting partnership between Vaughn and Jane Goldman.
5. Kingsman: The Golden Circle
To say the Kingsman sequel is easily Vaughn’s weakest film is to do a disservice to what the director put forth in his ludicrous continuation of R-rated Bond-inspired mayhem. Critics largely panned The Golden Circle, and its flaws aren’t difficult to spot — Elton John’s cringe inducing extended cameo can’t be ignored. But in terms of expanding the comic book universe from which these movies are based, providing Eggsy’s character with greater depth and a formidable villain (the scenery-chewing Julianne Moore) and notching up the insanely dynamic action a few degrees, the second Kingsman builds upon everything Vaughn pulled off so well in the first film. Its excesses in length and violence are only disagreeable if you were already irritated by the choices made in The Secret Service — otherwise it’s a sufficient sequel.
4. Kick-Ass
Part of the momentary trend of “What if superheroes were REAL” among the continuous capeflick obsession of the 21st century, Kick-Ass appeared to break the mold back in 2010, paving the way for the likes of Deadpool. Super, released just months later, is the same kind of film with half the fuss. Kick-Ass was the first adaptation of the Mark Millar and John Romita Jr. comic book series and, despite its attributes, the movie is really only worth remembering for a young Chloë Grace Moretz in her best role and a classically unrestrained performance by Nicolas Cage. Early Aaron Taylor-Johnson is a charisma void and he nearly sucks the life out of this fringe film of the 21st century’s most lucrative genre. Kick-Ass is nonetheless mischievously charming and was Vaughn’s first real foray into winning over domestic audiences — the film is worth its salt just in the cult following it has fittingly accumulated.
3. Layer Cake
Vaughn got his own start in film by giving Guy Ritchie his big break — producing Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch made both Brits quite a bit of money. That said the only criticism to point out about the otherwise skillfully created Layer Cake is that Vaughn hadn’t quite found his voice as an auteur yet, and his directorial debut feels like a stylistic imitation of Ritchie. But Daniel Craig’s extended audition tape for the role of James Bond also made for a rock solid first crack at filmmaking for Vaughn, establishing him as a man of sharpened control over his material even if this is the one script he had no hand in writing. Imposing visual flair where you least expect it, Vaughn turns a convoluted crime-noir plot into a blissfully black-comic thriller. Though the influences of Bond seep through the cracks of nearly every film of his, the minimalism of Layer Cake favors paranoia and menace over cheek and gadgetry.
2. Kingsman: The Secret Service
Kingsman was the perfect match for Vaughn’s slight sense of self-awareness and bravura sensibilities in pacing and fight sequences. For all of its flagrant attitudes and unswerving flippancy, the first Kingsman was able to embrace both parody and unabashed homage of James Bond in inspired, spectacular fashion. The profanity and gleeful violence are just the dressing for a substantial action film that established Vaughn as a director of relatively unmatched kinetic aptitude. With a modest but sizable budget to play around with, Vaughn wove all his interests into his best of his adaptations of Mark Millar’s work. This send-up of spy tropes makes it look easy to take a crack at the secret agent film and Vaughn’s ease in filmmaking is equally comfortable to watch.
1. X-Men: First Class
One of modern times’ few uncluttered superhero films, First Class is the unassuming precipice of the X-Men franchise and furthermore one of the most overlooked pieces in all of caped cinema. Vaughn flirted with the idea of helming the eventual Brett Ratner-directed X-Men sequel The Last Stand in 2006, of which Vaughn was ultimately very critical. After the disaster of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Vaughn was tapped to breathe new life into the property and wipe the floundering franchise’s slate clean — which the Bryan Singer-directed sequel Days of Future Past would quite literally do by the end of its time travel plot.
Vaughn helped write Days of Future Past and First Class, and his own preboot is better than equivalents of same era like Star Trek, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Batman Begins. As a 0-to-100-kickstart for a series begging to be modernized, First Class is in the same league as Casino Royale for delicate blockbuster diversion and surgical course correction, regardless of where the newly forged paths led. Just as a standalone origin story on Charles Xavier founding the School for Gifted Youngsters and his unique friendship with Erik Lehnsherr, this is the quintessential X-Men film. First Class expertly explores the material’s allegories, properly contrasts the ideologies of the clashing lead characters and adds some of the strangest X-Men into the cinematic superhero lexicon.
Most importantly for the film’s peculiar sense of style and humor, the 60s setting is a wonderful backdrop for the camp (some of the special effects are delightfully cheesy) and coolness of the X-Men universe. Vaughn is at his most restrained here, not giving in to all-consuming spectacle that has come to define the genre in the years since 2011. This is an exceptionally character-driven X-Men film — especially with Wolverine not hogging the spotlight — and yet moments like Magneto raising a submarine out of the water are awe-inspiring and, best of all, earned. James McAvoy as Professor X and Michael Fassbender as Magneto is also perfect casting and their talents lend an unprecedented gravitas to the X-Men series and superhero films in general. Vaughn’s leash was never longer and X-Men: First Class is the best example of the director’s striking panache.
*Published at TheCinemaholic.com / June 19th, 2018
7. The King's Man
If only he hadn’t wasted his time carving out new lows while he tries to draw something deeper from the Bond alternative that is the Kingsman series. I highly doubt he wants to hang his hat on this series for life, but damn there’s an ironically insistent directionless that this film forces on us and the whole series… why didn’t we just make Kingsman 3 again? Most would say this fledgling franchise already fumbled with The Golden Circle but I’ll be the first to defend that epic double down on the first’s foolish fun. Beside wanting to get lost in more period genre fare like he excelled at in X-Men First Class, the creative calculations here are off and maybe never made sense to begin with — the fun has been fucked with, and this movie’s MCU post credits moment just seals the more straight-faced stupidity. I used to think Vaughn was underrated but this sorry prequel basically evened out a now slightly less exceptional filmography.
6. Stardust
Based on the Neil Gaiman novel from 1999, Stardust softened the darker edges of its source material into something closely resembling The Princess Bride. Fantasy-light to a tee, Stardust is a yarn worth wasting an evening on thanks to the good-humored tone and a fairly stacked cast. Charlie Cox and Claire Danes make for decent romantic leads as they act opposite an impressive supporting cast that includes Mark Strong, Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer and Peter O’Toole. Stardust is the least characteristic of Vaughn’s overall style and yet the B-movie whimsy is mildly infectious in its own way. At best Stardust established the beginning of a fruitful screenwriting partnership between Vaughn and Jane Goldman.
5. Kingsman: The Golden Circle
To say the Kingsman sequel is easily Vaughn’s weakest film is to do a disservice to what the director put forth in his ludicrous continuation of R-rated Bond-inspired mayhem. Critics largely panned The Golden Circle, and its flaws aren’t difficult to spot — Elton John’s cringe inducing extended cameo can’t be ignored. But in terms of expanding the comic book universe from which these movies are based, providing Eggsy’s character with greater depth and a formidable villain (the scenery-chewing Julianne Moore) and notching up the insanely dynamic action a few degrees, the second Kingsman builds upon everything Vaughn pulled off so well in the first film. Its excesses in length and violence are only disagreeable if you were already irritated by the choices made in The Secret Service — otherwise it’s a sufficient sequel.
4. Kick-Ass
Part of the momentary trend of “What if superheroes were REAL” among the continuous capeflick obsession of the 21st century, Kick-Ass appeared to break the mold back in 2010, paving the way for the likes of Deadpool. Super, released just months later, is the same kind of film with half the fuss. Kick-Ass was the first adaptation of the Mark Millar and John Romita Jr. comic book series and, despite its attributes, the movie is really only worth remembering for a young Chloë Grace Moretz in her best role and a classically unrestrained performance by Nicolas Cage. Early Aaron Taylor-Johnson is a charisma void and he nearly sucks the life out of this fringe film of the 21st century’s most lucrative genre. Kick-Ass is nonetheless mischievously charming and was Vaughn’s first real foray into winning over domestic audiences — the film is worth its salt just in the cult following it has fittingly accumulated.
3. Layer Cake
Vaughn got his own start in film by giving Guy Ritchie his big break — producing Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch made both Brits quite a bit of money. That said the only criticism to point out about the otherwise skillfully created Layer Cake is that Vaughn hadn’t quite found his voice as an auteur yet, and his directorial debut feels like a stylistic imitation of Ritchie. But Daniel Craig’s extended audition tape for the role of James Bond also made for a rock solid first crack at filmmaking for Vaughn, establishing him as a man of sharpened control over his material even if this is the one script he had no hand in writing. Imposing visual flair where you least expect it, Vaughn turns a convoluted crime-noir plot into a blissfully black-comic thriller. Though the influences of Bond seep through the cracks of nearly every film of his, the minimalism of Layer Cake favors paranoia and menace over cheek and gadgetry.
2. Kingsman: The Secret Service
Kingsman was the perfect match for Vaughn’s slight sense of self-awareness and bravura sensibilities in pacing and fight sequences. For all of its flagrant attitudes and unswerving flippancy, the first Kingsman was able to embrace both parody and unabashed homage of James Bond in inspired, spectacular fashion. The profanity and gleeful violence are just the dressing for a substantial action film that established Vaughn as a director of relatively unmatched kinetic aptitude. With a modest but sizable budget to play around with, Vaughn wove all his interests into his best of his adaptations of Mark Millar’s work. This send-up of spy tropes makes it look easy to take a crack at the secret agent film and Vaughn’s ease in filmmaking is equally comfortable to watch.
1. X-Men: First Class
One of modern times’ few uncluttered superhero films, First Class is the unassuming precipice of the X-Men franchise and furthermore one of the most overlooked pieces in all of caped cinema. Vaughn flirted with the idea of helming the eventual Brett Ratner-directed X-Men sequel The Last Stand in 2006, of which Vaughn was ultimately very critical. After the disaster of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Vaughn was tapped to breathe new life into the property and wipe the floundering franchise’s slate clean — which the Bryan Singer-directed sequel Days of Future Past would quite literally do by the end of its time travel plot.
Vaughn helped write Days of Future Past and First Class, and his own preboot is better than equivalents of same era like Star Trek, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Batman Begins. As a 0-to-100-kickstart for a series begging to be modernized, First Class is in the same league as Casino Royale for delicate blockbuster diversion and surgical course correction, regardless of where the newly forged paths led. Just as a standalone origin story on Charles Xavier founding the School for Gifted Youngsters and his unique friendship with Erik Lehnsherr, this is the quintessential X-Men film. First Class expertly explores the material’s allegories, properly contrasts the ideologies of the clashing lead characters and adds some of the strangest X-Men into the cinematic superhero lexicon.
Most importantly for the film’s peculiar sense of style and humor, the 60s setting is a wonderful backdrop for the camp (some of the special effects are delightfully cheesy) and coolness of the X-Men universe. Vaughn is at his most restrained here, not giving in to all-consuming spectacle that has come to define the genre in the years since 2011. This is an exceptionally character-driven X-Men film — especially with Wolverine not hogging the spotlight — and yet moments like Magneto raising a submarine out of the water are awe-inspiring and, best of all, earned. James McAvoy as Professor X and Michael Fassbender as Magneto is also perfect casting and their talents lend an unprecedented gravitas to the X-Men series and superhero films in general. Vaughn’s leash was never longer and X-Men: First Class is the best example of the director’s striking panache.
*Published at TheCinemaholic.com / June 19th, 2018
Every Noah Baumbach Film Ranked
Noah Baumbach is a born indie filmmaker. The child of two critics, the New York native has become one of America’s most distinct and exemplary writer-directors of low-budget films for nearly three decades. Apart from brief co-writer credits for Wes Anderson joints Life Aquatic and Fantastic Mr. Fox, he’s been the guiding force behind every project he’s helmed.
With the wits to write one stinging original screenplay after another and the fortitude to direct his own material competently, Baumbach has become one of the most essential modern auteurs of his kind. His filmography echoes Woody Allen in his prime — philosophizing comedy, cutting social commentary and gems of insightful dialogue are all staples of Baumbach’s imprint.
13. Mr. Jealousy
A modest character study exploring the mistrust and emasculation of cuckoldry (or at least the dreadful fear of it), Mr. Jealousy has ideas worth investigating but it remains Baumbach’s least developed film. However slight in structure or in crafting memorable dialogue, Baumbach still manages to make a good premise into a half-decent film.
12. Highball
Though he ultimately disowned the film, Highball, for all its amateurish aspects, is a respectably twee comedy. Made on the fly with money left over from the making of Mr. Jealousy, the film’s three acts focus on a group of friends over time as they participate in various get-togethers — a boring birthday, an awkward Halloween party and New Year's Eve specifically. The film was shot in less than a week and also features Baumbach acting in the largest role of any of his self-directed performances. If nothing else, Highball was a testament to how much the then fledgling filmaker could accomplish with the most meager of resources at his disposal.
11. Margot at the Wedding
The middle chapter of Baumbach’s career as it stands today is one dictated by an attempt to generate empathy for at least moderately despicable characters — Nicole Kidman’s Margot may be the most difficult of these to defend. From her strained relationship with her young son to her interactions with her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh in the first of two roles in her then-husband’s films) and her future husband Malcolm (Jack Black), we see every prickly, unflattering side of our titular character. Falling on the more distinctly dramatic end of Baumbach’s comedy-drama tightrope, Margot at the Wedding is a minor moment of his career.
10. De Palma
This straightforward documentary finds our filmmaker in question celebrating and examining an American auteur from the previous generation. Co-directed by Jake Paltrow, De Palma finds Brian breaking down his entire career from his early days before his proper debut through 2012’s Passion. Honestly reflecting on his successes and failures spanning over four decades, De Palma gets candid about his navigation through New Hollywood and, at its most interesting, comes clean about his shortcomings as a director. Working from the most subjective perspective of objectivity on a lengthy filmography, De Palma functions best as an adequate introduction to a fundamental American director.
9. Kicking and Screaming
Baumbach’s humble debut is laced with the themes one could expect from a young filmmaker struggling to make his voice heard — the limbo of post-college life and the aching pain of not having a damn clue what to do with the rest of your life. Many of these topics would be fleshed out better in later films, but Kicking and Screaming remains the most potent work of his early career, establishing watchable actors like Carlos Jacott, Chris Eigeman and Eric Stoltz as a regular part of his initial career.
8. Greenberg
Rodger Greenberg is perhaps Baumbach’s most challenging character — an ex-musician and recent ex-mental patient housesitting for his well-off brother in California. He begins a thoroughly dysfunctional relationship with Florence (Greta Gerwig in her first collaboration with Baumbach), the brother’s personal assistant. Nailing the discomfort of social anxiety and the fastidiousness of OCD, Greenberg can be tough to watch in its darkest moments but it set the tone for Baumbach’s copious productivity this current decade — fast, effective dialogue in service of realistic, flawed characters. The film also marked the first and best of Baumbach’s collaborations with Ben Stiller.
7. While We're Young
The generational gap is always a bigger divide than we imagine. That has become a recurring refrain for Baumbach, particularly in his most recent films. But in the strange friendship between two couples separated by two decades, While We’re Young becomes the definitive film on the subject. Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts opposite Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried makes for brilliantly awkward comedy and some outwardly hilarious moments — the ayahuasca ceremony may be the funniest thing Baumbach has written. Abundant with pointed if obvious social observations, While We’re Young is without a doubt one of the director’s wittiest efforts.
6. White Noise
5. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
Baumbach’s first Netflix feature didn’t require a theater experience to register as one of his finest films. A more complex update of the family drama dynamics he made a name for in The Squid and the Whale, The (New and Selected) Meyerowitz Stories are bursting with rich comedy and acerbic satire. Most unexpectedly, the film showcases powerful performances from Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler. A continuation of the Sorkin-like verbosity he seemed to have perfected in Mistress America, this is a film worth multiple watches just for how sharp and layered the humor is and how interesting a fictitious family tree Baumbach has sketched out.
4. The Squid and the Whale
Earning an Oscar Nomination as a result of his most critically acclaimed film, Baumbach’s very biographical tale of two young brothers dealing with their parent's divorce is the director’s most intimate film. Contrasting early male adolescence with the snobbery of aging pseudo-intellectual parents, the film’s drama and insight arrives from how each son gravitates toward the parent they are closest to. The best of his pitch black comedies, The Squid and the Whale was Baumbach’s discreet and mature breakthrough.
3. Mistress America
Baumbach’s littlest masterpiece Mistress America is the giddiest and most energetic script of his career, brimming with character revelations, genius one-liners and some of the writer-director’s most entertaining banter. When the mother of a college freshman and the dad of 30-year-old New York socialite are getting married, the soon-to-be sisters form a sweet and strange codependence — young Tracy (an amazing Lola Kirke) uses the bubbly Brooke (Gerwig) as inspiration for her creative writing while Brooke basks in her admiration as she struggles to start a restaurant. Baumbach’s violet-tinged theatrics turn a flawless script into a near-perfect screwball comedy that tackles a half-dozen other subjects while tapping into the essence of sisterhood.
2. Frances Ha
Emulating Woody Allen, Jim Jarmusch and French New Wave in his monochromatic masterwork, Frances Ha is the lovely apex of Baumbach’s substantial career and the best consequence of his romantic and creative partnership with star and co-writer Greta Gerwig. While still maintaining authorship, Gerwig was clearly Baumbach’s muse in Frances Ha and Mistress America — and like Jean-Luc Godard and Allen before him, the inspiration derived from his significant other has led him to the most subtextually stimulating, thematically rewarding and splendidly funny films of his career. This portrait of Frances, an aspiring late-20s dancer barely making ends meet in New York, is the quintessential quarter-life-crisis film. Baumbach molds our protagonist’s best-friendship with Sophie (Mickey Summer) into a sublimely textured and fervently expressive romantic comedy. As a testament to Gerwig’s talents (Lady Bird was just more proof), her effect on Baumbach or both, Frances Ha is drawn from true inspiration, which is hard to fake. The film is so authentic that it hurts.
1. Marriage Story
I don’t care about the memes, or that rich white people also have problems. This is simply one of the best screenplays and most honest cinematic reverence for relationships I’ve seen in a long time. Baumbach seems so drawn to the lighter side of satire that I didn’t know he had another Allen-like trait of turning out some great dramatic work after a spell of the funnier stuff. If The Squid and the Whale, Frances Ha and Mistress America were all refinements on a sturdy working craft, this is what it was all leading towards. It’s a little more Driver’s story than a mutual showcase but somehow Baumbach, in one of most nakedly autobiographical creations, keeps things democratic. His films, though sharp with a postmodern, semi-sardonic, dearly human acuteness, always felt a little small — you could dismiss even some of his best as privileged hipster fare on a bad day. Marriage Story is a sure a modern classic as he’s concocted, almost scaldingly truthful, and fully realized and very nearly epic in sum. There’s something to be said for consistently topping yourself.
*Published at TheCinemaholic.com / June 15th, 2018
With the wits to write one stinging original screenplay after another and the fortitude to direct his own material competently, Baumbach has become one of the most essential modern auteurs of his kind. His filmography echoes Woody Allen in his prime — philosophizing comedy, cutting social commentary and gems of insightful dialogue are all staples of Baumbach’s imprint.
13. Mr. Jealousy
A modest character study exploring the mistrust and emasculation of cuckoldry (or at least the dreadful fear of it), Mr. Jealousy has ideas worth investigating but it remains Baumbach’s least developed film. However slight in structure or in crafting memorable dialogue, Baumbach still manages to make a good premise into a half-decent film.
12. Highball
Though he ultimately disowned the film, Highball, for all its amateurish aspects, is a respectably twee comedy. Made on the fly with money left over from the making of Mr. Jealousy, the film’s three acts focus on a group of friends over time as they participate in various get-togethers — a boring birthday, an awkward Halloween party and New Year's Eve specifically. The film was shot in less than a week and also features Baumbach acting in the largest role of any of his self-directed performances. If nothing else, Highball was a testament to how much the then fledgling filmaker could accomplish with the most meager of resources at his disposal.
11. Margot at the Wedding
The middle chapter of Baumbach’s career as it stands today is one dictated by an attempt to generate empathy for at least moderately despicable characters — Nicole Kidman’s Margot may be the most difficult of these to defend. From her strained relationship with her young son to her interactions with her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh in the first of two roles in her then-husband’s films) and her future husband Malcolm (Jack Black), we see every prickly, unflattering side of our titular character. Falling on the more distinctly dramatic end of Baumbach’s comedy-drama tightrope, Margot at the Wedding is a minor moment of his career.
10. De Palma
This straightforward documentary finds our filmmaker in question celebrating and examining an American auteur from the previous generation. Co-directed by Jake Paltrow, De Palma finds Brian breaking down his entire career from his early days before his proper debut through 2012’s Passion. Honestly reflecting on his successes and failures spanning over four decades, De Palma gets candid about his navigation through New Hollywood and, at its most interesting, comes clean about his shortcomings as a director. Working from the most subjective perspective of objectivity on a lengthy filmography, De Palma functions best as an adequate introduction to a fundamental American director.
9. Kicking and Screaming
Baumbach’s humble debut is laced with the themes one could expect from a young filmmaker struggling to make his voice heard — the limbo of post-college life and the aching pain of not having a damn clue what to do with the rest of your life. Many of these topics would be fleshed out better in later films, but Kicking and Screaming remains the most potent work of his early career, establishing watchable actors like Carlos Jacott, Chris Eigeman and Eric Stoltz as a regular part of his initial career.
8. Greenberg
Rodger Greenberg is perhaps Baumbach’s most challenging character — an ex-musician and recent ex-mental patient housesitting for his well-off brother in California. He begins a thoroughly dysfunctional relationship with Florence (Greta Gerwig in her first collaboration with Baumbach), the brother’s personal assistant. Nailing the discomfort of social anxiety and the fastidiousness of OCD, Greenberg can be tough to watch in its darkest moments but it set the tone for Baumbach’s copious productivity this current decade — fast, effective dialogue in service of realistic, flawed characters. The film also marked the first and best of Baumbach’s collaborations with Ben Stiller.
7. While We're Young
The generational gap is always a bigger divide than we imagine. That has become a recurring refrain for Baumbach, particularly in his most recent films. But in the strange friendship between two couples separated by two decades, While We’re Young becomes the definitive film on the subject. Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts opposite Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried makes for brilliantly awkward comedy and some outwardly hilarious moments — the ayahuasca ceremony may be the funniest thing Baumbach has written. Abundant with pointed if obvious social observations, While We’re Young is without a doubt one of the director’s wittiest efforts.
6. White Noise
5. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
Baumbach’s first Netflix feature didn’t require a theater experience to register as one of his finest films. A more complex update of the family drama dynamics he made a name for in The Squid and the Whale, The (New and Selected) Meyerowitz Stories are bursting with rich comedy and acerbic satire. Most unexpectedly, the film showcases powerful performances from Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler. A continuation of the Sorkin-like verbosity he seemed to have perfected in Mistress America, this is a film worth multiple watches just for how sharp and layered the humor is and how interesting a fictitious family tree Baumbach has sketched out.
4. The Squid and the Whale
Earning an Oscar Nomination as a result of his most critically acclaimed film, Baumbach’s very biographical tale of two young brothers dealing with their parent's divorce is the director’s most intimate film. Contrasting early male adolescence with the snobbery of aging pseudo-intellectual parents, the film’s drama and insight arrives from how each son gravitates toward the parent they are closest to. The best of his pitch black comedies, The Squid and the Whale was Baumbach’s discreet and mature breakthrough.
3. Mistress America
Baumbach’s littlest masterpiece Mistress America is the giddiest and most energetic script of his career, brimming with character revelations, genius one-liners and some of the writer-director’s most entertaining banter. When the mother of a college freshman and the dad of 30-year-old New York socialite are getting married, the soon-to-be sisters form a sweet and strange codependence — young Tracy (an amazing Lola Kirke) uses the bubbly Brooke (Gerwig) as inspiration for her creative writing while Brooke basks in her admiration as she struggles to start a restaurant. Baumbach’s violet-tinged theatrics turn a flawless script into a near-perfect screwball comedy that tackles a half-dozen other subjects while tapping into the essence of sisterhood.
2. Frances Ha
Emulating Woody Allen, Jim Jarmusch and French New Wave in his monochromatic masterwork, Frances Ha is the lovely apex of Baumbach’s substantial career and the best consequence of his romantic and creative partnership with star and co-writer Greta Gerwig. While still maintaining authorship, Gerwig was clearly Baumbach’s muse in Frances Ha and Mistress America — and like Jean-Luc Godard and Allen before him, the inspiration derived from his significant other has led him to the most subtextually stimulating, thematically rewarding and splendidly funny films of his career. This portrait of Frances, an aspiring late-20s dancer barely making ends meet in New York, is the quintessential quarter-life-crisis film. Baumbach molds our protagonist’s best-friendship with Sophie (Mickey Summer) into a sublimely textured and fervently expressive romantic comedy. As a testament to Gerwig’s talents (Lady Bird was just more proof), her effect on Baumbach or both, Frances Ha is drawn from true inspiration, which is hard to fake. The film is so authentic that it hurts.
1. Marriage Story
I don’t care about the memes, or that rich white people also have problems. This is simply one of the best screenplays and most honest cinematic reverence for relationships I’ve seen in a long time. Baumbach seems so drawn to the lighter side of satire that I didn’t know he had another Allen-like trait of turning out some great dramatic work after a spell of the funnier stuff. If The Squid and the Whale, Frances Ha and Mistress America were all refinements on a sturdy working craft, this is what it was all leading towards. It’s a little more Driver’s story than a mutual showcase but somehow Baumbach, in one of most nakedly autobiographical creations, keeps things democratic. His films, though sharp with a postmodern, semi-sardonic, dearly human acuteness, always felt a little small — you could dismiss even some of his best as privileged hipster fare on a bad day. Marriage Story is a sure a modern classic as he’s concocted, almost scaldingly truthful, and fully realized and very nearly epic in sum. There’s something to be said for consistently topping yourself.
*Published at TheCinemaholic.com / June 15th, 2018
Every Star Wars Film Ranked
Some people watch Star Wars and see the peak cultural touchstone of their young lives. Others see Spaceballs minus the parody. Somewhere in between the casual filmgoer has been exposed in some way to the monstrous film series that is Star Wars, be it an original, prequel, or one of Disney’s new attempts at further box office domination.
With no new Star Wars films set to release in the coming year and a half — until J. J. Abrams’ course correction conclusion to the sequel trilogy in Episode IX — here are all of the series’ live action films ranked from worst to best from the non-fan perspective.
11. Rogue One
Though from a filmmaking perspective Rogue One is more than just fine, it’s nearly as bad as the prequels in conception alone, but in the opposite way. A slew of silly space operas now chronologically shift to a gritty, humorless war film. Just as drawn out as Lucas’s ego-stroking prequels, this is one of the least engaging entries of the series — a heaping slice of fan service disguised as something greater and more important.
A New Hope never dwelled on how the Death Star plans were nabbed — it was a plot device ready to set the entire original film into motion. Now the convoluted story of a drab, one-note collection of misfits trying to obtain what we already know they steal forms a truer prequel to the original.
While The Force Awakens admittedly updates all of the elements that made the world crazy about the first film, it doesn’t reside entirely in fanboy-baiting nostalgia. What distinguishes Rogue One from Disney’s first try and frankly the rest of series is that it sorely lacks in fun. Star Wars was supposed to be space fantasy adventure right? Since when did we have to take it as deadly serious as Apocalypse Now?
The actual story of Rogue One could have been a nifty spin-off film, but, just like Gareth Edwards spoiled the promising 2014 Godzilla remake, he does the same here; both films even had similarly misleading marketing. Maybe Disney made Rogue One too safe for the sake box office numbers, so Edwards can’t be left entirely to blame. But just like everyone thought the Darth Vader parts were the best of the movie, they were just so — a calculated last-minute decision by a corporation that may always squander the potential for originality with a penchant for the nostalgic.
10. The Last Jedi
Easily the most divisive Star Wars film to date, The Last Jedi was Disney’s riskiest play yet with their latest billion dollar property.
As much as The Force Awakens opened the door to a new era of Star Wars, writer-director Rian Johnson’s middle chapter of the sequel trilogy was decidedly directionless. Like he pranked every fan, casual and die hard, who had speculated over the mysteries laid out in the previous episode, Johnson settles for subversion itself as a substitute for questions answered and characters developed. The Last Jedi challenges one’s expectation more than any Star Wars film before it, particularly if you were expecting a good film.
Though it’s passable in meager moments, The Last Jedi is foremost a huge failure for how significantly it squanders its own potential. Every moment of originality that could have placed it in the ranks as the best entry since the original trilogy is undone by stupidity strongly reminiscent of the farcical nature of the prequels. An awesome scene like Rey and Kylo’s throne room team-up is tainted by the nonchalant disposal of Snoke. The light speed ram through the star destroyer is a great bit of spectacle superseded by the illogic of Holdo keeping it a secret from her crew. Fin nearly sacrifices himself for the greater good before Rose laughably saves him by almost killing him, then she ironically gives a monologue on how love will save us while placing the entire Resistance closer to harm. The contradictions go on and on.
Most disappointingly of all, The Last Jedi barely advances any overarching story and leaves no reason to be excited about the conclusion to the new trilogy. Save for the progression of Rey and Kylo’s relationship, J. J. Abrams was left with quite the mess to clean up for Disney to salvage the majority of Star Wars fans.
9. The Phantom Menace
Likely one of the most miscalculated and excessive efforts ever put to film, the first of the eagerly anticipated Star Wars prequels would end up being the most narratively unimportant to the saga. The events of The Phantom Menace are trivial, as the rest of the series continues 10 years after the story of our false protagonist, Anakin Skywalker, here played by a tiny, insufferable Jake Lloyd. Liam Neeson’s Qui-Gon Jinn has at least twice the time on-screen as Lloyd, but his considerable talents are among the chief to fall to the hand of George Lucas’s profound deficiency at writing dialogue and connecting his stories with internal logic.
The Phantom Menace is a rough starting point for the series’ chronology, and an unpleasant one to have unfold before your eyes. From tarnishing the mythology of the originals to the firmly established overuse of the false, phony and clean CGI for a vast majority of the film, Lucas’s entire vision is misguided and disjointed. John Williams’ music is the only consistent saving grace of the prequels — his talent is wasted on the worst of blockbusters here, but throughout these films he is able to elevate the sour tone of the visuals and the script. Without Williams, each of the three movies in question would play out like an embarrassing spoof — he is magically able to string together the bland editing and now very dated visual effects with unwarranted, furious intent.
Jar Jar Binks tops a list of bafflingly stupid cinematic choices, which also includes midi-chlorians and killing off Darth Maul — the only vaguely interesting figure amidst a sea of robotic, vanilla characters despite how little he is seen. As Lucas bit off more than he could chew, the grandiosity of Anakin’s downfall has to be foreshadowed with a virgin birth and one of the dumbest uses of the likes of prophecies and chosen ones. And his new emphasis on the supposed intellectualism of space politics only further cements the prequel trilogy as a failure across the board. The particularly disagreeable version of space fantasy that culminates in Episode I just happens to be the series’ worst.
8. Attack of the Clones
After the mother of all palette cleansers with Episode I, Lucas seems to try to correct his overall self-indulgence at least a little with Attack of the Clones. Though just as ineptly scripted as the first, this film’s only benefit is its lack of as many repulsive elements — and from time to time a scene won’t ring completely false.
Episode II has more time for this trilogy’s finest casting choice in Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, but his larger role just means some extra quipping. Jar Jar’s role is thankfully greatly reduced here, and at least a child isn’t playing Darth Vader the youngling. An angsty adolescent instead is a small step up though — Hayden Christiansen is a poor actor to begin with, but Lucas’s lines turn him into a whiny, short-tempered and furthermore unsympathetic main character.
The arc of Anakin’s tragic downfall is less Shakespearean and more soap opera. The quarter-baked romance between he and Natalie Portman’s Padmé Amidala is some of the most worthy hate-watch material that the infamous prequels have to offer. This emphatically clichéd love story forms the spineless emotional backbone to a wildly overblown and often comical film trilogy. And Obi-Wan’s subplot in discovering the missing Clone-creating planet Kamino just serves as padding to push the romantic aspects as forcefully as possible. By the time it seems our star-crossed lovers are doomed, and Padmé confesses to Anakin that she “truly, deeply” loves him, our first instinct is to roll our eyes rather than dab them.
A few moments go over well enough in a cinematic sense. After that horrid bit of dialogue just mentioned, Anakin, Obi-Wan and Padme fight with monsters in the Geonosis gladiator arena in an entertaining set piece. But this is the longest entry of the series and nearly the least justified — did we need the video game-ready factory scene, or a Yoda lightsaber duel? Though not bursting at the seams with as much of the tacky filler of Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones exists mostly to set up the aforementioned The Clone Wars and put everything in place for the only prequel that even remotely justified its existence in the first place.
7. The Force Awakens
J. J. Abrams was an innocuous choice, but probably the best man for the job of creating a fresh start to Disney’s sequel Star Wars saga. At the very least he has a profound sense of propulsive direction, infusing even cheap references to the original films with a level of joy.
The skeleton of the plot of The Force Awakens is damn near identical to A New Hope, but its enjoyable to see how its placement of characters steadily shuffles the older players out and the new faces to the center of attention. The death of Han Solo was the beginning of the end for the leads of the original trilogy and following Harrison Ford’s exit in the film we get the most rewarding scene. The climactic face-off between Rey, Fin and Kylo Ren is earned and stirring.
Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver and Oscar Isaac are all curiously smart choices for our new set of primary characters — each respectively does well in infusing enough credibility to balance out the expected wit. However, John Boyega’s underwritten role as rogue storm trooper turned resistance fighter unfortunately shortchanges his performance.
The Force Awakens struggles to put forth many new things, but the film works as Abrams’ own remix of the original film, updating every outdated facet of the first film to modern tastes. Before Episode VIII evaporated the momentum of the new series, this film left the future of Star Wars looking considerably bright. Especially with abundant filmmaking resources and built-in audiences at their disposal, Disney will hopefully hit their stride in offering more creative films without pandering to fans. The studio should have a long while until the profitability wears out.
6. Solo: A Star Wars Story
Living up to everything Rogue One could have been — a swashbuckler, a clever heist movie, at least its own “Star Wars Story” — Solo has the benefit of receiving fans and general audiences anticipating something rather subpar.
Acting coaches for leading man Alden Ehrenreich, the firing of original directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and expensive reshoots all pointed to disaster. Though Lord and Miller’s borderline parody might have been more enjoyable, Solo neatly mixes watchable new characters with amusing manifestations of fan favorites, expands the Star Wars universe in a mostly interesting way and turns a movie that shouldn’t even exist into a half-decent origin story worthy of the sequels it attempts to set up.
This is not to say the film is miraculously great. Solo’s simple plot involving hyperfuel gives the whole project a uniformly safe feel and certain players in our backstabbing band of anti-heroes function like archetypes, somewhat unpredictable as they are. As for Han Solo’s backstory, the film is going off of maybe five minutes of dialogue in the original trilogy; the blaster, the Falcon, the Kessel Run, meeting Chewbacca, gambling with Lando, etc. — obviously it’s all worked into the narrative. Because the iconic pieces of Star Wars are in the forefront, the excess fan service has been thankfully scaled back, even if there are the occasionally condescending winks and nods.
Even with Donald Glover, Emilia Clarke, Woody Harrelson and Paul Bettany all fleshing out an entertaining supporting cast, its Ehrenreich himself that keeps the film together. Ehrenreich’s take on Han feels like a weak impression before it turns to reasonably inhabited bravado as the film plays out. The character has a bit of room to grow and even in the film future, as this Star Wars Story leaves out Jabba the Hutt, Boba Fett and Greedo for future installments.
For a film so unnecessary, the final product is tonally consistent with classic Star Wars and satisfyingly fun in its self-contained simplicity. There’s not much at stake, but the most surprising thing about Ron Howard’s film is that it emanates any sort of agreeable charm, let alone a good deal of it.
5. Revenge of the Sith
As the lesser of three evils, Revenge of the Sith most often gets a pass from audiences — it remains certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes and when it was released A. O. Scott called in better than the 1977 original.
But in the scope of the saga as we see it today, it’s a stretch that Obi-Wan’s bit of backstory on Darth Vader needed a two and a half hour epic to explain. Nonetheless the least repulsive of the three prequels tries to balance Lucas’s love for childlike humor and cartoonish action sequences with the inevitable impending dark side, which includes the serial murder of children and some domestic abuse. Full of inherent inconsistencies, Revenge of the Sith is a microcosm of the ambition and potential of Lucas’s concept for the prequels, and also reveals all of his worst tendencies of the series — flat dialogue, tensionless fight sequences, unintentional humor, all of which has contributed to an entire subreddit’s page worth of memes over the years.
It’s ironic that as the prequels got progressively gloomier, the mistakes and poor filmmaking choices became more noticeable even if they are fewer. Chock full of betrayal, manipulation, anger and murder, this film, for mostly worse, feels like a genuine space opera, oscillating between grand scale sci-fi fantasy and cheesy, dutifully melodramatic dialogue. Revenge of the Sith is the most enjoyable prequel because for once Lucas’s ultimate intentions are somewhat clear, and the entertainment value, intended or not, is surprisingly high. More than a few moments achieve the mythic quality Lucas reaches for.
But when this film’s ending tries its darndest to end up essentially at the beginning of A New Hope, it becomes obvious that for as much as Lucas aspired to here, these films still only rely on the original trilogy’s notoriety and the unbound but creatively bankrupt mind of its architect. Episode III conjures a cocktail of the bloodless familiar and disturbing, uninspired creations. The prequels deserve all the hate they get because everything new is grotesque and everything that existed before is either recycled or simply ruined.
4. The Rise of Skywalker
If you ignore all of its imposing faults, there is so much entertainment value here as compared to the thematic rewriting of The Last Jedi and the soulless retreading of The Force Awakens. For all its stupidities leading it to the ultimate conclusion of a trilogy AND a trilogy of trilogies, The Rise of Skywalker delivers every aspect of the serialized superficial space opera we crave: epic confrontations, idiotic genetic reveals, globe-trotting, Macguffin hunting nonsense. I wish there was something more original or concise about The Rise of Skywalker but it made the best of a story situation fouled up not once but twice. If it didn’t cram three movies worth of narrative in two and a half hours, maybe it would won over critics and audiences but personally I like my Star Wars silly, colorful and overstuffed.
3. Return of the Jedi
The part of the original trilogy most worthy of criticism, Return of the Jedi, no matter how wobbly, brings the first wave of Star Wars to a generally satisfying close. In terms of low-hanging criticisms, the Ewoks show the series blatantly catering to a very young audience, Han Solo is at his most useless, and the beginning of these films reusing many prime pieces of the property that came beforehand, like that second Death Star.
But it’s hard to deny the film’s own merits. The idea of Jabba the Hutt enters the nasty flesh after two films of reputation, and the extended sequence at his palace is suitably weird fun. Throughout the film, the action and production design still remains a marvel of craft — the peculiar tone of the saga adapts nicely to the new terrors and wonders in Episode VI.
Everything in Jedi’s rousing climax with Luke, Vader and the Emperor has a grand perspective and is the film’s highlight — it brings the whole of the series into focus and can’t help but feel like a proper finale. The end of Luke and Vader’s arcs is almost astonishingly touching, selling the trilogy altogether as one of pop culture’s most deservedly iconic series.
2. Star Wars
The humble beginnings of Star Wars are challenged with each new entry that comes forth. One of the biggest criticisms of Disney’s first two efforts is that they each relied so completely on the contents of the film phenomenon. But on its own, Star Wars is quaint to our modern tastes and yet seems to be the major predictor of how action movies and nerd culture would eventually earn a permanent spot in the mainstream.
Star Wars takes itself seriously enough to be sold as the foundation of a realized universe, but its just light, simple and straightforward enough to work exactly as it did for the public and those that identified with it forty years ago. It’s a perfectly paced, magnificently edited blockbuster that, while old-fashioned in production values and story structure, feels captivatingly contemporary. For those growing up with Disney’s fresh onslaught of films, they may look back on the original films and note how dated it all seems. But Lucas proved with his creatively bankrupt prequel trilogy that the technical restrictions of New Hollywood yielded innovations that seem of a bygone era in the age of 21st century cinema.
What’s remarkable about the first Star Wars is despite how scrappy and silly it may be on the surface, it’s a prime example of the reaches of escapism that film can have. The plot navigates through a vivid, living universe that has only been made to feel so authentic after so much time in the pop culture conversation and all the homage it is paid with nearly every subsequent sequel.
1. The Empire Strikes Back
One of the great film sequels, The Empire Strikes Back easily stands toe to toe with the original for classic moments and reliably entertaining characters and conflicts. As an expansion of the Star Wars mythology, it is bold enough dwell on all new locales in Hoth, Dagobah and Cloud City, and wise enough to expand its cast with memorable, canon-defining characters like Yoda, Boba Fett and Lando Calrissian. All that while fleshing out the key players from the first without missing a single emotional beat along the way.
Though it’s the darkest of the original trilogy, it still bears all the corn and aged effects that make it a brilliant continuation of the simple hero’s journey adventure of the original. Plus, by its famously dour conclusion, it’s full shape forms the series’ most convincing iteration of the idea of a space opera, the result of the most unique and interesting story structure of the series. After spending the first act together, our band of leads break off and the hope of later reuniting is ultimately faltered.
Empire balances realistic romance and playful humor on the side of Han, Leia and company’s chase in the Millennium Falcon from Vader’s Imperial clutch. And Luke’s training with Yoda remains the height of Star Wars’ cinematic potential. This part of the second act delves the deeper into Jedi mythology than any other movie has gone, tests Luke’s character thoroughly and gives us several wonderful moments of insight from the most sage of little green aliens. Beyond his famous lines, Yoda’s most profound sentiment is in his urgency for Luke to perceive not only the Force but also himself as something spiritual, outside the physical. “Luminous beings are we,” he croaks before grabbing Luke’s shoulder to shake it — “not this crude matter.”
Boasting nearly as much originality as its predecessor, Empire edges out the number one spot for its ability to be taken at face value, with little need for growing up with the film to appreciate its qualities. The straightforward innocence of Star Wars was itself elevated by The Empire Strikes Back through sheer force of passionate invention and respect for the growth of its characters. The film is textbook blockbuster filmmaking at its richest.
*Originally published at TasteofCinema.com / May 27th, 2017 / Updated on May 29th, 2018
With no new Star Wars films set to release in the coming year and a half — until J. J. Abrams’ course correction conclusion to the sequel trilogy in Episode IX — here are all of the series’ live action films ranked from worst to best from the non-fan perspective.
11. Rogue One
Though from a filmmaking perspective Rogue One is more than just fine, it’s nearly as bad as the prequels in conception alone, but in the opposite way. A slew of silly space operas now chronologically shift to a gritty, humorless war film. Just as drawn out as Lucas’s ego-stroking prequels, this is one of the least engaging entries of the series — a heaping slice of fan service disguised as something greater and more important.
A New Hope never dwelled on how the Death Star plans were nabbed — it was a plot device ready to set the entire original film into motion. Now the convoluted story of a drab, one-note collection of misfits trying to obtain what we already know they steal forms a truer prequel to the original.
While The Force Awakens admittedly updates all of the elements that made the world crazy about the first film, it doesn’t reside entirely in fanboy-baiting nostalgia. What distinguishes Rogue One from Disney’s first try and frankly the rest of series is that it sorely lacks in fun. Star Wars was supposed to be space fantasy adventure right? Since when did we have to take it as deadly serious as Apocalypse Now?
The actual story of Rogue One could have been a nifty spin-off film, but, just like Gareth Edwards spoiled the promising 2014 Godzilla remake, he does the same here; both films even had similarly misleading marketing. Maybe Disney made Rogue One too safe for the sake box office numbers, so Edwards can’t be left entirely to blame. But just like everyone thought the Darth Vader parts were the best of the movie, they were just so — a calculated last-minute decision by a corporation that may always squander the potential for originality with a penchant for the nostalgic.
10. The Last Jedi
Easily the most divisive Star Wars film to date, The Last Jedi was Disney’s riskiest play yet with their latest billion dollar property.
As much as The Force Awakens opened the door to a new era of Star Wars, writer-director Rian Johnson’s middle chapter of the sequel trilogy was decidedly directionless. Like he pranked every fan, casual and die hard, who had speculated over the mysteries laid out in the previous episode, Johnson settles for subversion itself as a substitute for questions answered and characters developed. The Last Jedi challenges one’s expectation more than any Star Wars film before it, particularly if you were expecting a good film.
Though it’s passable in meager moments, The Last Jedi is foremost a huge failure for how significantly it squanders its own potential. Every moment of originality that could have placed it in the ranks as the best entry since the original trilogy is undone by stupidity strongly reminiscent of the farcical nature of the prequels. An awesome scene like Rey and Kylo’s throne room team-up is tainted by the nonchalant disposal of Snoke. The light speed ram through the star destroyer is a great bit of spectacle superseded by the illogic of Holdo keeping it a secret from her crew. Fin nearly sacrifices himself for the greater good before Rose laughably saves him by almost killing him, then she ironically gives a monologue on how love will save us while placing the entire Resistance closer to harm. The contradictions go on and on.
Most disappointingly of all, The Last Jedi barely advances any overarching story and leaves no reason to be excited about the conclusion to the new trilogy. Save for the progression of Rey and Kylo’s relationship, J. J. Abrams was left with quite the mess to clean up for Disney to salvage the majority of Star Wars fans.
9. The Phantom Menace
Likely one of the most miscalculated and excessive efforts ever put to film, the first of the eagerly anticipated Star Wars prequels would end up being the most narratively unimportant to the saga. The events of The Phantom Menace are trivial, as the rest of the series continues 10 years after the story of our false protagonist, Anakin Skywalker, here played by a tiny, insufferable Jake Lloyd. Liam Neeson’s Qui-Gon Jinn has at least twice the time on-screen as Lloyd, but his considerable talents are among the chief to fall to the hand of George Lucas’s profound deficiency at writing dialogue and connecting his stories with internal logic.
The Phantom Menace is a rough starting point for the series’ chronology, and an unpleasant one to have unfold before your eyes. From tarnishing the mythology of the originals to the firmly established overuse of the false, phony and clean CGI for a vast majority of the film, Lucas’s entire vision is misguided and disjointed. John Williams’ music is the only consistent saving grace of the prequels — his talent is wasted on the worst of blockbusters here, but throughout these films he is able to elevate the sour tone of the visuals and the script. Without Williams, each of the three movies in question would play out like an embarrassing spoof — he is magically able to string together the bland editing and now very dated visual effects with unwarranted, furious intent.
Jar Jar Binks tops a list of bafflingly stupid cinematic choices, which also includes midi-chlorians and killing off Darth Maul — the only vaguely interesting figure amidst a sea of robotic, vanilla characters despite how little he is seen. As Lucas bit off more than he could chew, the grandiosity of Anakin’s downfall has to be foreshadowed with a virgin birth and one of the dumbest uses of the likes of prophecies and chosen ones. And his new emphasis on the supposed intellectualism of space politics only further cements the prequel trilogy as a failure across the board. The particularly disagreeable version of space fantasy that culminates in Episode I just happens to be the series’ worst.
8. Attack of the Clones
After the mother of all palette cleansers with Episode I, Lucas seems to try to correct his overall self-indulgence at least a little with Attack of the Clones. Though just as ineptly scripted as the first, this film’s only benefit is its lack of as many repulsive elements — and from time to time a scene won’t ring completely false.
Episode II has more time for this trilogy’s finest casting choice in Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, but his larger role just means some extra quipping. Jar Jar’s role is thankfully greatly reduced here, and at least a child isn’t playing Darth Vader the youngling. An angsty adolescent instead is a small step up though — Hayden Christiansen is a poor actor to begin with, but Lucas’s lines turn him into a whiny, short-tempered and furthermore unsympathetic main character.
The arc of Anakin’s tragic downfall is less Shakespearean and more soap opera. The quarter-baked romance between he and Natalie Portman’s Padmé Amidala is some of the most worthy hate-watch material that the infamous prequels have to offer. This emphatically clichéd love story forms the spineless emotional backbone to a wildly overblown and often comical film trilogy. And Obi-Wan’s subplot in discovering the missing Clone-creating planet Kamino just serves as padding to push the romantic aspects as forcefully as possible. By the time it seems our star-crossed lovers are doomed, and Padmé confesses to Anakin that she “truly, deeply” loves him, our first instinct is to roll our eyes rather than dab them.
A few moments go over well enough in a cinematic sense. After that horrid bit of dialogue just mentioned, Anakin, Obi-Wan and Padme fight with monsters in the Geonosis gladiator arena in an entertaining set piece. But this is the longest entry of the series and nearly the least justified — did we need the video game-ready factory scene, or a Yoda lightsaber duel? Though not bursting at the seams with as much of the tacky filler of Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones exists mostly to set up the aforementioned The Clone Wars and put everything in place for the only prequel that even remotely justified its existence in the first place.
7. The Force Awakens
J. J. Abrams was an innocuous choice, but probably the best man for the job of creating a fresh start to Disney’s sequel Star Wars saga. At the very least he has a profound sense of propulsive direction, infusing even cheap references to the original films with a level of joy.
The skeleton of the plot of The Force Awakens is damn near identical to A New Hope, but its enjoyable to see how its placement of characters steadily shuffles the older players out and the new faces to the center of attention. The death of Han Solo was the beginning of the end for the leads of the original trilogy and following Harrison Ford’s exit in the film we get the most rewarding scene. The climactic face-off between Rey, Fin and Kylo Ren is earned and stirring.
Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver and Oscar Isaac are all curiously smart choices for our new set of primary characters — each respectively does well in infusing enough credibility to balance out the expected wit. However, John Boyega’s underwritten role as rogue storm trooper turned resistance fighter unfortunately shortchanges his performance.
The Force Awakens struggles to put forth many new things, but the film works as Abrams’ own remix of the original film, updating every outdated facet of the first film to modern tastes. Before Episode VIII evaporated the momentum of the new series, this film left the future of Star Wars looking considerably bright. Especially with abundant filmmaking resources and built-in audiences at their disposal, Disney will hopefully hit their stride in offering more creative films without pandering to fans. The studio should have a long while until the profitability wears out.
6. Solo: A Star Wars Story
Living up to everything Rogue One could have been — a swashbuckler, a clever heist movie, at least its own “Star Wars Story” — Solo has the benefit of receiving fans and general audiences anticipating something rather subpar.
Acting coaches for leading man Alden Ehrenreich, the firing of original directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and expensive reshoots all pointed to disaster. Though Lord and Miller’s borderline parody might have been more enjoyable, Solo neatly mixes watchable new characters with amusing manifestations of fan favorites, expands the Star Wars universe in a mostly interesting way and turns a movie that shouldn’t even exist into a half-decent origin story worthy of the sequels it attempts to set up.
This is not to say the film is miraculously great. Solo’s simple plot involving hyperfuel gives the whole project a uniformly safe feel and certain players in our backstabbing band of anti-heroes function like archetypes, somewhat unpredictable as they are. As for Han Solo’s backstory, the film is going off of maybe five minutes of dialogue in the original trilogy; the blaster, the Falcon, the Kessel Run, meeting Chewbacca, gambling with Lando, etc. — obviously it’s all worked into the narrative. Because the iconic pieces of Star Wars are in the forefront, the excess fan service has been thankfully scaled back, even if there are the occasionally condescending winks and nods.
Even with Donald Glover, Emilia Clarke, Woody Harrelson and Paul Bettany all fleshing out an entertaining supporting cast, its Ehrenreich himself that keeps the film together. Ehrenreich’s take on Han feels like a weak impression before it turns to reasonably inhabited bravado as the film plays out. The character has a bit of room to grow and even in the film future, as this Star Wars Story leaves out Jabba the Hutt, Boba Fett and Greedo for future installments.
For a film so unnecessary, the final product is tonally consistent with classic Star Wars and satisfyingly fun in its self-contained simplicity. There’s not much at stake, but the most surprising thing about Ron Howard’s film is that it emanates any sort of agreeable charm, let alone a good deal of it.
5. Revenge of the Sith
As the lesser of three evils, Revenge of the Sith most often gets a pass from audiences — it remains certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes and when it was released A. O. Scott called in better than the 1977 original.
But in the scope of the saga as we see it today, it’s a stretch that Obi-Wan’s bit of backstory on Darth Vader needed a two and a half hour epic to explain. Nonetheless the least repulsive of the three prequels tries to balance Lucas’s love for childlike humor and cartoonish action sequences with the inevitable impending dark side, which includes the serial murder of children and some domestic abuse. Full of inherent inconsistencies, Revenge of the Sith is a microcosm of the ambition and potential of Lucas’s concept for the prequels, and also reveals all of his worst tendencies of the series — flat dialogue, tensionless fight sequences, unintentional humor, all of which has contributed to an entire subreddit’s page worth of memes over the years.
It’s ironic that as the prequels got progressively gloomier, the mistakes and poor filmmaking choices became more noticeable even if they are fewer. Chock full of betrayal, manipulation, anger and murder, this film, for mostly worse, feels like a genuine space opera, oscillating between grand scale sci-fi fantasy and cheesy, dutifully melodramatic dialogue. Revenge of the Sith is the most enjoyable prequel because for once Lucas’s ultimate intentions are somewhat clear, and the entertainment value, intended or not, is surprisingly high. More than a few moments achieve the mythic quality Lucas reaches for.
But when this film’s ending tries its darndest to end up essentially at the beginning of A New Hope, it becomes obvious that for as much as Lucas aspired to here, these films still only rely on the original trilogy’s notoriety and the unbound but creatively bankrupt mind of its architect. Episode III conjures a cocktail of the bloodless familiar and disturbing, uninspired creations. The prequels deserve all the hate they get because everything new is grotesque and everything that existed before is either recycled or simply ruined.
4. The Rise of Skywalker
If you ignore all of its imposing faults, there is so much entertainment value here as compared to the thematic rewriting of The Last Jedi and the soulless retreading of The Force Awakens. For all its stupidities leading it to the ultimate conclusion of a trilogy AND a trilogy of trilogies, The Rise of Skywalker delivers every aspect of the serialized superficial space opera we crave: epic confrontations, idiotic genetic reveals, globe-trotting, Macguffin hunting nonsense. I wish there was something more original or concise about The Rise of Skywalker but it made the best of a story situation fouled up not once but twice. If it didn’t cram three movies worth of narrative in two and a half hours, maybe it would won over critics and audiences but personally I like my Star Wars silly, colorful and overstuffed.
3. Return of the Jedi
The part of the original trilogy most worthy of criticism, Return of the Jedi, no matter how wobbly, brings the first wave of Star Wars to a generally satisfying close. In terms of low-hanging criticisms, the Ewoks show the series blatantly catering to a very young audience, Han Solo is at his most useless, and the beginning of these films reusing many prime pieces of the property that came beforehand, like that second Death Star.
But it’s hard to deny the film’s own merits. The idea of Jabba the Hutt enters the nasty flesh after two films of reputation, and the extended sequence at his palace is suitably weird fun. Throughout the film, the action and production design still remains a marvel of craft — the peculiar tone of the saga adapts nicely to the new terrors and wonders in Episode VI.
Everything in Jedi’s rousing climax with Luke, Vader and the Emperor has a grand perspective and is the film’s highlight — it brings the whole of the series into focus and can’t help but feel like a proper finale. The end of Luke and Vader’s arcs is almost astonishingly touching, selling the trilogy altogether as one of pop culture’s most deservedly iconic series.
2. Star Wars
The humble beginnings of Star Wars are challenged with each new entry that comes forth. One of the biggest criticisms of Disney’s first two efforts is that they each relied so completely on the contents of the film phenomenon. But on its own, Star Wars is quaint to our modern tastes and yet seems to be the major predictor of how action movies and nerd culture would eventually earn a permanent spot in the mainstream.
Star Wars takes itself seriously enough to be sold as the foundation of a realized universe, but its just light, simple and straightforward enough to work exactly as it did for the public and those that identified with it forty years ago. It’s a perfectly paced, magnificently edited blockbuster that, while old-fashioned in production values and story structure, feels captivatingly contemporary. For those growing up with Disney’s fresh onslaught of films, they may look back on the original films and note how dated it all seems. But Lucas proved with his creatively bankrupt prequel trilogy that the technical restrictions of New Hollywood yielded innovations that seem of a bygone era in the age of 21st century cinema.
What’s remarkable about the first Star Wars is despite how scrappy and silly it may be on the surface, it’s a prime example of the reaches of escapism that film can have. The plot navigates through a vivid, living universe that has only been made to feel so authentic after so much time in the pop culture conversation and all the homage it is paid with nearly every subsequent sequel.
1. The Empire Strikes Back
One of the great film sequels, The Empire Strikes Back easily stands toe to toe with the original for classic moments and reliably entertaining characters and conflicts. As an expansion of the Star Wars mythology, it is bold enough dwell on all new locales in Hoth, Dagobah and Cloud City, and wise enough to expand its cast with memorable, canon-defining characters like Yoda, Boba Fett and Lando Calrissian. All that while fleshing out the key players from the first without missing a single emotional beat along the way.
Though it’s the darkest of the original trilogy, it still bears all the corn and aged effects that make it a brilliant continuation of the simple hero’s journey adventure of the original. Plus, by its famously dour conclusion, it’s full shape forms the series’ most convincing iteration of the idea of a space opera, the result of the most unique and interesting story structure of the series. After spending the first act together, our band of leads break off and the hope of later reuniting is ultimately faltered.
Empire balances realistic romance and playful humor on the side of Han, Leia and company’s chase in the Millennium Falcon from Vader’s Imperial clutch. And Luke’s training with Yoda remains the height of Star Wars’ cinematic potential. This part of the second act delves the deeper into Jedi mythology than any other movie has gone, tests Luke’s character thoroughly and gives us several wonderful moments of insight from the most sage of little green aliens. Beyond his famous lines, Yoda’s most profound sentiment is in his urgency for Luke to perceive not only the Force but also himself as something spiritual, outside the physical. “Luminous beings are we,” he croaks before grabbing Luke’s shoulder to shake it — “not this crude matter.”
Boasting nearly as much originality as its predecessor, Empire edges out the number one spot for its ability to be taken at face value, with little need for growing up with the film to appreciate its qualities. The straightforward innocence of Star Wars was itself elevated by The Empire Strikes Back through sheer force of passionate invention and respect for the growth of its characters. The film is textbook blockbuster filmmaking at its richest.
*Originally published at TasteofCinema.com / May 27th, 2017 / Updated on May 29th, 2018
Every Richard Linklater Film Ranked
Houston, Texas native Richard Linklater, founder of the Austin Film Society in 1985, embodies the best aspects of the American filmmaker and their relevance to current film culture. Throughout nearly all of his work, his films communicate humanistic, naturalist and existential concerns and draw from influences ranging from Robert Bresson to Robert Altman.
Since his humble beginnings in the late 80s and early 90s to his comfortable prominence on the domestic filmmaking stage throughout the 21st century, Linklater is a self-made director who wears his attitudes and ideologies on his characters via his frequently flawlessly penned dialogue.
21. Bad News Bears
Written by Cats & Dogs and Bad Santa writers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, Linklater’s tediously faithful revamp of the 1976 The Bad News Bears struggles to find a reason to exist over the course of its generous runtime.
The few original laughs of this Bad News Bears aren’t drawn from any kind of inspiration, but by sheer luck that Billy Bob Thorton — who could never hold a candle to Walter Matthau’s original Morris Buttermaker — says something nasty in the right way. Most everything in the film functions as heartless and wearying remake material. If these story elements weren’t completely cliché 40 years prior, they certainly were by 2005.
The 1976 film is no classic, but that doesn’t make the 2005 version worth any more — every kid in the dugout is a pale imitation of the original lineup. The film is the only one of Linklater’s not worth much at all, which he paid for at the box office.
20. Where'd You Go, Bernadette?
Ah, you can’t win em all. If any movie of late feels like a bored director read a decent book and thought “why not?” it’s Where’d You Go. Hell if Scorsese does it why not Linklater, but this is more like a bad Jason Reitman movie. The problem is other than inspiration via Philip K Dick and Mike White, the best Linklater films come straight from his head. When Cate Blanchette can’t salvage your film at center stage, you’re truly out of luck, at least until next time.
19. Fast Food Nation
Known to be a voracious reader as opposed to the typical super-8-wielding young filmmaker, Linklater was fascinated enough by Eric Schlosser’s 2001 non-fiction book Fast Food Nation to loosely adapt it into his own narrative film.
Schlosser helped Linklater write the film, which debuted at the 2006 Cannes festival without making many waves. Fast Food Nation aims for comedy-drama territory but ultimately ends up being one of Linklater’s few films without much sense of conceptual cohesion or tonal consistency.
A hodgepodge of political and ethical issues and a huge helping of sanctimony make up the lacking ingredients of Fast Food Nation — the film’s ideas would have been much better served in a documentary.
18. The Newton Boys
Based on the true story of the Newton Gang, Linklater’s historical comedy-drama found him uniquely relishing in an earlier period setting and reuniting with Matthew McConaughey and mainstay Ethan Hawke.
The Newton Boys, while noble in essence, was a rare misstep in the early career of Linklater — the story of four brothers with an affinity for robbing banks between 1919 and 1924 was a box office flop and furthermore incapable of exploiting the real-life tale for anything particularly thrilling or funny.
With a budget bigger than all his previous films combined, it’s ironic that Linklater was only able to offer a film as middling as The Newton Boys after a few modest classics. Like McConaughey’s Willis losing nearly all his money on fruitless oil wells, Linklater hedged the wrong bet with this one — but some of his greatest films were just ahead.
17. SubUrbia
Adapting his own stage play, Eric Bogosian created the foundation of perhaps Linklater’s most cynical film. Giovanni Ribisi stars as the ringleader of a friend group searching for meaning while bumming around the concrete confines of a Texan suburb. His character Jeff becomes swept up in jealousy when an old friend Pony (Jayce Bartok), since turned rock star, comes back home as part of his band’s stadium tour.
Despite its darker edge, this is somehow one of the more dated of Linklater’s films. The 90s never felt so 80s and the drama played out against the hair gel, bright colors, lack of sleeves and dated discourse places SubUrbia right in its time and place for the worst. Bogosian’s screenplay and the few revelations therein are but morsels compared to the lines Linklater can usually feed his actors.
16. Me and Orson Welles
Decent enough to recommend offhandedly, the pleasant and whimsical Me and Orson Welles finds the best in a young Zac Efron fresh off High School Musical and provides a fine platform for Christian McKay’s bravura performance as Orson Welles, if not much else.
In this adaptation of the 2003 Robert Kaplow novel, Welles recruits Efron’s young Richard Samuels to star in his famous 1937 staging of Julius Caesar — from there Samuels and Welles engage in a struggle over production assistant Sonja (Claire Danes), whom they both fancy. It’s the kind of film fit for Woody Allen on an off year, surviving by wit and romantic intrigue alone.
Embracing the playful period peep with greater conviction than Newton Boys, Me and Orson Welles is about as minor a work as you’ll find in Linklater’s catalogue, yet it still aligns with his traits of optimism and thoughtful dialogue.
15. It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books
Exceedingly minimalist in its form, It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books was Linklater’s bare bones debut directed, written, produced (for a whopping $3,000) and starring the fresh filmmaker himself.
The film find’s Linklater in a silent drift, simply travelling to meet up with his friend, travelling back, and appearing basically aimless in the self-directed performance. Biographical in its nature, It’s Impossible is concerned with communicating the isolation and solace of modern day voyages — sleeping on buses, killing time in terminals. Linklater places us in many moments where dialogue is short in supply.
Mumblecore in its essence, It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books isn’t necessarily invigorating or exemplary of the breadth of Linklater’s talents, but it showcases a confident young filmmaker with potential to spare.
14. Tape
Before the 21st century would find him a more professional filmmaker, Tape was the last whiff of Linklater’s early independent spirit as it was relevant to truly lo-fi filmmaking.
The acting reunion of Dead Poets Society stars Ethan Hawke and Robert Sean Leonard — the two coincidentally play old high school friends — is tempered by a brief appearance by Uma Thurman in the final act. Making for an impressive box film, Tape’s fuzzy digital camcorder florescence renders Linklater’s miniscule film incredibly intimate.
Like it was made in a weekend, the nonchalant charm of Tape is in Stephen Belber’s adaptation of his own stage play, which, while not possessing Linklater’s hand, plays close enough to real life to appreciate.
13. Bernie
Bernie’s bracing mixture of dark humor and stranger than fiction storytelling is a curious blend but Linklater’s brand of sympathy turns this otherwise nonessential piece of the prolific filmmaker’s repertoire into a gem all its own.
Jack Black’s character work as Bernie Tiede, the bubbly mortician turned murderer, makes for one of Black’s best roles. Like the people of Carthage, Texas who defended Bernie even after his confession, Linklater easily attains compassion for our befuddling protagonist’s situation. Linklater has expressed his love for Hitchcock’s Psycho for the sly ways it forces one to empathize with a monster, and that influence comes across most clearly in this film.
12. Slacker
Slacker is genuine Linklater, a work of experimental creativity strung together with myriad interesting, intellectual musings. The film feels a bit like a scrappy warm-up for what would become crystal clear in Waking Life a decade later, but Slacker has plenty to offer by itself.
Beginning with Linklater himself as a talkative traveller rambling to a taxi driver, the omniscient camera follows passerby to passerby amongst the Austin population in order to complete its structure. Like Dazed and Confused and SubUrbia afterwards, Slacker marked Linklater’s first consideration of the forgotten subcultures and the unspoken masses of his era.
More his debut proper than It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books, Slacker was a signal of masterpieces to come while remaining a minor one itself — many of Linklater’s ideological foundations can be identified in Slacker’s arrangement of characters and interactions.
11. Last Flag Flying
Linklater’s most emotionally wrenching film investigates the stateside grief of overseas warfare through the eyes of Doc — Steve Carell in a performance to match his transformation in Foxcatcher. Considered a spiritual successor to the 1973 Darryl Ponicsan adaptation The Last Detail, Last Flag Flying stands on its own regardless.
With his decidedly leftist leanings, Linklater restrains himself from too much anti-nationalist rhetoric while still making the case that the loss of human life supersedes any sense of jingoistic duty. Lawrence Fishburne and Bryan Cranston turn in excellent performances as Doc’s Vietnam War buddies who assist him on a trip to collect and bury his recently fallen son, a marine just like them.
Abundant with the tenderness and touches of humor one could expect from the director, Linklater is also incredibly observationalist when the tear-jerking moments rear their head. Last Flag Flying is a rare politically minded moment for a director who wisely focuses predominantly on camaraderie and friendship.
10. Everybody Wants Some!!
Whether you see it as a spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused or as an overdue apology to baseball following his Bad News Bears blunder, Everybody Wants Some!! is a very good time watching college guys have a very good time.
Thankfully, the debauchery of this early 80s nostalgia trip doesn’t grow tiresome. Linklater leaves plenty of room for his staples of philosophical discourse, social commentary, time-related narratives and humanistic optimism in depicting a college baseball team coming to terms with one another during the weekend before fall semester.
Exploring the identity crisis of finding your scene and the often animalistic urges of male competition, the film manages to let the good times roll even when Linklater stops to make a point or wax poetic. Everybody Wants Some!! proved that Linklater had lost none of his instincts when it comes to giving slackers a good name.
9. Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood
8. School of Rock
Working with a hilarious script by Mike White, who also stars in the film, School of Rock is far and away Linklater’s most financially successful film and also the strongest of his directorial efforts that he did not write himself.
Apart from Mr. Schneebly wonderful batch of students, Jack Black’s unhinged, livewire performance easily lives up to his Tenacious D mentality. His controlled chaos is a joy to behold bit after bit — the single take as he sings his work in progress rock opera to the class a cappella is a testament to Black’s dexterity as a performer.
Happy endings and PG-13 ratings aside, School of Rock has a mature sense of humor while also staying appropriate enough for the ages similar to the kids of Horace Green. The film’s soundtrack is full of well-chosen rock songs and the original ones aren’t bad either. Laced with sheer exuberance in its entirety, I doubt Linklater ever had a better time shooting a movie and it shows.
7. Before Midnight
The weakest of three masterworks, Before Midnight is the fantasy-shattering reverberation of two fairly enchanting installments. Reality, creeping in after two predecessors veiled with romance, is here to stay.
Midnight is the most narrative of the three Before films and bears the largest cast too. As much as Linklater retains his knack for interesting dialogue and earnest introspection, Midnight is purposely structured to be a mild letdown based on its thematic principles. After months of vacationing in Greece, Jesse and Celine are finally away from their twin daughters for an evening, but the littlest of things will get a heated conversation avalanching into verbal warfare. It’s a devastating third act, one that feels both thoroughly rehearsed and wonderfully improvised like some of the best moments of the last two installments.
Who knows what awaits us in 2022, although anyone’s best guess is along the lines of divorce — these films won’t be getting any rosier if they continue. However it turns out, Linklater will likely outdo himself again. Each continuation of his 1995 masterpiece could have spoiled a good thing, but he has justified a new film every time. Before Noon will either work out well or not at all.
6. Dazed and Confused
Wearing its nostalgia well, Dazed and Confused is an indispensible cult classic and Linklater’s first great film. Navigating many social circles on the last day and night of the school year, the film covers newly spanked freshman to seniors savoring their first or last breath of freedom, depending on how you look at it.
By working in his own experiences at Huntsville High School, Linklater’s film has the unique ability to make you feel like you’re reuniting with old friends no matter who is on-screen. Jason London and Wiley Wiggins are our more identifiable leads, while Matthew McConaughey, in his legendary acting debut, is an easy highlight from the impeccable and extensive supporting cast.
Linklater’s wit was sharpening, his eye for realism becoming clearer and his screenwriting tactics were just starting to flourish — not many directors could handle this many separate characters without weakening the film as a whole. Taken as a coming-of-age touchstone or simply the comfiest of hangout movies, Dazed and Confused is always what you need it to be.
5. A Scanner Darkly
Maybe Linklater’s most underrated film, A Scanner Darkly returns to the rotoscoping of Waking Life to serve a purpose equal to that of a permanent dream state — visualizing one of Philip K Dick’s near-futures through the eyes of an addict. Envisioned as if Substance D is warping your own consciousness, the film follows undercover drug enforcement agent Bob Archter (Keanu Reeves) as he spans both sides of the film’s drug epidemic, from his burnout friends to the anonymity of his office work.
On par with Blade Runner and Minority Report in terms of cinematic realization and honoring the masterly sci-fi writer’s thematic implications, A Scanner Darkly finds Linklater at the height of his skills as a director of performance, an adaptive screenwriter and a humanist filmmaker. The stoner-logic humor of Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson’s antics, the neo-noir aspects of Winona Ryder’s femme fatale and the somber lamentation of Dick’s ending are all pieces of a great film that become more appreciable with multiple viewings.
A world of extreme surveillance, police state, and drug culture exploited by our own government is not unlike Dick’s other visions — particular to A Scanner Darkly are poignant themes of identity, paranoia and the cycle of addiction. Despite the tragedy of its scope, Linklater’s film is supremely entertaining, full of intellectual fat to chew and visual wonders to relish.
4. Boyhood
The critical darling of 2014 was not without its naysayers — several detractors from the universal praise called Boyhood’s 12-year shoot a gimmick unsupported by a boring narrative. But with Birdman’s win at the Oscars the following year, Boyhood’s been left to age rather gracefully. Boyhood serves as a marvelous experimental film, a seismic assessment of the classic coming-of-age story and a living, breathing time capsule of 21st century culture from the millennial perspective.
Of course there is not much internal conflict, no overarching plots and payoffs — anyone wondering, “What’s the point?” by the film’s 2 ½-hour-plus conclusion were never going to find it. Linklater’s movies have always been drawn from premise and dialogue than simple dramatic structure, but in Boyhood his inner mumblecore broke forth. Embracing the quotidian factors of modern young life — the banalities of teenage chatter, petty arguments with parents — Boyhood reflected the realism of our own lives regardless of how entertaining it was.
Boyhood is Linklater’s late career masterpiece, and on any viewing it’s thrilling to watch not only the actors in character transform before our eyes, but also to see an assured independent director meld into a seasoned American filmmaker. Echoing and epitomizing so many of his previous sentiments and themes, Boyhood is representative of almost everything Linklater has sought to express throughout his career.
3. Before Sunset
A second chance for his estranged characters and a first chance to cinematically explore time on a large scale, Before Sunset is perhaps Linklater’s most precise and subtextually stimulating film.
Playing out in real time over the film’s swift 80-minute runtime, Before Sunset reunites Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy’s Jesse and Celine nine years after their parting in Before Sunrise. Jesse has since written a book fictionalizing their night together and on the final stop of his overseas book tour she locates him at a Paris bookshop.
Of course, beneath the politeness of catching up and the energy of rediscovering their conversational repartee are all of flirtation’s indirectness and subtleties. Since he’s married with a kid and she has a boyfriend, Before Sunset almost becomes a thriller in how well it teases the will-they-won’t-they angle. The film purposely cuts right before things get really interesting, but even with such a cliffhanger Sunset is satisfying just in their exquisite interactions — we can decide for ourselves if recapturing an unrealistic version of happiness is worth risking an individually ideal life.
Before Sunset is about reflection more than about rekindling romance. After all the anticipation and ambiguity, the film exhales with Celine’s performance of her confessional waltz in the film’s gentle climax. Finally the audience can stop second-guessing and so can Jesse. With its authentic depiction of desire and some of Linklater’s best dialogue to date, Before Sunset is one of the director’s finest features.
2. Before Sunrise
As much as Before Sunset may be the perfect sequel, it’s near impossible to top the fulfillment of new love as it blossoms before you in Before Sunrise.
Two of the best scenes Linklater has ever penned appear back to back in Sunrise. First, Jesse and Celine’s back-alley conversation weighs the value of happiness in relation to family and personal success, and their contrasting perspectives are both priceless. Afterward in a crowded café, the two coyly pretend to be calling their friends back home in order to reach a state of honest communication with each other. These scenes are ravishing in their beautiful symbiosis of dialogue and performance — they’re so natural you could mistake these moments for real life.
Each successive Before installment has shed the skin of previous naivety and youth for greater pragmatism, but Before Sunrise is not some starry-eyed paperback novel. There’s still a burning cynicism bubbling beneath the veneer of European summer romance, as our jaded adolescents seem shy to admit to each other how deeply they feel by the end of their painfully brief encounter. The feeling of Before Sunrise is bittersweet, like a dream you could have sworn was real, except you can revisit this film’s lovely perfection again and again.
1. Waking Life
“You know they say dreams are real only as long as they last — couldn’t you say the same thing about life?”
A head-spinning, bracingly original masterpiece, Waking Life is one of the most complex modern screenplays put to film. Get on this film’s wavelength and Linklater’s rotoscoped and feverishly philosophical dream vision will literally transport you both visually and cerebrally over the course of its dense, intricate hour and a half.
It’s animation technique — which took many months with local artists to complete as opposed to the brief few weeks of shooting — was groundbreaking, but beneath the psychedelic sublimity on the surface of Waking Life lies rare thematic and reflective profundity. Seeking no less than to encapsulate all his various feelings on the essence of life and its paradoxical relationship with dreams, Linklater’s multiple masterfully arranged monologues serve as stages in the brain’s final subconscious moments before death is permanent.
Waking Life properly imitates the stilted surrealism of dreaming, but its ideas are clear as day. Linklater’s acrobatic prose bends many of his prescribed perspectives to the life-affirming bent, but the film never preaches or subscribes to one idea absolutely. His wildly ambitious original screenplay is so intent on truth — fueled by necessary poetics and even pretension when needed – that its variant forms of veracity just become more moments and ideas to savor as they pass.
“Things only mean as much as the meaningfulness we allow them to have,” wrote Linklater for Zoey Deutch’s character in Everybody Wants Some!! Experiencing Linklater’s best films firsthand does more justice to them than words can, and Waking Life leaves behind potential meaning for curious audiences that is practically boundless.
*Published at TasteofCinema.com / May 3rd, 2018
Since his humble beginnings in the late 80s and early 90s to his comfortable prominence on the domestic filmmaking stage throughout the 21st century, Linklater is a self-made director who wears his attitudes and ideologies on his characters via his frequently flawlessly penned dialogue.
21. Bad News Bears
Written by Cats & Dogs and Bad Santa writers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, Linklater’s tediously faithful revamp of the 1976 The Bad News Bears struggles to find a reason to exist over the course of its generous runtime.
The few original laughs of this Bad News Bears aren’t drawn from any kind of inspiration, but by sheer luck that Billy Bob Thorton — who could never hold a candle to Walter Matthau’s original Morris Buttermaker — says something nasty in the right way. Most everything in the film functions as heartless and wearying remake material. If these story elements weren’t completely cliché 40 years prior, they certainly were by 2005.
The 1976 film is no classic, but that doesn’t make the 2005 version worth any more — every kid in the dugout is a pale imitation of the original lineup. The film is the only one of Linklater’s not worth much at all, which he paid for at the box office.
20. Where'd You Go, Bernadette?
Ah, you can’t win em all. If any movie of late feels like a bored director read a decent book and thought “why not?” it’s Where’d You Go. Hell if Scorsese does it why not Linklater, but this is more like a bad Jason Reitman movie. The problem is other than inspiration via Philip K Dick and Mike White, the best Linklater films come straight from his head. When Cate Blanchette can’t salvage your film at center stage, you’re truly out of luck, at least until next time.
19. Fast Food Nation
Known to be a voracious reader as opposed to the typical super-8-wielding young filmmaker, Linklater was fascinated enough by Eric Schlosser’s 2001 non-fiction book Fast Food Nation to loosely adapt it into his own narrative film.
Schlosser helped Linklater write the film, which debuted at the 2006 Cannes festival without making many waves. Fast Food Nation aims for comedy-drama territory but ultimately ends up being one of Linklater’s few films without much sense of conceptual cohesion or tonal consistency.
A hodgepodge of political and ethical issues and a huge helping of sanctimony make up the lacking ingredients of Fast Food Nation — the film’s ideas would have been much better served in a documentary.
18. The Newton Boys
Based on the true story of the Newton Gang, Linklater’s historical comedy-drama found him uniquely relishing in an earlier period setting and reuniting with Matthew McConaughey and mainstay Ethan Hawke.
The Newton Boys, while noble in essence, was a rare misstep in the early career of Linklater — the story of four brothers with an affinity for robbing banks between 1919 and 1924 was a box office flop and furthermore incapable of exploiting the real-life tale for anything particularly thrilling or funny.
With a budget bigger than all his previous films combined, it’s ironic that Linklater was only able to offer a film as middling as The Newton Boys after a few modest classics. Like McConaughey’s Willis losing nearly all his money on fruitless oil wells, Linklater hedged the wrong bet with this one — but some of his greatest films were just ahead.
17. SubUrbia
Adapting his own stage play, Eric Bogosian created the foundation of perhaps Linklater’s most cynical film. Giovanni Ribisi stars as the ringleader of a friend group searching for meaning while bumming around the concrete confines of a Texan suburb. His character Jeff becomes swept up in jealousy when an old friend Pony (Jayce Bartok), since turned rock star, comes back home as part of his band’s stadium tour.
Despite its darker edge, this is somehow one of the more dated of Linklater’s films. The 90s never felt so 80s and the drama played out against the hair gel, bright colors, lack of sleeves and dated discourse places SubUrbia right in its time and place for the worst. Bogosian’s screenplay and the few revelations therein are but morsels compared to the lines Linklater can usually feed his actors.
16. Me and Orson Welles
Decent enough to recommend offhandedly, the pleasant and whimsical Me and Orson Welles finds the best in a young Zac Efron fresh off High School Musical and provides a fine platform for Christian McKay’s bravura performance as Orson Welles, if not much else.
In this adaptation of the 2003 Robert Kaplow novel, Welles recruits Efron’s young Richard Samuels to star in his famous 1937 staging of Julius Caesar — from there Samuels and Welles engage in a struggle over production assistant Sonja (Claire Danes), whom they both fancy. It’s the kind of film fit for Woody Allen on an off year, surviving by wit and romantic intrigue alone.
Embracing the playful period peep with greater conviction than Newton Boys, Me and Orson Welles is about as minor a work as you’ll find in Linklater’s catalogue, yet it still aligns with his traits of optimism and thoughtful dialogue.
15. It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books
Exceedingly minimalist in its form, It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books was Linklater’s bare bones debut directed, written, produced (for a whopping $3,000) and starring the fresh filmmaker himself.
The film find’s Linklater in a silent drift, simply travelling to meet up with his friend, travelling back, and appearing basically aimless in the self-directed performance. Biographical in its nature, It’s Impossible is concerned with communicating the isolation and solace of modern day voyages — sleeping on buses, killing time in terminals. Linklater places us in many moments where dialogue is short in supply.
Mumblecore in its essence, It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books isn’t necessarily invigorating or exemplary of the breadth of Linklater’s talents, but it showcases a confident young filmmaker with potential to spare.
14. Tape
Before the 21st century would find him a more professional filmmaker, Tape was the last whiff of Linklater’s early independent spirit as it was relevant to truly lo-fi filmmaking.
The acting reunion of Dead Poets Society stars Ethan Hawke and Robert Sean Leonard — the two coincidentally play old high school friends — is tempered by a brief appearance by Uma Thurman in the final act. Making for an impressive box film, Tape’s fuzzy digital camcorder florescence renders Linklater’s miniscule film incredibly intimate.
Like it was made in a weekend, the nonchalant charm of Tape is in Stephen Belber’s adaptation of his own stage play, which, while not possessing Linklater’s hand, plays close enough to real life to appreciate.
13. Bernie
Bernie’s bracing mixture of dark humor and stranger than fiction storytelling is a curious blend but Linklater’s brand of sympathy turns this otherwise nonessential piece of the prolific filmmaker’s repertoire into a gem all its own.
Jack Black’s character work as Bernie Tiede, the bubbly mortician turned murderer, makes for one of Black’s best roles. Like the people of Carthage, Texas who defended Bernie even after his confession, Linklater easily attains compassion for our befuddling protagonist’s situation. Linklater has expressed his love for Hitchcock’s Psycho for the sly ways it forces one to empathize with a monster, and that influence comes across most clearly in this film.
12. Slacker
Slacker is genuine Linklater, a work of experimental creativity strung together with myriad interesting, intellectual musings. The film feels a bit like a scrappy warm-up for what would become crystal clear in Waking Life a decade later, but Slacker has plenty to offer by itself.
Beginning with Linklater himself as a talkative traveller rambling to a taxi driver, the omniscient camera follows passerby to passerby amongst the Austin population in order to complete its structure. Like Dazed and Confused and SubUrbia afterwards, Slacker marked Linklater’s first consideration of the forgotten subcultures and the unspoken masses of his era.
More his debut proper than It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books, Slacker was a signal of masterpieces to come while remaining a minor one itself — many of Linklater’s ideological foundations can be identified in Slacker’s arrangement of characters and interactions.
11. Last Flag Flying
Linklater’s most emotionally wrenching film investigates the stateside grief of overseas warfare through the eyes of Doc — Steve Carell in a performance to match his transformation in Foxcatcher. Considered a spiritual successor to the 1973 Darryl Ponicsan adaptation The Last Detail, Last Flag Flying stands on its own regardless.
With his decidedly leftist leanings, Linklater restrains himself from too much anti-nationalist rhetoric while still making the case that the loss of human life supersedes any sense of jingoistic duty. Lawrence Fishburne and Bryan Cranston turn in excellent performances as Doc’s Vietnam War buddies who assist him on a trip to collect and bury his recently fallen son, a marine just like them.
Abundant with the tenderness and touches of humor one could expect from the director, Linklater is also incredibly observationalist when the tear-jerking moments rear their head. Last Flag Flying is a rare politically minded moment for a director who wisely focuses predominantly on camaraderie and friendship.
10. Everybody Wants Some!!
Whether you see it as a spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused or as an overdue apology to baseball following his Bad News Bears blunder, Everybody Wants Some!! is a very good time watching college guys have a very good time.
Thankfully, the debauchery of this early 80s nostalgia trip doesn’t grow tiresome. Linklater leaves plenty of room for his staples of philosophical discourse, social commentary, time-related narratives and humanistic optimism in depicting a college baseball team coming to terms with one another during the weekend before fall semester.
Exploring the identity crisis of finding your scene and the often animalistic urges of male competition, the film manages to let the good times roll even when Linklater stops to make a point or wax poetic. Everybody Wants Some!! proved that Linklater had lost none of his instincts when it comes to giving slackers a good name.
9. Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood
8. School of Rock
Working with a hilarious script by Mike White, who also stars in the film, School of Rock is far and away Linklater’s most financially successful film and also the strongest of his directorial efforts that he did not write himself.
Apart from Mr. Schneebly wonderful batch of students, Jack Black’s unhinged, livewire performance easily lives up to his Tenacious D mentality. His controlled chaos is a joy to behold bit after bit — the single take as he sings his work in progress rock opera to the class a cappella is a testament to Black’s dexterity as a performer.
Happy endings and PG-13 ratings aside, School of Rock has a mature sense of humor while also staying appropriate enough for the ages similar to the kids of Horace Green. The film’s soundtrack is full of well-chosen rock songs and the original ones aren’t bad either. Laced with sheer exuberance in its entirety, I doubt Linklater ever had a better time shooting a movie and it shows.
7. Before Midnight
The weakest of three masterworks, Before Midnight is the fantasy-shattering reverberation of two fairly enchanting installments. Reality, creeping in after two predecessors veiled with romance, is here to stay.
Midnight is the most narrative of the three Before films and bears the largest cast too. As much as Linklater retains his knack for interesting dialogue and earnest introspection, Midnight is purposely structured to be a mild letdown based on its thematic principles. After months of vacationing in Greece, Jesse and Celine are finally away from their twin daughters for an evening, but the littlest of things will get a heated conversation avalanching into verbal warfare. It’s a devastating third act, one that feels both thoroughly rehearsed and wonderfully improvised like some of the best moments of the last two installments.
Who knows what awaits us in 2022, although anyone’s best guess is along the lines of divorce — these films won’t be getting any rosier if they continue. However it turns out, Linklater will likely outdo himself again. Each continuation of his 1995 masterpiece could have spoiled a good thing, but he has justified a new film every time. Before Noon will either work out well or not at all.
6. Dazed and Confused
Wearing its nostalgia well, Dazed and Confused is an indispensible cult classic and Linklater’s first great film. Navigating many social circles on the last day and night of the school year, the film covers newly spanked freshman to seniors savoring their first or last breath of freedom, depending on how you look at it.
By working in his own experiences at Huntsville High School, Linklater’s film has the unique ability to make you feel like you’re reuniting with old friends no matter who is on-screen. Jason London and Wiley Wiggins are our more identifiable leads, while Matthew McConaughey, in his legendary acting debut, is an easy highlight from the impeccable and extensive supporting cast.
Linklater’s wit was sharpening, his eye for realism becoming clearer and his screenwriting tactics were just starting to flourish — not many directors could handle this many separate characters without weakening the film as a whole. Taken as a coming-of-age touchstone or simply the comfiest of hangout movies, Dazed and Confused is always what you need it to be.
5. A Scanner Darkly
Maybe Linklater’s most underrated film, A Scanner Darkly returns to the rotoscoping of Waking Life to serve a purpose equal to that of a permanent dream state — visualizing one of Philip K Dick’s near-futures through the eyes of an addict. Envisioned as if Substance D is warping your own consciousness, the film follows undercover drug enforcement agent Bob Archter (Keanu Reeves) as he spans both sides of the film’s drug epidemic, from his burnout friends to the anonymity of his office work.
On par with Blade Runner and Minority Report in terms of cinematic realization and honoring the masterly sci-fi writer’s thematic implications, A Scanner Darkly finds Linklater at the height of his skills as a director of performance, an adaptive screenwriter and a humanist filmmaker. The stoner-logic humor of Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson’s antics, the neo-noir aspects of Winona Ryder’s femme fatale and the somber lamentation of Dick’s ending are all pieces of a great film that become more appreciable with multiple viewings.
A world of extreme surveillance, police state, and drug culture exploited by our own government is not unlike Dick’s other visions — particular to A Scanner Darkly are poignant themes of identity, paranoia and the cycle of addiction. Despite the tragedy of its scope, Linklater’s film is supremely entertaining, full of intellectual fat to chew and visual wonders to relish.
4. Boyhood
The critical darling of 2014 was not without its naysayers — several detractors from the universal praise called Boyhood’s 12-year shoot a gimmick unsupported by a boring narrative. But with Birdman’s win at the Oscars the following year, Boyhood’s been left to age rather gracefully. Boyhood serves as a marvelous experimental film, a seismic assessment of the classic coming-of-age story and a living, breathing time capsule of 21st century culture from the millennial perspective.
Of course there is not much internal conflict, no overarching plots and payoffs — anyone wondering, “What’s the point?” by the film’s 2 ½-hour-plus conclusion were never going to find it. Linklater’s movies have always been drawn from premise and dialogue than simple dramatic structure, but in Boyhood his inner mumblecore broke forth. Embracing the quotidian factors of modern young life — the banalities of teenage chatter, petty arguments with parents — Boyhood reflected the realism of our own lives regardless of how entertaining it was.
Boyhood is Linklater’s late career masterpiece, and on any viewing it’s thrilling to watch not only the actors in character transform before our eyes, but also to see an assured independent director meld into a seasoned American filmmaker. Echoing and epitomizing so many of his previous sentiments and themes, Boyhood is representative of almost everything Linklater has sought to express throughout his career.
3. Before Sunset
A second chance for his estranged characters and a first chance to cinematically explore time on a large scale, Before Sunset is perhaps Linklater’s most precise and subtextually stimulating film.
Playing out in real time over the film’s swift 80-minute runtime, Before Sunset reunites Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy’s Jesse and Celine nine years after their parting in Before Sunrise. Jesse has since written a book fictionalizing their night together and on the final stop of his overseas book tour she locates him at a Paris bookshop.
Of course, beneath the politeness of catching up and the energy of rediscovering their conversational repartee are all of flirtation’s indirectness and subtleties. Since he’s married with a kid and she has a boyfriend, Before Sunset almost becomes a thriller in how well it teases the will-they-won’t-they angle. The film purposely cuts right before things get really interesting, but even with such a cliffhanger Sunset is satisfying just in their exquisite interactions — we can decide for ourselves if recapturing an unrealistic version of happiness is worth risking an individually ideal life.
Before Sunset is about reflection more than about rekindling romance. After all the anticipation and ambiguity, the film exhales with Celine’s performance of her confessional waltz in the film’s gentle climax. Finally the audience can stop second-guessing and so can Jesse. With its authentic depiction of desire and some of Linklater’s best dialogue to date, Before Sunset is one of the director’s finest features.
2. Before Sunrise
As much as Before Sunset may be the perfect sequel, it’s near impossible to top the fulfillment of new love as it blossoms before you in Before Sunrise.
Two of the best scenes Linklater has ever penned appear back to back in Sunrise. First, Jesse and Celine’s back-alley conversation weighs the value of happiness in relation to family and personal success, and their contrasting perspectives are both priceless. Afterward in a crowded café, the two coyly pretend to be calling their friends back home in order to reach a state of honest communication with each other. These scenes are ravishing in their beautiful symbiosis of dialogue and performance — they’re so natural you could mistake these moments for real life.
Each successive Before installment has shed the skin of previous naivety and youth for greater pragmatism, but Before Sunrise is not some starry-eyed paperback novel. There’s still a burning cynicism bubbling beneath the veneer of European summer romance, as our jaded adolescents seem shy to admit to each other how deeply they feel by the end of their painfully brief encounter. The feeling of Before Sunrise is bittersweet, like a dream you could have sworn was real, except you can revisit this film’s lovely perfection again and again.
1. Waking Life
“You know they say dreams are real only as long as they last — couldn’t you say the same thing about life?”
A head-spinning, bracingly original masterpiece, Waking Life is one of the most complex modern screenplays put to film. Get on this film’s wavelength and Linklater’s rotoscoped and feverishly philosophical dream vision will literally transport you both visually and cerebrally over the course of its dense, intricate hour and a half.
It’s animation technique — which took many months with local artists to complete as opposed to the brief few weeks of shooting — was groundbreaking, but beneath the psychedelic sublimity on the surface of Waking Life lies rare thematic and reflective profundity. Seeking no less than to encapsulate all his various feelings on the essence of life and its paradoxical relationship with dreams, Linklater’s multiple masterfully arranged monologues serve as stages in the brain’s final subconscious moments before death is permanent.
Waking Life properly imitates the stilted surrealism of dreaming, but its ideas are clear as day. Linklater’s acrobatic prose bends many of his prescribed perspectives to the life-affirming bent, but the film never preaches or subscribes to one idea absolutely. His wildly ambitious original screenplay is so intent on truth — fueled by necessary poetics and even pretension when needed – that its variant forms of veracity just become more moments and ideas to savor as they pass.
“Things only mean as much as the meaningfulness we allow them to have,” wrote Linklater for Zoey Deutch’s character in Everybody Wants Some!! Experiencing Linklater’s best films firsthand does more justice to them than words can, and Waking Life leaves behind potential meaning for curious audiences that is practically boundless.
*Published at TasteofCinema.com / May 3rd, 2018
Every Sam Mendes Film Ranked
Though he began in theater and never abandoned it, Sam Mendes can only be considered a British film director based on how many Bond films he has to his name. Deemed Best Director right off the bat for his debut film American Beauty, the English director would spearhead many films focusing on particularly domestic concerns up until he gave his life over to 007 for several years.
Needless to say his film career has had nowhere to go but down, but Mendes has worked his way in and out of relevancy without lack of trying. Likely burned out from Bond, Mendes seems content continuing his devotion to the stage from Shakespeare and Willy Wonka. His seven films over the course of 15 plus years has left us with plenty to examine – Mendes’ filmography is diverse and unpredictable.
9. Empire of Light
8. Spectre
On the level of craft alone, Spectre is decent. But just as a spy film, let alone the longest and priciest installment in the most enduring film series of all time, Spectre is dull and stupid even for Bond.
Attempting to emulate everything that worked so well between Mendes and director of photography Roger Deakins in Skyfall, Spectre stylistically offers more grand scale, faux art-house Bond. Even though cinematographer Hoyte von Hoytema does his best to recapture Skyfall’s vibrancy, the script doesn’t allow him the opportunity to conjure anything visually memorable.
With an indulgent two and a half hour runtime and a 250 million dollar budget, one would hope that the end product wouldn’t be lacking in tonal consistency, engaging action or much purpose beyond exaggerating the stakes. Christoph Waltz’ performance is more Dr. Evil than Blofeld reincarnate and Léa Seydoux is much too young to be Bond’s new girlfriend. With so much behind it, the film’s monotony is inexcusable — the pacing seeks the patience and elegance of Skyfall’s scope but comes off trite and tedious in every instant.
On the surface, Spectre is fairly sumptuous — that opening long take is the best part of the film and it’s a short spectacle of controlled ambition on the part of Mendes before the script unravels the film’s potential scene by scene. Somehow not a single sequence is justifiably entertaining, the dialogue is utilitarian and charmless (the same goes for Craig, who is clearly having a worse time than in Skyfall) and the script’s lazy retcon of the entire Craig series is a baffling story choice.
Trying to culminate the Craig films as a whole to make the installment superficially more significant, Spectre expects us to believe the past three villains, all separately motivated, were all just pawns in Blofeld’s game as head of the titular illuminati-esque organization. Quantum may have been a blunder after the thrust of Casino Royale, but it didn’t diminish the quality of three films on top of being a stinker itself.
7. Away We Go
Though Mendes has been able to shift genres with a sure hand, his short career hit its first major misstep in the very minor romantic comedy Away We Go.
Believable as John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph are as an unmarried couple on the cusp of parenthood — the script was the debut of husband and wife Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida — the film’s insights are never cutting enough and the humor seldom lands. Even with a substantial support cast (Jeff Daniels, Allison Janney, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jim Gaffigan are in the mix), the performers are unable to elevate their roles past caricatures, passing amusements in a frequently bumpy road trip flick.
Away We Go is neither exceptionally truthful nor anything close to a satisfying comedy. In trying to further himself as a jack-of-all-trades, Mendes instead proved that he’s most comfortable in the wheelhouse of drama.
6. Jarhead
As a psychologically driven war film, Jarhead was destined be met with a less than glowing reaction from critics and a shrug from most audiences conditioned to expect many more explosions in films of this nature.
But that was the point — for Marines during the first Iraq War, leading up to Operation Desert Storm, conditions and training was brutal, and the time spent in combat was sparse. In a deliberately unsatisfying war film about a fairly forgotten war, the audience yearns for a proper call to action as much as the soldiers depicted. This kind of blue balls is essential to the film’s ideas, but weakens Jarhead in respect to entertainment and structure.
In the three cases of Mendes turning written works into film, the autobiographical tale of Anthony Swofford feels like it would be most interesting on the page. Jake Gyllenhaal is as full of conviction as he usually is, but the mental and emotional endurance test over the course of all the boredom, paranoia, emasculation, and disassociation in the desert would be best explained by Swoff himself.
No matter how good Roger Deakins’ flushed, washed out cinematography is in the first of several collaborations between he and Mendes, this material was not well-suited for a normal narrative.
5. 1917
In a less reasonable reality this clear Academy Awards catnip would have easily outvoted Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite and honestly 1917 wouldn’t be the worst thing to be crowned Best Picture since Green Book was the previous year’s winner. Between Roger Deakins’ legendary touch (in which he emulates everything Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography imparts in sweeping long takes discreetly sown together), excellent performances from unknowns (despite checkpoints with familiar faces in british acting with Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Benedict Cumberbatch) and genuinely cinematic moments furthered by Thomas Newman’s surefire scoring.
EEHHHHE
4. Revolutionary Road
Mendes returned to the suburban home front to critique the American dream once more in an adaptation of the celebrated Richard Yates novel. Removed of the irony and multiple interpretations of American Beauty, Revolutionary Road examines the disarray of the nuclear family for the own personal hell it can always become.
As much of an Oscar grab as Revolutionary Road was from the offset, the film doesn’t wallow in melodrama, but it still milks the flaring emotions of the story for all they’re worth. If it weren’t for a generic score by Thomas Newman — far too reminiscent of his contribution to American Beauty — and performances that make the film feel more like polished theater, the film would be something close to a masterpiece. Directly contrasting the escape to better living that American Beauty showcases, Revolutionary Road heartbreakingly demonstrates how easy it is to naïvely aim to radically shift your life only to end up right where you started.
The geyser of emotions that well up from the strained marriage of Frank and April Wheeler is full of gravitas. If only Mendes could have properly directed his then-wife Kate Winslet to a more subtle final performance and helped Leo look less like he was playing dress-up. Winslet won an Oscar the same year for The Reader after winning a Golden Globe for the performance in question, but honestly her skills have never served her better than in Heavenly Creatures so many years ago. Michael Shannon is the real revelation of acting in Revolutionary Road — he is absolutely brilliant in his two scenes.
Looking the sheer torture of love gone seriously sour right in the face, Mendes’ fourth film was a return to form and yet pales in comparison to what American Beauty accomplished with much less screaming. Revolutionary Road may bear blistering truths, but its ideas have been dissected before and better.
3. Skyfall
After Quantum of Solace disrupted the straight and narrow reboot path set by the virtuosity of Casino Royale, Mendes corrected James Bond’s 21st century course with Skyfall — only to ironically create Spectre, which would disrupt the continuation once again.
But as the 50th anniversary of the series, there was nothing more refreshing than an epically mounted, beautifully photographed and proficiently paced chapter in the franchise. Skyfall was its own contained story and yet miraculously closed a kind of narrative loop of the entire 23-part series as a whole in stirring, stimulating fashion.
Sequences like the opening chase in Turkey, sleuthing in Shanghai and the final shootout at Bond Manor stand with some of the best moments of the franchise, and Mendes and Deakins alike prove their capabilities with the fast-moving, elaborate action. Deakins — in the best of three consecutive collaborations with Mendes — also makes the most of every set piece, landscape and exchange of dialogue with his masterful compositions. Mendes extracts excellent performances that make the one-liners glisten, and of course every actor looks damn good under Deakin’s rich lighting that accents contrasting colors.
Skillfully weaving fresh portrayals of M, Q and Moneypenny (Ralph Fiennes, Ben Wishaw and Naomi Harris respectively) into the new canon, Skyfall rebooted the series for good with a strong mainstay cast. There’s no telling where the characters of Craig’s fifth and final film — directed by Danny Boyle in a change of pace — will be by its conclusion.
Thomas Newman’s score is also uncharacteristically good for a blockbuster spectacle. Rather than blending into the background when things get loud, Newman’s future-edged score has the fury and atmosphere to elevate many scenes. The exact opposite of Quantum, every action release has plenty of delicate build-up, and this is where Newman’s music is most beneficial.
Most importantly, Mendes’ Bond film was a showman-like homecoming for the British director and a more than suitable celebration of cinema’s most iconic spy.
2. American Beauty
The Best Picture winner that put Mendes on the map from day one has aged curiously.
First off and most recently, there are the aspects of Kevin Spacey’s personal life that can make his sexually driven spiritual awakening in the film feel even more uncomfortable than it did nearly twenty years ago. But what a wide-ranging, invigorating performance from Spacey, his talents met equally by Annette Benning. Side by side the two make the Titanic reunion of Revolutionary Road look like a school play.
Of course, any talk of the film’s actual profundity is countered by those cringe-inducing speeches by the drug-dealing voyeur Ricky. In fact, the script has so much pontificating schmaltz and just plain bad writing mixed with genuine insight, social satire and convincing drama that Alan Boll’s prickly script manages to be unassumingly textured, encouraging discussion more than the film necessarily deserves. Should we be laughing at Ricky when he shows Jane his home video of a plastic bag caught in the wind or be raptured by his every word? American Beauty covers numerous perspectives without subscribing to one entirely, making it easy to dismiss the film but much more difficult to summarize its true thematic intentions.
Boll’s first film script went through many changes and Mendes’ final product is an improvement upon the initial story. When Mendes had completed the film and it wasn’t quite what he imagined, his alterations left more optimism and ambiguity to soften the film’s cynical edge. Like Fight Club, Office Space and similarly minded movies of its time, American Beauty cleverly revels in breaking from the conformity of prescribed working class/suburban norms and expectations. Much of American Beauty’s sharpest humor comes from Lester’s transition to a man who lives exactly as he’d like to. While the script seems to relish the kind of liberation he steadily attains, the audience can stand back — perhaps more useful than looking closer as the tagline suggests — and can see a selfish piece of shit just as easily as an average 40-something in a full-fledged mid-life crisis.
You should stand back too, because then the film’s flaws seem more insignificant. Some of the dialogue, particularly when Boll pretends to know how teenage girls speak to each other, is atrocious. Some characters are simplistic enough to make you wonder if they’re clichéd on purpose or just written flatly. Either way, Mendes manages tonal acrobatics between murder, satire, melodrama, comedy, and surrealism and gets the best from a sizable and talented cast.
As one of the better Best Picture winners of the 90s, American Beauty’s quality will be forever up for debate, but its attributes in several individual cases — particularly in direction and performances — will not be in question.
1. Road to Perdition
The knack for violence and atmospheric gravitas Mendes offered in this film likely lead him down the path to doubling up on James Bond. Regardless, Road to Perdition is the most distinct film of Mendes’ filmography, a stark neo-noir crime thriller that succeeds in period authenticity, palpable suspense and masterly performances, all in service of one of the most riveting gangster films that we’ve been blessed with in recent decades.
Populated with the likes of Tom Hanks (at his least cuddly), Paul Newman, Daniel Craig, Jude Law and Cirián Hinds, the original graphic novel’s trench-coated characters and Gothic elements leap off the page to they’re own shadowy, beautifully grim realization on-screen. Mendes’ film, the only one he’s both directed and produced, cinematically echoes the look of a graphic novel without resorting to the soulless style of Sin City or a Zack Snyder movie. Conrad L. Hall’s photography is extraordinary and his execution along with Mendes’ direction fulfills the dynamics of the source material’s potential to its zenith.
Amidst an uncomplicated plot clouded by double crossings, Road to Perdition’s strength is in its simplicity. A father and son relationship is set against Depression-era gangster trappings, and this solid emotional core renders the film’s implementation of refined style that much more effective. Told from the son’s perspective, our view of father Hanks is first obscured before a superlative first-person shot shows us a glimpse Sullivan Jr.’s first exposure to his father’s real profession in visceral fashion. The film’s climax is also an impeccable display of light and shadow — the film’s rain-soaked ambiance and mise-en-scène across the board is flawless everywhere, but this scene in particular.
There’s not much to defend about Road to Perdition because there’s so little wrong with it. The film has so much to offer anyone at all engrossed by visual craft, production value, expert performances, thrilling genre moments and dramatic weight. With only his second film, Sam Mendes had established himself as an assured and capable director and Road to Perdition has aged finely enough to justify his entire career even if he sticks with the stage for good.
*Published at TasteofCinema.com / April 11, 2018
Needless to say his film career has had nowhere to go but down, but Mendes has worked his way in and out of relevancy without lack of trying. Likely burned out from Bond, Mendes seems content continuing his devotion to the stage from Shakespeare and Willy Wonka. His seven films over the course of 15 plus years has left us with plenty to examine – Mendes’ filmography is diverse and unpredictable.
9. Empire of Light
8. Spectre
On the level of craft alone, Spectre is decent. But just as a spy film, let alone the longest and priciest installment in the most enduring film series of all time, Spectre is dull and stupid even for Bond.
Attempting to emulate everything that worked so well between Mendes and director of photography Roger Deakins in Skyfall, Spectre stylistically offers more grand scale, faux art-house Bond. Even though cinematographer Hoyte von Hoytema does his best to recapture Skyfall’s vibrancy, the script doesn’t allow him the opportunity to conjure anything visually memorable.
With an indulgent two and a half hour runtime and a 250 million dollar budget, one would hope that the end product wouldn’t be lacking in tonal consistency, engaging action or much purpose beyond exaggerating the stakes. Christoph Waltz’ performance is more Dr. Evil than Blofeld reincarnate and Léa Seydoux is much too young to be Bond’s new girlfriend. With so much behind it, the film’s monotony is inexcusable — the pacing seeks the patience and elegance of Skyfall’s scope but comes off trite and tedious in every instant.
On the surface, Spectre is fairly sumptuous — that opening long take is the best part of the film and it’s a short spectacle of controlled ambition on the part of Mendes before the script unravels the film’s potential scene by scene. Somehow not a single sequence is justifiably entertaining, the dialogue is utilitarian and charmless (the same goes for Craig, who is clearly having a worse time than in Skyfall) and the script’s lazy retcon of the entire Craig series is a baffling story choice.
Trying to culminate the Craig films as a whole to make the installment superficially more significant, Spectre expects us to believe the past three villains, all separately motivated, were all just pawns in Blofeld’s game as head of the titular illuminati-esque organization. Quantum may have been a blunder after the thrust of Casino Royale, but it didn’t diminish the quality of three films on top of being a stinker itself.
7. Away We Go
Though Mendes has been able to shift genres with a sure hand, his short career hit its first major misstep in the very minor romantic comedy Away We Go.
Believable as John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph are as an unmarried couple on the cusp of parenthood — the script was the debut of husband and wife Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida — the film’s insights are never cutting enough and the humor seldom lands. Even with a substantial support cast (Jeff Daniels, Allison Janney, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jim Gaffigan are in the mix), the performers are unable to elevate their roles past caricatures, passing amusements in a frequently bumpy road trip flick.
Away We Go is neither exceptionally truthful nor anything close to a satisfying comedy. In trying to further himself as a jack-of-all-trades, Mendes instead proved that he’s most comfortable in the wheelhouse of drama.
6. Jarhead
As a psychologically driven war film, Jarhead was destined be met with a less than glowing reaction from critics and a shrug from most audiences conditioned to expect many more explosions in films of this nature.
But that was the point — for Marines during the first Iraq War, leading up to Operation Desert Storm, conditions and training was brutal, and the time spent in combat was sparse. In a deliberately unsatisfying war film about a fairly forgotten war, the audience yearns for a proper call to action as much as the soldiers depicted. This kind of blue balls is essential to the film’s ideas, but weakens Jarhead in respect to entertainment and structure.
In the three cases of Mendes turning written works into film, the autobiographical tale of Anthony Swofford feels like it would be most interesting on the page. Jake Gyllenhaal is as full of conviction as he usually is, but the mental and emotional endurance test over the course of all the boredom, paranoia, emasculation, and disassociation in the desert would be best explained by Swoff himself.
No matter how good Roger Deakins’ flushed, washed out cinematography is in the first of several collaborations between he and Mendes, this material was not well-suited for a normal narrative.
5. 1917
In a less reasonable reality this clear Academy Awards catnip would have easily outvoted Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite and honestly 1917 wouldn’t be the worst thing to be crowned Best Picture since Green Book was the previous year’s winner. Between Roger Deakins’ legendary touch (in which he emulates everything Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography imparts in sweeping long takes discreetly sown together), excellent performances from unknowns (despite checkpoints with familiar faces in british acting with Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Benedict Cumberbatch) and genuinely cinematic moments furthered by Thomas Newman’s surefire scoring.
EEHHHHE
4. Revolutionary Road
Mendes returned to the suburban home front to critique the American dream once more in an adaptation of the celebrated Richard Yates novel. Removed of the irony and multiple interpretations of American Beauty, Revolutionary Road examines the disarray of the nuclear family for the own personal hell it can always become.
As much of an Oscar grab as Revolutionary Road was from the offset, the film doesn’t wallow in melodrama, but it still milks the flaring emotions of the story for all they’re worth. If it weren’t for a generic score by Thomas Newman — far too reminiscent of his contribution to American Beauty — and performances that make the film feel more like polished theater, the film would be something close to a masterpiece. Directly contrasting the escape to better living that American Beauty showcases, Revolutionary Road heartbreakingly demonstrates how easy it is to naïvely aim to radically shift your life only to end up right where you started.
The geyser of emotions that well up from the strained marriage of Frank and April Wheeler is full of gravitas. If only Mendes could have properly directed his then-wife Kate Winslet to a more subtle final performance and helped Leo look less like he was playing dress-up. Winslet won an Oscar the same year for The Reader after winning a Golden Globe for the performance in question, but honestly her skills have never served her better than in Heavenly Creatures so many years ago. Michael Shannon is the real revelation of acting in Revolutionary Road — he is absolutely brilliant in his two scenes.
Looking the sheer torture of love gone seriously sour right in the face, Mendes’ fourth film was a return to form and yet pales in comparison to what American Beauty accomplished with much less screaming. Revolutionary Road may bear blistering truths, but its ideas have been dissected before and better.
3. Skyfall
After Quantum of Solace disrupted the straight and narrow reboot path set by the virtuosity of Casino Royale, Mendes corrected James Bond’s 21st century course with Skyfall — only to ironically create Spectre, which would disrupt the continuation once again.
But as the 50th anniversary of the series, there was nothing more refreshing than an epically mounted, beautifully photographed and proficiently paced chapter in the franchise. Skyfall was its own contained story and yet miraculously closed a kind of narrative loop of the entire 23-part series as a whole in stirring, stimulating fashion.
Sequences like the opening chase in Turkey, sleuthing in Shanghai and the final shootout at Bond Manor stand with some of the best moments of the franchise, and Mendes and Deakins alike prove their capabilities with the fast-moving, elaborate action. Deakins — in the best of three consecutive collaborations with Mendes — also makes the most of every set piece, landscape and exchange of dialogue with his masterful compositions. Mendes extracts excellent performances that make the one-liners glisten, and of course every actor looks damn good under Deakin’s rich lighting that accents contrasting colors.
Skillfully weaving fresh portrayals of M, Q and Moneypenny (Ralph Fiennes, Ben Wishaw and Naomi Harris respectively) into the new canon, Skyfall rebooted the series for good with a strong mainstay cast. There’s no telling where the characters of Craig’s fifth and final film — directed by Danny Boyle in a change of pace — will be by its conclusion.
Thomas Newman’s score is also uncharacteristically good for a blockbuster spectacle. Rather than blending into the background when things get loud, Newman’s future-edged score has the fury and atmosphere to elevate many scenes. The exact opposite of Quantum, every action release has plenty of delicate build-up, and this is where Newman’s music is most beneficial.
Most importantly, Mendes’ Bond film was a showman-like homecoming for the British director and a more than suitable celebration of cinema’s most iconic spy.
2. American Beauty
The Best Picture winner that put Mendes on the map from day one has aged curiously.
First off and most recently, there are the aspects of Kevin Spacey’s personal life that can make his sexually driven spiritual awakening in the film feel even more uncomfortable than it did nearly twenty years ago. But what a wide-ranging, invigorating performance from Spacey, his talents met equally by Annette Benning. Side by side the two make the Titanic reunion of Revolutionary Road look like a school play.
Of course, any talk of the film’s actual profundity is countered by those cringe-inducing speeches by the drug-dealing voyeur Ricky. In fact, the script has so much pontificating schmaltz and just plain bad writing mixed with genuine insight, social satire and convincing drama that Alan Boll’s prickly script manages to be unassumingly textured, encouraging discussion more than the film necessarily deserves. Should we be laughing at Ricky when he shows Jane his home video of a plastic bag caught in the wind or be raptured by his every word? American Beauty covers numerous perspectives without subscribing to one entirely, making it easy to dismiss the film but much more difficult to summarize its true thematic intentions.
Boll’s first film script went through many changes and Mendes’ final product is an improvement upon the initial story. When Mendes had completed the film and it wasn’t quite what he imagined, his alterations left more optimism and ambiguity to soften the film’s cynical edge. Like Fight Club, Office Space and similarly minded movies of its time, American Beauty cleverly revels in breaking from the conformity of prescribed working class/suburban norms and expectations. Much of American Beauty’s sharpest humor comes from Lester’s transition to a man who lives exactly as he’d like to. While the script seems to relish the kind of liberation he steadily attains, the audience can stand back — perhaps more useful than looking closer as the tagline suggests — and can see a selfish piece of shit just as easily as an average 40-something in a full-fledged mid-life crisis.
You should stand back too, because then the film’s flaws seem more insignificant. Some of the dialogue, particularly when Boll pretends to know how teenage girls speak to each other, is atrocious. Some characters are simplistic enough to make you wonder if they’re clichéd on purpose or just written flatly. Either way, Mendes manages tonal acrobatics between murder, satire, melodrama, comedy, and surrealism and gets the best from a sizable and talented cast.
As one of the better Best Picture winners of the 90s, American Beauty’s quality will be forever up for debate, but its attributes in several individual cases — particularly in direction and performances — will not be in question.
1. Road to Perdition
The knack for violence and atmospheric gravitas Mendes offered in this film likely lead him down the path to doubling up on James Bond. Regardless, Road to Perdition is the most distinct film of Mendes’ filmography, a stark neo-noir crime thriller that succeeds in period authenticity, palpable suspense and masterly performances, all in service of one of the most riveting gangster films that we’ve been blessed with in recent decades.
Populated with the likes of Tom Hanks (at his least cuddly), Paul Newman, Daniel Craig, Jude Law and Cirián Hinds, the original graphic novel’s trench-coated characters and Gothic elements leap off the page to they’re own shadowy, beautifully grim realization on-screen. Mendes’ film, the only one he’s both directed and produced, cinematically echoes the look of a graphic novel without resorting to the soulless style of Sin City or a Zack Snyder movie. Conrad L. Hall’s photography is extraordinary and his execution along with Mendes’ direction fulfills the dynamics of the source material’s potential to its zenith.
Amidst an uncomplicated plot clouded by double crossings, Road to Perdition’s strength is in its simplicity. A father and son relationship is set against Depression-era gangster trappings, and this solid emotional core renders the film’s implementation of refined style that much more effective. Told from the son’s perspective, our view of father Hanks is first obscured before a superlative first-person shot shows us a glimpse Sullivan Jr.’s first exposure to his father’s real profession in visceral fashion. The film’s climax is also an impeccable display of light and shadow — the film’s rain-soaked ambiance and mise-en-scène across the board is flawless everywhere, but this scene in particular.
There’s not much to defend about Road to Perdition because there’s so little wrong with it. The film has so much to offer anyone at all engrossed by visual craft, production value, expert performances, thrilling genre moments and dramatic weight. With only his second film, Sam Mendes had established himself as an assured and capable director and Road to Perdition has aged finely enough to justify his entire career even if he sticks with the stage for good.
*Published at TasteofCinema.com / April 11, 2018
Every 21st Century Domestic Box Office Champion Ranked
In a perfect world, public opinion would always align with critical consensus. But just like critics, the people who make up the widespread American moviegoing audience are often wrong. Any given year will feature box office smashes for the right reasons — a curious audience and a great film connect over several weeks, leaving an important impact on pop culture that can last if the cards are right. And sometimes you get a new Transformers movie.
But though spectators can be tricked by marketing, fooled by brand recognition and swayed by gimmickry, they singlehandedly keep film alive and, when a masterpiece or two sneaks its way into the Hollywood machine, keep film relevant. From the turn of the century when Ron Howard’s Grinch was king to the foregone conclusion of Stars Wars: The Last Jedi becoming 2017’s highest grossing film, here’s every yearly domestic box office winner so far this century ranked.
23. Bad Boys for Life
22. How the Grinch Stole Christmas
$260,044,825
Beating the wholly superior Cast Away for the top spot, Ron Howard’s holiday abomination was apparently just a warm-up for directing Best Picture winner A Beautiful Mind.
Perverting everything Dr. Seuss could have ever intended with his lovely children’s books, this horrific live action vision exploited extensive nostalgia for the author’s broad catalogue — as well as the iconic 1966 animated adaptation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! — in order to easily coast to box office profits.
An ad-libbing Jim Carrey under pounds of makeup is somehow more inspired than any facet of this adaptation of the 69-page book. With a new 3D animated version of the tale being released this year — in the vein of more recent films Horton Hears a Who and The Lorax — it’s becoming clearer that How the Grinch Stole Christmas! was never meant to be translated to real life. The makeup of the Whos is disturbing and for all the detail in production design, the effort is utterly wasted on a hack screenplay loaded with tasteless adult humor and a multitude of excessive additions to what boils down to a bedtime story.
Worst of all this Grinch completely disregards the simple but essential themes of Seuss’ book itself, apart from the beats it can’t miss. The film tries to comment on the soulless consumerist frenzy of modern day Christmas while ironically being a direct product of that same commercialization
21. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
$532,177,324
Disney owned 2016 with the three highest domestic grossers of the year, with Rogue One claiming first alongside Finding Dory and Captain America: Civil War, all of which were the only films that year to gross over 400 million.
With the first spin-off of the series, Disney proved they could slap the name Star Wars on anything and put up huge numbers. But just because it’s right there in the title of the original film, Star Wars was many things before you would ever venture to call it a war film. Even with the tragedy and space politics introduced in the prequels, Star Wars always managed to be at least a little fun.
As with his first blockbuster Godzilla back in 2014, Gareth Edwards offers in-moment tension and competent action but, alas, a final film that’s much different than advertised. No amount of self-seriousness, unlimited budget and audience testing can support weak characters and hapless, space-trotting plotting.
Rogue One, for the fanboys at least, basks in the reality of A New Hope’s era, but it could never survive by its own merits alone without the original, the shadow of which this Star Wars story will forever lie and hopefully be forgotten.
20. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
$618,710,718
Most critics praised it as bold and most fans were enraged — what can be added to the cesspool of pointless opinions? While properly steering Disney’s multibillion-dollar franchise into uncharted waters — the biggest shortcoming of the otherwise decent The Force Awakens — Rian Johnson’s supposedly auteurist Star Wars film barely stands on its own as a film before you put it in context of a sequel, let alone part of a greater saga.
You don’t need to be a Jedi to use the Force? Snoke was just a random Sith? We can win wars with love? The dust has yet to settle and the verdict on Episode VIII is still out — that 96%/48% split between top critics and audiences on Rotten Tomatoes says enough. Critics seem to have either been paid off or have literally no knowledge of Star Wars.
Sure, Johnson may have subverted many an expectation, but there’s nothing in place of the choices he chose not to make. The film’s collection of B-plots makes for a weak reincarnation of the scattered failures of The Empire Strikes Back. And worst of all, the film couldn’t have left you less excited for the next installment. The Last Jedi at least has Rey and Kylo at the center — the only parts of the new story that work — but even though we’re over halfway through the new trilogy, nothing actually consequential has taken place.
19. Shrek 2
$441,226,247
Smoking huge grossers like Spider-Man 2 and The Passion of the Christ, Shrek’s inevitable sequel made Dreamworks Animation a lasting alterative to Disney’s family entertainment. Too bad their legacy is built up crude, obvious humor and unending pop culture references.
It’s far more watchable than Shrek the Third or Shrek Forever After, but Shrek 2 has little of the universal appeal that made its predecessor so memorable. Unless you’re still in elementary school, Shrek 2 has next to nothing to offer.
18. Spider-Man: No Way Home
17. Avatar
$749,766,139
Released nearly a decade ago, it’s incredible how insignificant the world’s highest grossing film ever feels in the scheme of modern cinema. But no matter the film’s waning imprint on the collective consciousness, James Cameron labors on still three years out from the first of many sequels to his juggernaut Avatar.
In the moment, as it was with Titanic, it was easy to laud Cameron for his technical achievement and eye for epic scope, but Avatar’s story, characters and dialogue are still just about as clichéd as you can get — even some of the visual effects are already dated.
The irony of Cameron’s efforts is that at the end of the wearying road to perfecting the 3D cinematic experience — a gradually declining trend he singlehandedly and needlessly revitalized — the longevity of his efforts are essentially wasted. He can create a profound theater going experience that is then lost and compressed for the rest of the film’s existence, where the flimsy writing and obvious messages can be taken for what little they’re worth.
16. American Sniper
$350,126,372
Though it couldn’t be crowned 2014’s winner until March of the following year — after it slowly but surely bested the third Hunger Games and Guardians of the Galaxy — Clint Eastwood’s biopic on Chris Kyle would become the only R-rated domestic box office champ this century has seen.
American Sniper had critical backing and fared well with the Academy, but Eastwood’s portrait of Kyle is a little too unbalanced to feel like much else than propaganda. After a fair and complex portrayal of Kyle’s psychological conflict for a majority of the film, the tragedy that ended Kyle’s life leads the staunch conservative Eastwood to simply shrine him and his film with patriotism. It’s a sharp 180 that derails everything intricate and powerful about the prior scripting and Bradley Cooper’s great performance.
But no matter your party or political affiliation though, American Sniper’s true story held interest for all of the moviegoing public.
15. Star Wars: The Force Awakens
$936,662,225
With the help of inflation and deep-rooted nostalgia, the first sequel to Return of the Jedi 32 years later easily became the highest grossing domestic film of all time. However, when you crunch the numbers based on ticket prices The Force Awakens not even in the top 10, where the original Star Wars sits at number 2.
The biggest problem with Episode VII is clearly how much it leans on the original’s structure, tone, characters and so forth. Disney and J. J. Abrams didn’t really give us a new chapter in the saga, but rather an introduction to the universe for the newbies and a soft reboot slap on the reset button for everyone else. This was the Abrams’ remix of A New Hope — the result is anything but novel, but it is competently made, exciting in its best moments and far from insulting to the legacy of the original films unlike The Last Jedi.
But does The Force Awakens deserve to be the unadjusted highest grossing domestic film of all time? Hell no, which is why it’s been bested by a prequel on this list.
14. Star Wars Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
$380,270,577
As easy as it is and has been to trash on the Star Wars prequels, Disney’s corporate-approved reinvigoration of the franchise has only forced us to see how inspired and inventive George Lucas’ efforts were. For recycling many elements of the original trilogy, Lucas attempted to lay out new stories, characters and imaginative creations. As poorly as they’ve aged as a showcase of modern film technology, there remains integrity at the artistic level. The business-minded meddling behind each of Disney’s new attempts is nowhere close to the authenticity of any Star Wars film prior.
Revenge of the Sith is a good film in essence if fumbled in execution, bearing all the ideas that Lucas likely wanted from this trilogy from the start. Episode III is full of dramatic moments that work — in the structure of a Shakespearean tragedy that attains that space opera niche perhaps better than any Star Wars film — and scenes and lines that function so terribly they’ve been subject to the finest of memes. If nothing else Revenge of the Sith is a cinematic gold mine of entertainment, scaling the very best and worst of the prequels — and Star Wars in general — in one package. At least it is actually an important, definitive entry in the saga.
13. Black Panther
12. Spider-Man 3
$336,530,303
Though it could never hold a candle to either of Sam Raimi’s excellent earlier superhero go-rounds, pretending Spider-Man 3 is awful is to ignore how much of the trademark camp that was already established in the series was still intentional this time.
When Peter goes bad, you’re actually laughing with the film as he embarrassingly struts and dances down the street, not at it. There are dumb things for sure, like retconning Uncle Ben’s killer to make it actually Sandman and rushing Venom, but Thomas Haden Church and Topher Grace do fine with their respective villains.
Most importantly, Tobey Maguire is giving it his all, and the film, however much corniness was deliberate, is thoroughly engaging. In an infamous year for bad threequels, the last genuine Spider-Man film was far from the worst offender that could have grossed the most in 2007.
11. Avengers: Endgame
10. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
$424,668,047
Disney put up a fight with Iron Man 3 and Frozen, but Catching Fire, the apex of financial success and cinematic quality for The Hunger Games series, managed to top the phenomenon of the first film.
Following flop after flop of young adult novels turned would-be teen film franchises (Lemony Snicket, Eragon, The Golden Compass), The Hunger Games came closest to repeating the unprecedented success of the Harry Potter films. Before popularity tapered out, the first two Games each managed to outgross any Potter film.
Realizing the potential of the most popular chapter in Suzanne Collins’ trilogy, Catching Fire couldn’t exactly escape the simplistic politics of its dystopian setting but succeeded in taking the exciting structure of the first film and cleverly raising the stakes and complexity.
9. The Avengers
$623,357,910
An ingenious reward for patient build-up and franchise expansion, The Avengers was novel blockbuster filmmaking. Even though the film’s seismic entertainment value just a few years later seems a little lacking compared to the current fluidity of Marvel’s most streamlined output ever, The Avengers is the touchstone of the brand’s global dominance.
The year before it seemed that Marvel had put Thor and Captain America in place just to have them become part of Iron Man’s crew in the team-up, but the camaraderie along with Mark Ruffalo’s replacement Hulk made for a ensemble that was delightful to watch in any capacity together on-screen. Like Age of Ultron three years later, The Avengers could be easily forgotten, but Joss Whedon’s levity lent Marvel fare a singular cheekiness from then on out with that has led to some of its best and very worst moments, the latter being an overreliance on quips in place of actual humor (ahem Guardians and Vol. 2).
There are better Marvel movies out there, and far better superhero films, but in its moment The Avengers felt like an event, something that only the momentous zeitgeist surrounding Black Panther can equal. Its pleasures felt earned, and while Infinity War this summer might offer more mayhem on a grander scale, it won’t be nearly as much of a watershed moment for caped cinema.
8. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
$381,011,219
A fine finale but a far cry from the series’ best, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 finished its run with the highest domestic numbers of the franchise, though when adjusted for inflation nothing ever outgrossed The Sorcerer’s Stone.
Part 2, in delivering a bewildering, roller coaster climax, really only suffers by way of the questionable choices made by J. K. Rowling in the final chapters of her seven-part book series. Harry’s death-limbo sequence with Dumbledore is some of the best stuff Rowling ever wrote, but the cheesy epilogue, on top of the simple Christ allegory of Harry’s end sacrifice, makes for a less than substantial sendoff to a beloved series.
That said, David Yates had become comfortable directing the last half of the series, and he makes the most of the latter half of Deathly Hallows as Part 1 left it. The Gringotts break-in and even the exposition-heavy montage involving Snape’s memory are thrilling moments. But as the shortest film in the franchise, Deathly Hallows could have taken its time in somber conclusion rather than settle for swift action and a brief departure.
7. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
$317,575,550
Barely edging out its fantasy adaptation opponent in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, the first Harry Potter film would incite a decade of unparalleled global fan fever even after the books were completed.
Though not anywhere close to the series’ finest, on its own Chris Columbus’ first incarnation of J K Rowling’s exuberant world remains a comfy children’s classic. Establishing Potter trademarks of Quidditch, Hogwarts classes and fantastic beasts, Sorcerer’s Stone boasts the kind of magic that feels more real the more nostalgic you are for the series. The perfect cast of the now-famous lead trio and British acting elites is wonderful to watch, and John Williams’ score is rich and iconic.
If it weren’t for the Scooby Doo-tier mysteries guiding first few episodic stories, Sorcerer’s Stone would be a real classic. Instead it can settle for being a defining part of modern fantasy filmmaking.
6. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
$423,315,812
Blowing any other competitors right out of the water, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest easily topped 2006 domestically and became just the third film to gross over a billion dollars worldwide.
The franchise has since run aground, but Gore Verbinski’s original trilogy was rather inspired as a blockbuster franchise at the time. At World’s End finally hit the sour point of the series’ excess and convolution, but Dead Man’s Chest was right in the sweet spot of seafaring, swashbuckling spectacle and ruthless, backstabbing characters.
Steered by an Indiana Jones-esque plot, the sequel to the unexpectedly popular first installment improved nearly everything that came before it — the dialogue, visual effects, set pieces and supporting cast. Bill Nighy’s Davy Jones made for a superb villain and Depp, whatever the reviews said at the time, had not yet lost his flamboyant charms.
5. Top Gun: Maverick
4. Toy Story 3
$415,004,880
The swan song of Pixar’s untarnished streak, Toy Story 3 was an uncalled-for and yet still surprisingly brilliant addition to the studios canon. Toy Story has been the only Disney/Pixar film to spawn worthwhile sequels — Cars 2 and 3 saw diminishing returns while Monsters University and Finding Dory earned plenty to make up for it.
Gracefully discussing the passage of time, acceptance of change and the pains of growing up, Toy Story 3 is one of Pixar’s last genuinely mature films, Inside Out notwithstanding. Aside from the easy profits, Disney has no reason to be tempting fate with a fourth film. Toy Story 3 wasn’t just another sequel, but a final chapter — its finality will be tampered by simple corporate greed.
3. Spider-Man
$403,706,375
Sam Raimi’s first iteration of what comic book movies ought to be is quaint, but even a decade and a half after the fact the original Spider-Man is a masterwork of the visual and emotion potential of superhero films.
Raimi pulls off a cinematically coherent, flawlessly edited film that mimics the panel-by-panel pacing and immediacy of a comic book. Most outstandingly the 2002 Spider-Man fulfilled the template for the superhero origin story better than anyone had at the time, and it has yet to be topped in that regard.
The casting is fundamentally great, the wisdom is timeless, and the hilarity — both purposeful and that which only memes can reveal as genius — is potent throughout.
Raimi’s particular stylization more than overcomes some of the dated visual effects and the few drawbacks to his trilogy’s signature brand of corniness.
2. The Dark Knight
$533,345,358
One of the most profound cultural milestones of the 21st century, The Dark Knight was obviously elevated by the ghost of Heath Ledger in his truly captivating turn as The Joker. But Ledger’s villainous Oscar-winning performance was just icing on the cake for one of the few masterful blockbusters to grace the silver screen this century.
Mounted by the balance between epic scope and tangible realism, the grittiness of Batman Begins was realized to its zenith in what is arguably Nolan’s most well scripted and directed film. The Dark Knight Rises, along with Interstellar, would see a noticeable decline in the quality of Nolan’s output as his ambitions began to exceed his abilities. Back when he kept his reach within his imagination, Nolan flourished with The Prestige, Inception and the Batman film in question.
At the time The Dark Knight broke multiple records including midnight sales, opening day, and opening weekend to name a few. With 10 years of hindsight, we can definitively say that Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster masterpiece earned every penny. The Dark Knight is unmatched in brawny, thought-provoking entertainment value — something like one of the best seasons of television edited into 2½ hours of exhaustive, exhilarating cinema.
1. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
$377,027,325
A most splendid sendoff to a cultural phenomenon, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King dominated every part of the cinematic landscape in 2003 and deserved every bit of attention and recognition.
Let alone the fact that it matched records for the most Oscar wins with 11 total, outgrossed each of its previous installments in unprecedented fashion and became just the second film to gross over a billion dollars worldwide. Upon release, anticipation for The Return of the King was at a fever pitch for The Lord of the Rings as a fandom and a powerhouse film series. This gargantuan epic was riding a long-travelling hype train after 6 years of preparation, and the final product is one of emotive intimacy and impossible scale we’re unlikely to ever see again in the current state of Hollywood.
An exercise of purposeful scripting and visual storytelling, the full four-hour vision of The Return of the King is a meticulous and mature work of pure climax, spectacular mythmaking and profound feeling. If somewhere in the grand splendor of the film’s final act you are not reduced to tears, you just may be a robot.
Audiences may have been antsy during the string of multiple endings, but the execution of them is classic and succinct — so many impactful moments are communicated without dialogue. The labyrinthine world building of Tolkien’s writing was manifested so convincingly on-screen by this point that expressions were enough — as Arwen and Aragorn reunite, as the hobbits drink together again back at the Green Dragon, as Frodo turns and smiles on the ship to the Grey Havens.
With the trilogy aging finer year by year, it’s safe to say The Lord of the Rings as a whole is the most essential work of popular cinema in the 21st century, with The Return of the King resting as its crowning jewel.
*Published at TasteofCinema.com / March 5th, 2018
But though spectators can be tricked by marketing, fooled by brand recognition and swayed by gimmickry, they singlehandedly keep film alive and, when a masterpiece or two sneaks its way into the Hollywood machine, keep film relevant. From the turn of the century when Ron Howard’s Grinch was king to the foregone conclusion of Stars Wars: The Last Jedi becoming 2017’s highest grossing film, here’s every yearly domestic box office winner so far this century ranked.
23. Bad Boys for Life
22. How the Grinch Stole Christmas
$260,044,825
Beating the wholly superior Cast Away for the top spot, Ron Howard’s holiday abomination was apparently just a warm-up for directing Best Picture winner A Beautiful Mind.
Perverting everything Dr. Seuss could have ever intended with his lovely children’s books, this horrific live action vision exploited extensive nostalgia for the author’s broad catalogue — as well as the iconic 1966 animated adaptation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! — in order to easily coast to box office profits.
An ad-libbing Jim Carrey under pounds of makeup is somehow more inspired than any facet of this adaptation of the 69-page book. With a new 3D animated version of the tale being released this year — in the vein of more recent films Horton Hears a Who and The Lorax — it’s becoming clearer that How the Grinch Stole Christmas! was never meant to be translated to real life. The makeup of the Whos is disturbing and for all the detail in production design, the effort is utterly wasted on a hack screenplay loaded with tasteless adult humor and a multitude of excessive additions to what boils down to a bedtime story.
Worst of all this Grinch completely disregards the simple but essential themes of Seuss’ book itself, apart from the beats it can’t miss. The film tries to comment on the soulless consumerist frenzy of modern day Christmas while ironically being a direct product of that same commercialization
21. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
$532,177,324
Disney owned 2016 with the three highest domestic grossers of the year, with Rogue One claiming first alongside Finding Dory and Captain America: Civil War, all of which were the only films that year to gross over 400 million.
With the first spin-off of the series, Disney proved they could slap the name Star Wars on anything and put up huge numbers. But just because it’s right there in the title of the original film, Star Wars was many things before you would ever venture to call it a war film. Even with the tragedy and space politics introduced in the prequels, Star Wars always managed to be at least a little fun.
As with his first blockbuster Godzilla back in 2014, Gareth Edwards offers in-moment tension and competent action but, alas, a final film that’s much different than advertised. No amount of self-seriousness, unlimited budget and audience testing can support weak characters and hapless, space-trotting plotting.
Rogue One, for the fanboys at least, basks in the reality of A New Hope’s era, but it could never survive by its own merits alone without the original, the shadow of which this Star Wars story will forever lie and hopefully be forgotten.
20. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
$618,710,718
Most critics praised it as bold and most fans were enraged — what can be added to the cesspool of pointless opinions? While properly steering Disney’s multibillion-dollar franchise into uncharted waters — the biggest shortcoming of the otherwise decent The Force Awakens — Rian Johnson’s supposedly auteurist Star Wars film barely stands on its own as a film before you put it in context of a sequel, let alone part of a greater saga.
You don’t need to be a Jedi to use the Force? Snoke was just a random Sith? We can win wars with love? The dust has yet to settle and the verdict on Episode VIII is still out — that 96%/48% split between top critics and audiences on Rotten Tomatoes says enough. Critics seem to have either been paid off or have literally no knowledge of Star Wars.
Sure, Johnson may have subverted many an expectation, but there’s nothing in place of the choices he chose not to make. The film’s collection of B-plots makes for a weak reincarnation of the scattered failures of The Empire Strikes Back. And worst of all, the film couldn’t have left you less excited for the next installment. The Last Jedi at least has Rey and Kylo at the center — the only parts of the new story that work — but even though we’re over halfway through the new trilogy, nothing actually consequential has taken place.
19. Shrek 2
$441,226,247
Smoking huge grossers like Spider-Man 2 and The Passion of the Christ, Shrek’s inevitable sequel made Dreamworks Animation a lasting alterative to Disney’s family entertainment. Too bad their legacy is built up crude, obvious humor and unending pop culture references.
It’s far more watchable than Shrek the Third or Shrek Forever After, but Shrek 2 has little of the universal appeal that made its predecessor so memorable. Unless you’re still in elementary school, Shrek 2 has next to nothing to offer.
18. Spider-Man: No Way Home
17. Avatar
$749,766,139
Released nearly a decade ago, it’s incredible how insignificant the world’s highest grossing film ever feels in the scheme of modern cinema. But no matter the film’s waning imprint on the collective consciousness, James Cameron labors on still three years out from the first of many sequels to his juggernaut Avatar.
In the moment, as it was with Titanic, it was easy to laud Cameron for his technical achievement and eye for epic scope, but Avatar’s story, characters and dialogue are still just about as clichéd as you can get — even some of the visual effects are already dated.
The irony of Cameron’s efforts is that at the end of the wearying road to perfecting the 3D cinematic experience — a gradually declining trend he singlehandedly and needlessly revitalized — the longevity of his efforts are essentially wasted. He can create a profound theater going experience that is then lost and compressed for the rest of the film’s existence, where the flimsy writing and obvious messages can be taken for what little they’re worth.
16. American Sniper
$350,126,372
Though it couldn’t be crowned 2014’s winner until March of the following year — after it slowly but surely bested the third Hunger Games and Guardians of the Galaxy — Clint Eastwood’s biopic on Chris Kyle would become the only R-rated domestic box office champ this century has seen.
American Sniper had critical backing and fared well with the Academy, but Eastwood’s portrait of Kyle is a little too unbalanced to feel like much else than propaganda. After a fair and complex portrayal of Kyle’s psychological conflict for a majority of the film, the tragedy that ended Kyle’s life leads the staunch conservative Eastwood to simply shrine him and his film with patriotism. It’s a sharp 180 that derails everything intricate and powerful about the prior scripting and Bradley Cooper’s great performance.
But no matter your party or political affiliation though, American Sniper’s true story held interest for all of the moviegoing public.
15. Star Wars: The Force Awakens
$936,662,225
With the help of inflation and deep-rooted nostalgia, the first sequel to Return of the Jedi 32 years later easily became the highest grossing domestic film of all time. However, when you crunch the numbers based on ticket prices The Force Awakens not even in the top 10, where the original Star Wars sits at number 2.
The biggest problem with Episode VII is clearly how much it leans on the original’s structure, tone, characters and so forth. Disney and J. J. Abrams didn’t really give us a new chapter in the saga, but rather an introduction to the universe for the newbies and a soft reboot slap on the reset button for everyone else. This was the Abrams’ remix of A New Hope — the result is anything but novel, but it is competently made, exciting in its best moments and far from insulting to the legacy of the original films unlike The Last Jedi.
But does The Force Awakens deserve to be the unadjusted highest grossing domestic film of all time? Hell no, which is why it’s been bested by a prequel on this list.
14. Star Wars Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
$380,270,577
As easy as it is and has been to trash on the Star Wars prequels, Disney’s corporate-approved reinvigoration of the franchise has only forced us to see how inspired and inventive George Lucas’ efforts were. For recycling many elements of the original trilogy, Lucas attempted to lay out new stories, characters and imaginative creations. As poorly as they’ve aged as a showcase of modern film technology, there remains integrity at the artistic level. The business-minded meddling behind each of Disney’s new attempts is nowhere close to the authenticity of any Star Wars film prior.
Revenge of the Sith is a good film in essence if fumbled in execution, bearing all the ideas that Lucas likely wanted from this trilogy from the start. Episode III is full of dramatic moments that work — in the structure of a Shakespearean tragedy that attains that space opera niche perhaps better than any Star Wars film — and scenes and lines that function so terribly they’ve been subject to the finest of memes. If nothing else Revenge of the Sith is a cinematic gold mine of entertainment, scaling the very best and worst of the prequels — and Star Wars in general — in one package. At least it is actually an important, definitive entry in the saga.
13. Black Panther
12. Spider-Man 3
$336,530,303
Though it could never hold a candle to either of Sam Raimi’s excellent earlier superhero go-rounds, pretending Spider-Man 3 is awful is to ignore how much of the trademark camp that was already established in the series was still intentional this time.
When Peter goes bad, you’re actually laughing with the film as he embarrassingly struts and dances down the street, not at it. There are dumb things for sure, like retconning Uncle Ben’s killer to make it actually Sandman and rushing Venom, but Thomas Haden Church and Topher Grace do fine with their respective villains.
Most importantly, Tobey Maguire is giving it his all, and the film, however much corniness was deliberate, is thoroughly engaging. In an infamous year for bad threequels, the last genuine Spider-Man film was far from the worst offender that could have grossed the most in 2007.
11. Avengers: Endgame
10. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
$424,668,047
Disney put up a fight with Iron Man 3 and Frozen, but Catching Fire, the apex of financial success and cinematic quality for The Hunger Games series, managed to top the phenomenon of the first film.
Following flop after flop of young adult novels turned would-be teen film franchises (Lemony Snicket, Eragon, The Golden Compass), The Hunger Games came closest to repeating the unprecedented success of the Harry Potter films. Before popularity tapered out, the first two Games each managed to outgross any Potter film.
Realizing the potential of the most popular chapter in Suzanne Collins’ trilogy, Catching Fire couldn’t exactly escape the simplistic politics of its dystopian setting but succeeded in taking the exciting structure of the first film and cleverly raising the stakes and complexity.
9. The Avengers
$623,357,910
An ingenious reward for patient build-up and franchise expansion, The Avengers was novel blockbuster filmmaking. Even though the film’s seismic entertainment value just a few years later seems a little lacking compared to the current fluidity of Marvel’s most streamlined output ever, The Avengers is the touchstone of the brand’s global dominance.
The year before it seemed that Marvel had put Thor and Captain America in place just to have them become part of Iron Man’s crew in the team-up, but the camaraderie along with Mark Ruffalo’s replacement Hulk made for a ensemble that was delightful to watch in any capacity together on-screen. Like Age of Ultron three years later, The Avengers could be easily forgotten, but Joss Whedon’s levity lent Marvel fare a singular cheekiness from then on out with that has led to some of its best and very worst moments, the latter being an overreliance on quips in place of actual humor (ahem Guardians and Vol. 2).
There are better Marvel movies out there, and far better superhero films, but in its moment The Avengers felt like an event, something that only the momentous zeitgeist surrounding Black Panther can equal. Its pleasures felt earned, and while Infinity War this summer might offer more mayhem on a grander scale, it won’t be nearly as much of a watershed moment for caped cinema.
8. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
$381,011,219
A fine finale but a far cry from the series’ best, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 finished its run with the highest domestic numbers of the franchise, though when adjusted for inflation nothing ever outgrossed The Sorcerer’s Stone.
Part 2, in delivering a bewildering, roller coaster climax, really only suffers by way of the questionable choices made by J. K. Rowling in the final chapters of her seven-part book series. Harry’s death-limbo sequence with Dumbledore is some of the best stuff Rowling ever wrote, but the cheesy epilogue, on top of the simple Christ allegory of Harry’s end sacrifice, makes for a less than substantial sendoff to a beloved series.
That said, David Yates had become comfortable directing the last half of the series, and he makes the most of the latter half of Deathly Hallows as Part 1 left it. The Gringotts break-in and even the exposition-heavy montage involving Snape’s memory are thrilling moments. But as the shortest film in the franchise, Deathly Hallows could have taken its time in somber conclusion rather than settle for swift action and a brief departure.
7. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
$317,575,550
Barely edging out its fantasy adaptation opponent in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, the first Harry Potter film would incite a decade of unparalleled global fan fever even after the books were completed.
Though not anywhere close to the series’ finest, on its own Chris Columbus’ first incarnation of J K Rowling’s exuberant world remains a comfy children’s classic. Establishing Potter trademarks of Quidditch, Hogwarts classes and fantastic beasts, Sorcerer’s Stone boasts the kind of magic that feels more real the more nostalgic you are for the series. The perfect cast of the now-famous lead trio and British acting elites is wonderful to watch, and John Williams’ score is rich and iconic.
If it weren’t for the Scooby Doo-tier mysteries guiding first few episodic stories, Sorcerer’s Stone would be a real classic. Instead it can settle for being a defining part of modern fantasy filmmaking.
6. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
$423,315,812
Blowing any other competitors right out of the water, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest easily topped 2006 domestically and became just the third film to gross over a billion dollars worldwide.
The franchise has since run aground, but Gore Verbinski’s original trilogy was rather inspired as a blockbuster franchise at the time. At World’s End finally hit the sour point of the series’ excess and convolution, but Dead Man’s Chest was right in the sweet spot of seafaring, swashbuckling spectacle and ruthless, backstabbing characters.
Steered by an Indiana Jones-esque plot, the sequel to the unexpectedly popular first installment improved nearly everything that came before it — the dialogue, visual effects, set pieces and supporting cast. Bill Nighy’s Davy Jones made for a superb villain and Depp, whatever the reviews said at the time, had not yet lost his flamboyant charms.
5. Top Gun: Maverick
4. Toy Story 3
$415,004,880
The swan song of Pixar’s untarnished streak, Toy Story 3 was an uncalled-for and yet still surprisingly brilliant addition to the studios canon. Toy Story has been the only Disney/Pixar film to spawn worthwhile sequels — Cars 2 and 3 saw diminishing returns while Monsters University and Finding Dory earned plenty to make up for it.
Gracefully discussing the passage of time, acceptance of change and the pains of growing up, Toy Story 3 is one of Pixar’s last genuinely mature films, Inside Out notwithstanding. Aside from the easy profits, Disney has no reason to be tempting fate with a fourth film. Toy Story 3 wasn’t just another sequel, but a final chapter — its finality will be tampered by simple corporate greed.
3. Spider-Man
$403,706,375
Sam Raimi’s first iteration of what comic book movies ought to be is quaint, but even a decade and a half after the fact the original Spider-Man is a masterwork of the visual and emotion potential of superhero films.
Raimi pulls off a cinematically coherent, flawlessly edited film that mimics the panel-by-panel pacing and immediacy of a comic book. Most outstandingly the 2002 Spider-Man fulfilled the template for the superhero origin story better than anyone had at the time, and it has yet to be topped in that regard.
The casting is fundamentally great, the wisdom is timeless, and the hilarity — both purposeful and that which only memes can reveal as genius — is potent throughout.
Raimi’s particular stylization more than overcomes some of the dated visual effects and the few drawbacks to his trilogy’s signature brand of corniness.
2. The Dark Knight
$533,345,358
One of the most profound cultural milestones of the 21st century, The Dark Knight was obviously elevated by the ghost of Heath Ledger in his truly captivating turn as The Joker. But Ledger’s villainous Oscar-winning performance was just icing on the cake for one of the few masterful blockbusters to grace the silver screen this century.
Mounted by the balance between epic scope and tangible realism, the grittiness of Batman Begins was realized to its zenith in what is arguably Nolan’s most well scripted and directed film. The Dark Knight Rises, along with Interstellar, would see a noticeable decline in the quality of Nolan’s output as his ambitions began to exceed his abilities. Back when he kept his reach within his imagination, Nolan flourished with The Prestige, Inception and the Batman film in question.
At the time The Dark Knight broke multiple records including midnight sales, opening day, and opening weekend to name a few. With 10 years of hindsight, we can definitively say that Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster masterpiece earned every penny. The Dark Knight is unmatched in brawny, thought-provoking entertainment value — something like one of the best seasons of television edited into 2½ hours of exhaustive, exhilarating cinema.
1. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
$377,027,325
A most splendid sendoff to a cultural phenomenon, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King dominated every part of the cinematic landscape in 2003 and deserved every bit of attention and recognition.
Let alone the fact that it matched records for the most Oscar wins with 11 total, outgrossed each of its previous installments in unprecedented fashion and became just the second film to gross over a billion dollars worldwide. Upon release, anticipation for The Return of the King was at a fever pitch for The Lord of the Rings as a fandom and a powerhouse film series. This gargantuan epic was riding a long-travelling hype train after 6 years of preparation, and the final product is one of emotive intimacy and impossible scale we’re unlikely to ever see again in the current state of Hollywood.
An exercise of purposeful scripting and visual storytelling, the full four-hour vision of The Return of the King is a meticulous and mature work of pure climax, spectacular mythmaking and profound feeling. If somewhere in the grand splendor of the film’s final act you are not reduced to tears, you just may be a robot.
Audiences may have been antsy during the string of multiple endings, but the execution of them is classic and succinct — so many impactful moments are communicated without dialogue. The labyrinthine world building of Tolkien’s writing was manifested so convincingly on-screen by this point that expressions were enough — as Arwen and Aragorn reunite, as the hobbits drink together again back at the Green Dragon, as Frodo turns and smiles on the ship to the Grey Havens.
With the trilogy aging finer year by year, it’s safe to say The Lord of the Rings as a whole is the most essential work of popular cinema in the 21st century, with The Return of the King resting as its crowning jewel.
*Published at TasteofCinema.com / March 5th, 2018
Every 21st Century Oscar Winner for Best Animated Feature Ranked
Since its inclusion in the Academy Awards in 2001, the category for Best Animated Feature has been celebrating animation of all variations in the 21st century. Before Shrek was deemed the first winner, outside of special awards for certain achievements like Snow White and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? the only animated film to receive Oscar recognition was 1991’s Beauty and the Beast.
With 22 winners to date, there hasn’t been much room apart from Pixar’s utter domination (11 wins to date), with a healthy handful of notable exceptions in the mix. Often including acceptable populist fare and a couple of independent and foreign entries, the Academy Awards has largely and thankfully shone the spotlight on quality films only, with the occasional Boss Baby popping up. Best of all, the Oscar for Best Animated Feature has gone to a good movie practically every year — a rare bit of consistent justice within the clutter of Hollywood politics, even if superior snubs are almost just as prevelant.
22. Frozen
The weakest winner to come forth by far, Frozen was Disney’s attempt to rewrite their now-dated princess stories for a new generation. But by the end of the film they end up complicating their tweaked formula too far past nostalgic simplicity into muddled confusion. Olaf may be the only element worth the movie’s insane popularity, but one loveable supporting character can’t maintain an entire fairy tale. Frozen 2 despite less purpose made better on the first sensation's select successes.
Meanwhile, genuinely worthwhile nominees like the French children’s film Ernest and Celestine and Hayao Miyazaki’s final feature The Wind Rises were shut out in an obvious popularity contest.
21. Brave
One stage in the waning of Pixar’s untarnished clout — bookended in the studio’s chronology by Cars 2 and Monsters University — Brave is beautifully rendered but clichéd, forgettable and certainly didn’t deserve to best stop-motion animated gems like Aardman’s The Pirates! Band of Misfits and Laika’s strongest film ParaNorman. Cases could be made for superiority of Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie or Wreck-It-Ralph as well.
Taking a comedic stab of sorts at medieval times is fine, but who would think How to Train Your Dragon, which came out two years prior, and its sequel would outdo an original Pixar joint? The gorgeous landscapes and Merida’s red curls make for visual wonders that simply mask a trite tale of mother-daughter reconciliation.
20. Zootopia
It would be easy to laud Zootopia for explaining the ills of racism to youngsters, but the in-universe workings of its setting and story don’t make too much sense on their own, let alone if you actually want to translate the ideas to the real world.
Of course the kids probably aren't thinking that hard, but even with a noir-tinted plot, solid lead characters and a gag-a-plenty premise, Zootopia is still lacking for being such positive brainwashing. The mature subtext doesn’t forgive some of the film’s lazy jokes and that cringe-inducing Shakira song.
Worse still is that Zootopia was inferior to every one of its awards competitors. Kubo and the Two Strings, My Life as a Zucchini and The Red Turtle are all underappreciated, impassioned projects, and even Disney’s new wave princess story Moana was an unqualified treat.
19. Coco
Coco has its admirers, but It is difficult to place the film in any other other realm but below their best, which means out of the top ten. I like the sentiments, the songs and the cultural exploration so rarely beheld in mainstream film. It’s just that Coco has the problem many late Pixar’s have: a built-in emotional tether that leaves room to leave crying but bearing few characters or situations that sit with you or challenge you or a child’s maturity.
I hate to say it's ok to forget no matter how catchy "Remember Me" is. To me it’s just a more dressed up Paranorman.
18. Encanto
17. Happy Feet
It earns points for sheer originality, a talented voice cast and fairly stunning animated detail, but Happy Feet is not what one would call a lasting cinematic achievement, despite George Miller's oddly placed fervor.
Though the idea of an animated musical about a penguin that tap dances because he’s a talentless singer does feel instinctive as a kid flick premise. Happy Feet even deals with typical individualist notions that define plenty of animated films, touching on environmental issues as well in the process. As a musical it outdoes Frozen’s pop soundtrack, and the film’s animation, particularly in underwater settings, is striking.
But for as unique as Happy Feet is, there is a sense of purposelessness that keeps it from any kind of enduring status.
16. Big Hero 6
Perhaps the most purely fun winner on the list, Big Hero 6 works as an energetic comedy before it becomes the slyest superhero film you may ever see assemble. It doesn’t boast many important themes but it does pack a wallop of entertainment value.
But surefire fun doesn’t make Big Hero 6 better than other films in one of the strongest sets of five Best Animated Feature nominees — a mainstay starting in 2011 after usually including only three contenders. The nods to How to Train Your Dragon 2, Song of the Sea, The Boxtrolls, and, most exceptionally, The Tale of Princess Kaguya make for a diverse year for the category but, of course, Disney’s features almost always have to come out on top.
15. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
Stop motion is far from dead — Laika has been proving that over the past decade and been nominated several times for keeping the painstaking, antiquated filmmaking process alive and gratifyingly contemporary in masterful films. The work of Aardman is no different, and their offerings are usually hilarious and tangibly textured.
Playful, inventive and utterly charming, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit upholds everything beloved about the famous pair of British animated characters. In the best company of the inspired Miyazaki film Howl’s Moving Castle and another stop-motion gem in Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, Wallace and Gromit, after several delightful short films, happened upon Oscar gold in their only feature film, at least so far.
14. Wall-E
Overrated to boot, Wall-E is one half genius and one half less so. Prescient as it may be about the fate of mankind’s pudgy, screen-obsessed future, Wall-E’s lovely robot romance amongst the post-apocalyptic hellscape of earth is much more interesting and all but forgotten once we leave our abandoned planet. With several references to 2001: A Space Odyssey, it's clear that Pixar wanted to make something both digestible and profound, and the final film is a compromise of both of these intentions.
The absence of dialogue in the film’s first act is one choice that pays off quite well, but the film’s last moments can’t balance climax and comedy. Despite being made at the height of Pixar’s ambitious risk-taking, Wall-E should have cared as little for kid-friendly conventions as Ratatouille did the year prior.
13. Toy Story 3
Rounding out the best animated trilogy in memory, Toy Story 3 didn’t even need the effortless tear-jerking of its final moments to make it a great film. This film appeared an unnecessary gamble from the offset since Toy Story 2 was released over a decade beforehand. As the swan song to Pixar’s reign of artistic authority (Cars 2 would make Cars look like a classic), Toy Story 3 serves as a poignant, heart-wrenching capper to a wonderful triptych as well as an unprecedented collection of animated masterworks for any age.
But sticking the landing with a third Toy Story left us with only a temporary sigh of relief, as the worry of besmirching the series became exponentially greater with the unstoppable imminence of a fourth entry in 2019.
12. Toy Story 4
11. Inside Out
After sullying their reputation in the early years of this decade, many wondered if any of Pixar's singular magic was still intact. Though it was only momentary, Inside Out was a registered return to glory for the studio, standing confidently among someof the best work they’ve ever produced.
Needless to say personifying emotions resulted in much hilarity and heart-warming — the film’s revelatory climax on the symbiosis of happiness and sadness is extremely effective at radiating simple paradoxical truth and also squeezing out a few tears from the audience too. Unlike Zootopia, the simplification of something complexly human was translated correctly. The psychological aspects of 12-year-old girl’s mind are well imagined, almost to the point of explaining the inner workings too far. Inside Out’s ingenuity is only clearer as the studio’s barrage of sequels and safe original films continues to unfold.
10. Shrek
The first winner of the Best Animated Feature category is obviously one for the books. Shrek and its equally amusing sequel rightfully achieved their spot in pop culture before wearing it out with too many sequels and a forgettable spinoff, pardon me one forgettable and one mesmerizing, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is quite something.
The film’s juvenile, almost angsty 180 flip of fairy tale conventions is still a fresh, forward-thinking premise. For as many fart jokes as there are in Shrek, there are worthwhile sentiments and lessons to ascertain from its story’s contents, equaling any number of Disney’s princess fables.
The voice cast also cannot be underpraised. Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy and Cameron Diaz were perfectly selected for their vocal talents, and their efforts were the only thing that made Shrek the Third and Forever After remotely watchable. The series also never had a better villain than John Lithgow’s Lord Farquaad.
9. Finding Nemo
A popular classic but still almost not quite top-shelf quality for the studio’s frequently conquered summits, Finding Nemo is nonetheless quintessential Pixar. Outside of the tale’s basic scope, Finding Nemo succeeds by way of an incredible array of memorable side characters (Dory, Bruce, Crush and Squirt, Nemo’s school friends, Nemo’s fish tank friends, etc.), familiar sentiment, and Pixar’s most gorgeous animation ever put to film.
A perfect voice cast also nails the clever script of the Best Original Screenplay nominee. Finding Nemo is one of the bestselling DVDs of all time, and it’s earned its place as a delightful mainstay in many a kid’s movie collection for the foreseeable future.
8. Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio
7. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
6. Rango
Bracingly original, Rango saw Gore Verbinski churning out his best and only animated film of his career after coming off a multibillion dollar Disney franchise and a decent and depressing Nicolas Cage film. Within the limitlessness that 3-D animation offers as opposed to live action (even with a 300 million budget), Verbinski thrived like never before.
The vivid character design, offbeat humor and Western homage made this film stand out against mainstream Disney and DreamWorks fare. Rango is the most worthwhile use of Johnny Depp’s talent in recent years, and proof of Verbinski’s range as well, which stretches from horror to the film in question.
Pirates of the Caribbean felt like a living cartoon to begin with, but Rango’s more focused and less serious lens gave Verbinski the ability to bask in adventure, spectacle and quirkiness to no end.
5. Soul
4. Up
Up remains one the Pixar brand’s most powerful creations just for the film’s ability to conjure the waterworks with universally moving emotion.
Edging out a strong batch of nominees including Coraline, Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Secret of Kells, Up remains unquestionably the best animated film of 2009, and — as the Academy had just expanded its Best Picture nominees to 10 for a brief two years — was rightfully considered one of the best films of the year in general.
Up neatly balances innocent escapism, adorable characters for the youngsters and mature thematic material that can be grasped by all but only appreciated by those of increasing age. Though people lump all their praise on the film's breathtaking opening montage, that profound sequence is just the crux of Up’s expressive dexterity and wondrous pleasures.
3. Ratatouille
If this isn’t Pixar’s finest to date, then it must be Brad Bird’s other film with the brand. An ingenious deconstruction of the relationship between artist and critic, Ratatouille is Pixar’s most fervently themed film as well as their most conceptually daring.
The dynamic between curmudgeon food critic Anton Ego (imposingly voiced by Peter O’Toole) and rat of patrician taste Remy (a chummy Patton Oswalt) feels both fundamental to depicting the purposes of art and engaging in the discussion of it. On top of its impactful, self-reflexive topics, the film is delightfully funny, sincere and nuanced. Ratatouille is plainly prime, classic, indispensible Pixar.
2. The Incredibles
Both a shrewd suburban satire and the most uncompromisingly entertaining spy/superhero film to grace the big screen, to this day The Incredibles is as good as its title suggests.
The Incredibles was Pixar at the height of its powers, when the studio was in the process of cementing its brand in immortality. Sure this film was followed by Pixar’s first real hiccup, but The Incredibles is good enough to forgive another Cars sequel or two.
The film handles its violence and postmodernist view of superheroes gracefully amongst the cartoon logic and cute parodies. Even though its not even considered in the debate sometimes, The Incredibles is easily one of the greatest superhero flicks ever made, up there with The Dark Knight and the original two Spider-Man’s.
A flawless voice cast of Samuel L. Jackson, Holly Hunter, Craig T. Nelson and director Brad Bird made the most of the original and didn't even let us down hard at all in 2018's Incredibles 2.
1. Spirited Away
Hayao Miyazaki had already been at the top of his game for twenty years before he made the most popular film of his career. Surreal and subconsciously stimulating, Spirited Away is a most unique fairy tale, the Alice in Wonderland of our time. The fantasy story has an abundance of mysteries, contemplations and thrills to offer all ages, further bolstered by strong characters and a sense of inspiration sophisticated enough for the most discerning of viewers.
As the standout crossover feature of one of the most masterful directors of animated films, Spirited Away cannot be underappreciated. Its wonders, whether you’re watching the original Japanese version or the American dub, are as vibrant and breathtaking as they were upon release.
Whether we’re talking about animated films – let alone one that tops a director’s own previous masterpieces like Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, My Neighbor Totoro and Princess Mononoke – or just films in general, Spirited Away is one of the most sublime cinematic creations of the new millennium.
*Published at TasteofCinema.com / February 19th, 2018
With 22 winners to date, there hasn’t been much room apart from Pixar’s utter domination (11 wins to date), with a healthy handful of notable exceptions in the mix. Often including acceptable populist fare and a couple of independent and foreign entries, the Academy Awards has largely and thankfully shone the spotlight on quality films only, with the occasional Boss Baby popping up. Best of all, the Oscar for Best Animated Feature has gone to a good movie practically every year — a rare bit of consistent justice within the clutter of Hollywood politics, even if superior snubs are almost just as prevelant.
22. Frozen
The weakest winner to come forth by far, Frozen was Disney’s attempt to rewrite their now-dated princess stories for a new generation. But by the end of the film they end up complicating their tweaked formula too far past nostalgic simplicity into muddled confusion. Olaf may be the only element worth the movie’s insane popularity, but one loveable supporting character can’t maintain an entire fairy tale. Frozen 2 despite less purpose made better on the first sensation's select successes.
Meanwhile, genuinely worthwhile nominees like the French children’s film Ernest and Celestine and Hayao Miyazaki’s final feature The Wind Rises were shut out in an obvious popularity contest.
21. Brave
One stage in the waning of Pixar’s untarnished clout — bookended in the studio’s chronology by Cars 2 and Monsters University — Brave is beautifully rendered but clichéd, forgettable and certainly didn’t deserve to best stop-motion animated gems like Aardman’s The Pirates! Band of Misfits and Laika’s strongest film ParaNorman. Cases could be made for superiority of Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie or Wreck-It-Ralph as well.
Taking a comedic stab of sorts at medieval times is fine, but who would think How to Train Your Dragon, which came out two years prior, and its sequel would outdo an original Pixar joint? The gorgeous landscapes and Merida’s red curls make for visual wonders that simply mask a trite tale of mother-daughter reconciliation.
20. Zootopia
It would be easy to laud Zootopia for explaining the ills of racism to youngsters, but the in-universe workings of its setting and story don’t make too much sense on their own, let alone if you actually want to translate the ideas to the real world.
Of course the kids probably aren't thinking that hard, but even with a noir-tinted plot, solid lead characters and a gag-a-plenty premise, Zootopia is still lacking for being such positive brainwashing. The mature subtext doesn’t forgive some of the film’s lazy jokes and that cringe-inducing Shakira song.
Worse still is that Zootopia was inferior to every one of its awards competitors. Kubo and the Two Strings, My Life as a Zucchini and The Red Turtle are all underappreciated, impassioned projects, and even Disney’s new wave princess story Moana was an unqualified treat.
19. Coco
Coco has its admirers, but It is difficult to place the film in any other other realm but below their best, which means out of the top ten. I like the sentiments, the songs and the cultural exploration so rarely beheld in mainstream film. It’s just that Coco has the problem many late Pixar’s have: a built-in emotional tether that leaves room to leave crying but bearing few characters or situations that sit with you or challenge you or a child’s maturity.
I hate to say it's ok to forget no matter how catchy "Remember Me" is. To me it’s just a more dressed up Paranorman.
18. Encanto
17. Happy Feet
It earns points for sheer originality, a talented voice cast and fairly stunning animated detail, but Happy Feet is not what one would call a lasting cinematic achievement, despite George Miller's oddly placed fervor.
Though the idea of an animated musical about a penguin that tap dances because he’s a talentless singer does feel instinctive as a kid flick premise. Happy Feet even deals with typical individualist notions that define plenty of animated films, touching on environmental issues as well in the process. As a musical it outdoes Frozen’s pop soundtrack, and the film’s animation, particularly in underwater settings, is striking.
But for as unique as Happy Feet is, there is a sense of purposelessness that keeps it from any kind of enduring status.
16. Big Hero 6
Perhaps the most purely fun winner on the list, Big Hero 6 works as an energetic comedy before it becomes the slyest superhero film you may ever see assemble. It doesn’t boast many important themes but it does pack a wallop of entertainment value.
But surefire fun doesn’t make Big Hero 6 better than other films in one of the strongest sets of five Best Animated Feature nominees — a mainstay starting in 2011 after usually including only three contenders. The nods to How to Train Your Dragon 2, Song of the Sea, The Boxtrolls, and, most exceptionally, The Tale of Princess Kaguya make for a diverse year for the category but, of course, Disney’s features almost always have to come out on top.
15. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
Stop motion is far from dead — Laika has been proving that over the past decade and been nominated several times for keeping the painstaking, antiquated filmmaking process alive and gratifyingly contemporary in masterful films. The work of Aardman is no different, and their offerings are usually hilarious and tangibly textured.
Playful, inventive and utterly charming, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit upholds everything beloved about the famous pair of British animated characters. In the best company of the inspired Miyazaki film Howl’s Moving Castle and another stop-motion gem in Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, Wallace and Gromit, after several delightful short films, happened upon Oscar gold in their only feature film, at least so far.
14. Wall-E
Overrated to boot, Wall-E is one half genius and one half less so. Prescient as it may be about the fate of mankind’s pudgy, screen-obsessed future, Wall-E’s lovely robot romance amongst the post-apocalyptic hellscape of earth is much more interesting and all but forgotten once we leave our abandoned planet. With several references to 2001: A Space Odyssey, it's clear that Pixar wanted to make something both digestible and profound, and the final film is a compromise of both of these intentions.
The absence of dialogue in the film’s first act is one choice that pays off quite well, but the film’s last moments can’t balance climax and comedy. Despite being made at the height of Pixar’s ambitious risk-taking, Wall-E should have cared as little for kid-friendly conventions as Ratatouille did the year prior.
13. Toy Story 3
Rounding out the best animated trilogy in memory, Toy Story 3 didn’t even need the effortless tear-jerking of its final moments to make it a great film. This film appeared an unnecessary gamble from the offset since Toy Story 2 was released over a decade beforehand. As the swan song to Pixar’s reign of artistic authority (Cars 2 would make Cars look like a classic), Toy Story 3 serves as a poignant, heart-wrenching capper to a wonderful triptych as well as an unprecedented collection of animated masterworks for any age.
But sticking the landing with a third Toy Story left us with only a temporary sigh of relief, as the worry of besmirching the series became exponentially greater with the unstoppable imminence of a fourth entry in 2019.
12. Toy Story 4
11. Inside Out
After sullying their reputation in the early years of this decade, many wondered if any of Pixar's singular magic was still intact. Though it was only momentary, Inside Out was a registered return to glory for the studio, standing confidently among someof the best work they’ve ever produced.
Needless to say personifying emotions resulted in much hilarity and heart-warming — the film’s revelatory climax on the symbiosis of happiness and sadness is extremely effective at radiating simple paradoxical truth and also squeezing out a few tears from the audience too. Unlike Zootopia, the simplification of something complexly human was translated correctly. The psychological aspects of 12-year-old girl’s mind are well imagined, almost to the point of explaining the inner workings too far. Inside Out’s ingenuity is only clearer as the studio’s barrage of sequels and safe original films continues to unfold.
10. Shrek
The first winner of the Best Animated Feature category is obviously one for the books. Shrek and its equally amusing sequel rightfully achieved their spot in pop culture before wearing it out with too many sequels and a forgettable spinoff, pardon me one forgettable and one mesmerizing, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is quite something.
The film’s juvenile, almost angsty 180 flip of fairy tale conventions is still a fresh, forward-thinking premise. For as many fart jokes as there are in Shrek, there are worthwhile sentiments and lessons to ascertain from its story’s contents, equaling any number of Disney’s princess fables.
The voice cast also cannot be underpraised. Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy and Cameron Diaz were perfectly selected for their vocal talents, and their efforts were the only thing that made Shrek the Third and Forever After remotely watchable. The series also never had a better villain than John Lithgow’s Lord Farquaad.
9. Finding Nemo
A popular classic but still almost not quite top-shelf quality for the studio’s frequently conquered summits, Finding Nemo is nonetheless quintessential Pixar. Outside of the tale’s basic scope, Finding Nemo succeeds by way of an incredible array of memorable side characters (Dory, Bruce, Crush and Squirt, Nemo’s school friends, Nemo’s fish tank friends, etc.), familiar sentiment, and Pixar’s most gorgeous animation ever put to film.
A perfect voice cast also nails the clever script of the Best Original Screenplay nominee. Finding Nemo is one of the bestselling DVDs of all time, and it’s earned its place as a delightful mainstay in many a kid’s movie collection for the foreseeable future.
8. Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio
7. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
6. Rango
Bracingly original, Rango saw Gore Verbinski churning out his best and only animated film of his career after coming off a multibillion dollar Disney franchise and a decent and depressing Nicolas Cage film. Within the limitlessness that 3-D animation offers as opposed to live action (even with a 300 million budget), Verbinski thrived like never before.
The vivid character design, offbeat humor and Western homage made this film stand out against mainstream Disney and DreamWorks fare. Rango is the most worthwhile use of Johnny Depp’s talent in recent years, and proof of Verbinski’s range as well, which stretches from horror to the film in question.
Pirates of the Caribbean felt like a living cartoon to begin with, but Rango’s more focused and less serious lens gave Verbinski the ability to bask in adventure, spectacle and quirkiness to no end.
5. Soul
4. Up
Up remains one the Pixar brand’s most powerful creations just for the film’s ability to conjure the waterworks with universally moving emotion.
Edging out a strong batch of nominees including Coraline, Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Secret of Kells, Up remains unquestionably the best animated film of 2009, and — as the Academy had just expanded its Best Picture nominees to 10 for a brief two years — was rightfully considered one of the best films of the year in general.
Up neatly balances innocent escapism, adorable characters for the youngsters and mature thematic material that can be grasped by all but only appreciated by those of increasing age. Though people lump all their praise on the film's breathtaking opening montage, that profound sequence is just the crux of Up’s expressive dexterity and wondrous pleasures.
3. Ratatouille
If this isn’t Pixar’s finest to date, then it must be Brad Bird’s other film with the brand. An ingenious deconstruction of the relationship between artist and critic, Ratatouille is Pixar’s most fervently themed film as well as their most conceptually daring.
The dynamic between curmudgeon food critic Anton Ego (imposingly voiced by Peter O’Toole) and rat of patrician taste Remy (a chummy Patton Oswalt) feels both fundamental to depicting the purposes of art and engaging in the discussion of it. On top of its impactful, self-reflexive topics, the film is delightfully funny, sincere and nuanced. Ratatouille is plainly prime, classic, indispensible Pixar.
2. The Incredibles
Both a shrewd suburban satire and the most uncompromisingly entertaining spy/superhero film to grace the big screen, to this day The Incredibles is as good as its title suggests.
The Incredibles was Pixar at the height of its powers, when the studio was in the process of cementing its brand in immortality. Sure this film was followed by Pixar’s first real hiccup, but The Incredibles is good enough to forgive another Cars sequel or two.
The film handles its violence and postmodernist view of superheroes gracefully amongst the cartoon logic and cute parodies. Even though its not even considered in the debate sometimes, The Incredibles is easily one of the greatest superhero flicks ever made, up there with The Dark Knight and the original two Spider-Man’s.
A flawless voice cast of Samuel L. Jackson, Holly Hunter, Craig T. Nelson and director Brad Bird made the most of the original and didn't even let us down hard at all in 2018's Incredibles 2.
1. Spirited Away
Hayao Miyazaki had already been at the top of his game for twenty years before he made the most popular film of his career. Surreal and subconsciously stimulating, Spirited Away is a most unique fairy tale, the Alice in Wonderland of our time. The fantasy story has an abundance of mysteries, contemplations and thrills to offer all ages, further bolstered by strong characters and a sense of inspiration sophisticated enough for the most discerning of viewers.
As the standout crossover feature of one of the most masterful directors of animated films, Spirited Away cannot be underappreciated. Its wonders, whether you’re watching the original Japanese version or the American dub, are as vibrant and breathtaking as they were upon release.
Whether we’re talking about animated films – let alone one that tops a director’s own previous masterpieces like Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, My Neighbor Totoro and Princess Mononoke – or just films in general, Spirited Away is one of the most sublime cinematic creations of the new millennium.
*Published at TasteofCinema.com / February 19th, 2018
10 Films That Prove 2013 Is This Decade's Best Year for Cinema
2013 is the best year in film our decade has yet to witness. With only two years left to show us the full scope of cinema in the 2010s, the year is likely be considered the most fruitful of the bunch by the time the 2020s are upon us.
In a year when films like Her, The Wind Rises, Fruitvale Station, Stoker, Upstream Color, Spring Breakers, Enemy and Under the Skin are only the tip of the iceberg concerning the finest films the year has to offer, you know our decade has been graciously blessed with a full calendar of kino.
This list hopes to reflect the breadth of 2013’s greatest films, obviously informed by the inevitability of personal taste nonetheless. Here are 10 films that prove 2013 is best year for film this decade so far.
10. Blue is the Warmest Colour
Sprawling and infinitely tender, Blue is the Warmest Colour covers the complete cycle of a once in a lifetime romance. The blubbering and bliss and everything in between comes standard with such heightened emotions, let alone that we are dealing with none other than the French.
Adèle Exarchopoulos’s humanity in the leading role makes the patient and grandly mounted film a disquieting experience when it functions as a coming-of-age film. But it’s the radiant chemistry between Léa Seydoux and Exarchopoulos that turns Tunisian-French director Abdellatif Kechiche’s film into such a remarkable romance.
After controversially putting his leads — and apparently the crew as well — through hell in the filming process, Seydoux and Exarchopoulos seemed to defend Kechiche’s methods despite their issues for the sake of art. Kechiche whittled down some 800 hours of footage and B-roll in the editing room, and the product of Kechiche’s efforts is potent and ravishing.
The overwhelming 3-hour final film overcomes the sketchiest details of its conception, and its beauty is evidence of Kechiche’s discipline and uncompromising vision. By the weepy, pitiful conclusion, we are right there with Adèle having our heart ripped out, and the totality of the film’s full power and intimacy finally takes hold as Adèle walks away from the defining love of her youth.
9. The Wolf of Wall Street
Perhaps the best thing about The Wolf of Wall Street is its accessibility — for the average Joes of the world, Jordan Belfort is probably everything one would hope to aspire to: a self-made man of supreme wealth and unmeasured excess.
Of course these folks tend to ignore the swift downfall that ends Belfort’s reign on Wall Street. But Scorsese’s real audience is clearly those that see past the cocaine-fueled fever dream to the emptiness beneath and the vivacious satire left in the place where the film’s heart should.
Anyone who criticized the film for its depiction of repugnant behavior of all sorts was actually on Scorsese’s level all along. Within the saga of stock trading shenanigans, both the ultimate male fantasy and the slyest of cautionary tales is played out.
The definitive Scorsese film of the century so far, The Wolf of Wall Street feels like its monstrous 3-hour runtime could go on awhile longer without a problem, and the film is genuinely a wonder of scripting, pacing and editing in order to have such an immediate effect.
8. Coherence
Essentially the less-is-more film philosophy in process, Coherence is probably the most efficiently minimalist sci-fi film since Primer, yet only just brainy enough to be grasped and thoroughly enjoyed on a first watch and with subsequent viewings.
With not much of a working script and only unknown improvisational actors, the performances and delivery of dialogue in James Ward Byrkit’s film could be a little too uncanny for some. But as per the director’s intent to strip everthing as close to reality as possible, this ingenious choice makes their collective navigation through a night of comet-induced sci-fi-horror head-fuckery all the more grounded and eerily terrifying.
With a whopping budget of $50,000, Coherence’s shoot on digital was limited for the most part in Byrkit’s own living room. Aside from the self-imposed restrictions of the film’s production, the proof of enduring vitality for Coherence is how its stripped-bare parallel universe concept plays so casual before you realize how thought-provokingly profuse Byrkit’s narrative really is.
7. Short Term 12
A quaint work of striking emotional clarity, Short Term 12 was one of the most effective and unexpected films of 2013.
Though it could have easily fallen by the wayside due to its hipster guise — which can poison even the most well-meaning stories — Destin Daniel Cretton elevates potentially manipulative material and breathes life into an independent cinematic gem. Not only that, the film truly introduced us to the dramatic talents of Brie Larson, a fact that cannot be ignored when the now Best Actress winner is the lead of the film. She had excelled in supporting comedy roles like Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and 21 Jump Street before unlocking a career that has set her up as Marvel’s first female superhero, and her gifts are one of the primary reasons Short Term 12 is so special.
Despite how much Larson brings to the table, the true break out star of Short Term 12 was Lakeith Stanfield, whose freestyle rapping scene is the highlight of the film, a powerful performance that has potential in just minutes to leave you speechless and possibly reaching for tissues. His great supporting turns in Straight Outta Compton and Get Out have helped prove that a prolific acting career is on Stanfield’s horizon.
The film’s focus on troubled teens through the eyes of twenty-something counselors might seem emotionally exploitative on the surface, but the film never sugarcoats the pain or overembellishes the drama. Distant as the supporting characters are, they are written with the proper temperament to capture the attitude of adolescent outcasts. Emotionally taxing as Short Term 12 is through and through, the film’s rewards are more than worthwhile.
6. Prisoners
Prisoners introduced Denis Villeneuve to American audiences, and arguably it remains his best film. After years of the Canadian director’s French-language films, Villeneuve began his steady ascent to Hollywood recognition in 2013 with Prisoners and Enemy, both starring Jake Gyllenhaal in some of his best roles. Villeneuve quickly worked his way to high profile sci-fi with Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, notable in an age when the genre’s offerings are scarce, and he has since received lauding from critics and audiences alike for these most recent efforts.
The film in question is so reminiscent of David Fincher that its fortunate Villeneuve has found his own niche, but regardless of what other films it evokes, Prisoners is about as perfect a thriller as you could hope for. From the grave, captivating performances by Hugh Jackman and Gyllenhaal to Roger Deakins’ grimly gorgeous camerawork, the talent for a mainstream mystery thriller doesn’t get much better than this. But relative rookie screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski’s prickly morals and sparse revelations assemble into an absorbing story and an ultimately unnerving and understatedly entertaining film, as Villeneuve realizes the film’s gloomy atmosphere to dour perfection.
Like Christopher Nolan before him, we have a tactful director that has managed to work his artfully minded filmmaking ideology into populist film. Sure 2049 was basically a flop, but its reputation and accumulated following already exceed the box office numbers. With that in mind, it’s going to take quite a few disasters to strip Villeneuve of the clout and creative power he now possesses.
5. Before Midnight
The third installment in Richard Linklater’s Before series will hopefully not be the last. After the thrilling novelty of Sunrise and second chance suspense of Sunset, Midnight became the most subdued piece of the romantic film series and the one most charged by dark, unpleasant truths.
The bravura, lifelike performances from Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, as well as the quality of naturalistic, intellectual writing the remarkable pair helped pen, are up to the near-perfect standards of the earlier films. Midnight is possibly the weakest of the bunch and yet a singularly great piece of filmmaking in its own right. Opposed to the starry-eyed realism beforehand, Before Midnight is a revealing look at true love put to the test of time.
As much as fans will be craving another film in 2022, I wonder if all the thematic content left to explore with these characters has been all but spent with Before Midnight’s comprehensive take on the comforts and ills of long-term relationships. The final act of Before Midnight gives Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt a run for its money for most brutally believable argument sequence — as petty quarrelling warps to full-blown feuding, the dialogue and performances is exacting and penetrating; for the first time a Before film has a structural climax, which gives Midnight its air of finality.
With a new decade of filmmaking gold already like Bernie, Everybody Wants Some!!, and of course Boyhood, Linklater has been proving he’s as vital to American cinema as ever, and Before Midnight shows he’s also self-aware of his place in the span of his career and his life.
4. Inside Llewyn Davis
Though the critics will always have their backs, the Coens two are probably done trying to please the Academy Awards, if they ever were. With the brief reinstatement of the 10 nominees rule they earned some renewed attention for A Serious Man and True Grit following their win for No Country For Old Men. But their most recent films Inside Llewyn Davis and Hail, Caesar! came and went so quietly you could almost call them underrated. The latter satire was a satisfying romp, but the precise balance of comedy and drama in Inside Llewyn Davis puts it up there with the truest and most essential films of the Coen Brothers, and furthermore should have been celebrated in its own time.
Bruno Delbonnel’s cozy, soft-focus-frigid cinematography, the film’s robust soundtrack and a stellar supporting cast (including Carey Mulligan, John Goodman, Justin Timberlake, Adam Driver, the list goes on) all make an odyssey-like tale of cyclical failure a pleasure to navigate even if the destination is a familiar pain and longing. The appearance of a young Bob Dylan in the final scene is supposed to put Davis’ career in perspective: he’s just another guy with a guitar trying to make it big — his talents are only worth so much.
Oscar Isaac is phenomenal as our main man, a mooching depressive grouch who’s still somehow a completely relatable antihero. Davis keeps a network of friend’s couches in order to have a place to sleep, and life is constantly one step ahead of him. For all his narcissism and flaws of personal character, we are on his side through the inappropriate swearing and sardonic remarks because his struggle feels very honest circumstantial even if his arc is tragic and inconsequential.
Not many films nowadays will look you straight in the face and tell you what you don’t want to hear: it really might not work out for you. But this brand of misery feels strangely comforting in Inside Llewyn Davis, and the film’s greatest attribute is that it identifies the beauty in the attempt at following your dreams even if the attempt is all there is.
3. The Great Beauty
Young Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino communicated the weight of many long years in his Best Foreign Language winner La grande belleza. Echoing the epic romanticism of Fellini before him, Sorrentino’s grandiose drama within the circles of the cosmopolitan Italian elite was not popular in its own country, only to dominantly transfix viewers stateside.
Anchored by the magnetically suave Toni Servillo as our towering protagonist Jep Gambardello, The Great Beauty offers as much thematic gravitas for those in the twilight of their lives as for those at the dawn. The sentiment of looking back on one’s life and the futility of past accomplishments resonates no matter how close to 65 you are.
Breathlessly edited and rapturously shot, everything so ornate about The Great Beauty’s production and locale is backed up by lovely touches of humor, an oddly memorable sea of characters and an ambiance of aching nostalgia. Consummately conceived from a technical perspective, the film is a staggering vision with affectionate details to appreciate in every moment.
The Great Beauty is every bit as sublime and decadent in its practice as the haven in Italy it depicts. Sporting cutting social critiques, seasoned philosophical wisdom and surreal instances of introspection, nothing in the story or dialogue falters. As but a fragment of the spectacular world cinema from this prosperous year, Sorrentino’s film is just one of those great beauties we are all desperately looking for.
2. Frances Ha
Noah Baumbach had been fine-tuning his skill at scathing independent comedies for nearly two decades before he reached the zenith of his potential. When he fully embraced his muse Greta Gerwig, the finest work of his career took shape. And weirdly enough her first solo efforts in Lady Bird have already been awarded more than any of Baumbach’s films.
Gerwig’s biggest breakout role was likely her first with Baumbach, a lead role alongside Ben Stiller in Greenberg. Despite Baumbach’s modest success and mastery of his own craft before their connection, his most accomplished films — Frances Ha and Mistress America — are only his most hilarious and profound because of Gerwig’s simultaneous input in writing and performance.
Capturing the late bloomer’s coming-of-age story or quarter-life crisis if you will, Frances Ha could basically serve as the calling card for the entire mumblecore genre. The upper class New Yorker characters, the winding, plotless narrative, the verbal acrobatics and obscure references (not to mention the supple monochromatic cinematography) all point to fedora-tipping hipsterisms. But as insufferable as these elements may appear on paper, the actual impression of Frances Ha is shrewdly charming and delicately reassuring — the film basks in cynicism and social critiques typical of Baumbach while he also paints the most loving portrait of his beloved that he can muster.
The pointed insight, dry humor and engaging cast coalesce into something good enough to be the template for the strong indie film as we know it today. Frances Ha is at once masterful and unassuming.
1. 12 Years a Slave
What greater justice can there be for movies than when one of the best films of the year, if not the best, ends up shrouded in the immortality of Oscar gold? Lord knows how swiftly 12 Years a Slave could have dominated the Academy Awards given how severely Hollywood politics have shifted in just the past five years, but the fact that it succeeds with flying colors, first as a film and then as history recreated, is enough to call it one of the few films of the 2010s to unreservedly cherish.
Steve McQueen’s third feature was not your average piece of Oscar bait back in the 2014 awards season. The adaptation of Solomon Northup’s incredible story developed into a most heart-rending and suitably epic template for McQueen to span all sides of the ignorant brutalities of slavery in 19th century America.
And with such a topic, most viewers, especially white folks, would have accepted simple pandering freely and blindly. But McQueen doesn’t exploit the rotted underbelly of our history for cheap emotional ploys or middle school moralizing. Some criticized 12 Years a Slave for depicting only as much as average white audiences could tolerate; the endless suffering of one born into slavery would never appeal to the masses. Beyond the horrors of slavery itself, the particulars of a free man removed from domestic bliss and forced to endure hardships he thought he had circumvented makes Northup’s tale more personal, saddening and universal.
McQueen is as meticulous and painstaking as possible in his cinematic rendering of the era. Not a single line of dialogue, aspect of production design or member of its cast of well-known actors comes off as anything other than authentic and timeless — yes, even Brad Pitt.
Regardless of the extraordinary power of feeling that 12 Years a Slave yields, the film is simply one of the most important and uncompromising historical films of all time. It is a fresh classic, an essential viewing for even the most squeamish viewer and the crowning jewel of 2013 cinema.
*Published at TasteofCinema.com / January 16th, 2018
In a year when films like Her, The Wind Rises, Fruitvale Station, Stoker, Upstream Color, Spring Breakers, Enemy and Under the Skin are only the tip of the iceberg concerning the finest films the year has to offer, you know our decade has been graciously blessed with a full calendar of kino.
This list hopes to reflect the breadth of 2013’s greatest films, obviously informed by the inevitability of personal taste nonetheless. Here are 10 films that prove 2013 is best year for film this decade so far.
10. Blue is the Warmest Colour
Sprawling and infinitely tender, Blue is the Warmest Colour covers the complete cycle of a once in a lifetime romance. The blubbering and bliss and everything in between comes standard with such heightened emotions, let alone that we are dealing with none other than the French.
Adèle Exarchopoulos’s humanity in the leading role makes the patient and grandly mounted film a disquieting experience when it functions as a coming-of-age film. But it’s the radiant chemistry between Léa Seydoux and Exarchopoulos that turns Tunisian-French director Abdellatif Kechiche’s film into such a remarkable romance.
After controversially putting his leads — and apparently the crew as well — through hell in the filming process, Seydoux and Exarchopoulos seemed to defend Kechiche’s methods despite their issues for the sake of art. Kechiche whittled down some 800 hours of footage and B-roll in the editing room, and the product of Kechiche’s efforts is potent and ravishing.
The overwhelming 3-hour final film overcomes the sketchiest details of its conception, and its beauty is evidence of Kechiche’s discipline and uncompromising vision. By the weepy, pitiful conclusion, we are right there with Adèle having our heart ripped out, and the totality of the film’s full power and intimacy finally takes hold as Adèle walks away from the defining love of her youth.
9. The Wolf of Wall Street
Perhaps the best thing about The Wolf of Wall Street is its accessibility — for the average Joes of the world, Jordan Belfort is probably everything one would hope to aspire to: a self-made man of supreme wealth and unmeasured excess.
Of course these folks tend to ignore the swift downfall that ends Belfort’s reign on Wall Street. But Scorsese’s real audience is clearly those that see past the cocaine-fueled fever dream to the emptiness beneath and the vivacious satire left in the place where the film’s heart should.
Anyone who criticized the film for its depiction of repugnant behavior of all sorts was actually on Scorsese’s level all along. Within the saga of stock trading shenanigans, both the ultimate male fantasy and the slyest of cautionary tales is played out.
The definitive Scorsese film of the century so far, The Wolf of Wall Street feels like its monstrous 3-hour runtime could go on awhile longer without a problem, and the film is genuinely a wonder of scripting, pacing and editing in order to have such an immediate effect.
8. Coherence
Essentially the less-is-more film philosophy in process, Coherence is probably the most efficiently minimalist sci-fi film since Primer, yet only just brainy enough to be grasped and thoroughly enjoyed on a first watch and with subsequent viewings.
With not much of a working script and only unknown improvisational actors, the performances and delivery of dialogue in James Ward Byrkit’s film could be a little too uncanny for some. But as per the director’s intent to strip everthing as close to reality as possible, this ingenious choice makes their collective navigation through a night of comet-induced sci-fi-horror head-fuckery all the more grounded and eerily terrifying.
With a whopping budget of $50,000, Coherence’s shoot on digital was limited for the most part in Byrkit’s own living room. Aside from the self-imposed restrictions of the film’s production, the proof of enduring vitality for Coherence is how its stripped-bare parallel universe concept plays so casual before you realize how thought-provokingly profuse Byrkit’s narrative really is.
7. Short Term 12
A quaint work of striking emotional clarity, Short Term 12 was one of the most effective and unexpected films of 2013.
Though it could have easily fallen by the wayside due to its hipster guise — which can poison even the most well-meaning stories — Destin Daniel Cretton elevates potentially manipulative material and breathes life into an independent cinematic gem. Not only that, the film truly introduced us to the dramatic talents of Brie Larson, a fact that cannot be ignored when the now Best Actress winner is the lead of the film. She had excelled in supporting comedy roles like Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and 21 Jump Street before unlocking a career that has set her up as Marvel’s first female superhero, and her gifts are one of the primary reasons Short Term 12 is so special.
Despite how much Larson brings to the table, the true break out star of Short Term 12 was Lakeith Stanfield, whose freestyle rapping scene is the highlight of the film, a powerful performance that has potential in just minutes to leave you speechless and possibly reaching for tissues. His great supporting turns in Straight Outta Compton and Get Out have helped prove that a prolific acting career is on Stanfield’s horizon.
The film’s focus on troubled teens through the eyes of twenty-something counselors might seem emotionally exploitative on the surface, but the film never sugarcoats the pain or overembellishes the drama. Distant as the supporting characters are, they are written with the proper temperament to capture the attitude of adolescent outcasts. Emotionally taxing as Short Term 12 is through and through, the film’s rewards are more than worthwhile.
6. Prisoners
Prisoners introduced Denis Villeneuve to American audiences, and arguably it remains his best film. After years of the Canadian director’s French-language films, Villeneuve began his steady ascent to Hollywood recognition in 2013 with Prisoners and Enemy, both starring Jake Gyllenhaal in some of his best roles. Villeneuve quickly worked his way to high profile sci-fi with Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, notable in an age when the genre’s offerings are scarce, and he has since received lauding from critics and audiences alike for these most recent efforts.
The film in question is so reminiscent of David Fincher that its fortunate Villeneuve has found his own niche, but regardless of what other films it evokes, Prisoners is about as perfect a thriller as you could hope for. From the grave, captivating performances by Hugh Jackman and Gyllenhaal to Roger Deakins’ grimly gorgeous camerawork, the talent for a mainstream mystery thriller doesn’t get much better than this. But relative rookie screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski’s prickly morals and sparse revelations assemble into an absorbing story and an ultimately unnerving and understatedly entertaining film, as Villeneuve realizes the film’s gloomy atmosphere to dour perfection.
Like Christopher Nolan before him, we have a tactful director that has managed to work his artfully minded filmmaking ideology into populist film. Sure 2049 was basically a flop, but its reputation and accumulated following already exceed the box office numbers. With that in mind, it’s going to take quite a few disasters to strip Villeneuve of the clout and creative power he now possesses.
5. Before Midnight
The third installment in Richard Linklater’s Before series will hopefully not be the last. After the thrilling novelty of Sunrise and second chance suspense of Sunset, Midnight became the most subdued piece of the romantic film series and the one most charged by dark, unpleasant truths.
The bravura, lifelike performances from Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, as well as the quality of naturalistic, intellectual writing the remarkable pair helped pen, are up to the near-perfect standards of the earlier films. Midnight is possibly the weakest of the bunch and yet a singularly great piece of filmmaking in its own right. Opposed to the starry-eyed realism beforehand, Before Midnight is a revealing look at true love put to the test of time.
As much as fans will be craving another film in 2022, I wonder if all the thematic content left to explore with these characters has been all but spent with Before Midnight’s comprehensive take on the comforts and ills of long-term relationships. The final act of Before Midnight gives Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt a run for its money for most brutally believable argument sequence — as petty quarrelling warps to full-blown feuding, the dialogue and performances is exacting and penetrating; for the first time a Before film has a structural climax, which gives Midnight its air of finality.
With a new decade of filmmaking gold already like Bernie, Everybody Wants Some!!, and of course Boyhood, Linklater has been proving he’s as vital to American cinema as ever, and Before Midnight shows he’s also self-aware of his place in the span of his career and his life.
4. Inside Llewyn Davis
Though the critics will always have their backs, the Coens two are probably done trying to please the Academy Awards, if they ever were. With the brief reinstatement of the 10 nominees rule they earned some renewed attention for A Serious Man and True Grit following their win for No Country For Old Men. But their most recent films Inside Llewyn Davis and Hail, Caesar! came and went so quietly you could almost call them underrated. The latter satire was a satisfying romp, but the precise balance of comedy and drama in Inside Llewyn Davis puts it up there with the truest and most essential films of the Coen Brothers, and furthermore should have been celebrated in its own time.
Bruno Delbonnel’s cozy, soft-focus-frigid cinematography, the film’s robust soundtrack and a stellar supporting cast (including Carey Mulligan, John Goodman, Justin Timberlake, Adam Driver, the list goes on) all make an odyssey-like tale of cyclical failure a pleasure to navigate even if the destination is a familiar pain and longing. The appearance of a young Bob Dylan in the final scene is supposed to put Davis’ career in perspective: he’s just another guy with a guitar trying to make it big — his talents are only worth so much.
Oscar Isaac is phenomenal as our main man, a mooching depressive grouch who’s still somehow a completely relatable antihero. Davis keeps a network of friend’s couches in order to have a place to sleep, and life is constantly one step ahead of him. For all his narcissism and flaws of personal character, we are on his side through the inappropriate swearing and sardonic remarks because his struggle feels very honest circumstantial even if his arc is tragic and inconsequential.
Not many films nowadays will look you straight in the face and tell you what you don’t want to hear: it really might not work out for you. But this brand of misery feels strangely comforting in Inside Llewyn Davis, and the film’s greatest attribute is that it identifies the beauty in the attempt at following your dreams even if the attempt is all there is.
3. The Great Beauty
Young Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino communicated the weight of many long years in his Best Foreign Language winner La grande belleza. Echoing the epic romanticism of Fellini before him, Sorrentino’s grandiose drama within the circles of the cosmopolitan Italian elite was not popular in its own country, only to dominantly transfix viewers stateside.
Anchored by the magnetically suave Toni Servillo as our towering protagonist Jep Gambardello, The Great Beauty offers as much thematic gravitas for those in the twilight of their lives as for those at the dawn. The sentiment of looking back on one’s life and the futility of past accomplishments resonates no matter how close to 65 you are.
Breathlessly edited and rapturously shot, everything so ornate about The Great Beauty’s production and locale is backed up by lovely touches of humor, an oddly memorable sea of characters and an ambiance of aching nostalgia. Consummately conceived from a technical perspective, the film is a staggering vision with affectionate details to appreciate in every moment.
The Great Beauty is every bit as sublime and decadent in its practice as the haven in Italy it depicts. Sporting cutting social critiques, seasoned philosophical wisdom and surreal instances of introspection, nothing in the story or dialogue falters. As but a fragment of the spectacular world cinema from this prosperous year, Sorrentino’s film is just one of those great beauties we are all desperately looking for.
2. Frances Ha
Noah Baumbach had been fine-tuning his skill at scathing independent comedies for nearly two decades before he reached the zenith of his potential. When he fully embraced his muse Greta Gerwig, the finest work of his career took shape. And weirdly enough her first solo efforts in Lady Bird have already been awarded more than any of Baumbach’s films.
Gerwig’s biggest breakout role was likely her first with Baumbach, a lead role alongside Ben Stiller in Greenberg. Despite Baumbach’s modest success and mastery of his own craft before their connection, his most accomplished films — Frances Ha and Mistress America — are only his most hilarious and profound because of Gerwig’s simultaneous input in writing and performance.
Capturing the late bloomer’s coming-of-age story or quarter-life crisis if you will, Frances Ha could basically serve as the calling card for the entire mumblecore genre. The upper class New Yorker characters, the winding, plotless narrative, the verbal acrobatics and obscure references (not to mention the supple monochromatic cinematography) all point to fedora-tipping hipsterisms. But as insufferable as these elements may appear on paper, the actual impression of Frances Ha is shrewdly charming and delicately reassuring — the film basks in cynicism and social critiques typical of Baumbach while he also paints the most loving portrait of his beloved that he can muster.
The pointed insight, dry humor and engaging cast coalesce into something good enough to be the template for the strong indie film as we know it today. Frances Ha is at once masterful and unassuming.
1. 12 Years a Slave
What greater justice can there be for movies than when one of the best films of the year, if not the best, ends up shrouded in the immortality of Oscar gold? Lord knows how swiftly 12 Years a Slave could have dominated the Academy Awards given how severely Hollywood politics have shifted in just the past five years, but the fact that it succeeds with flying colors, first as a film and then as history recreated, is enough to call it one of the few films of the 2010s to unreservedly cherish.
Steve McQueen’s third feature was not your average piece of Oscar bait back in the 2014 awards season. The adaptation of Solomon Northup’s incredible story developed into a most heart-rending and suitably epic template for McQueen to span all sides of the ignorant brutalities of slavery in 19th century America.
And with such a topic, most viewers, especially white folks, would have accepted simple pandering freely and blindly. But McQueen doesn’t exploit the rotted underbelly of our history for cheap emotional ploys or middle school moralizing. Some criticized 12 Years a Slave for depicting only as much as average white audiences could tolerate; the endless suffering of one born into slavery would never appeal to the masses. Beyond the horrors of slavery itself, the particulars of a free man removed from domestic bliss and forced to endure hardships he thought he had circumvented makes Northup’s tale more personal, saddening and universal.
McQueen is as meticulous and painstaking as possible in his cinematic rendering of the era. Not a single line of dialogue, aspect of production design or member of its cast of well-known actors comes off as anything other than authentic and timeless — yes, even Brad Pitt.
Regardless of the extraordinary power of feeling that 12 Years a Slave yields, the film is simply one of the most important and uncompromising historical films of all time. It is a fresh classic, an essential viewing for even the most squeamish viewer and the crowning jewel of 2013 cinema.
*Published at TasteofCinema.com / January 16th, 2018
5 Reasons Why Waking Life Is
the Most Profound Animated Movie
of All Time
How do you explain the truth when it has already been said for you? The best films, let alone animated ones, seem to take the words right out of your mouth. You feel as if a filmmaker has miraculously bridged their past present to your future present, all to make you feel more understood and a little less insane.
Great animated films, from Fantasia to Pixar’s finest to astonishing contemporary gems like Don Hertzfeldt’s It’s Such a Beautiful Day, all have played with a world that only exists on-screen. Richard Linklater, perhaps the quintessential independent American filmmaker of his era, has almost always crafted fables that exist in reality.
With Waking Life, one of two animated films to his name, Linklater conjoined the tangible and the elusive with a film that blurs the line between the surreal and the substantial. In a genuinely grandiose and poignantly lo-fi cinematic feast for the eyes and the brain, he molded what could be considered the most profound animated film of all time. Here are five reasons why Waking Life deserves such stature.
1. Revolutionary animation
On a strictly visual level, Waking Life was groundbreaking and remains to this day unmatched as a work of animation. Utilizing a breakthrough in computerized rotoscoping, rather embarrassing digital camera footage was purified into a film of evocative fluidity. Combining several styles of animation from scene to scene into a seamless whole, vivid colors and wavering, double-vision-esque, undeniably psychedelic imagery form the vibrant backbone of an experience with so much more to offer outside of intoxicating visuals.
Five years after Waking Life’s release, Linklater’s own adaptation of the near-future novel A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick — who clearly holds a particular appeal for Linklater, as Dick is integral to the ending of Waking Life — would become another obvious outlet for the use of rotoscoping’s distinctive visual effect. A Scanner Darkly is a minor masterpiece in its own right and rotoscoping is a perfect way to communicate the mind-altering effects of the film’s central addictive drug, Substance D, but not for much else.
In Waking Life, rotoscoping has an enormous role to play: it conveys the slippery volatility of dreams while simultaneously drawing our attention to their uncanny yet utterly familiar relation to real life. It also offers opportunities to enhanced the film’s many monologues with flourishes that visualize the topics they explain. Numerous solo speeches are enriched with these playful touches, the most memorable being David Sosa’s explanation of our place in relation to the physical laws of the universe and quantum mechanics as well as Kim Krizan — writer alongside Linklater on his marvelously romantic and comparably perceptive Before trilogy — almost ironically trying to verbalize the limitations of words when it comes to defining the abstract, or that which is “unspeakable.”
2. Flawless dialogue
It’s one thing to find the right words to do any kind of justice to life’s many ineffable qualities but it’s an awe-inspiring feat to sum up the essence of existence in a series of interactions spanning just over 90 minutes.
An easy thing to appreciate about Linklater’s brand of filmmaking is how he stretches not just what you can accomplish with the film form but with scripts themselves. He reaches for ideas that navigate an overarching meaning in the process of scene after scene of rich, sage dialogue, and in Waking Life, the fragments seem unrelated before you see them altogether. The 2001 film is in some respects a more contemporary and refined version of his early 1991 film Slacker, which similarly caught so many perspectives by letting the camera follow situations from stranger to passerby and so on. As Slacker begins with a character played by Linklater describing a vantage on dreams to a cab driver after a flight, Waking Life inversely ends with an appearance from the director further discussing the nature of dreaming.
Moreover, the film excels at feeling so real amongst such forcefully imposed surrealism due to the naturalism in each and every delivery of Linklater’s lines, something seemingly encourage throughout his filmography. Starkly contrasting every effervescent frame, the writing comes forth so purposefully due to the casual, conversational beats each actor brings to Linklater’s cinema vérité, near-docufiction format. To the ears, every monologue appears formed in a vacuum, where each philosophical musing is tailored to the deliverer and bold, complicated ideas and revelations are borne with incredible clarity through intimate, genuine performances.
3. Thematic ambitions
“There's no story. It's just... people, gestures, moments, bits of rapture, fleeting emotions. In short, the greatest stories ever told,” says Alex Nixon — who under layers of flowing animation resembles a young Quentin Tarantino — when asked to describe a novel he is penning.
Amongst so much pontificating about our place in the cosmos and the state of the human condition as it stood at the turn of the millennia, Waking Life also highlights Linklater’s own struggle to say something forward and honest about the creative process and filmmaking itself — miraculously he pulls this off without feeling strained or self-congratulating. Louis Mackey, who appeared in Slacker, questions what causes so few of us to reach the heights of great figures in history by posing a devastating question: “What is the most universal human characteristic: fear or laziness?” Mackey’s soliloquy identifies the agonizingly slow grind of human achievement, and Nixon too points to Linklater’s own process of honorably echoing everyday reality in his own work.
In one of the most unique and overlooked moments the film, a chimp professor, animated as such but voiced by Steve Fitch, conducts a brief seminar on modern culture as viewed from the future, with footage of punk rock concerts and bleak film dramas as reference. “Art was not the goal but the occasion and the method for locating our specific rhythm and buried possibilities of our time. The discovery of a true communication was what it was about, or at least the quest for such a communication.” Like so much of Waking Life, the consequences of Linklater’s rigidly self-aware intentions are most often arrestingly resonant.
In perhaps the most self-reflexive, cinematically profound segment of the film, our nameless protagonist finds himself in a movie theater watching Caveh Zahedi describe to David Jewell just what film truly seeks to capture. Reexamining parts of Andre Bazin’s celebrated film theory, he equates cinema to a record of God, one that is constantly changing. This sequence also discusses what Linklater calls The Holy Moment, where film can show that the present itself is yearning to be recognized within the specificity of its replicated reality — somehow the duty of movies is to show us this even though it’s practically impossible to exist within a heightened awareness all the time. This scene is but a microcosm of Linklater’s larger goal throughout Waking Life, which is to succinctly explicate that life is raging all around us every second of every day. His ideological aim is nothing less than shaking the viewer out of their passivity and into the space of sincerely living.
This brings me to a fundamental thematic aspect to Waking Life, which is its unflinching optimism. From the onset, one of our first real monologues is driven by philosophy professor Robert C. Solomon, who urges his students, and later Wiggins’ character in private, to look at existentialism without any sense of gloom as we conduct the story of our lives. Aside from several segments with a much darker edge to them, the scope of Linklater’s observation and insight is one of unyielding exuberance. He makes enthusiasm look downright courageous, especially considering the very loose plot deals with the acceptance of death by its conclusion. Released just weeks after 9/11, one can imagine how invigorating the film’s barefaced revel in present-day life’s problems and potential must have been for the newly shaken and confused.
Instead of being circular and self-defeating, Linklater, in these scenes mentioned and anywhere else in Waking Life, unabashedly gets at the heart of how filmmaking is supposed to move us, and how the abstract and the forthright can be imparted at once without pretension or generalization.
4. Experimental narrative
It’s easy enough to explain the general premise of Waking Life — our protagonist, played by Wiley Wiggins in his only real starring role outside of Linklater’s cult favorite Dazed and Confused, is caught in an endless dream state ultimately suggesting this is his remaining brain activity immediately following death. Linklater’s invariably dense script, however, leaves room for countless narrative detours that sometimes don’t enhance the film’s plot — what little there is — but further mold the complexity and range of the philosophical standpoints that he employs.
Some parts of the films, like Charles Gunning’s brooding, venomous prison confession and the early orchestral band rehearsal, have nothing to do with Wiley Wiggins’ character or his psychoactive story. Even in vignettes where he is present, the point is that he is the audience to any given speaker, and their views may not have much to do with his own concerns. But no matter how little each persona’s ideological stance seems to relate to Linklater’s own storytelling goals, each piece feels essential to the intricate puzzle. Each piece can be taken on its own, and yet even the shortest oration is an indispensible link in a chain of subconsciously stimulating thought.
Interludes with channel surfing — which features Kregg A. Foote briefly engaging in ego-breaking discourse as well as Mary McBay explaining the dream-state of death our protagonist finds himself in — offer key ideas and a break from the expansive soliloquies. Linklater steadily oscillates between broadening the mind and enhancing the nuances of his tricky tale. And a sketch as good as the post-coital ramblings between Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke function as an interesting missing piece to the Before trilogy while nonchalantly clarifying to the viewer about the 6-12 minutes of brain activity that comes with death, before it actually becomes important to us.
The story of Waking Life is in many ways bare, though, viewed in a more discriminating state, the subconscious, intuitive way in which the film dissects both modern philosophical quandaries and the bizarre, beguiling phenomenon of dreaming is too remarkable to overlook. Linklater’s earnest, ravishingly thought-provoking dialogue exercised effortlessly by various acting talents carries the film through its own hurdles in film structure — in few film’s is the dialogue more contingent to its internal propulsion. Waking Life seamlessly marries the avant-garde with the all too real, just as any film that wishes to merge the sensations of both living and dreaming on a visual and narrative level should.
5. Bridging the gap between director and audience
Breaking the fourth wall — from Pierrot le Fou to Annie Hall to Deadpool – has its place in the highest and lowest practices of film. Many directors choose to reroute the communication of their innermost feelings and sociopolitical opinions through exquisitely arranged discourse — at least some the best writer-directors do.
Before and after Waking Life, Linklater so often has used his films as a way to express himself as deeply as the medium will allow him, and it's clear that his most fervent urgency, and his biggest soapbox, lies in Waking Life. The film acts as a vessel for him to challenge the notion of a constant worldview or a singular perspective as he reaches into every corner of his soul in order to attain a higher state of objectivity and the widest spectrum of truth possible.
One of the deepest pleasures of revisiting Waking Life is in thinking about the certainty of the various characters’ attitudes and beliefs. Many align in reassurance while some clash with shades of morbidity. Each time you watch it, one speech that you always blew off as a pretentious flub may resonate more fully, like perhaps the extremist political stances touted by Alex Jones and J. C. Shakespeare. And something that seemed utterly profound might eventually appear more customary and blend back into the fabric of lyrically concentrated wisdom that the film already has in spades. It’s not much of a challenge for a director to profess himself cinematically — especially in a movie as candid as this — but it’s really something to express as much as Linklater does without letting your filmmaking efforts get pompous or overambitious in the process.
As the film reaches its end and Wiggins’ character begins to understand his fate, Linklater literally strips the veil separating artist from audience. Hunched over a pinball machine — a curious staple of many of his films — Linklater spins tales of Philip K. Dick’s paranoia and the filmmaker’s own twisted dreams, all to land at a place he often lands in his movies. He essentially pleads anyone watching not to give in to the commonplace distraction that comprises so much of film and culture, and offers a subdued and significant wake up call to our most bewildering present.
The final sentiment of Boyhood, Linklater’s biggest critical success, finds fresh college kid Mason reaching a related revelation while sharing a lovely conversation with a girl about the moment seizing us and how it’s always right now, all while soaking in some hallucinogenic chocolate. Very similar thoughts are echoed in his Before films, recently in Everybody Wants Some!! and even Me and Orson Welles — all of his movies, at least in some small way, are related to time. In the subconscious infinity of dream-space, Waking Life’s parting sentiment is the same only moreso, and it finds a great director at his most direct: “There’s only one moment, and it’s now, and it’s eternity.”
It’s happening as I write this and as you read it. As long as Linklater is making movies, he’ll never stop trying to show us how dearly important it is that we understand that we are alive right now. So many animated films attempt to show you a world of escapist splendor impossible in the real world. The reality — or surreality if you will — of Waking Life is a place just as fascinating to inhabit, only the realm it forces you to look at in wide-eyed wonderment is already all around you.
*Published at TasteofCinema.com / November 14th, 2017
Great animated films, from Fantasia to Pixar’s finest to astonishing contemporary gems like Don Hertzfeldt’s It’s Such a Beautiful Day, all have played with a world that only exists on-screen. Richard Linklater, perhaps the quintessential independent American filmmaker of his era, has almost always crafted fables that exist in reality.
With Waking Life, one of two animated films to his name, Linklater conjoined the tangible and the elusive with a film that blurs the line between the surreal and the substantial. In a genuinely grandiose and poignantly lo-fi cinematic feast for the eyes and the brain, he molded what could be considered the most profound animated film of all time. Here are five reasons why Waking Life deserves such stature.
1. Revolutionary animation
On a strictly visual level, Waking Life was groundbreaking and remains to this day unmatched as a work of animation. Utilizing a breakthrough in computerized rotoscoping, rather embarrassing digital camera footage was purified into a film of evocative fluidity. Combining several styles of animation from scene to scene into a seamless whole, vivid colors and wavering, double-vision-esque, undeniably psychedelic imagery form the vibrant backbone of an experience with so much more to offer outside of intoxicating visuals.
Five years after Waking Life’s release, Linklater’s own adaptation of the near-future novel A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick — who clearly holds a particular appeal for Linklater, as Dick is integral to the ending of Waking Life — would become another obvious outlet for the use of rotoscoping’s distinctive visual effect. A Scanner Darkly is a minor masterpiece in its own right and rotoscoping is a perfect way to communicate the mind-altering effects of the film’s central addictive drug, Substance D, but not for much else.
In Waking Life, rotoscoping has an enormous role to play: it conveys the slippery volatility of dreams while simultaneously drawing our attention to their uncanny yet utterly familiar relation to real life. It also offers opportunities to enhanced the film’s many monologues with flourishes that visualize the topics they explain. Numerous solo speeches are enriched with these playful touches, the most memorable being David Sosa’s explanation of our place in relation to the physical laws of the universe and quantum mechanics as well as Kim Krizan — writer alongside Linklater on his marvelously romantic and comparably perceptive Before trilogy — almost ironically trying to verbalize the limitations of words when it comes to defining the abstract, or that which is “unspeakable.”
2. Flawless dialogue
It’s one thing to find the right words to do any kind of justice to life’s many ineffable qualities but it’s an awe-inspiring feat to sum up the essence of existence in a series of interactions spanning just over 90 minutes.
An easy thing to appreciate about Linklater’s brand of filmmaking is how he stretches not just what you can accomplish with the film form but with scripts themselves. He reaches for ideas that navigate an overarching meaning in the process of scene after scene of rich, sage dialogue, and in Waking Life, the fragments seem unrelated before you see them altogether. The 2001 film is in some respects a more contemporary and refined version of his early 1991 film Slacker, which similarly caught so many perspectives by letting the camera follow situations from stranger to passerby and so on. As Slacker begins with a character played by Linklater describing a vantage on dreams to a cab driver after a flight, Waking Life inversely ends with an appearance from the director further discussing the nature of dreaming.
Moreover, the film excels at feeling so real amongst such forcefully imposed surrealism due to the naturalism in each and every delivery of Linklater’s lines, something seemingly encourage throughout his filmography. Starkly contrasting every effervescent frame, the writing comes forth so purposefully due to the casual, conversational beats each actor brings to Linklater’s cinema vérité, near-docufiction format. To the ears, every monologue appears formed in a vacuum, where each philosophical musing is tailored to the deliverer and bold, complicated ideas and revelations are borne with incredible clarity through intimate, genuine performances.
3. Thematic ambitions
“There's no story. It's just... people, gestures, moments, bits of rapture, fleeting emotions. In short, the greatest stories ever told,” says Alex Nixon — who under layers of flowing animation resembles a young Quentin Tarantino — when asked to describe a novel he is penning.
Amongst so much pontificating about our place in the cosmos and the state of the human condition as it stood at the turn of the millennia, Waking Life also highlights Linklater’s own struggle to say something forward and honest about the creative process and filmmaking itself — miraculously he pulls this off without feeling strained or self-congratulating. Louis Mackey, who appeared in Slacker, questions what causes so few of us to reach the heights of great figures in history by posing a devastating question: “What is the most universal human characteristic: fear or laziness?” Mackey’s soliloquy identifies the agonizingly slow grind of human achievement, and Nixon too points to Linklater’s own process of honorably echoing everyday reality in his own work.
In one of the most unique and overlooked moments the film, a chimp professor, animated as such but voiced by Steve Fitch, conducts a brief seminar on modern culture as viewed from the future, with footage of punk rock concerts and bleak film dramas as reference. “Art was not the goal but the occasion and the method for locating our specific rhythm and buried possibilities of our time. The discovery of a true communication was what it was about, or at least the quest for such a communication.” Like so much of Waking Life, the consequences of Linklater’s rigidly self-aware intentions are most often arrestingly resonant.
In perhaps the most self-reflexive, cinematically profound segment of the film, our nameless protagonist finds himself in a movie theater watching Caveh Zahedi describe to David Jewell just what film truly seeks to capture. Reexamining parts of Andre Bazin’s celebrated film theory, he equates cinema to a record of God, one that is constantly changing. This sequence also discusses what Linklater calls The Holy Moment, where film can show that the present itself is yearning to be recognized within the specificity of its replicated reality — somehow the duty of movies is to show us this even though it’s practically impossible to exist within a heightened awareness all the time. This scene is but a microcosm of Linklater’s larger goal throughout Waking Life, which is to succinctly explicate that life is raging all around us every second of every day. His ideological aim is nothing less than shaking the viewer out of their passivity and into the space of sincerely living.
This brings me to a fundamental thematic aspect to Waking Life, which is its unflinching optimism. From the onset, one of our first real monologues is driven by philosophy professor Robert C. Solomon, who urges his students, and later Wiggins’ character in private, to look at existentialism without any sense of gloom as we conduct the story of our lives. Aside from several segments with a much darker edge to them, the scope of Linklater’s observation and insight is one of unyielding exuberance. He makes enthusiasm look downright courageous, especially considering the very loose plot deals with the acceptance of death by its conclusion. Released just weeks after 9/11, one can imagine how invigorating the film’s barefaced revel in present-day life’s problems and potential must have been for the newly shaken and confused.
Instead of being circular and self-defeating, Linklater, in these scenes mentioned and anywhere else in Waking Life, unabashedly gets at the heart of how filmmaking is supposed to move us, and how the abstract and the forthright can be imparted at once without pretension or generalization.
4. Experimental narrative
It’s easy enough to explain the general premise of Waking Life — our protagonist, played by Wiley Wiggins in his only real starring role outside of Linklater’s cult favorite Dazed and Confused, is caught in an endless dream state ultimately suggesting this is his remaining brain activity immediately following death. Linklater’s invariably dense script, however, leaves room for countless narrative detours that sometimes don’t enhance the film’s plot — what little there is — but further mold the complexity and range of the philosophical standpoints that he employs.
Some parts of the films, like Charles Gunning’s brooding, venomous prison confession and the early orchestral band rehearsal, have nothing to do with Wiley Wiggins’ character or his psychoactive story. Even in vignettes where he is present, the point is that he is the audience to any given speaker, and their views may not have much to do with his own concerns. But no matter how little each persona’s ideological stance seems to relate to Linklater’s own storytelling goals, each piece feels essential to the intricate puzzle. Each piece can be taken on its own, and yet even the shortest oration is an indispensible link in a chain of subconsciously stimulating thought.
Interludes with channel surfing — which features Kregg A. Foote briefly engaging in ego-breaking discourse as well as Mary McBay explaining the dream-state of death our protagonist finds himself in — offer key ideas and a break from the expansive soliloquies. Linklater steadily oscillates between broadening the mind and enhancing the nuances of his tricky tale. And a sketch as good as the post-coital ramblings between Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke function as an interesting missing piece to the Before trilogy while nonchalantly clarifying to the viewer about the 6-12 minutes of brain activity that comes with death, before it actually becomes important to us.
The story of Waking Life is in many ways bare, though, viewed in a more discriminating state, the subconscious, intuitive way in which the film dissects both modern philosophical quandaries and the bizarre, beguiling phenomenon of dreaming is too remarkable to overlook. Linklater’s earnest, ravishingly thought-provoking dialogue exercised effortlessly by various acting talents carries the film through its own hurdles in film structure — in few film’s is the dialogue more contingent to its internal propulsion. Waking Life seamlessly marries the avant-garde with the all too real, just as any film that wishes to merge the sensations of both living and dreaming on a visual and narrative level should.
5. Bridging the gap between director and audience
Breaking the fourth wall — from Pierrot le Fou to Annie Hall to Deadpool – has its place in the highest and lowest practices of film. Many directors choose to reroute the communication of their innermost feelings and sociopolitical opinions through exquisitely arranged discourse — at least some the best writer-directors do.
Before and after Waking Life, Linklater so often has used his films as a way to express himself as deeply as the medium will allow him, and it's clear that his most fervent urgency, and his biggest soapbox, lies in Waking Life. The film acts as a vessel for him to challenge the notion of a constant worldview or a singular perspective as he reaches into every corner of his soul in order to attain a higher state of objectivity and the widest spectrum of truth possible.
One of the deepest pleasures of revisiting Waking Life is in thinking about the certainty of the various characters’ attitudes and beliefs. Many align in reassurance while some clash with shades of morbidity. Each time you watch it, one speech that you always blew off as a pretentious flub may resonate more fully, like perhaps the extremist political stances touted by Alex Jones and J. C. Shakespeare. And something that seemed utterly profound might eventually appear more customary and blend back into the fabric of lyrically concentrated wisdom that the film already has in spades. It’s not much of a challenge for a director to profess himself cinematically — especially in a movie as candid as this — but it’s really something to express as much as Linklater does without letting your filmmaking efforts get pompous or overambitious in the process.
As the film reaches its end and Wiggins’ character begins to understand his fate, Linklater literally strips the veil separating artist from audience. Hunched over a pinball machine — a curious staple of many of his films — Linklater spins tales of Philip K. Dick’s paranoia and the filmmaker’s own twisted dreams, all to land at a place he often lands in his movies. He essentially pleads anyone watching not to give in to the commonplace distraction that comprises so much of film and culture, and offers a subdued and significant wake up call to our most bewildering present.
The final sentiment of Boyhood, Linklater’s biggest critical success, finds fresh college kid Mason reaching a related revelation while sharing a lovely conversation with a girl about the moment seizing us and how it’s always right now, all while soaking in some hallucinogenic chocolate. Very similar thoughts are echoed in his Before films, recently in Everybody Wants Some!! and even Me and Orson Welles — all of his movies, at least in some small way, are related to time. In the subconscious infinity of dream-space, Waking Life’s parting sentiment is the same only moreso, and it finds a great director at his most direct: “There’s only one moment, and it’s now, and it’s eternity.”
It’s happening as I write this and as you read it. As long as Linklater is making movies, he’ll never stop trying to show us how dearly important it is that we understand that we are alive right now. So many animated films attempt to show you a world of escapist splendor impossible in the real world. The reality — or surreality if you will — of Waking Life is a place just as fascinating to inhabit, only the realm it forces you to look at in wide-eyed wonderment is already all around you.
*Published at TasteofCinema.com / November 14th, 2017
Every 21st Century Oscar Winner for Best Original Screenplay Ranked
An original screenplay doesn’t adhere to the rules of adaptation, which often lends the subsequent film more novelty than the latest production of a New York Times bestseller. In the 21st century, countless innovative screenwriters have taken real life or a really great idea to heart and set the foundation for refreshingly genuine cinema. They’ve missed more than a few but an excess of inventive scripts have been honored by the Academy Awards with at least a nomination and, gratefully, the winners are broadly commendable.
23. Crash
Racism: The Movie would have been a more fitting title. Somehow edging out masterful screenplays like Good Night, and Good Luck and The Squid and the Whale, Crash was foolishly rewarded many times over for all of its blunt, cliché-ridden storytelling choices. Even ignoring the agonizing obviousness of its themes, Crash’s greatest detriment is its fractured narrative. As is often the case with this unwise, Love Actually-adjacent screenwriting choice, few if any individual threads of the story have an impact since each fragment is buried by the rest.
With little elucidation on this era's racial discrimination woes while so completely removed from subtlety and severely hackneyed by an unfocused arrangement, Crash’s Academy Award wins will go down as one of the Oscar’s biggest regrets of the age.
22. Birdman
Though it has a solid premise, Emmanuel Lubezki’s magic touch and a few good performances to its credit, Birdman’s script is hindered by its smug self-importance. It had little right to best the likes of Boyhood, Nightcrawler and The Grand Budapest Hotel for Best Original Screenplay
Ineptly trying to comment on fame, our social media obsessed times, art reflecting life and life reflecting art and so on, Birdman's understanding of the modern artist's plight lacks actual shrewdness. Practically every attempt at intellectualism is undercut by the film’s sickening semi-self-awareness that assumes its own cinematic significance through Lubezki’s daring execution of the film’s seamless-take gimmick. Michael Keaton’s meta-personality non-character, the generic ambiguous ending and cringy references to Twitter and the like are but a few touches that Alejandro Iñárritu’s script — composed by a total of four writers — miscalculates. As words only, there is no unexpected virtue of ignorance.
21. The King’s Speech
Branded and sealed as 100% pure Oscar bait, The King’s Speech followed the easy path to awards season dominance one would assume from its composition of Academy turn-ons. But while it’ll age pretty feebly, the dialogue of Tom Hooper’s adequate film is probably its strongest asset. Christopher Nolan undoubtedly deserved the award for Inception over this inspirational yet sterile period piece but, in all fairness, the screenplay ultimately earns the regality and humanity it attempts to get across.
Its saccharine true story falls too closely to the ideal Oscar magnet but, in its own context, the dialogue is tidy and amusing. At least its predictability can be placed on a higher shelf of sophistication.
20. Green Book
Peter, the more fortunate of the Farrelly brothers — the duo behind Dumb and Dumber, There’s Something About Mary, Shallow Hal and other ’sweet’ gross out comedies — now has a couple Oscars for a historically dubious holiday road trip movie about racism being bad. It was a fairly weak year all things considered but Green Book’s sweep felt like the Oscars had stepped backwards about 30 years, and not just because of the screenplay's inverted Driving Miss Daisy trappings.
It bears some palpable pathos but Green Book’s Sunday school lesson on acceptance doesn’t come close to Paul Schrader’s excruciating examination of faith in a doomed world (First Reformed), Yorgos Lanthimos’ social-climbing ass-kissing period roast (The Favourite) or Alfonso Cuarón’s textured glimpse at the most ordinary, unconsidered of lives (Roma).
19. Everything Everywhere All At Once
18. Belfast
17. Little Miss Sunshine
Both childishly sweet and modestly mature, Little Miss Sunshine works as a quaint indie comedy and a dysfunctional family drama. The bright, bitter film too often skates by on quirk to make it one for the history books but the husband and wife directorial team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris craft memorable characters within a throwback road trip premise.
Like the cousin to the average Wes Anderson film, Little Miss Sunshine is elevated largely due to its stacked cast. Amongst the spare, orchestrated charm Little Miss Sunshine has a few points to make about notions of success and beauty, and its light satire of pageantry as well as the average family unit is reasonably resonant. Pan's Labyrinth was clearly robbed, and/or Letters From Iwo Jima.
16. Spotlight
No doubt an accomplishment in purpose and execution, Spotlight does not earn points for exceptional writing even as it remains about as tactful as the journalists it commends. But with no great moralizing or intricate arguments to make here, the story behind the scandal becomes a tad self-defeating. As can happen with any awards season fare of the based on a true story breed, the history itself is more important than the film could hope to be.
Spotlight is a strong drama with an urgent script and agenda — if only a compact film ripped from a blooming imagination such as Alex Garland's Ex Machina could’ve received recognition instead.
15. Milk
Leveed by incredible work by Sean Penn, Josh Brolin and James Franco, the review of recent history laid out in Milk inspiringly encapsulates the optimism and struggle of both gay acceptance and grassroots political movements.
Gus Van Sant's film was a late iteration of his fundemental imprint on the New Queer Cinema movement of last century. Especially following a slew of formally daring, critically divisive experiments (Gerry, Elephant, Last Days and Paranoid Park), Milk’s classical script was a welcome reversion sure enough to stir emotions as easily as it informed. While Martin McDonagh exceptional debut In Bruges surely merited a win, Harvey Milk's story is nevertheless an essential excerpt in the uphill battle of civil rights.
14. Almost Famous
Cameron Crowe’s most affectionate and endearing of his rosy-cheeked repertoire stands just above Jerry Maguire as his strongest feat to date. Profundity, laughs and cultural commentary propel Crowe’s film as a piece of autobiography and an engaging, well-constructed story. The writer-director’s heartfelt screenplay becomes exceptionally cinematic in the hands of a capable cast.
Elevated beyond Crowe’s trademark sentiment, Almost Famous’ box office bombing is rather fitting since its cult reputation has only broadened over time. One of the defining non-musical films about music, Almost Famous encases the thrill of fandom and the empty vanity of stardom with agreeable, enlightening dialogue.
13. Promising Young Woman
12. Juno
Wisely removing the politics of women’s rights from the gist of its premise, Juno tackles teen comedy and the coming-of-age story from a snidely mature and incredibly contemporary perspective. Juno herself is as much a now-classic character as a vessel to explore the condition and outlook of the hipster millennial. While the hyper-clever dialogue can be an earful, Diablo Cody’s debut screenplay, perfectly realized by Jason Reitman, is still a marvel in capturing its generation's zeitgeist. Not every teenager possesses Aaron Sorkin-like wit but communication through wannabe catchphrases and affected sarcasm is spot on.
Finding the lightness in the overwhelming confusion of adolescence, Cody’s screenplay leaves the morals of unwanted pregnancy in 2007 to 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and instead fashions unforgettable characters and some of the most quotable exchanges heard this millennia.
11. Talk to Her
Morally challenging and dramatically unconventional, Talk to Her found Pedro Almodóvar with plenty more to prove beyond where his lengthy catalogue already was before 2002.
Uncharacteristically focusing on the men of his story, the time-hopping, perspective-shifting tale of a complicated friendship takes many unexpected and disquieting turns throughout. The zigzagged narrative comfortably covers loneliness, grief, unrequited love and the ambiguity of truth without coming off scattershot or overstretched.
Though the female characters take the backseat due to their respective comas, Almodóvar does them justice by exploring their identities through their counterparts. Unpredictable and darkly poetic, Talk to Her’s fitting win made an easy case that more non-English films should be honored outside of the Best Foreign Language Film category.
10. Django Unchained
While Inglourious Basterds is seemingly engraved as his mid-career peak, Django Unchained is at least arguably equivalent if not superior. Before his unhinged tastes got the better of him in The Hateful Eight, Tarantino really hit a sweet spot in his revisionist slavery revenge flick, which honors Westerns even moreso than Kill Bill: Volume 2.
Tarantino’s celebrated mastery of tension through discourse is gratifyingly reaffirmed in the extensive dialogue sequences involving Leonardo DiCaprio’s superb crack at Calvin Candie and the absurdities that go down at Candyland ranch.
With a win already to Tarantino’s name, the more respectable choice would have been Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom. Anderson has never won despite several nominations and that 2012 adolescent romance is the most ravishing of his fanciful collection.
9. The Hurt Locker
Depicting the lives of soldiers who recently fought in Iraq without glorifying the situation is a narrow tightrope to cross when the film is essentially the character study of a cavalier, reckless thrill-junkie. Nevertheless Mark Boal does an extraordinary job cramming thrills, commentary and purposeful character development into the film’s month-long timeline in Bravo Company’s final rotation as they dismantle explosives in harrowing, gradually escalating situations.
Thematically, Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker isn’t terribly complex. It opens with a simple quote that it advances by revealing the layers of Jeremy Renner’s character. While real events have served the Boal/Bigelow pairing well in further films (Zero Dark Thirty, Detroit) — with fiction built on Boal's journalistic eye, the gravity of our incessant meddling in the Middle East is still drawn with candor and realism.
8. Get Out
This one would smack of consolatory, courtesy awards-giving if Get Out wasn’t a big moment in cinema for both critics and audiences. If Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election, every part of Jordon Peele's picture of everyday racism and high concept killers would still hit the nail on the head. It makes points discreetly and without an excess of cult-clamoring, zeitgeist-primed insanity. It’s just an ingenious horror flick borne out of the ‘social thrillers’ as Peele calls them (Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives) around fifty years prior. Peele nearly outdid himself in the allegorical Us but Get Out will linger longer and more fervently in cultural memory as American racial tensions persist.
Meritorious as Peele may have been, Greta Gerwig had an equally poignant debut screenplay to match (Lady Bird) and Martin McDonagh (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) will be overdue by his next project.
7. Manchester by the Sea
Anyone who writes off Manchester by the Sea as a miserably depressing drama has forgotten just how funny the script really is. Powered by sincere, realistic performances, Lonergan’s drifting narrative has enough payoffs in its character's variable relationships, as well as barefaced, theatrical moments of melodrama, to fill a season of television.
In a year when any nominee could have walked away with the Oscar and deserved it — the good company also included La La Land, The Lobster, 20th Century Women and Hell or High Water — Lonergan’s understated masterwork still feels like the right choice. The tonal shades this film finds within the foibles of grief are somehow chilling and warming; Manchester is full of tremendous feeling despite how simple the story really is. The melancholy and sympathy are actually acutely comforting when fully embraced because Lonergan cultivates his Bostonian neorealism with stark plainness and poetic candor.
6. Gosford Park
The actor, novelist and writer-director Julian Fellowes made a noble screenwriting debut with Gosford Park, a studied whodunit based solely on an idea pitched by Bob Balaban, one in an enormous cast of mostly well-known British talents. Fellowes even helps Balaban tease the audience with a tear into the fourth wall — his character is a producer attempting to put together a film with the same premise playing out in Robert Altman's late masterpiece.
With such a wealth of characters, the actual narrative thrust of Gosford Park is in first gear, leaving you with plenty of chances to relish the subtext within the peculiar individual relations and try to keep a few names straight. The film is so stripped of plot that its web of Jane Austen characters trapped in an Agatha Christie mystery would probably fit better on the page. But when you have Britain’s elite thespians and dense, thoughtful material, it’s hard not to be entertained by the satirical spectacle of conducting a vast ensemble of eccentric personalities and possible suspects.
As a thriller it may be less than jolting — the murder doesn't occur for over an hour — but the classic smarts of Altman's film are a treat to savor all the same.
5. Her
An earnest, piercing dissection of modern romance and one of the most prescient science fiction films of the era, Her’s script is as moving on the page as it is on film.
That's not to take anything away from Spike Jonze and the way breathes life into an awkwardly authentic future-romance fable without a hitch. Jonze has always had a knack for satire and humor, but the unfulfilled pathos hiding in his two Charlie Kaufman-penned features and his Where the Wild Things Are adaptation emerges from the weeds in his most absolute, forthright feature thus far.
Punctuated by the so true sting of loneliness and modern technology’s way of distracting us from that void in our lives, Her intuitively handles thematic musings that are unavoidable in such a pontentially soft, saccharine sci-fi premise. But between the many fascinations of seeing a human/AI romantic relationship play out, Jonze treats us to hilarity and heaviness in manageable loads. Her is ultimately one of the most original love stories ever conceived for film and an earnestly human portrait of 21st century disillusionment.
4. Parasite
3. Midnight in Paris
Scaling the peak of his work in the late 70s, Midnight in Paris is the defining film of at least the last two dozen Woody Allen features. Wry, insightful, and continuing a legacy of engaging in philosophical quandaries and social commentary, this Owen Wilson-led film — which euphorically confirms the underrated actor as the best surrogate for Allen’s own voice — investigates the glorification of the past, curiosity vs. intellectualism and fresh romantic idiosyncrasies. A protagonist caught in a screenwriting rut and aiming to make his mark in literature also feels very autobiographical even by Woody’s standards.
Allen’s scripts are sometimes so singularly powered by dialogue that they would pass better as plays, but with an obviously gorgeous locale to send a cinematic love letter to, Midnight in Paris is a lovely visual experience to boot. This comforting late-era masterstroke fits into a filmography comprised of nearly 50 distillations of the writer-director’s formula, only this one stands out as an effortless, whimsical and downright enchanting time-travel fantasy romance rivaling The Purple Rose of Cairo.
2. Lost in Translation
Sofia Coppola’s gentle, meditative calling card wrestled the best out of leads Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson — their individual roles provide some of the finest work of their respective careers and fuse for a most adorable chemistry in their brief, nearly platonic Tokyo companionship.
The brilliance of the film and Coppola’s general skill at screenwriting is in how much she conveys without words by instead planting more meaning in looks and gestures than dialogue could ever do justice. She makes the touching of another’s foot look daring and rapturous and likewise karaoke is made spiritual and scandalous through her direction. If there were an Oscar for best curated soundtrack, Coppola would clean up.
Lost in Translation is splendidly romantic and yet Coppola is sharp enough to know that suggesting a yearning and a delicate subtext would be infinitely more tender than a textbook travelogue movie affair. The sparse dialogue could be held in question for an Original Screenplay win, but whenever Murray or Johansson speak, they have our complete attention in their most lowly first world problems as well as in their late night existential anxiety.
1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Insightfully and ingeniously written, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a true original and a high water mark for Kaufman’s potential as of his career in 2004. It’s matched in quality by Kaufman’s only writer-director triumphs in Synecdoche, New York and Anomalisa, which is to say he’s been on a roll.
In terms of plotting and themes, no other Best Original Screenplay winner has been so singular or significant. The film’s genre intricacies — which comingle romantic comedy, sci-fi and surrealism to truly bizarre conclusions — have an equal hand in aiding Kaufman’s revelatory writing process. How does one show the light at the end of the tunnel after a devastating breakup? Kaufman illustrates that without our worst memories we wouldn’t even be ourselves.
Observational, uniquely clever and doused with potent dreaminess where needed, Eternal Sunshine became something to cherish with the assistance of a great cast and Michel Gondry’s exemplary eye. The humanity and imagination of Charlie Kaufman’s original script offers peculiar narrative gratification along with universal human truths. As a story alone, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind stands as one of the most venerable screenplays of our time.
*Published at TasteofCinema.com / November 11th, 2017
23. Crash
Racism: The Movie would have been a more fitting title. Somehow edging out masterful screenplays like Good Night, and Good Luck and The Squid and the Whale, Crash was foolishly rewarded many times over for all of its blunt, cliché-ridden storytelling choices. Even ignoring the agonizing obviousness of its themes, Crash’s greatest detriment is its fractured narrative. As is often the case with this unwise, Love Actually-adjacent screenwriting choice, few if any individual threads of the story have an impact since each fragment is buried by the rest.
With little elucidation on this era's racial discrimination woes while so completely removed from subtlety and severely hackneyed by an unfocused arrangement, Crash’s Academy Award wins will go down as one of the Oscar’s biggest regrets of the age.
22. Birdman
Though it has a solid premise, Emmanuel Lubezki’s magic touch and a few good performances to its credit, Birdman’s script is hindered by its smug self-importance. It had little right to best the likes of Boyhood, Nightcrawler and The Grand Budapest Hotel for Best Original Screenplay
Ineptly trying to comment on fame, our social media obsessed times, art reflecting life and life reflecting art and so on, Birdman's understanding of the modern artist's plight lacks actual shrewdness. Practically every attempt at intellectualism is undercut by the film’s sickening semi-self-awareness that assumes its own cinematic significance through Lubezki’s daring execution of the film’s seamless-take gimmick. Michael Keaton’s meta-personality non-character, the generic ambiguous ending and cringy references to Twitter and the like are but a few touches that Alejandro Iñárritu’s script — composed by a total of four writers — miscalculates. As words only, there is no unexpected virtue of ignorance.
21. The King’s Speech
Branded and sealed as 100% pure Oscar bait, The King’s Speech followed the easy path to awards season dominance one would assume from its composition of Academy turn-ons. But while it’ll age pretty feebly, the dialogue of Tom Hooper’s adequate film is probably its strongest asset. Christopher Nolan undoubtedly deserved the award for Inception over this inspirational yet sterile period piece but, in all fairness, the screenplay ultimately earns the regality and humanity it attempts to get across.
Its saccharine true story falls too closely to the ideal Oscar magnet but, in its own context, the dialogue is tidy and amusing. At least its predictability can be placed on a higher shelf of sophistication.
20. Green Book
Peter, the more fortunate of the Farrelly brothers — the duo behind Dumb and Dumber, There’s Something About Mary, Shallow Hal and other ’sweet’ gross out comedies — now has a couple Oscars for a historically dubious holiday road trip movie about racism being bad. It was a fairly weak year all things considered but Green Book’s sweep felt like the Oscars had stepped backwards about 30 years, and not just because of the screenplay's inverted Driving Miss Daisy trappings.
It bears some palpable pathos but Green Book’s Sunday school lesson on acceptance doesn’t come close to Paul Schrader’s excruciating examination of faith in a doomed world (First Reformed), Yorgos Lanthimos’ social-climbing ass-kissing period roast (The Favourite) or Alfonso Cuarón’s textured glimpse at the most ordinary, unconsidered of lives (Roma).
19. Everything Everywhere All At Once
18. Belfast
17. Little Miss Sunshine
Both childishly sweet and modestly mature, Little Miss Sunshine works as a quaint indie comedy and a dysfunctional family drama. The bright, bitter film too often skates by on quirk to make it one for the history books but the husband and wife directorial team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris craft memorable characters within a throwback road trip premise.
Like the cousin to the average Wes Anderson film, Little Miss Sunshine is elevated largely due to its stacked cast. Amongst the spare, orchestrated charm Little Miss Sunshine has a few points to make about notions of success and beauty, and its light satire of pageantry as well as the average family unit is reasonably resonant. Pan's Labyrinth was clearly robbed, and/or Letters From Iwo Jima.
16. Spotlight
No doubt an accomplishment in purpose and execution, Spotlight does not earn points for exceptional writing even as it remains about as tactful as the journalists it commends. But with no great moralizing or intricate arguments to make here, the story behind the scandal becomes a tad self-defeating. As can happen with any awards season fare of the based on a true story breed, the history itself is more important than the film could hope to be.
Spotlight is a strong drama with an urgent script and agenda — if only a compact film ripped from a blooming imagination such as Alex Garland's Ex Machina could’ve received recognition instead.
15. Milk
Leveed by incredible work by Sean Penn, Josh Brolin and James Franco, the review of recent history laid out in Milk inspiringly encapsulates the optimism and struggle of both gay acceptance and grassroots political movements.
Gus Van Sant's film was a late iteration of his fundemental imprint on the New Queer Cinema movement of last century. Especially following a slew of formally daring, critically divisive experiments (Gerry, Elephant, Last Days and Paranoid Park), Milk’s classical script was a welcome reversion sure enough to stir emotions as easily as it informed. While Martin McDonagh exceptional debut In Bruges surely merited a win, Harvey Milk's story is nevertheless an essential excerpt in the uphill battle of civil rights.
14. Almost Famous
Cameron Crowe’s most affectionate and endearing of his rosy-cheeked repertoire stands just above Jerry Maguire as his strongest feat to date. Profundity, laughs and cultural commentary propel Crowe’s film as a piece of autobiography and an engaging, well-constructed story. The writer-director’s heartfelt screenplay becomes exceptionally cinematic in the hands of a capable cast.
Elevated beyond Crowe’s trademark sentiment, Almost Famous’ box office bombing is rather fitting since its cult reputation has only broadened over time. One of the defining non-musical films about music, Almost Famous encases the thrill of fandom and the empty vanity of stardom with agreeable, enlightening dialogue.
13. Promising Young Woman
12. Juno
Wisely removing the politics of women’s rights from the gist of its premise, Juno tackles teen comedy and the coming-of-age story from a snidely mature and incredibly contemporary perspective. Juno herself is as much a now-classic character as a vessel to explore the condition and outlook of the hipster millennial. While the hyper-clever dialogue can be an earful, Diablo Cody’s debut screenplay, perfectly realized by Jason Reitman, is still a marvel in capturing its generation's zeitgeist. Not every teenager possesses Aaron Sorkin-like wit but communication through wannabe catchphrases and affected sarcasm is spot on.
Finding the lightness in the overwhelming confusion of adolescence, Cody’s screenplay leaves the morals of unwanted pregnancy in 2007 to 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and instead fashions unforgettable characters and some of the most quotable exchanges heard this millennia.
11. Talk to Her
Morally challenging and dramatically unconventional, Talk to Her found Pedro Almodóvar with plenty more to prove beyond where his lengthy catalogue already was before 2002.
Uncharacteristically focusing on the men of his story, the time-hopping, perspective-shifting tale of a complicated friendship takes many unexpected and disquieting turns throughout. The zigzagged narrative comfortably covers loneliness, grief, unrequited love and the ambiguity of truth without coming off scattershot or overstretched.
Though the female characters take the backseat due to their respective comas, Almodóvar does them justice by exploring their identities through their counterparts. Unpredictable and darkly poetic, Talk to Her’s fitting win made an easy case that more non-English films should be honored outside of the Best Foreign Language Film category.
10. Django Unchained
While Inglourious Basterds is seemingly engraved as his mid-career peak, Django Unchained is at least arguably equivalent if not superior. Before his unhinged tastes got the better of him in The Hateful Eight, Tarantino really hit a sweet spot in his revisionist slavery revenge flick, which honors Westerns even moreso than Kill Bill: Volume 2.
Tarantino’s celebrated mastery of tension through discourse is gratifyingly reaffirmed in the extensive dialogue sequences involving Leonardo DiCaprio’s superb crack at Calvin Candie and the absurdities that go down at Candyland ranch.
With a win already to Tarantino’s name, the more respectable choice would have been Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom. Anderson has never won despite several nominations and that 2012 adolescent romance is the most ravishing of his fanciful collection.
9. The Hurt Locker
Depicting the lives of soldiers who recently fought in Iraq without glorifying the situation is a narrow tightrope to cross when the film is essentially the character study of a cavalier, reckless thrill-junkie. Nevertheless Mark Boal does an extraordinary job cramming thrills, commentary and purposeful character development into the film’s month-long timeline in Bravo Company’s final rotation as they dismantle explosives in harrowing, gradually escalating situations.
Thematically, Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker isn’t terribly complex. It opens with a simple quote that it advances by revealing the layers of Jeremy Renner’s character. While real events have served the Boal/Bigelow pairing well in further films (Zero Dark Thirty, Detroit) — with fiction built on Boal's journalistic eye, the gravity of our incessant meddling in the Middle East is still drawn with candor and realism.
8. Get Out
This one would smack of consolatory, courtesy awards-giving if Get Out wasn’t a big moment in cinema for both critics and audiences. If Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election, every part of Jordon Peele's picture of everyday racism and high concept killers would still hit the nail on the head. It makes points discreetly and without an excess of cult-clamoring, zeitgeist-primed insanity. It’s just an ingenious horror flick borne out of the ‘social thrillers’ as Peele calls them (Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives) around fifty years prior. Peele nearly outdid himself in the allegorical Us but Get Out will linger longer and more fervently in cultural memory as American racial tensions persist.
Meritorious as Peele may have been, Greta Gerwig had an equally poignant debut screenplay to match (Lady Bird) and Martin McDonagh (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) will be overdue by his next project.
7. Manchester by the Sea
Anyone who writes off Manchester by the Sea as a miserably depressing drama has forgotten just how funny the script really is. Powered by sincere, realistic performances, Lonergan’s drifting narrative has enough payoffs in its character's variable relationships, as well as barefaced, theatrical moments of melodrama, to fill a season of television.
In a year when any nominee could have walked away with the Oscar and deserved it — the good company also included La La Land, The Lobster, 20th Century Women and Hell or High Water — Lonergan’s understated masterwork still feels like the right choice. The tonal shades this film finds within the foibles of grief are somehow chilling and warming; Manchester is full of tremendous feeling despite how simple the story really is. The melancholy and sympathy are actually acutely comforting when fully embraced because Lonergan cultivates his Bostonian neorealism with stark plainness and poetic candor.
6. Gosford Park
The actor, novelist and writer-director Julian Fellowes made a noble screenwriting debut with Gosford Park, a studied whodunit based solely on an idea pitched by Bob Balaban, one in an enormous cast of mostly well-known British talents. Fellowes even helps Balaban tease the audience with a tear into the fourth wall — his character is a producer attempting to put together a film with the same premise playing out in Robert Altman's late masterpiece.
With such a wealth of characters, the actual narrative thrust of Gosford Park is in first gear, leaving you with plenty of chances to relish the subtext within the peculiar individual relations and try to keep a few names straight. The film is so stripped of plot that its web of Jane Austen characters trapped in an Agatha Christie mystery would probably fit better on the page. But when you have Britain’s elite thespians and dense, thoughtful material, it’s hard not to be entertained by the satirical spectacle of conducting a vast ensemble of eccentric personalities and possible suspects.
As a thriller it may be less than jolting — the murder doesn't occur for over an hour — but the classic smarts of Altman's film are a treat to savor all the same.
5. Her
An earnest, piercing dissection of modern romance and one of the most prescient science fiction films of the era, Her’s script is as moving on the page as it is on film.
That's not to take anything away from Spike Jonze and the way breathes life into an awkwardly authentic future-romance fable without a hitch. Jonze has always had a knack for satire and humor, but the unfulfilled pathos hiding in his two Charlie Kaufman-penned features and his Where the Wild Things Are adaptation emerges from the weeds in his most absolute, forthright feature thus far.
Punctuated by the so true sting of loneliness and modern technology’s way of distracting us from that void in our lives, Her intuitively handles thematic musings that are unavoidable in such a pontentially soft, saccharine sci-fi premise. But between the many fascinations of seeing a human/AI romantic relationship play out, Jonze treats us to hilarity and heaviness in manageable loads. Her is ultimately one of the most original love stories ever conceived for film and an earnestly human portrait of 21st century disillusionment.
4. Parasite
3. Midnight in Paris
Scaling the peak of his work in the late 70s, Midnight in Paris is the defining film of at least the last two dozen Woody Allen features. Wry, insightful, and continuing a legacy of engaging in philosophical quandaries and social commentary, this Owen Wilson-led film — which euphorically confirms the underrated actor as the best surrogate for Allen’s own voice — investigates the glorification of the past, curiosity vs. intellectualism and fresh romantic idiosyncrasies. A protagonist caught in a screenwriting rut and aiming to make his mark in literature also feels very autobiographical even by Woody’s standards.
Allen’s scripts are sometimes so singularly powered by dialogue that they would pass better as plays, but with an obviously gorgeous locale to send a cinematic love letter to, Midnight in Paris is a lovely visual experience to boot. This comforting late-era masterstroke fits into a filmography comprised of nearly 50 distillations of the writer-director’s formula, only this one stands out as an effortless, whimsical and downright enchanting time-travel fantasy romance rivaling The Purple Rose of Cairo.
2. Lost in Translation
Sofia Coppola’s gentle, meditative calling card wrestled the best out of leads Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson — their individual roles provide some of the finest work of their respective careers and fuse for a most adorable chemistry in their brief, nearly platonic Tokyo companionship.
The brilliance of the film and Coppola’s general skill at screenwriting is in how much she conveys without words by instead planting more meaning in looks and gestures than dialogue could ever do justice. She makes the touching of another’s foot look daring and rapturous and likewise karaoke is made spiritual and scandalous through her direction. If there were an Oscar for best curated soundtrack, Coppola would clean up.
Lost in Translation is splendidly romantic and yet Coppola is sharp enough to know that suggesting a yearning and a delicate subtext would be infinitely more tender than a textbook travelogue movie affair. The sparse dialogue could be held in question for an Original Screenplay win, but whenever Murray or Johansson speak, they have our complete attention in their most lowly first world problems as well as in their late night existential anxiety.
1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Insightfully and ingeniously written, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a true original and a high water mark for Kaufman’s potential as of his career in 2004. It’s matched in quality by Kaufman’s only writer-director triumphs in Synecdoche, New York and Anomalisa, which is to say he’s been on a roll.
In terms of plotting and themes, no other Best Original Screenplay winner has been so singular or significant. The film’s genre intricacies — which comingle romantic comedy, sci-fi and surrealism to truly bizarre conclusions — have an equal hand in aiding Kaufman’s revelatory writing process. How does one show the light at the end of the tunnel after a devastating breakup? Kaufman illustrates that without our worst memories we wouldn’t even be ourselves.
Observational, uniquely clever and doused with potent dreaminess where needed, Eternal Sunshine became something to cherish with the assistance of a great cast and Michel Gondry’s exemplary eye. The humanity and imagination of Charlie Kaufman’s original script offers peculiar narrative gratification along with universal human truths. As a story alone, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind stands as one of the most venerable screenplays of our time.
*Published at TasteofCinema.com / November 11th, 2017
Every 21st Century Oscar Winner for Best Cinematography Ranked
Cinematography is the aspect of filmmaking most unique to the medium. The camera has a relation to the spectator as well as what is being filmed; it’s the bare bones of the genuine language of cinema.
The Academy Awards have honored many deserving films of beauty in our millennia while, as with any category or any given Oscar year, several injustices have been made. This list hopes to separate those films with timeless appeal from works of only a momentary impression.
21. Slumdog Millionaire
Caught between the handheld grain of a Paul Greengrass Bourne movie and the saturated sheen of a J. J. Abrams joint, Slumdog Millionaire attempts to express the rags to riches tale of an Indian boy as filtered by Englishman Danny Boyle to please the minimal integrity of the undiscerning American masses cloying for sentiment of just this variety.
The Best Picture winner of 2008 opts for visual and narrative crowd-pleasing rather than providing a genuine slice of life perspective on poverty in India or any kind of decent Bollywood homage or revival. Dutch angles, vibrant colors and kinetic, momentous energy only go so far in Slumdog — it’s easily the least noteworthy of any film walking away with Best Cinematography in the 21st century. With eight total Oscar wins, Slumdog Millionaire capitalized on a generally weak year but, for the category in question, the film somehow beat The Dark Knight's Wally Pfister.
20. Avatar
Single-handedly sending 3D back to the forefront of Hollywood moviemaking, Avatar was a critical and commercial phenomenon that would, if nothing else, earn James Cameron respect for his talents as a director of unmatched technical ambitions.
However, Cameron’s first (of many more to come eventually and unfortunately) trek into Pandora doesn’t successfully inhabit a world, though I’m sure audiences and Oscar voters alike were astounded by the façade of his complex and expensive 3D technology back in 2009. The handheld style used to film most of this effects-laden epic tries to convince you of a filmic reality, but in the second dimension where it’ll forever be viewed (unless 3D TV’s somehow make it into the average living room) Cameron’s hollow extravaganza plays like a damn expensive, utterly familiar video game.
This feels like a case where technical prizes were awarded where justified — as it nabbed wins for Art Direction and obviously Visual Effects — but the art of camera movement in the highest grossing film of all time is less about creativity than trickery. With films as finely shot — and with such fewer frills — as Inglourious Basterds, The Hurt Locker and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, it’s a shame the Academy couldn’t see past the veil of Avatar’s unstoppable popularity and supposed innovations.
19. Life of Pi
Another case where technical craft is valued higher than dramatic accomplishment is Life of Pi, a decent film on the optic and storytelling fronts but simply undeserving of the award for Best Cinematography. The craft of Best Director winner Ang Lee’s film is not in its camerawork but as adaptation. Yann Martel's celebrated novel loses little of its vivid Robinson-Crusoe-plus-tiger vision.
Cinematographer Claudio Miranda at least deserves credit for making fine use of the enormous water tank employed for several months of filming and managing to craft a believable blockbuster out of the footage. But Miranda’s work is only so impressive. Life of Pi succeeds in translating believable fantasy but feels artistically trapped by the demands of the story. It's simply unremarkable on a purely visual level and did not fully deserve the award over the typically strong work of seasoned veterans like Roger Deakins for Skyfall, Janusz Kaminski for Lincoln and Robert Richardson for Django Unchained.
18. Memoirs of a Geisha
A Spielberg-backed, Rob Marshall-directed adaptation of an American bestseller entitled Memoirs of a Geisha was never going to scan as particularly genuine. Removed of its clunky, predictable story Memoirs is a comfortable visual treat but every flaw within and surrounding this film can’t help but taint the moving images as they wash over us.
Though it was unpopular in Japan for its controversial casting of Chinese actors in the lead roles, this filmmaking aspect can be overlooked. Everything that reminds us of its English-language origins and execution, however, does ruin the film’s impact. The splendor of Geisha’s production design is repeatedly undone by its startling lack of authenticity. Backed with an incredible budget and starring Chinese actors speaking clichés in English through thick accents, the tale about the difficult lives of Japanese women becomes utterly moot.
The gorgeous lighting and dynamic colors wielded by cinematographer Dion Beebe do little if anything to stimulate the mind beyond appreciating sets of ornate images. Don't get me started on how Memoirs bested Good Night, and Good Luck let alone The New World.
17. Mank
In the messiest year for the Academy since they fudged who won Best Picture — so not long, eh? — 2020 was cinematically handicapped and likewise the categories were feeble across the board. A particularly paltry pool of Best Cinematography selections is painful to swallow, especially when snubbed films like First Cow, I’m Thinking of Ending Things and Tenet rightly should’ve been nominated and might've won well within reason.
Mank looks good enough — Fincher doesn’t mess around when it comes to the technical details but in this streaming era he also can’t quite escape that Netflix polish. The aspect ratio and doggedly digital format sort of contrast the idea of antiquated reproduction, and not in a nice chiaroscuro way. Judas and the Black Messiah and Nomadland are shot well enough but including The Trial of the Chicago 7 and News of the World among the year's supposed best is truly laughable.
16. 1917
If we’re awarding technical accomplishment, then Roger Deakins justly nabbed another award while channeling his contemporary Emmanuel Lubezki’s one-take insanity and wonderful invisible editing. 1917 is nothing less than a professional visual exercise. But the ultimate emptiness adds little to the WWI genre besides a cinematic form that will most appeal to gamers, Deakins pulls off some miracles but the efforts are artistically muddled by Sam Mendes' limitations.
The Lighthouse is the honest standout, while Quentin Tarantino’s best in forever was plenty worth rewarding in this department. All I’m saying is where was the love for Deakins back in 2007 or any of the other dozen times?
15. The Revenant 14. Birdman 13. Gravity
Speaking of Lubezki, let's condense those three consecutive Oscar wins. Lubezki is one of the most talented cinematographers working today and has been crowned as such — if only his wins were for his most exquisite contributions. The Tree of Life, Children of Men and The New World all stand as better films and more transcendent visual experiences that, though given a nod by the Academy, were never graced with a warranted win.
I find Gravity to be the finest of his winning work, as Alfonso Cuarón’s quest for technical perfection allowed Lubezki the opportunity to explore impossible scenarios. That absurdly magnificent opening shot is better than the film itself and elsewhere Lubezki still composes lasting images such as Sandra Bullock’s floating fetal position in the womb of a safe spacecraft.
Birdman’s single-take gimmick as well as The Revenant’s serene view of the wintry wilderness both make for in-moment movie magic that is washed clean the minute you reflect on either film. Birdman is ideologically simple-minded, as Lubezki’s singular eye convinces you you’re watching something that could actually win Best Picture. And while prominently featuring Leo’s most try-hard Oscar-face, The Revenant's uninspired true story premise is drawn out to epic length as once again Alejandro Iñárritu uses Lubezki as a crutch for his own shortcomings.
Movies as peerlessly framed as Inside Llewyn Davis, The Grand Budapest Hotel and Mad Max: Fury Road were needlessly neglected for the sake of an gratuitous three-peat, that's all there is to it.
12. Hugo
If you’re going to film a love letter to early cinema, you better be doing something interesting with your camera. But when the cinematographer is Robert Richardson, with Martin Scorsese is at the helm, chances are the results are going to be pretty stunning.
Hugo is a quaint story with a massive budget and sadly audiences didn’t turn out for something so dissimilar to the famous director's familiar wheelhouse. But just in regard to its extraordinary opening shot — which in 3D or 2D makes James Cameron look like a bit of a hack — Hugo sings through Scorsese's fusion of classical and cutting edge. Even in its smallest moments there is something to appreciate in the camera's eye.
11. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
Master and Commander has so much going for it apart from the language of the camera that the reasonable quality in this department is easy enough to overlook.
Chaotic in sparse moments of battle and sweeping in its aerial photography, the film's cinematography is lacking somewhat only in its scenes of dialogue, strongly staged and acted as they may be. Most of the paradoxically epic and intimate qualities of this sole Patrick O’Brian adaptation can be attributed to its flawlessly inhabited universe, which makes the historical part of its fiction as painstakingly accurate as possible.
The Far Side of the World comes off uncommonly realistic, but that’s less to do with what the camera aims for than it is the brilliant production and costume design paying off. When the cast, crew and characters finally get to stretch their legs on the Galapagos Islands, cinematographer Russell Boyd too gets to breathe in the space of freedom after being stuck so long in close quarters.
10. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Ang Lee’s 2000 wuxia film managed to become a worldwide phenomenon and its appealing potency has hardly waned. Crouching Tiger handles grand scale and patient pace with the assistance of cinematographer Peter Pau. The martial arts sequences are thankfully allowed a reserved distance, often capturing the whole conflict in clarity rather than in quick cuts and close-ups. The almost otherworld setting is the film's spacious, scenic springboard to further the film’s visual majesty.
The film is somewhat less than magnificent outside of its more lavish aspects but as a whole the production of Crouching Tiger remains outstanding to behold and all the more praiseworthy for single-handedly helping keep world cinema relevant for domestic folk in the 21st century.
9. Inception
Though as years pass my admiration for Inception has waned due to how little of the script actually aspires to the surreal — or at least the generally dreamlike — I can’t say that Wally Pfister’s skilled hand, this time partly in high speed digital photography, doesn’t make Nolan’s mind-bending actioner all the more brilliant. Just those remarkable takes of Joseph Gordon-Levitt's spinning hallway brawl would be enough to hand Pfister a trophy.
With sublime compositions of color — steely blues and greys offset deep, warm tones, especially between the first two dream levels — Pfister makes the most of Nolan’s complex vision while devising a fairly easy visual experience to navigate. Their collective labors culminate in the finest fruits the Nolan-Pfister pairing ever reaped.
8. Roma
Roma was Netflix's first solid gold Oscar bait real estate but unlike Fincher's Mank, Cuarón's black-and-white, personally important career shift topped a strong year and resisted the stigma and limitations of the stream-glean. Cuarón’s evolving extended takes extract all possible cinematic value from the pivotal moments — I’ve never been so awe-struck by steadily panning cameras.
The surrounding contenders had a lot of showmanship but few films evoked such powerful poetry from such filmographic simplicities. The Favourite’s fish-eyed elegance and Cold War’s stark stylishness easily could’ve snagged this one without a fuss.
7. The Aviator
Utilizing every technique necessary to convey the reality of a life lived — in this case Howard Hughes — The Aviator was probably the most ambitious film of Scorsese’s career by 2004.
The camera carefully reflects the cracks in Hughes psyche as his obsessive-compulsive disorder worsens with age, like the slow motion and fast editing of blinding camera bulbs in his moments of public fame and the stark symmetry of the memorable bathroom scenes showcasing his fear of germs. Scorsese even manipulated the film’s look to reflect that of early bipack color films.
Every moment of motion is arresting. At three hours in length, The Aviator feels like it could go on another act or so as Scorsese’s sweeping biographical drama seems to only convey a fraction of what fascinates him about the adventurous filmmaker, engineer and business magnate. Robert Richardson’s second win of the century in collaboration with Scorsese operates as an epic, captivating historical simulacrum.
6. Pan’s Labyrinth
Guillermo Del Toro’s calling card, which intrinsically blends dark fantasy with grim wartime elements, is an indisputably passionate creation.
Exceedingly love and crushingly bleak, Pan’s Labyrinth’s oscillating cinematography is the forefront property to technically fulfill this original, heartwrenching fairy tale. Like the best of Spielberg’s work with Kaminski, every emotional beat of this story is realized by the gestures and perspective of the camera. Del Toro’s view, along with cinematographer Guillermo Navarro, is constantly enamored by wonder.
I’m not quite sure how the Academy could pass over Lubezki’s flawless work in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men — film photography that stands with the best of the current century — but if it was going to lose, it should have been at the sight of Pan’s Labyrinth.
5. Road to Perdition
Like an update of the stylistic facets of film noir, Road to Perdition was the grand finale for the illustrious career of Conrad L. Hall, who earned his third Academy Award — and second with Sam Mendes along with American Beauty — after nearly fifty active years as a director of photography.
What he exhibits through the sheer balance of light and shadow is enough to commend Hall, but he somehow makes a cheerless color film feel as if it was actually ripped from an age of black and white and revitalized for modern times. He emulates both the graphic novel from which the film is based and the atmospheric influences of painter Edward Hopper.
Stunning sequences like the rainy climax as Hanks’ Michael Sullivan finally finishes off his faithless father figure in Paul Newman’s John Rooney is a substantial payoff of the compositional restraint and extraordinary blocking beforehand. And contemporary techniques like POV — implemented when Sullivan Jr. sees firsthand what his father does for a living — balance out everything seemingly old-fashioned about Road to Perdition.
4. Blade Runner 2049
As Denis Villeneuve was broaching the mainstream without selling out, Blade Runner 2049 became an exceptional blockbuster event (and an inevitable flop). The belated sequel employs so many practical effects that Deakins is simply making the most of superlative production design and Oscar-winning visual effects to achieve the screensaver-suited sci-fi goods. The film's neon-noir look is cleaner than Ridley Scott's original, and in its boldest saturations the look is easy to make fun of: Ryan Gosling has a thing for being silhouetted by bisexual lighting.
Nonetheless Deakins' ultimate goods are magnificent, imposing, and just downright impressive. The cinematography is enough to move the film dangerously close to the discussion of modern classics. It’s gratifying that Deakins much deserved, long overdue legacy award was dolled out for a career-encompassing pass with the camera. He easily smoked Hoyte van Hoytema's expansive, practical polish for Dunkirk, Bruno Delbonnel's period haze in Darkest Hour or even the sheer viscosity of The Shape of Water.
3. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Though supported by years of pre-visualization, revolutionary visual effects, perfect casting and so much else that went right with Peter Jackson’s monumental Middle-earth undertaking, Andrew Lesnie’s own offerings in this and each Lord of the Rings installment are vivacious and unmistakably inspired. The Two Towers and The Return of the King were not even nominated for cinematography in following years but throughout the trilogy Lesnie locates an updated expressionism for both the splendid and the sinister sides of Tolkien’s lore.
Actually reading the mammoth fairy tale really makes you appreciate how Lesnie and Jackson managed to transpose something so seemingly bound to the page and make dynamic, cinematic sense of it all. The use of miniatures, WETA’s digital magic and the intuitive use of New Zealand’s breathtaking locales all are in aid of marvelously actualizing the first leg of Frodo’s journey and beyond.
Fellowship itself conjures incredible tricks of forced perspective in order to deal with the hobbits' height difference, among other savvy illusions that let this high fantasy appear rightly so. The independent nature of the massive three-film shoot never results in cutting corners but rather breaking the mold, with Fellowship often considered the most impressive for having the fewest digital effects. Lesnie is able create countless images as iconic as the elements of the story itself – he makes the impossible look so very real.
2. La La Land
Even if you’re one of those soulless bastards somehow not emotionally affected by Damien Chazelle’s second feature, even the most cynical curmudgeon would have to admit La La Land is spectacularly shot.
It is exuberant to watch fledgling auteur Damien Chazelle paint in such masterful strokes, spreading his wings as a director to the full realization of his inner vision by way of a modern musical undertaking no doubt inspired by his adoration for Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Chazelle’s master-class editing made Whiplash a fittingly rhythmic visual experience, though here the highlight is in the magic of stimulating, tirelessly rehearsed unbroken takes.
Despite the wild ambition of these astonishing oners in practice, Chazelle and cinematographer Linus Sandgren never draw attention to themselves the way Lubezki might ostentatiously flaunt an accomplished long shot. Whether it’s a pivotal number like “A Lovely Night” or the intimacy of Emma Stone’s “Audition,” Chazelle is mathematical about technical and emotional synchronicity. Utilizing whip-pans, dreamy lighting and faultless stirs of movement, La La Land is somehow full of ardent feeling and thrilling perfectionism.
1. There Will Be Blood
Between Deakins’ magnificent imprint on No Country For Old Men and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, as well as Kaminski’s work in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, 2007 was a prestige year for the art of cinematography. The fact that Robert Elswit’s camerawork in There Will Be Blood still bests these incredible contenders is evidence enough of how amazing a visual experience it really is.
Elswit has been Paul Thomas Anderson’s right hand man since Hard Eight, and his subtle, stately compositions have only improved with each film of this partnership — their latest collaboration in Inherent Vice is like a free tutorial in shooting interesting dialogue. But in the case of There Will Be Blood, virtually any frame could be hung up on the wall and practically every take is it’s own momentary work of art. Something as simple as Daniel Plainview mapping his pipeline is an astonishing accomplishment of precision, gently basking in the beautiful Texas landscapes while tapping into the knotty morality at the center of Anderson’s themes and larger than life characters. Beyond the film’s immortal ending, the number of remarkable scenes on a purely visual plane is abundant.
There Will Be Blood rapidly transcends from an experimental period piece to the heights of mythic drama, like it was ripped from some dark, succulent nebulous — a feat in severe debt to Elswit’s instinctive talent with the camera.
*Published at TasteofCinema.com / September 29th, 2017
The Academy Awards have honored many deserving films of beauty in our millennia while, as with any category or any given Oscar year, several injustices have been made. This list hopes to separate those films with timeless appeal from works of only a momentary impression.
21. Slumdog Millionaire
Caught between the handheld grain of a Paul Greengrass Bourne movie and the saturated sheen of a J. J. Abrams joint, Slumdog Millionaire attempts to express the rags to riches tale of an Indian boy as filtered by Englishman Danny Boyle to please the minimal integrity of the undiscerning American masses cloying for sentiment of just this variety.
The Best Picture winner of 2008 opts for visual and narrative crowd-pleasing rather than providing a genuine slice of life perspective on poverty in India or any kind of decent Bollywood homage or revival. Dutch angles, vibrant colors and kinetic, momentous energy only go so far in Slumdog — it’s easily the least noteworthy of any film walking away with Best Cinematography in the 21st century. With eight total Oscar wins, Slumdog Millionaire capitalized on a generally weak year but, for the category in question, the film somehow beat The Dark Knight's Wally Pfister.
20. Avatar
Single-handedly sending 3D back to the forefront of Hollywood moviemaking, Avatar was a critical and commercial phenomenon that would, if nothing else, earn James Cameron respect for his talents as a director of unmatched technical ambitions.
However, Cameron’s first (of many more to come eventually and unfortunately) trek into Pandora doesn’t successfully inhabit a world, though I’m sure audiences and Oscar voters alike were astounded by the façade of his complex and expensive 3D technology back in 2009. The handheld style used to film most of this effects-laden epic tries to convince you of a filmic reality, but in the second dimension where it’ll forever be viewed (unless 3D TV’s somehow make it into the average living room) Cameron’s hollow extravaganza plays like a damn expensive, utterly familiar video game.
This feels like a case where technical prizes were awarded where justified — as it nabbed wins for Art Direction and obviously Visual Effects — but the art of camera movement in the highest grossing film of all time is less about creativity than trickery. With films as finely shot — and with such fewer frills — as Inglourious Basterds, The Hurt Locker and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, it’s a shame the Academy couldn’t see past the veil of Avatar’s unstoppable popularity and supposed innovations.
19. Life of Pi
Another case where technical craft is valued higher than dramatic accomplishment is Life of Pi, a decent film on the optic and storytelling fronts but simply undeserving of the award for Best Cinematography. The craft of Best Director winner Ang Lee’s film is not in its camerawork but as adaptation. Yann Martel's celebrated novel loses little of its vivid Robinson-Crusoe-plus-tiger vision.
Cinematographer Claudio Miranda at least deserves credit for making fine use of the enormous water tank employed for several months of filming and managing to craft a believable blockbuster out of the footage. But Miranda’s work is only so impressive. Life of Pi succeeds in translating believable fantasy but feels artistically trapped by the demands of the story. It's simply unremarkable on a purely visual level and did not fully deserve the award over the typically strong work of seasoned veterans like Roger Deakins for Skyfall, Janusz Kaminski for Lincoln and Robert Richardson for Django Unchained.
18. Memoirs of a Geisha
A Spielberg-backed, Rob Marshall-directed adaptation of an American bestseller entitled Memoirs of a Geisha was never going to scan as particularly genuine. Removed of its clunky, predictable story Memoirs is a comfortable visual treat but every flaw within and surrounding this film can’t help but taint the moving images as they wash over us.
Though it was unpopular in Japan for its controversial casting of Chinese actors in the lead roles, this filmmaking aspect can be overlooked. Everything that reminds us of its English-language origins and execution, however, does ruin the film’s impact. The splendor of Geisha’s production design is repeatedly undone by its startling lack of authenticity. Backed with an incredible budget and starring Chinese actors speaking clichés in English through thick accents, the tale about the difficult lives of Japanese women becomes utterly moot.
The gorgeous lighting and dynamic colors wielded by cinematographer Dion Beebe do little if anything to stimulate the mind beyond appreciating sets of ornate images. Don't get me started on how Memoirs bested Good Night, and Good Luck let alone The New World.
17. Mank
In the messiest year for the Academy since they fudged who won Best Picture — so not long, eh? — 2020 was cinematically handicapped and likewise the categories were feeble across the board. A particularly paltry pool of Best Cinematography selections is painful to swallow, especially when snubbed films like First Cow, I’m Thinking of Ending Things and Tenet rightly should’ve been nominated and might've won well within reason.
Mank looks good enough — Fincher doesn’t mess around when it comes to the technical details but in this streaming era he also can’t quite escape that Netflix polish. The aspect ratio and doggedly digital format sort of contrast the idea of antiquated reproduction, and not in a nice chiaroscuro way. Judas and the Black Messiah and Nomadland are shot well enough but including The Trial of the Chicago 7 and News of the World among the year's supposed best is truly laughable.
16. 1917
If we’re awarding technical accomplishment, then Roger Deakins justly nabbed another award while channeling his contemporary Emmanuel Lubezki’s one-take insanity and wonderful invisible editing. 1917 is nothing less than a professional visual exercise. But the ultimate emptiness adds little to the WWI genre besides a cinematic form that will most appeal to gamers, Deakins pulls off some miracles but the efforts are artistically muddled by Sam Mendes' limitations.
The Lighthouse is the honest standout, while Quentin Tarantino’s best in forever was plenty worth rewarding in this department. All I’m saying is where was the love for Deakins back in 2007 or any of the other dozen times?
15. The Revenant 14. Birdman 13. Gravity
Speaking of Lubezki, let's condense those three consecutive Oscar wins. Lubezki is one of the most talented cinematographers working today and has been crowned as such — if only his wins were for his most exquisite contributions. The Tree of Life, Children of Men and The New World all stand as better films and more transcendent visual experiences that, though given a nod by the Academy, were never graced with a warranted win.
I find Gravity to be the finest of his winning work, as Alfonso Cuarón’s quest for technical perfection allowed Lubezki the opportunity to explore impossible scenarios. That absurdly magnificent opening shot is better than the film itself and elsewhere Lubezki still composes lasting images such as Sandra Bullock’s floating fetal position in the womb of a safe spacecraft.
Birdman’s single-take gimmick as well as The Revenant’s serene view of the wintry wilderness both make for in-moment movie magic that is washed clean the minute you reflect on either film. Birdman is ideologically simple-minded, as Lubezki’s singular eye convinces you you’re watching something that could actually win Best Picture. And while prominently featuring Leo’s most try-hard Oscar-face, The Revenant's uninspired true story premise is drawn out to epic length as once again Alejandro Iñárritu uses Lubezki as a crutch for his own shortcomings.
Movies as peerlessly framed as Inside Llewyn Davis, The Grand Budapest Hotel and Mad Max: Fury Road were needlessly neglected for the sake of an gratuitous three-peat, that's all there is to it.
12. Hugo
If you’re going to film a love letter to early cinema, you better be doing something interesting with your camera. But when the cinematographer is Robert Richardson, with Martin Scorsese is at the helm, chances are the results are going to be pretty stunning.
Hugo is a quaint story with a massive budget and sadly audiences didn’t turn out for something so dissimilar to the famous director's familiar wheelhouse. But just in regard to its extraordinary opening shot — which in 3D or 2D makes James Cameron look like a bit of a hack — Hugo sings through Scorsese's fusion of classical and cutting edge. Even in its smallest moments there is something to appreciate in the camera's eye.
11. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
Master and Commander has so much going for it apart from the language of the camera that the reasonable quality in this department is easy enough to overlook.
Chaotic in sparse moments of battle and sweeping in its aerial photography, the film's cinematography is lacking somewhat only in its scenes of dialogue, strongly staged and acted as they may be. Most of the paradoxically epic and intimate qualities of this sole Patrick O’Brian adaptation can be attributed to its flawlessly inhabited universe, which makes the historical part of its fiction as painstakingly accurate as possible.
The Far Side of the World comes off uncommonly realistic, but that’s less to do with what the camera aims for than it is the brilliant production and costume design paying off. When the cast, crew and characters finally get to stretch their legs on the Galapagos Islands, cinematographer Russell Boyd too gets to breathe in the space of freedom after being stuck so long in close quarters.
10. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Ang Lee’s 2000 wuxia film managed to become a worldwide phenomenon and its appealing potency has hardly waned. Crouching Tiger handles grand scale and patient pace with the assistance of cinematographer Peter Pau. The martial arts sequences are thankfully allowed a reserved distance, often capturing the whole conflict in clarity rather than in quick cuts and close-ups. The almost otherworld setting is the film's spacious, scenic springboard to further the film’s visual majesty.
The film is somewhat less than magnificent outside of its more lavish aspects but as a whole the production of Crouching Tiger remains outstanding to behold and all the more praiseworthy for single-handedly helping keep world cinema relevant for domestic folk in the 21st century.
9. Inception
Though as years pass my admiration for Inception has waned due to how little of the script actually aspires to the surreal — or at least the generally dreamlike — I can’t say that Wally Pfister’s skilled hand, this time partly in high speed digital photography, doesn’t make Nolan’s mind-bending actioner all the more brilliant. Just those remarkable takes of Joseph Gordon-Levitt's spinning hallway brawl would be enough to hand Pfister a trophy.
With sublime compositions of color — steely blues and greys offset deep, warm tones, especially between the first two dream levels — Pfister makes the most of Nolan’s complex vision while devising a fairly easy visual experience to navigate. Their collective labors culminate in the finest fruits the Nolan-Pfister pairing ever reaped.
8. Roma
Roma was Netflix's first solid gold Oscar bait real estate but unlike Fincher's Mank, Cuarón's black-and-white, personally important career shift topped a strong year and resisted the stigma and limitations of the stream-glean. Cuarón’s evolving extended takes extract all possible cinematic value from the pivotal moments — I’ve never been so awe-struck by steadily panning cameras.
The surrounding contenders had a lot of showmanship but few films evoked such powerful poetry from such filmographic simplicities. The Favourite’s fish-eyed elegance and Cold War’s stark stylishness easily could’ve snagged this one without a fuss.
7. The Aviator
Utilizing every technique necessary to convey the reality of a life lived — in this case Howard Hughes — The Aviator was probably the most ambitious film of Scorsese’s career by 2004.
The camera carefully reflects the cracks in Hughes psyche as his obsessive-compulsive disorder worsens with age, like the slow motion and fast editing of blinding camera bulbs in his moments of public fame and the stark symmetry of the memorable bathroom scenes showcasing his fear of germs. Scorsese even manipulated the film’s look to reflect that of early bipack color films.
Every moment of motion is arresting. At three hours in length, The Aviator feels like it could go on another act or so as Scorsese’s sweeping biographical drama seems to only convey a fraction of what fascinates him about the adventurous filmmaker, engineer and business magnate. Robert Richardson’s second win of the century in collaboration with Scorsese operates as an epic, captivating historical simulacrum.
6. Pan’s Labyrinth
Guillermo Del Toro’s calling card, which intrinsically blends dark fantasy with grim wartime elements, is an indisputably passionate creation.
Exceedingly love and crushingly bleak, Pan’s Labyrinth’s oscillating cinematography is the forefront property to technically fulfill this original, heartwrenching fairy tale. Like the best of Spielberg’s work with Kaminski, every emotional beat of this story is realized by the gestures and perspective of the camera. Del Toro’s view, along with cinematographer Guillermo Navarro, is constantly enamored by wonder.
I’m not quite sure how the Academy could pass over Lubezki’s flawless work in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men — film photography that stands with the best of the current century — but if it was going to lose, it should have been at the sight of Pan’s Labyrinth.
5. Road to Perdition
Like an update of the stylistic facets of film noir, Road to Perdition was the grand finale for the illustrious career of Conrad L. Hall, who earned his third Academy Award — and second with Sam Mendes along with American Beauty — after nearly fifty active years as a director of photography.
What he exhibits through the sheer balance of light and shadow is enough to commend Hall, but he somehow makes a cheerless color film feel as if it was actually ripped from an age of black and white and revitalized for modern times. He emulates both the graphic novel from which the film is based and the atmospheric influences of painter Edward Hopper.
Stunning sequences like the rainy climax as Hanks’ Michael Sullivan finally finishes off his faithless father figure in Paul Newman’s John Rooney is a substantial payoff of the compositional restraint and extraordinary blocking beforehand. And contemporary techniques like POV — implemented when Sullivan Jr. sees firsthand what his father does for a living — balance out everything seemingly old-fashioned about Road to Perdition.
4. Blade Runner 2049
As Denis Villeneuve was broaching the mainstream without selling out, Blade Runner 2049 became an exceptional blockbuster event (and an inevitable flop). The belated sequel employs so many practical effects that Deakins is simply making the most of superlative production design and Oscar-winning visual effects to achieve the screensaver-suited sci-fi goods. The film's neon-noir look is cleaner than Ridley Scott's original, and in its boldest saturations the look is easy to make fun of: Ryan Gosling has a thing for being silhouetted by bisexual lighting.
Nonetheless Deakins' ultimate goods are magnificent, imposing, and just downright impressive. The cinematography is enough to move the film dangerously close to the discussion of modern classics. It’s gratifying that Deakins much deserved, long overdue legacy award was dolled out for a career-encompassing pass with the camera. He easily smoked Hoyte van Hoytema's expansive, practical polish for Dunkirk, Bruno Delbonnel's period haze in Darkest Hour or even the sheer viscosity of The Shape of Water.
3. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Though supported by years of pre-visualization, revolutionary visual effects, perfect casting and so much else that went right with Peter Jackson’s monumental Middle-earth undertaking, Andrew Lesnie’s own offerings in this and each Lord of the Rings installment are vivacious and unmistakably inspired. The Two Towers and The Return of the King were not even nominated for cinematography in following years but throughout the trilogy Lesnie locates an updated expressionism for both the splendid and the sinister sides of Tolkien’s lore.
Actually reading the mammoth fairy tale really makes you appreciate how Lesnie and Jackson managed to transpose something so seemingly bound to the page and make dynamic, cinematic sense of it all. The use of miniatures, WETA’s digital magic and the intuitive use of New Zealand’s breathtaking locales all are in aid of marvelously actualizing the first leg of Frodo’s journey and beyond.
Fellowship itself conjures incredible tricks of forced perspective in order to deal with the hobbits' height difference, among other savvy illusions that let this high fantasy appear rightly so. The independent nature of the massive three-film shoot never results in cutting corners but rather breaking the mold, with Fellowship often considered the most impressive for having the fewest digital effects. Lesnie is able create countless images as iconic as the elements of the story itself – he makes the impossible look so very real.
2. La La Land
Even if you’re one of those soulless bastards somehow not emotionally affected by Damien Chazelle’s second feature, even the most cynical curmudgeon would have to admit La La Land is spectacularly shot.
It is exuberant to watch fledgling auteur Damien Chazelle paint in such masterful strokes, spreading his wings as a director to the full realization of his inner vision by way of a modern musical undertaking no doubt inspired by his adoration for Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Chazelle’s master-class editing made Whiplash a fittingly rhythmic visual experience, though here the highlight is in the magic of stimulating, tirelessly rehearsed unbroken takes.
Despite the wild ambition of these astonishing oners in practice, Chazelle and cinematographer Linus Sandgren never draw attention to themselves the way Lubezki might ostentatiously flaunt an accomplished long shot. Whether it’s a pivotal number like “A Lovely Night” or the intimacy of Emma Stone’s “Audition,” Chazelle is mathematical about technical and emotional synchronicity. Utilizing whip-pans, dreamy lighting and faultless stirs of movement, La La Land is somehow full of ardent feeling and thrilling perfectionism.
1. There Will Be Blood
Between Deakins’ magnificent imprint on No Country For Old Men and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, as well as Kaminski’s work in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, 2007 was a prestige year for the art of cinematography. The fact that Robert Elswit’s camerawork in There Will Be Blood still bests these incredible contenders is evidence enough of how amazing a visual experience it really is.
Elswit has been Paul Thomas Anderson’s right hand man since Hard Eight, and his subtle, stately compositions have only improved with each film of this partnership — their latest collaboration in Inherent Vice is like a free tutorial in shooting interesting dialogue. But in the case of There Will Be Blood, virtually any frame could be hung up on the wall and practically every take is it’s own momentary work of art. Something as simple as Daniel Plainview mapping his pipeline is an astonishing accomplishment of precision, gently basking in the beautiful Texas landscapes while tapping into the knotty morality at the center of Anderson’s themes and larger than life characters. Beyond the film’s immortal ending, the number of remarkable scenes on a purely visual plane is abundant.
There Will Be Blood rapidly transcends from an experimental period piece to the heights of mythic drama, like it was ripped from some dark, succulent nebulous — a feat in severe debt to Elswit’s instinctive talent with the camera.
*Published at TasteofCinema.com / September 29th, 2017
10 Films From The 21st Century That Deserved Greater Box Office Success
If the mainstream filmgoer cared more about independent film, it would feel a more just cinematic world — but lo, it will never be so. But even the supposed connoisseur would have to admit a film that is both good and popular is at least just as miraculous as a low-budget indie treasure. Many films that flop deserve to but with so many dollars at stake the fickle nature of typical taste can deter the kind of films that should in fact be reaching far and through the masses.
So while I wish every great smaller film could turn its profit over like Jordan Peele did with Get Out, here are films designed to please many that only pleased a few, setting a sad precedent for the nonexistence of similar efforts.
10. Rango
Budget: $135,000,000
Domestic Gross: $123,477,607
Worldwide Total: $245,724,603
Easily one of the weirdest animated films of the current century, Rango stands with some of Pixar’s best of recent years in terms of originality and ragged self-assurance. It parodies the Western genre, doesn’t make its scruffy animal side characters look cute at all and is furthermore a skillful conception by a man who spent five years making an overly convoluted and cartoonish film trilogy out of a theme park ride.
Johnny Depp as a lost t-shirted pet lizard amidst the unforgiving desert and Wild West sounds like a bit of a stretch, and the Nickelodeon-backed endeavor was showered with enormous effort to underwhelming returns. While Disney can make any 3D animated adventure or musical they please, and the laziness of Illumination Entertainment’s output seems to be consistently popular, risks as big as this one shouldn’t be so enjoyable — but when they are it deserves to be noticed. Rango is special for Hans Zimmer’s score alone, which is a remarkable addition to the film.
A studio like Laika may put in incredible work with no real proceeds for the sake of art, but for as strange as Rango is, its talking animal dynamic was right up the alley of the average parent-child consumer duo that dictates what kids films live and die. This audience is not terribly discerning and it’s worth lamenting a year in which something as unexpected and interesting as Rango was outgrossed by the likes of Cars 2.
9. Hugo
Budget: $180,000,000
Domestic Gross: $73,864,507
Worldwide Total: $185,770,160
Martin Scorsese is locked into his gangster side in terms of box office profits — leaving more challenging works like Silence, which took him an eternity to get off the ground, with little recognition from most audiences.
Chief of these recently was 2011’s Hugo, which felt personal to Scorsese on many levels, primary of which being his unadorned love for film. Tracing the original magic back to the early days of cinema, the film's 3D is pretty spectacular in and of itself, capturing the antiquity of cinema through a digitally enhanced children’s film; the visual result is both quaint and yet so entrancing.
Asa Butterfield was at his height of leading young adult-aimed fare of this sort, his innocence and amusing friendship with Chloë Grace Moretz’ character providing a composite view of childhood curiosity and the innate wonder of movie-going.
That lofty price tag and unmarketable premise though pretty much sealed the film’s ill fate from the offset. Hugo, though forgotten more than the likes of popular, more Scorsese-esque works like The Departed and The Wolf of Wall Street, is still one of the finest films of his late career.
8. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Budget: $85,000,000
Domestic Gross: $31,524,275
Worldwide Total: $47,664,559
Baby Driver will hopefully put Edgar Wright further toward the front of the cinematic landscape, but it’s still a shame that few filmgoers found their way to Wright’s first non-British visual symphony.
After establishing such a cult following with the first two installments of the Cornetto trilogy and Spaced, American fans of the talented director didn’t justify Scott Pilgrim’s curiously sizable cost. But with more at his disposal, the insane visuals throughout make this perhaps his most purely entertaining attempt to date. Too bad the subculture of hipsters waiting for an adaptation of the Scott Pilgrim property didn’t help the disappointing numbers of this ingeniously edited and paced film.
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was also Michael Cera’s last real hurrah as a comic leading man, and he was surrounded by a wild, shrewd spectacle to counter his typical beta, mawkish charm. The film’s late summer release in 2010 should have yielded quite the breakout hit as a very original project with little competition. For every attribute this film has, poor marketing ultimately cast this gem out of the collective consciousness.
7. Cinderella Man
Budget: $88,000,000
Domestic Gross: $61,649,911
Worldwide Total: $108,539,911
Sports films haven’t had a new heyday in the 21st century. Disney churned them out one by one about a decade ago, but only left-field successes like Creed have been really worth celebrating, the obvious prestige of Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby notwithstanding. Cinderella Man is one of two excellent sports films by Ron Howard along with the similarly ignored Rush.
Howard (recent Stars Wars directorial recruit) has always teetered between his Oscar bids and mainstream schlock, but the happy middle met in the crossover appeal of Cinderella Man never connected with the American public the way it was destined to. An agreeable underdog premise, all-around decent filmmaking craft, praiseworthy performances by the likes of Russell Crowe, Paul Giamatti and company all suggested some level of box office glory.
By its nature Cinderella Man feels like a definitive crowd pleaser, from its historical drama surrounding the woes of the Great Depression to the predictability of its ultimate boxing-centric outcome. Closer to the heights of Apollo 13 and Frost/Nixon than, say, that Dan Brown trilogy, Cinderella Man unfortunately made money more equivalent to Oscar-aimed indies and came up short in that regard too with only three nominations.
Overlooked though it may be, Cinderella Man certainly stands as one of the best sports films of our era. It continued a fine run of Crowe-led dramas, didn’t stoop to sentimentality as vapidly as many of its genre do and the tale of James J. Braddock is a good story — in terms of biographical sports dramas, it’s one actually worth telling.
6. Watchmen
Budget: $130,000,000
Domestic Gross: $107,509,799
Worldwide Total: $185,258,983
Sometimes it seems like Zack Snyder is vehemently trying to prove he is not a good director. Before he was ruining DC films like there’s no tomorrow (Man of Steel, BvS: Dawn of Justice, and at least some of the forthcoming Justice League film) he was still making terrible films — and some of his best.
300 is still massively overrated but at least Sucker Punch was punished financially for its obscenities. On the flipside Legend of the Guardians, like Rango, is a children’s film just unrecognizable enough to be ignored by the public and is arguably his most pleasant film, capitalizing heavily on his signature visual style through animation, for the better.
But Watchmen, surely Snyder’s most ambitious and polarizing film, qualifies as his masterpiece if you can consider him to be one who could produce such a thing. No film has ever suited his aesthetic temperament so well and the sprawling film has many moments of fascinating spectacle that far outweigh a few instances of cringe-worthiness.
What’s most regrettable about the weak box office response is how great the source material is. The world and ideas of Watchmen satisfy every craving a mainstream public could have after believing in the artistic possibilities of superhero films in the wake of the pop culture moment that was 2008’s The Dark Knight.
People come out in droves for the predictable fun of Marvel’s endless cycle of comic book adaptations but somehow this serious try directed little more than the fans of the source material to the epically lengthed graphic novel adaptation. Sure, DC proved that imitating Christopher Nolan was not the road to creating good films within a cinematic universe now that Wonder Woman has exploded. But looking back, Watchmen was a moment in which the public’s voracious desire for superhero films should have been quenched and then some by this bold vision of what so many films capture as camp and recyclable escapism.
5. Edge of Tomorrow
Budget: $178,000,000
Domestic Gross: $100,206,256
Worldwide Total: $370,541,256
We may have been blessed with a sequel but seriously, the secondary life of the summer 2014 surprise formerly known as Edge of Tomorrow has been bumpy. Aside from the stupidity of changing the name of the film to its tagline Live Die Repeat, now the studios have incorporated this madness into the sequel’s title Live Die Repeat and Repeat.
For Tom Cruise, Edge of Tomorrow saw the continuation of his lessening box office draw outside of the Mission: Impossible franchise and The Mummy only proved this further. But seeing this Japanese sci-fi light novel adaptation, spearheaded by Cruise’s best work in the past decade, was a treat for those who made it to the theaters. It just felt like a more natural return to him bringing in big money with an original film, at least more than Oblivion.
From the natural humor of its premise to the grit and thrill of its D-Day-plus-killer-aliens setting to the repartee between Cruise and Emily Blunt — who essentially owns the movie — very little went wrong here. But despite its catchy Groundhog Day meets War of the Worlds scenario, Edge of Tomorrow barely inched past the 100 million dollar mark, while only a few weeks after its release hoards of people saw Transformers: Age of Extinction.
The power of Rotten Tomatoes to give films box office boosts seems only to increase, but back in 2014 a 90% plus score didn’t help this film. Edge of Tomorrow’s life post-theaters has hopefully left a slightly larger audience hungry for more, so here’s to hoping Doug Limon’s second film earns its lucky greenlight.
4. Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events
Budget: $140,000,000
Domestic Gross: $118,634,549
Worldwide Total: $209,073,645
In the wake of Harry Potter’s unwieldy success, the 2000s saw a slew of modern young adult fiction attempting sequel-building teen fantasy adoration. Up until The Hunger Games in 2012, virtually none had succeeded. But the worst blow for a series of its kind never to be was Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.
Nickelodeon and Paramount backed the film at a lofty 140 million and the resulting world of Daniel Handler’s twisted meta-Gothic children’s fables is visually sumptuous, possessing Emmanuel Lubezki’s immaculate, three-time Oscar winning touch in cinematography. Flawed as this film may be, Netflix’s iffy adaptation has revealed just how right Brad Silberling got it in 2004.
Beyond the exquisite production detail, the casting was damn near perfect as opposed to the hit or miss performances of the Neil Patrick Harris-led show. Carrey, unhinged as he may have been, is actually hilarious, eating up scenery like he’s been starved for days and doing the malicious character of Count Olaf justice. A comic actor playing an evil, terrible actor may have turned off people, but he balances the goofiness and menace fairly well. Liam Aiken and Emily Browning are also finely cast as our respective protagonists Klaus and Violet, while Bill Connelly, Timothy Spall and Meryl Streep all make great supporting turns. And Jude Law’s narration as Lemony Snicket was an impeccable choice.
Adapting The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room and The Wide Window into a single film simplified a few details but the quirk and postmodern worldbuilding rubs off neatly. This film set the stage for another 10 books that will never see the light of day in theaters yet it was still wise enough to wrap itself up nicely by the credits and dares to get rather emotional just before then.
The lack of competition facing A Series of Unfortunate Events in December of 2004 just shows that even when the time was ripe to profit from the fan base — all but two titles of the 13-part series were published — the turnout was not enough to validate further films.
3. Peter Pan
Budget: $100,000,000
Domestic Gross: $48,462,608
Worldwide Total: $121,975,011
Peter Pan seemed destined to be at least a minor classic of the family film regiment but was utterly swallowed up by the second weekend of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King on its Christmas 2003 weekend debut. To this day though it stands as the definitive version of J. M. Barrie’s timeless children’s fantasy — it makes the milquetoast flavor Disney’s 1953 version that is stamped in several generations minds look absurdly unrealized.
Jason Isaacs proper duel role as both Hook and George Darling is an underappreciated turn by an underappreciated actor. Olivia Williams is pretty incredible as Mary Darling. And the roles of Peter (Jeremy Sumpter) and Wendy (Rachel Hurd-Wood) are played with the correct respect to budding adolescence and performed with conviction, charm and grace by young actors all but disregarded after this more than profitless affair.
The lovely tone, convincing practical and visual effects and maturity towards its themes and dialogue make the tale all but timeless in its own right, though its been unheeded by many. But while parents took their kids to see Cheaper by the Dozen, which was released the same day, they ought to have been taking them to something worth its bulky budget and iconic name.
Largely this earnest adaptation succeeds in discussing topics of blossoming sexuality and the complexities of Peter and Wendy’s romance that Disney’s swill, and adaptations that like to cast women as Peter, ignore. Furthermore it feels handcrafted, sincerely emotional and should have made a bigger imprint on the collective fantasy milieu that was at its pinnacle of popularity at the moment.
2. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
Budget: $225,000,000
Domestic Gross: $141,621,490
Worldwide Total: $419,665,568
This was the beginning of the end for Narnia, as the big screen has known it. Disney’s first round in adapting C.S. Lewis' famous series paid off because they were dealing with the most popular book in the seven part fantasy saga — it even domestically outgrossed Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’s impressive resurgence for the wizarding series back in late 2005.
They intended for another winter release two years later, but the massively budgeted film was delayed and then slated for May 2008. That increase from 140 million to 225 was just what they did for Pirates of the Caribbean, but while Dead Man’s Chest became the third film ever to gross one billion dollars, Prince Caspian sputtered out with about half of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe’s earnings.
Mercilessly destroyed by its mid-May slot between Iron Man and the fourth Indiana Jones, the film opened decently and faded before earning even $150 million domestically. But Prince Caspian was superior to The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe in nearly every way. Less innocent, more exciting and more grandiose in its production, it proved that while the heights of cinematic fantasy — i.e. The Lord of the Rings — may never again be reached, we could enjoy something with equal capacity for wonder and worldbuilding, if not quite such abyss-like mythic depth.
Disney let it go after Caspian, and 20th Century Fox gave The Voyage of the Dawn Treader their best effort to middling results financially and critically. The Mark Gordon Company seeks to revamp the franchise with The Silver Chair, with Joe Johnston recently signed on the direct. But with close to a decade since the last entry, an inevitable Netflix reset might be due.
1. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
Budget: $150,000,000
Domestic Gross: $93,927,920
Worldwide Total: $212,011,111
Not only was Master and Commander one of the best films of 2003 — and one of the best adventure films of the 21st century — it was the start to what could have been the most intellectual series of historical action films cinema has ever seen.
Patrick O’Brien’s lengthy 20-book series of British naval war books during the Napoleonic Era has brought the prolific author to literary fame, but Peter Weir’s ambitious undertaking received a fraction of the attention it deserved and has been cursed with a less than propagating shelf life. The Far Side of the World stands as the lone entry, a David and Goliath tale for the high seas, with Russell Crowe’s towering Captain Jack Aubrey embarking across two oceans to wrangle the powerful French vessel The Acheron or “Phantom” with their sturdy but much quainter ship The HMS Surprise.
The film’s thoughtfully constructed sequel stinger teased the continuation of a series that ran aground out of the gate, grossing too much to call it a flop but not nearly enough to cause any fuss. Weir is even quoted stating how lukewarm reception ultimately sealed the fate of the potential Aubrey-Maturin film series — "I think that while it did well...ish at the box office, it didn't generate that monstrous, rapid income that provokes a sequel." And in late 2010 Russell Crowe urged fans on Twitter to contact Tom Rothman of Fox, to no avail in helping to revive the cause.
To this day though, Master and Commander remains one of the most sophisticated blockbusters ever conceived, its small-scale story unfolding into an epic of intimacy and meticulousness. The film's realism, exquisite photography, brilliant supporting cast led by Paul Bettany, awe-inspiring balance of choice classical music and Iva Davies score all converge at the summit of a perfect historical fiction. It provides a peek into a lost, outdated world that, for taking place over two centuries, is presented very much as modernity.
The film is told in an episodic nature and its several shifts from dilemma to dilemma form a genuine slice of Royal Navy life. Roughly released alongside the first Pirates of the Caribbean, the straitlaced contrast of Master and Commander bored many mainstream audiences with its lack of action and patient pace.
The Far Side of the World is the most real of film spectacles, brimming with great characters and virtuosic filmmaking. It’s the kind of the film seemingly pulled from out of the past — but with the technological capacity to make everything we see believable nowadays, ideally we should see more films like Master and Commander in the future.
*Published at TasteofCinema.com / July 7th, 2017
So while I wish every great smaller film could turn its profit over like Jordan Peele did with Get Out, here are films designed to please many that only pleased a few, setting a sad precedent for the nonexistence of similar efforts.
10. Rango
Budget: $135,000,000
Domestic Gross: $123,477,607
Worldwide Total: $245,724,603
Easily one of the weirdest animated films of the current century, Rango stands with some of Pixar’s best of recent years in terms of originality and ragged self-assurance. It parodies the Western genre, doesn’t make its scruffy animal side characters look cute at all and is furthermore a skillful conception by a man who spent five years making an overly convoluted and cartoonish film trilogy out of a theme park ride.
Johnny Depp as a lost t-shirted pet lizard amidst the unforgiving desert and Wild West sounds like a bit of a stretch, and the Nickelodeon-backed endeavor was showered with enormous effort to underwhelming returns. While Disney can make any 3D animated adventure or musical they please, and the laziness of Illumination Entertainment’s output seems to be consistently popular, risks as big as this one shouldn’t be so enjoyable — but when they are it deserves to be noticed. Rango is special for Hans Zimmer’s score alone, which is a remarkable addition to the film.
A studio like Laika may put in incredible work with no real proceeds for the sake of art, but for as strange as Rango is, its talking animal dynamic was right up the alley of the average parent-child consumer duo that dictates what kids films live and die. This audience is not terribly discerning and it’s worth lamenting a year in which something as unexpected and interesting as Rango was outgrossed by the likes of Cars 2.
9. Hugo
Budget: $180,000,000
Domestic Gross: $73,864,507
Worldwide Total: $185,770,160
Martin Scorsese is locked into his gangster side in terms of box office profits — leaving more challenging works like Silence, which took him an eternity to get off the ground, with little recognition from most audiences.
Chief of these recently was 2011’s Hugo, which felt personal to Scorsese on many levels, primary of which being his unadorned love for film. Tracing the original magic back to the early days of cinema, the film's 3D is pretty spectacular in and of itself, capturing the antiquity of cinema through a digitally enhanced children’s film; the visual result is both quaint and yet so entrancing.
Asa Butterfield was at his height of leading young adult-aimed fare of this sort, his innocence and amusing friendship with Chloë Grace Moretz’ character providing a composite view of childhood curiosity and the innate wonder of movie-going.
That lofty price tag and unmarketable premise though pretty much sealed the film’s ill fate from the offset. Hugo, though forgotten more than the likes of popular, more Scorsese-esque works like The Departed and The Wolf of Wall Street, is still one of the finest films of his late career.
8. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Budget: $85,000,000
Domestic Gross: $31,524,275
Worldwide Total: $47,664,559
Baby Driver will hopefully put Edgar Wright further toward the front of the cinematic landscape, but it’s still a shame that few filmgoers found their way to Wright’s first non-British visual symphony.
After establishing such a cult following with the first two installments of the Cornetto trilogy and Spaced, American fans of the talented director didn’t justify Scott Pilgrim’s curiously sizable cost. But with more at his disposal, the insane visuals throughout make this perhaps his most purely entertaining attempt to date. Too bad the subculture of hipsters waiting for an adaptation of the Scott Pilgrim property didn’t help the disappointing numbers of this ingeniously edited and paced film.
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was also Michael Cera’s last real hurrah as a comic leading man, and he was surrounded by a wild, shrewd spectacle to counter his typical beta, mawkish charm. The film’s late summer release in 2010 should have yielded quite the breakout hit as a very original project with little competition. For every attribute this film has, poor marketing ultimately cast this gem out of the collective consciousness.
7. Cinderella Man
Budget: $88,000,000
Domestic Gross: $61,649,911
Worldwide Total: $108,539,911
Sports films haven’t had a new heyday in the 21st century. Disney churned them out one by one about a decade ago, but only left-field successes like Creed have been really worth celebrating, the obvious prestige of Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby notwithstanding. Cinderella Man is one of two excellent sports films by Ron Howard along with the similarly ignored Rush.
Howard (recent Stars Wars directorial recruit) has always teetered between his Oscar bids and mainstream schlock, but the happy middle met in the crossover appeal of Cinderella Man never connected with the American public the way it was destined to. An agreeable underdog premise, all-around decent filmmaking craft, praiseworthy performances by the likes of Russell Crowe, Paul Giamatti and company all suggested some level of box office glory.
By its nature Cinderella Man feels like a definitive crowd pleaser, from its historical drama surrounding the woes of the Great Depression to the predictability of its ultimate boxing-centric outcome. Closer to the heights of Apollo 13 and Frost/Nixon than, say, that Dan Brown trilogy, Cinderella Man unfortunately made money more equivalent to Oscar-aimed indies and came up short in that regard too with only three nominations.
Overlooked though it may be, Cinderella Man certainly stands as one of the best sports films of our era. It continued a fine run of Crowe-led dramas, didn’t stoop to sentimentality as vapidly as many of its genre do and the tale of James J. Braddock is a good story — in terms of biographical sports dramas, it’s one actually worth telling.
6. Watchmen
Budget: $130,000,000
Domestic Gross: $107,509,799
Worldwide Total: $185,258,983
Sometimes it seems like Zack Snyder is vehemently trying to prove he is not a good director. Before he was ruining DC films like there’s no tomorrow (Man of Steel, BvS: Dawn of Justice, and at least some of the forthcoming Justice League film) he was still making terrible films — and some of his best.
300 is still massively overrated but at least Sucker Punch was punished financially for its obscenities. On the flipside Legend of the Guardians, like Rango, is a children’s film just unrecognizable enough to be ignored by the public and is arguably his most pleasant film, capitalizing heavily on his signature visual style through animation, for the better.
But Watchmen, surely Snyder’s most ambitious and polarizing film, qualifies as his masterpiece if you can consider him to be one who could produce such a thing. No film has ever suited his aesthetic temperament so well and the sprawling film has many moments of fascinating spectacle that far outweigh a few instances of cringe-worthiness.
What’s most regrettable about the weak box office response is how great the source material is. The world and ideas of Watchmen satisfy every craving a mainstream public could have after believing in the artistic possibilities of superhero films in the wake of the pop culture moment that was 2008’s The Dark Knight.
People come out in droves for the predictable fun of Marvel’s endless cycle of comic book adaptations but somehow this serious try directed little more than the fans of the source material to the epically lengthed graphic novel adaptation. Sure, DC proved that imitating Christopher Nolan was not the road to creating good films within a cinematic universe now that Wonder Woman has exploded. But looking back, Watchmen was a moment in which the public’s voracious desire for superhero films should have been quenched and then some by this bold vision of what so many films capture as camp and recyclable escapism.
5. Edge of Tomorrow
Budget: $178,000,000
Domestic Gross: $100,206,256
Worldwide Total: $370,541,256
We may have been blessed with a sequel but seriously, the secondary life of the summer 2014 surprise formerly known as Edge of Tomorrow has been bumpy. Aside from the stupidity of changing the name of the film to its tagline Live Die Repeat, now the studios have incorporated this madness into the sequel’s title Live Die Repeat and Repeat.
For Tom Cruise, Edge of Tomorrow saw the continuation of his lessening box office draw outside of the Mission: Impossible franchise and The Mummy only proved this further. But seeing this Japanese sci-fi light novel adaptation, spearheaded by Cruise’s best work in the past decade, was a treat for those who made it to the theaters. It just felt like a more natural return to him bringing in big money with an original film, at least more than Oblivion.
From the natural humor of its premise to the grit and thrill of its D-Day-plus-killer-aliens setting to the repartee between Cruise and Emily Blunt — who essentially owns the movie — very little went wrong here. But despite its catchy Groundhog Day meets War of the Worlds scenario, Edge of Tomorrow barely inched past the 100 million dollar mark, while only a few weeks after its release hoards of people saw Transformers: Age of Extinction.
The power of Rotten Tomatoes to give films box office boosts seems only to increase, but back in 2014 a 90% plus score didn’t help this film. Edge of Tomorrow’s life post-theaters has hopefully left a slightly larger audience hungry for more, so here’s to hoping Doug Limon’s second film earns its lucky greenlight.
4. Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events
Budget: $140,000,000
Domestic Gross: $118,634,549
Worldwide Total: $209,073,645
In the wake of Harry Potter’s unwieldy success, the 2000s saw a slew of modern young adult fiction attempting sequel-building teen fantasy adoration. Up until The Hunger Games in 2012, virtually none had succeeded. But the worst blow for a series of its kind never to be was Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.
Nickelodeon and Paramount backed the film at a lofty 140 million and the resulting world of Daniel Handler’s twisted meta-Gothic children’s fables is visually sumptuous, possessing Emmanuel Lubezki’s immaculate, three-time Oscar winning touch in cinematography. Flawed as this film may be, Netflix’s iffy adaptation has revealed just how right Brad Silberling got it in 2004.
Beyond the exquisite production detail, the casting was damn near perfect as opposed to the hit or miss performances of the Neil Patrick Harris-led show. Carrey, unhinged as he may have been, is actually hilarious, eating up scenery like he’s been starved for days and doing the malicious character of Count Olaf justice. A comic actor playing an evil, terrible actor may have turned off people, but he balances the goofiness and menace fairly well. Liam Aiken and Emily Browning are also finely cast as our respective protagonists Klaus and Violet, while Bill Connelly, Timothy Spall and Meryl Streep all make great supporting turns. And Jude Law’s narration as Lemony Snicket was an impeccable choice.
Adapting The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room and The Wide Window into a single film simplified a few details but the quirk and postmodern worldbuilding rubs off neatly. This film set the stage for another 10 books that will never see the light of day in theaters yet it was still wise enough to wrap itself up nicely by the credits and dares to get rather emotional just before then.
The lack of competition facing A Series of Unfortunate Events in December of 2004 just shows that even when the time was ripe to profit from the fan base — all but two titles of the 13-part series were published — the turnout was not enough to validate further films.
3. Peter Pan
Budget: $100,000,000
Domestic Gross: $48,462,608
Worldwide Total: $121,975,011
Peter Pan seemed destined to be at least a minor classic of the family film regiment but was utterly swallowed up by the second weekend of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King on its Christmas 2003 weekend debut. To this day though it stands as the definitive version of J. M. Barrie’s timeless children’s fantasy — it makes the milquetoast flavor Disney’s 1953 version that is stamped in several generations minds look absurdly unrealized.
Jason Isaacs proper duel role as both Hook and George Darling is an underappreciated turn by an underappreciated actor. Olivia Williams is pretty incredible as Mary Darling. And the roles of Peter (Jeremy Sumpter) and Wendy (Rachel Hurd-Wood) are played with the correct respect to budding adolescence and performed with conviction, charm and grace by young actors all but disregarded after this more than profitless affair.
The lovely tone, convincing practical and visual effects and maturity towards its themes and dialogue make the tale all but timeless in its own right, though its been unheeded by many. But while parents took their kids to see Cheaper by the Dozen, which was released the same day, they ought to have been taking them to something worth its bulky budget and iconic name.
Largely this earnest adaptation succeeds in discussing topics of blossoming sexuality and the complexities of Peter and Wendy’s romance that Disney’s swill, and adaptations that like to cast women as Peter, ignore. Furthermore it feels handcrafted, sincerely emotional and should have made a bigger imprint on the collective fantasy milieu that was at its pinnacle of popularity at the moment.
2. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
Budget: $225,000,000
Domestic Gross: $141,621,490
Worldwide Total: $419,665,568
This was the beginning of the end for Narnia, as the big screen has known it. Disney’s first round in adapting C.S. Lewis' famous series paid off because they were dealing with the most popular book in the seven part fantasy saga — it even domestically outgrossed Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’s impressive resurgence for the wizarding series back in late 2005.
They intended for another winter release two years later, but the massively budgeted film was delayed and then slated for May 2008. That increase from 140 million to 225 was just what they did for Pirates of the Caribbean, but while Dead Man’s Chest became the third film ever to gross one billion dollars, Prince Caspian sputtered out with about half of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe’s earnings.
Mercilessly destroyed by its mid-May slot between Iron Man and the fourth Indiana Jones, the film opened decently and faded before earning even $150 million domestically. But Prince Caspian was superior to The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe in nearly every way. Less innocent, more exciting and more grandiose in its production, it proved that while the heights of cinematic fantasy — i.e. The Lord of the Rings — may never again be reached, we could enjoy something with equal capacity for wonder and worldbuilding, if not quite such abyss-like mythic depth.
Disney let it go after Caspian, and 20th Century Fox gave The Voyage of the Dawn Treader their best effort to middling results financially and critically. The Mark Gordon Company seeks to revamp the franchise with The Silver Chair, with Joe Johnston recently signed on the direct. But with close to a decade since the last entry, an inevitable Netflix reset might be due.
1. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
Budget: $150,000,000
Domestic Gross: $93,927,920
Worldwide Total: $212,011,111
Not only was Master and Commander one of the best films of 2003 — and one of the best adventure films of the 21st century — it was the start to what could have been the most intellectual series of historical action films cinema has ever seen.
Patrick O’Brien’s lengthy 20-book series of British naval war books during the Napoleonic Era has brought the prolific author to literary fame, but Peter Weir’s ambitious undertaking received a fraction of the attention it deserved and has been cursed with a less than propagating shelf life. The Far Side of the World stands as the lone entry, a David and Goliath tale for the high seas, with Russell Crowe’s towering Captain Jack Aubrey embarking across two oceans to wrangle the powerful French vessel The Acheron or “Phantom” with their sturdy but much quainter ship The HMS Surprise.
The film’s thoughtfully constructed sequel stinger teased the continuation of a series that ran aground out of the gate, grossing too much to call it a flop but not nearly enough to cause any fuss. Weir is even quoted stating how lukewarm reception ultimately sealed the fate of the potential Aubrey-Maturin film series — "I think that while it did well...ish at the box office, it didn't generate that monstrous, rapid income that provokes a sequel." And in late 2010 Russell Crowe urged fans on Twitter to contact Tom Rothman of Fox, to no avail in helping to revive the cause.
To this day though, Master and Commander remains one of the most sophisticated blockbusters ever conceived, its small-scale story unfolding into an epic of intimacy and meticulousness. The film's realism, exquisite photography, brilliant supporting cast led by Paul Bettany, awe-inspiring balance of choice classical music and Iva Davies score all converge at the summit of a perfect historical fiction. It provides a peek into a lost, outdated world that, for taking place over two centuries, is presented very much as modernity.
The film is told in an episodic nature and its several shifts from dilemma to dilemma form a genuine slice of Royal Navy life. Roughly released alongside the first Pirates of the Caribbean, the straitlaced contrast of Master and Commander bored many mainstream audiences with its lack of action and patient pace.
The Far Side of the World is the most real of film spectacles, brimming with great characters and virtuosic filmmaking. It’s the kind of the film seemingly pulled from out of the past — but with the technological capacity to make everything we see believable nowadays, ideally we should see more films like Master and Commander in the future.
*Published at TasteofCinema.com / July 7th, 2017
5 Reasons Why Zodiac Is a Modern Masterpiece of American Cinema
Though the Academy Awards shut out the film thanks to an unreceptive public and an early March release, the stature of David Fincher’s Zodiac has only increased since its release a decade ago.
Cinephiles and mainstream moviegoers alike know Fincher’s name. His auteurist artistry and his proclivity for a certain kind of chilling, pulpy adult escapism make him largely appealing to all. Fincher quickly shook off his low point origins of Alien 3 to put out great works like Seven, Fight Club and, one of the finest films of our decade, The Social Network.
Many could argue that Aaron Sorkin’s immaculate script automatically places the 2010 modern classic at the top of Fincher’s filmography. But the labyrinth of provocative true-crime and de facto perfectionist filmmaking across a sprawling runtime leaves 2007’s Zodiac his most impassioned, unconventional and career-defining film to date.
1.Fincher’s first foray into digital filmmaking results in a visual triumph
As if he was waiting for this change his entire career, with Zodiac Fincher finally made the switch to digital filmmaking versus actual film.
The Thomson Viper was employed for this project, after Fincher utilized it for many of the commercials he shot in the years leading up to 2007. Zodiac was not shot entirely on digital though — for the slow motion murder sequences he relies on traditional high-speed film cameras and these brief scenes also point to his affinity for invisible visual effect enhancements; all that CG blood looks very real. His few touches of visual effects in his previous films like Panic Room here blossom into an indispensible part of capturing an uncanny period setting, and this more digitally inclined evolution would carry on to the present.
Many of the transition scenes of Zodiac go by seamlessly due to the unnoticeable integration of visual effects with real environments. His following film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button affirmed Fincher’s own capabilities as a filmmaker grappling with a hefty budget and production challenges. But in Zodiac, without so much money at his disposal, he makes one-off moments like the overhead shot following the exact turns of Paul Stein’s taxi and the reenacted time-lapse of construction for the Transamerica Pyramid entirely convincing.
Though he’d been experimenting with visual effects in the past, Zodiac marked an enormous conversion for Fincher’s career as his faultless integration of digital shooting and post-production manipulation was able to advance his own inherently exacting filmmaking style. Visually, films like The Social Network and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo have only confirmed that this shift has characterized his aesthetic permanently.
2. The reflective themes make it Fincher’s most personal work
Zodiac is more or less about all-consuming curiosity. Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance as Robert Graysmith works doubly as an insert for Fincher himself, full of unshaking, resilient inquisitiveness. The opening credits reflect this, as the film’s title comes up just as Graysmith tells his son before school to “learn a lot,” cementing the quest for knowledge as one of the film’s primary themes. Moments like this and the Dirty Harry theater scene also suggest the movie works in a metatextual sense in some small way.
Even the dullest of moments in Zodiac are infused with a fire and fervor because Fincher’s own fascination with the story is so obvious. Every revelation and new piece of information becomes bracing and absorbing. In a career full of fictional thrills, Zodiac functions as Fincher’s most personal, not to mention most truthful, work.
Lurid thrillers with neo-noir elements generally defined his catalogue before this film but all of Fincher's formal desires seem to reach their precipice and fulfillment in Zodiac. But what’s worth more than him mastering his favorite genre is his suitable quest for the truth.
Zodiac is elevated in scariness and relevance by its commitment to facts and fair representation for the dead. Though Fincher ultimately affirms the suspicions in Graysmith’s book that Arthur Leigh Allen — played with casual creepiness by John Carroll Lynch — was likely the infamous killer contrary to hard evidence, in each respective sequence involving the Zodiac, different actors represent the real-life boogeyman.
Despite the definitiveness with which Fincher makes his point and sways his audience to follow Graysmith’s line of thinking, the tinges of doubt that shroud this movie give it a unique unease and peculiar enjoyment — was Arthur Leigh Allen our man, or did Graysmith simply need his most burning question satisfied? For as much as Fincher aims for a kind of clarity in dramatizing the facts, doubt is one the themes that makes Zodiac something to cherish. The story of trying to catch the Zodiac killer is a genuine example of truth being stranger than fiction — the path to enlightenment is unpaved and the film reflects that in its sprawling scope and narrative uncertainty.
3. James Vanderbilt’s challenging script
Taking the biggest break of his career between films, Fincher spent a year and half reviewing the facts of the case firsthand, cautious about doing justice to the people who could not defend themselves or erase how Fincher would finally portray them. James Vanderbilt’s original script was improved by new interviews and perspectives of surviving players and victims, including Mike Mageau, the only living person to see Zodiac’s face.
The final screenplay is one of delicate, veracious precision and downright impressive in communicating expositional and factual information. Packing nearly every scene with vital case details somehow never makes the film feel stuffy or overambitious — even upon repeated viewings, nothing about the delivery or design of the dialogue rings false.
Fincher is notorious for forcing his actors through takes on takes (which Mark Ruffalo respected, Gyllenhaal less so), so perhaps the realist flow of the unfolding true tale is a result of Fincher’s on-set obsessiveness. Yet within all the facts there is room for character development aplenty.
Discreet humor is Vanderbilt’s way of elevating almost every moment of interplay between our three leads — though Robert Downey Jr.’s Paul Avery provides enough charismatic hilarity on his own — and comedy frequently levels out the nonstop progression of names, dates and moody atmospheres.
A few avenues of misdirection also help to highlight how elusive our titular killer was and how mythic he became. The phony call to Melvin Belli (a refined Brian Cox) on television or Graysmith’s inquiry turned paranoid encounter with Bob Vaughn (Charles Fleischer) emphasize the killer’s inherent mysterious and the horrible potential for copycats.
And with such an anticlimactic story — a murder mystery with essentially no ending — the film still satisfies. Not only are we pretty sure by the credits that Allen was the Zodiac, but the small payoff of Graysmith’s motivations — his deep need to see Zodiac’s face and know it’s truly him — comes quietly full circle.
But even as the film makes sure emotional beats are there to grasp, the real pleasure of Zodiac is getting caught up in every tantalizing detail of the case and the scripts’ steady deconstruction of American culture's fascination with serial killers.
4. A most dynamic acting ensemble
The casting of Zodiac, down to its smallest roles, is worth commending — of Fincher’s films only The Social Network rivals it for wall-to-wall great performances.
Zodiac’s trio is a collection of some of the strongest performances from Gyllenhaal, Ruffalo or Downey Jr. Gyllenhaal’s work as Graysmith is a multifaceted portrayal of a meek cartoonist turned private investigator, capturing the nuances of his descent from interested passerby to a man with unyielding interest in uncovering the Zodiac killer’s identity. Ruffalo is our hero for the second act as homicide detective Dave Toschi, who gets extraordinarily close to confirming Allen as the Zodiac before his career is ultimately dismantled by the case. Ruffalo’s turn as the hardy and finally frustrated cop is complex and tragic, and though Gyllenhaal is our real protagonist, Ruffalo commitment makes him the acting acme of the film. Downey Jr. plays very much to his strengths as the drunken crime journalist Paul Avery, whose coverage of the case turns him into a target and, in his best scene as Graysmith revisits him years after their friendship, an aged, boat-housed recluse.
The script's wit needed no help from Downey Jr.’s own unconquerable charm, but he’s still one to be taken seriously here in the right context. The film balances its main characters in a functional fashion as they individually become important to the story in an almost unpredictable rhythm. Each performer works well in their own scenes, but the best character moments in Zodiac come from the brilliant, sporadic interplay between our leads. Every supporting character is also finely cast and, even for those in just a single scene, extremely memorable. Anthony Edwards is engaging as Toschi’s right hand man Bill Armstrong, and Chloë Sevigny is excellent as Graysmith’s patient, deadpan wife Melanie. And every even more minor role is as praiseworthy as the aforementioned talent.
5. Fincher’s own meticulousness
There are myriad gratifications to gain from the sweat of Fincher’s own idiosyncratic process. Regardless of a script, which is where all of Zodiac’s story smarts and clever exchanges lay, Fincher as a director had only to make his version of the truth as infallibly genuine as possibly for the many minutiae of this San Francisco story to speak for itself.
While even Kubrick might have found Fincher’s attention to detail a little much, Zodiac’s script allows for a generally broad appeal by telling an albeit complicated tale as clearly and concisely as it can. The film’s crisp pace is the result of skillful, breathlessly unfolding editing — despite so little action, Fincher’s eye in post-production manages to create a murder-thriller in which a somewhat bloody and eventful first act is followed by over an hour and a half of procedural drama.
Only someone with such an all-encompassing vision could see a project as intrinsically testy as this one through to perfection. So much of the film’s successes are in what you don’t notice — all of the disparate elements coalesce without a hitch.
Another asset is the film’s well-gathered music. Originally Fincher wanted only period-specific needle drops in the film, but ultimately the inky black, minimally spooky score of long-time composer David Shire was utilized to tonally even out the antiquated pop songs. The opening murder sequence expresses this counterbalance well — the psychedelic rock of Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man” is rendered almost punk when juxtaposed with the scene of the crime. Then with the transition to Zodiac’s call to the police as police pull onto the scene, Shire’s unobtrusive touch enhances the scene with such subtle creepiness.
The murders aren’t overemphasized but they are methodically constructed. Beyond the fast-frame cameras used to capture the gun-related murders in slow motion, the most disturbing scene in the film is the Lake Berryessa murder, which is both underplayed and utterly scary. Fincher had trees flown in especially for the accuracy of this sequence’s setting and this scene wouldn’t have the same effect without them. The Washington and Cherry crime scene investigation was also conceived entirely for the sake of genuineness. The actual location had changed distinctly over the years, and the set reconstruction and flawless CG filling in the cracks makes Dave Toschi’s introduction a substantial cinematic moment.
Fincher seems drawn toward authenticity instinctually. His painstakingly precise visual depiction of the late 1960s and 1970s where the most of the film takes place is but a fragment of his own filmmaking obsession in Zodiac. As much as Fincher cares about the reality of what he depicts, he also want you to believe the preoccupation of the people involved in the hunt for Zodiac and to thereby take interest in the case yourself. In Zodiac, entertainment and truth meet at the most blissful of cinematic crossroads. It only makes sense that Fincher’s most fact-based film is his most scrupulous.
*Published at TasteofCinema.com / June 21st, 2017
Cinephiles and mainstream moviegoers alike know Fincher’s name. His auteurist artistry and his proclivity for a certain kind of chilling, pulpy adult escapism make him largely appealing to all. Fincher quickly shook off his low point origins of Alien 3 to put out great works like Seven, Fight Club and, one of the finest films of our decade, The Social Network.
Many could argue that Aaron Sorkin’s immaculate script automatically places the 2010 modern classic at the top of Fincher’s filmography. But the labyrinth of provocative true-crime and de facto perfectionist filmmaking across a sprawling runtime leaves 2007’s Zodiac his most impassioned, unconventional and career-defining film to date.
1.Fincher’s first foray into digital filmmaking results in a visual triumph
As if he was waiting for this change his entire career, with Zodiac Fincher finally made the switch to digital filmmaking versus actual film.
The Thomson Viper was employed for this project, after Fincher utilized it for many of the commercials he shot in the years leading up to 2007. Zodiac was not shot entirely on digital though — for the slow motion murder sequences he relies on traditional high-speed film cameras and these brief scenes also point to his affinity for invisible visual effect enhancements; all that CG blood looks very real. His few touches of visual effects in his previous films like Panic Room here blossom into an indispensible part of capturing an uncanny period setting, and this more digitally inclined evolution would carry on to the present.
Many of the transition scenes of Zodiac go by seamlessly due to the unnoticeable integration of visual effects with real environments. His following film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button affirmed Fincher’s own capabilities as a filmmaker grappling with a hefty budget and production challenges. But in Zodiac, without so much money at his disposal, he makes one-off moments like the overhead shot following the exact turns of Paul Stein’s taxi and the reenacted time-lapse of construction for the Transamerica Pyramid entirely convincing.
Though he’d been experimenting with visual effects in the past, Zodiac marked an enormous conversion for Fincher’s career as his faultless integration of digital shooting and post-production manipulation was able to advance his own inherently exacting filmmaking style. Visually, films like The Social Network and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo have only confirmed that this shift has characterized his aesthetic permanently.
2. The reflective themes make it Fincher’s most personal work
Zodiac is more or less about all-consuming curiosity. Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance as Robert Graysmith works doubly as an insert for Fincher himself, full of unshaking, resilient inquisitiveness. The opening credits reflect this, as the film’s title comes up just as Graysmith tells his son before school to “learn a lot,” cementing the quest for knowledge as one of the film’s primary themes. Moments like this and the Dirty Harry theater scene also suggest the movie works in a metatextual sense in some small way.
Even the dullest of moments in Zodiac are infused with a fire and fervor because Fincher’s own fascination with the story is so obvious. Every revelation and new piece of information becomes bracing and absorbing. In a career full of fictional thrills, Zodiac functions as Fincher’s most personal, not to mention most truthful, work.
Lurid thrillers with neo-noir elements generally defined his catalogue before this film but all of Fincher's formal desires seem to reach their precipice and fulfillment in Zodiac. But what’s worth more than him mastering his favorite genre is his suitable quest for the truth.
Zodiac is elevated in scariness and relevance by its commitment to facts and fair representation for the dead. Though Fincher ultimately affirms the suspicions in Graysmith’s book that Arthur Leigh Allen — played with casual creepiness by John Carroll Lynch — was likely the infamous killer contrary to hard evidence, in each respective sequence involving the Zodiac, different actors represent the real-life boogeyman.
Despite the definitiveness with which Fincher makes his point and sways his audience to follow Graysmith’s line of thinking, the tinges of doubt that shroud this movie give it a unique unease and peculiar enjoyment — was Arthur Leigh Allen our man, or did Graysmith simply need his most burning question satisfied? For as much as Fincher aims for a kind of clarity in dramatizing the facts, doubt is one the themes that makes Zodiac something to cherish. The story of trying to catch the Zodiac killer is a genuine example of truth being stranger than fiction — the path to enlightenment is unpaved and the film reflects that in its sprawling scope and narrative uncertainty.
3. James Vanderbilt’s challenging script
Taking the biggest break of his career between films, Fincher spent a year and half reviewing the facts of the case firsthand, cautious about doing justice to the people who could not defend themselves or erase how Fincher would finally portray them. James Vanderbilt’s original script was improved by new interviews and perspectives of surviving players and victims, including Mike Mageau, the only living person to see Zodiac’s face.
The final screenplay is one of delicate, veracious precision and downright impressive in communicating expositional and factual information. Packing nearly every scene with vital case details somehow never makes the film feel stuffy or overambitious — even upon repeated viewings, nothing about the delivery or design of the dialogue rings false.
Fincher is notorious for forcing his actors through takes on takes (which Mark Ruffalo respected, Gyllenhaal less so), so perhaps the realist flow of the unfolding true tale is a result of Fincher’s on-set obsessiveness. Yet within all the facts there is room for character development aplenty.
Discreet humor is Vanderbilt’s way of elevating almost every moment of interplay between our three leads — though Robert Downey Jr.’s Paul Avery provides enough charismatic hilarity on his own — and comedy frequently levels out the nonstop progression of names, dates and moody atmospheres.
A few avenues of misdirection also help to highlight how elusive our titular killer was and how mythic he became. The phony call to Melvin Belli (a refined Brian Cox) on television or Graysmith’s inquiry turned paranoid encounter with Bob Vaughn (Charles Fleischer) emphasize the killer’s inherent mysterious and the horrible potential for copycats.
And with such an anticlimactic story — a murder mystery with essentially no ending — the film still satisfies. Not only are we pretty sure by the credits that Allen was the Zodiac, but the small payoff of Graysmith’s motivations — his deep need to see Zodiac’s face and know it’s truly him — comes quietly full circle.
But even as the film makes sure emotional beats are there to grasp, the real pleasure of Zodiac is getting caught up in every tantalizing detail of the case and the scripts’ steady deconstruction of American culture's fascination with serial killers.
4. A most dynamic acting ensemble
The casting of Zodiac, down to its smallest roles, is worth commending — of Fincher’s films only The Social Network rivals it for wall-to-wall great performances.
Zodiac’s trio is a collection of some of the strongest performances from Gyllenhaal, Ruffalo or Downey Jr. Gyllenhaal’s work as Graysmith is a multifaceted portrayal of a meek cartoonist turned private investigator, capturing the nuances of his descent from interested passerby to a man with unyielding interest in uncovering the Zodiac killer’s identity. Ruffalo is our hero for the second act as homicide detective Dave Toschi, who gets extraordinarily close to confirming Allen as the Zodiac before his career is ultimately dismantled by the case. Ruffalo’s turn as the hardy and finally frustrated cop is complex and tragic, and though Gyllenhaal is our real protagonist, Ruffalo commitment makes him the acting acme of the film. Downey Jr. plays very much to his strengths as the drunken crime journalist Paul Avery, whose coverage of the case turns him into a target and, in his best scene as Graysmith revisits him years after their friendship, an aged, boat-housed recluse.
The script's wit needed no help from Downey Jr.’s own unconquerable charm, but he’s still one to be taken seriously here in the right context. The film balances its main characters in a functional fashion as they individually become important to the story in an almost unpredictable rhythm. Each performer works well in their own scenes, but the best character moments in Zodiac come from the brilliant, sporadic interplay between our leads. Every supporting character is also finely cast and, even for those in just a single scene, extremely memorable. Anthony Edwards is engaging as Toschi’s right hand man Bill Armstrong, and Chloë Sevigny is excellent as Graysmith’s patient, deadpan wife Melanie. And every even more minor role is as praiseworthy as the aforementioned talent.
5. Fincher’s own meticulousness
There are myriad gratifications to gain from the sweat of Fincher’s own idiosyncratic process. Regardless of a script, which is where all of Zodiac’s story smarts and clever exchanges lay, Fincher as a director had only to make his version of the truth as infallibly genuine as possibly for the many minutiae of this San Francisco story to speak for itself.
While even Kubrick might have found Fincher’s attention to detail a little much, Zodiac’s script allows for a generally broad appeal by telling an albeit complicated tale as clearly and concisely as it can. The film’s crisp pace is the result of skillful, breathlessly unfolding editing — despite so little action, Fincher’s eye in post-production manages to create a murder-thriller in which a somewhat bloody and eventful first act is followed by over an hour and a half of procedural drama.
Only someone with such an all-encompassing vision could see a project as intrinsically testy as this one through to perfection. So much of the film’s successes are in what you don’t notice — all of the disparate elements coalesce without a hitch.
Another asset is the film’s well-gathered music. Originally Fincher wanted only period-specific needle drops in the film, but ultimately the inky black, minimally spooky score of long-time composer David Shire was utilized to tonally even out the antiquated pop songs. The opening murder sequence expresses this counterbalance well — the psychedelic rock of Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man” is rendered almost punk when juxtaposed with the scene of the crime. Then with the transition to Zodiac’s call to the police as police pull onto the scene, Shire’s unobtrusive touch enhances the scene with such subtle creepiness.
The murders aren’t overemphasized but they are methodically constructed. Beyond the fast-frame cameras used to capture the gun-related murders in slow motion, the most disturbing scene in the film is the Lake Berryessa murder, which is both underplayed and utterly scary. Fincher had trees flown in especially for the accuracy of this sequence’s setting and this scene wouldn’t have the same effect without them. The Washington and Cherry crime scene investigation was also conceived entirely for the sake of genuineness. The actual location had changed distinctly over the years, and the set reconstruction and flawless CG filling in the cracks makes Dave Toschi’s introduction a substantial cinematic moment.
Fincher seems drawn toward authenticity instinctually. His painstakingly precise visual depiction of the late 1960s and 1970s where the most of the film takes place is but a fragment of his own filmmaking obsession in Zodiac. As much as Fincher cares about the reality of what he depicts, he also want you to believe the preoccupation of the people involved in the hunt for Zodiac and to thereby take interest in the case yourself. In Zodiac, entertainment and truth meet at the most blissful of cinematic crossroads. It only makes sense that Fincher’s most fact-based film is his most scrupulous.
*Published at TasteofCinema.com / June 21st, 2017
Horace and Pete:
C.K.'s Brilliant Gamble Pays Off
If anyone is able to marry comedy and tragedy effectively, it’s Louis C.K. – but never has he done it as deftly as he has with Horace and Pete.
The exploration of family and everyday life through the ancestral owners of a century-old bar and their customers is the comedian’s boldest and most mature creative work to date.
Ten episodes make up the first – and, if C.K. doesn’t change his mind, only – season of the series. After releasing the first episode of Horace and Pete late last January exclusively through his website, the final episode of the season premiered in early April. C.K. recently announced he is taking a break from his popular FX show Louie, so the possibility of returning for a sixth season of the sitcom, or another season of Horace and Pete, still looms.
Entirely self-funded, kept secret until its release date and free from the touch of any network, the show is a challenge to the current distribution model of television and other visual mediums.
C.K. went into debt early on in the production of the web series, with each episode costing him half a million dollars to produce. After announcing the conclusion of the show a few days prior, he assured the public in late April that he is far from bankruptcy. C.K. has earned back his money straight from his fans, keeping up with the direct-to-consumer mode of his more recent works. Each episode comes with a small price tag, the first being $5, the second $2 and the rest $3.
“Money grows back, time doesn’t,” C.K. said on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” back in May, quoting his mother. His plan was to have the revenue of the first four episodes pay for the rest of the show, but a promotional tour was necessary to generate enough money. C.K. plans to eventually sell the series to another streaming platform, such as Netflix.
Privately courting talents including Steve Buscemi, Jane Fonda and Edie Falco, C.K. cast himself in the story of three siblings carrying on their forefathers’ legacies through a family bar.
Scripted like theater and staged like it as well, Horace and Pete essentially has the feeling of a sitcom without an audience. C.K. plays Horace VIII, who has worked at the titular bar, where nearly all of the series takes place, for a year since the death of his father. Buscemi plays Pete, Horace's cousin, co-owner of the bar and a hermit ex-mental patient.
Alan Alda is brilliant, playing against type as foul-mouthed hypocrite Uncle Pete, the final co-owner of Horace and Pete’s. Falco rounds out the main cast as Sylvia, sister to the younger Horace and Pete, who is suffering from cancer and is frequently bitter towards the bar and the decades of woe that her ancestors have left behind. She wishes to sell the place to pay for chemotherapy but Pete cannot live a normal life outside the establishment.
Though the main story behind the characters has dramatic weight, C.K.’s delicate, fluid dialogue makes each encounter – from the grave seriousness of hot-button issues and despairing characters to the levity of the supporting cast bantering at the bar – entertaining and realistic.
Steven Wright, Kurt Metzger and Tom Noonan are the highlights of the fictional New York bar’s regulars, and their conversations can be as perceptive as they are ridiculous. Metzger frequently makes outrageous political claims that sound more convincing the longer he rambles on, and Noonan delivers a memorable dissection of love in the series’ penultimate episode.
Keeping with his reputation for confronting controversy or taboos – see any stand-up special of his, the less surreal episodes of Louie or that hotly debated bit on pedophilia from last season’s Saturday Night Live – Horace and Pete gets uncomfortably honest in discussions of topical concerns such as internet dating, abortion and transgender rights.
The seventh episode features a lengthy debate between C.K.’s character and Rhonda (Karen Pittman). The two are eating breakfast having slept together the night before and Rhonda suggests, but never explicitly states, that she was assigned male at birth. This results in a tense but valuable exploration of empathy, offering the candor that has been missing from the general dialogue of LGBTQ+ rights.
Stark and unbelievably sad, but often hilarious and stimulating, Horace and Pete is brave as both a creative and a business-model experiment. The absence of commercial breaks, the outdated suggestiveness of a live audience or laugh track and set durations for episode length – each one varies from 30 minutes to over an hour – render the show a novel viewing experience, and represents an exciting turn in the career of the Emmy-winning comedian.
The series ends abruptly and confusingly, as life often does, and the show’s quiet clarity may startle some. The truthfulness of C.K.’s voice, the series’ most indispensible asset, has always been masked with irony, self-deprecation and silliness but with Horace and Pete, he makes an explicit artistic statement.
In the end, C.K.’s conception is more Tennessee Williams than Amy Schumer, just further confirmation of his towering presence in our era of comedy.
*Published in The Pitt News / May 31st, 2016
The exploration of family and everyday life through the ancestral owners of a century-old bar and their customers is the comedian’s boldest and most mature creative work to date.
Ten episodes make up the first – and, if C.K. doesn’t change his mind, only – season of the series. After releasing the first episode of Horace and Pete late last January exclusively through his website, the final episode of the season premiered in early April. C.K. recently announced he is taking a break from his popular FX show Louie, so the possibility of returning for a sixth season of the sitcom, or another season of Horace and Pete, still looms.
Entirely self-funded, kept secret until its release date and free from the touch of any network, the show is a challenge to the current distribution model of television and other visual mediums.
C.K. went into debt early on in the production of the web series, with each episode costing him half a million dollars to produce. After announcing the conclusion of the show a few days prior, he assured the public in late April that he is far from bankruptcy. C.K. has earned back his money straight from his fans, keeping up with the direct-to-consumer mode of his more recent works. Each episode comes with a small price tag, the first being $5, the second $2 and the rest $3.
“Money grows back, time doesn’t,” C.K. said on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” back in May, quoting his mother. His plan was to have the revenue of the first four episodes pay for the rest of the show, but a promotional tour was necessary to generate enough money. C.K. plans to eventually sell the series to another streaming platform, such as Netflix.
Privately courting talents including Steve Buscemi, Jane Fonda and Edie Falco, C.K. cast himself in the story of three siblings carrying on their forefathers’ legacies through a family bar.
Scripted like theater and staged like it as well, Horace and Pete essentially has the feeling of a sitcom without an audience. C.K. plays Horace VIII, who has worked at the titular bar, where nearly all of the series takes place, for a year since the death of his father. Buscemi plays Pete, Horace's cousin, co-owner of the bar and a hermit ex-mental patient.
Alan Alda is brilliant, playing against type as foul-mouthed hypocrite Uncle Pete, the final co-owner of Horace and Pete’s. Falco rounds out the main cast as Sylvia, sister to the younger Horace and Pete, who is suffering from cancer and is frequently bitter towards the bar and the decades of woe that her ancestors have left behind. She wishes to sell the place to pay for chemotherapy but Pete cannot live a normal life outside the establishment.
Though the main story behind the characters has dramatic weight, C.K.’s delicate, fluid dialogue makes each encounter – from the grave seriousness of hot-button issues and despairing characters to the levity of the supporting cast bantering at the bar – entertaining and realistic.
Steven Wright, Kurt Metzger and Tom Noonan are the highlights of the fictional New York bar’s regulars, and their conversations can be as perceptive as they are ridiculous. Metzger frequently makes outrageous political claims that sound more convincing the longer he rambles on, and Noonan delivers a memorable dissection of love in the series’ penultimate episode.
Keeping with his reputation for confronting controversy or taboos – see any stand-up special of his, the less surreal episodes of Louie or that hotly debated bit on pedophilia from last season’s Saturday Night Live – Horace and Pete gets uncomfortably honest in discussions of topical concerns such as internet dating, abortion and transgender rights.
The seventh episode features a lengthy debate between C.K.’s character and Rhonda (Karen Pittman). The two are eating breakfast having slept together the night before and Rhonda suggests, but never explicitly states, that she was assigned male at birth. This results in a tense but valuable exploration of empathy, offering the candor that has been missing from the general dialogue of LGBTQ+ rights.
Stark and unbelievably sad, but often hilarious and stimulating, Horace and Pete is brave as both a creative and a business-model experiment. The absence of commercial breaks, the outdated suggestiveness of a live audience or laugh track and set durations for episode length – each one varies from 30 minutes to over an hour – render the show a novel viewing experience, and represents an exciting turn in the career of the Emmy-winning comedian.
The series ends abruptly and confusingly, as life often does, and the show’s quiet clarity may startle some. The truthfulness of C.K.’s voice, the series’ most indispensible asset, has always been masked with irony, self-deprecation and silliness but with Horace and Pete, he makes an explicit artistic statement.
In the end, C.K.’s conception is more Tennessee Williams than Amy Schumer, just further confirmation of his towering presence in our era of comedy.
*Published in The Pitt News / May 31st, 2016
First 3 Rivers Screenwriting Conference
Held Downtown
Local and national screenwriting talent collided in Downtown Pittsburgh this past weekend.
Spearheaded by director and founder Cathy Rescher, the three-day inaugural 3 Rivers Screenwriting Conference was held at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center Friday, May 20 through Sunday, May 22.
Rescher was inspired by the four-day screenwriting conference that takes place during the annual Austin Film Festival, the largest writers’ conference in the world. With 3 Rivers, she sought to put together a melting pot of Pittsburgh talent and insightful professionals involved in screenwriting and filmmaking in general.
Actually putting the pieces in place for the conference, though, was a challenge.
“I just thought to myself naïvely, ‘How hard can it be?’” said Rescher, who has experience in project management, marketing, design and related fields. She researched and booked various sponsors to help fund the weekend event, including Row House Cinema, Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, Pittsburgh Filmmakers and Stage 32, to name a few.
But Rescher’s biggest break was securing sponsorship from New Sun Rising – an organization that provides fiscal backing and mentoring to enterprises in the Pittsburgh region. New Sun Rising’s leaders unanimously voted to support the project, essentially greenlighting the conference with substantial monetary backing.
Tickets for the event started at $30 and the conference was host to over 30 speakers from around the country.
“Getting the caliber of industry professionals we had here was exactly what we set out to do and I remain hopeful we can continue doing it,” said Ramesh Santanam, who works in media and public relations and writes his own scripts. Santanam assisted with 3 Rivers by contacting and recruiting some of the speakers, as well as helping plan the conference’s programming.
“It was exhausting at times but entirely worthwhile, thanks to the many people who volunteered their time and expertise,” said Santanam.
The preeminent speakers included Ashley Edward Miller, a screenwriter for X-Men: First Class and Thor, and Laura Harkcom, writer and producer for Syfy and Fox and a consultant for NBCUniversal. Joining them was Christopher Lockhart, story editor at the William Morris Endeavor in Hollywood.
Those three guests would be hosts of the Pitch Finale, the last event of the conference. Three amateur screenwriters delivered pitches of their original scripts to the three judges, Miller, Harkcom and Lockhart.
Though the audience heavily favored the pitch about a modern-day stoner Dracula in Seattle by Lucas Esteves, a Point Park MFA graduate for Screenwriting and Playwriting, the judges awarded first place to John Spare, who is currently working towards completing the same graduate program.
Spare, whose pitch was an original horror-mystery story called “Black Eyed Kids,” was awarded a screenplay of The Usual Suspects as well as the opportunity to have his piece read in full by Lockhart, who has read over 60,000 scripts and whose agency’s clientele includes Denzel Washington, Matt Damon and Robert Downey Jr.
I attended just the final day of the weekend, drifting between the various panels, as there were always at least two occurring simultaneously.
Though I lament missing earlier discussions from the weekend such as “iPhone Filmmaking” and “Writing Dynamic Dialogue,” the lineup from Sunday was full of thought-provoking discussions.
Highlights included “Heroes and Villains” – hosted by Miller, author William C. Martell and Alvaro Rodriguez, cousin of Robert Rodriguez and writer of Machete – as well as “Comedy Sketch Writing,” led by Mike Betette of the “Epic Rap Battles of History” YouTube series.
“Writing Partners, Team and Groups” was also full of excellent conversation. Miller was especially witty and articulate. His advice was sound – “You can’t be a professional in this industry and not collaborate” might as well be the conference’s slogan – and his jokes hit. “If your experiments don’t work out, if you’re fast enough, you can always blame the other guy.”
Though it may be called a screenwriters conference, the scope of topics spread to nearly all facets of filmmaking and the industry.
Sarah O’Melia, a member of Pittsburgh’s chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Artists along with Rescher, assisted with the event’s marketing as well as helping with the website and brochure. She noted how much of the discussion that took place during the conference was applicable to many fields.
“I think a lot of what they’re saying is not just relevant to screenwriting or film or cinema, it can be relevant in any kind of art form,” said O’Melia.
Monique Helt-Morrison, a screenwriter and creative producer who just moved from Los Angeles, personified the independent screenwriter’s struggles and successes.
“I came from the hub to here really as a way to connect with local Pittsburghers who are likeminded in the TV, film and creative world – and of course to learn,” Morrison said.
During her senior year at Louisiana State University, she held a job doing social work for the school. As Morrison was about to leave for Los Angeles, her boss, Cecile Guin, handed her an unpublished, 500-page manuscript about the life of Feltus Taylor Jr., who was charged with armed robbery and first-degree murder in 1991 and executed in 2000.
The project, entitled “Waiting to Die,” has been Morrison’s passion project for the 16 years since. But despite the hurdles of legal rights, the project – for which Morrison has six separate screenplays, including writing for a season of television – is finally close to getting off the ground.
Morrison, who attended each day of the weekend, had no problem with the lack of overwhelming turnout. “What I like is that it’s intimate enough to where you can really get one-on-one time with the different panelists,” said Morrison.
The intimate format of the humble event’s inception resulted in an atmosphere that nurtured relaxed, stimulating conversation amongst the relatively famous guests as well as between the speakers and the audience.
Rescher considered the conference a success and says she is grateful to those who attended.
“It wasn’t the 500 people that I anticipated, but for a year one, I think I hit my mark. The people that came, they’re the early adapters, they’re the die-hards – I appreciate my audience so much,” said Rescher.
Rescher hopes that future 3 Rivers Screenwriting Conferences will give attendees the opportunity to connect with a greater web of talent in Pittsburgh’s independent film community, similar to Steeltown Entertainment’s Crew Connect project. Despite the time constraints and stress of creating the conference, she is optimistic about what she can do with more time to prepare and apply for grants.
“Hopefully next year, now that I have a lot of things more or less in place, it won’t be nearly as tough in terms of raising money and awareness.”
*Published in The Pitt News / May 24th, 2016
Spearheaded by director and founder Cathy Rescher, the three-day inaugural 3 Rivers Screenwriting Conference was held at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center Friday, May 20 through Sunday, May 22.
Rescher was inspired by the four-day screenwriting conference that takes place during the annual Austin Film Festival, the largest writers’ conference in the world. With 3 Rivers, she sought to put together a melting pot of Pittsburgh talent and insightful professionals involved in screenwriting and filmmaking in general.
Actually putting the pieces in place for the conference, though, was a challenge.
“I just thought to myself naïvely, ‘How hard can it be?’” said Rescher, who has experience in project management, marketing, design and related fields. She researched and booked various sponsors to help fund the weekend event, including Row House Cinema, Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, Pittsburgh Filmmakers and Stage 32, to name a few.
But Rescher’s biggest break was securing sponsorship from New Sun Rising – an organization that provides fiscal backing and mentoring to enterprises in the Pittsburgh region. New Sun Rising’s leaders unanimously voted to support the project, essentially greenlighting the conference with substantial monetary backing.
Tickets for the event started at $30 and the conference was host to over 30 speakers from around the country.
“Getting the caliber of industry professionals we had here was exactly what we set out to do and I remain hopeful we can continue doing it,” said Ramesh Santanam, who works in media and public relations and writes his own scripts. Santanam assisted with 3 Rivers by contacting and recruiting some of the speakers, as well as helping plan the conference’s programming.
“It was exhausting at times but entirely worthwhile, thanks to the many people who volunteered their time and expertise,” said Santanam.
The preeminent speakers included Ashley Edward Miller, a screenwriter for X-Men: First Class and Thor, and Laura Harkcom, writer and producer for Syfy and Fox and a consultant for NBCUniversal. Joining them was Christopher Lockhart, story editor at the William Morris Endeavor in Hollywood.
Those three guests would be hosts of the Pitch Finale, the last event of the conference. Three amateur screenwriters delivered pitches of their original scripts to the three judges, Miller, Harkcom and Lockhart.
Though the audience heavily favored the pitch about a modern-day stoner Dracula in Seattle by Lucas Esteves, a Point Park MFA graduate for Screenwriting and Playwriting, the judges awarded first place to John Spare, who is currently working towards completing the same graduate program.
Spare, whose pitch was an original horror-mystery story called “Black Eyed Kids,” was awarded a screenplay of The Usual Suspects as well as the opportunity to have his piece read in full by Lockhart, who has read over 60,000 scripts and whose agency’s clientele includes Denzel Washington, Matt Damon and Robert Downey Jr.
I attended just the final day of the weekend, drifting between the various panels, as there were always at least two occurring simultaneously.
Though I lament missing earlier discussions from the weekend such as “iPhone Filmmaking” and “Writing Dynamic Dialogue,” the lineup from Sunday was full of thought-provoking discussions.
Highlights included “Heroes and Villains” – hosted by Miller, author William C. Martell and Alvaro Rodriguez, cousin of Robert Rodriguez and writer of Machete – as well as “Comedy Sketch Writing,” led by Mike Betette of the “Epic Rap Battles of History” YouTube series.
“Writing Partners, Team and Groups” was also full of excellent conversation. Miller was especially witty and articulate. His advice was sound – “You can’t be a professional in this industry and not collaborate” might as well be the conference’s slogan – and his jokes hit. “If your experiments don’t work out, if you’re fast enough, you can always blame the other guy.”
Though it may be called a screenwriters conference, the scope of topics spread to nearly all facets of filmmaking and the industry.
Sarah O’Melia, a member of Pittsburgh’s chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Artists along with Rescher, assisted with the event’s marketing as well as helping with the website and brochure. She noted how much of the discussion that took place during the conference was applicable to many fields.
“I think a lot of what they’re saying is not just relevant to screenwriting or film or cinema, it can be relevant in any kind of art form,” said O’Melia.
Monique Helt-Morrison, a screenwriter and creative producer who just moved from Los Angeles, personified the independent screenwriter’s struggles and successes.
“I came from the hub to here really as a way to connect with local Pittsburghers who are likeminded in the TV, film and creative world – and of course to learn,” Morrison said.
During her senior year at Louisiana State University, she held a job doing social work for the school. As Morrison was about to leave for Los Angeles, her boss, Cecile Guin, handed her an unpublished, 500-page manuscript about the life of Feltus Taylor Jr., who was charged with armed robbery and first-degree murder in 1991 and executed in 2000.
The project, entitled “Waiting to Die,” has been Morrison’s passion project for the 16 years since. But despite the hurdles of legal rights, the project – for which Morrison has six separate screenplays, including writing for a season of television – is finally close to getting off the ground.
Morrison, who attended each day of the weekend, had no problem with the lack of overwhelming turnout. “What I like is that it’s intimate enough to where you can really get one-on-one time with the different panelists,” said Morrison.
The intimate format of the humble event’s inception resulted in an atmosphere that nurtured relaxed, stimulating conversation amongst the relatively famous guests as well as between the speakers and the audience.
Rescher considered the conference a success and says she is grateful to those who attended.
“It wasn’t the 500 people that I anticipated, but for a year one, I think I hit my mark. The people that came, they’re the early adapters, they’re the die-hards – I appreciate my audience so much,” said Rescher.
Rescher hopes that future 3 Rivers Screenwriting Conferences will give attendees the opportunity to connect with a greater web of talent in Pittsburgh’s independent film community, similar to Steeltown Entertainment’s Crew Connect project. Despite the time constraints and stress of creating the conference, she is optimistic about what she can do with more time to prepare and apply for grants.
“Hopefully next year, now that I have a lot of things more or less in place, it won’t be nearly as tough in terms of raising money and awareness.”
*Published in The Pitt News / May 24th, 2016