WakeFanatic
Well-known member
Bring on the tags, and the disagreement, here are my top 20 films of the past year. Sorry for some of the long write-ups.
20. Dredd (dir. Pete Travis)
An exercise in genre that recalls John Carpenter's work, Dredd is a gritty, stylized bit of fun that didn't receive the audience that it deserved.
19. Take This Waltz (dir. Sarah Polley)
A less devastating feature than the similarly themed Blue Valentine, this is nevertheless an affecting, terrifically directed and acted look at a marriage falling apart, and a woman searching for something more.
18. Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie (dir. Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim)
With this absurdist, surrealist comedy, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim suddenly find themselves emerging as important comedic voices in an era of improvised, non-sequitor comedy. Seemingly a series of disparate gags, Tim and Eric manage to thematically tie all the loose bits together, creating a movie that may cross all lines of conventional comedy, and enter into the territory of manic genius.
17. Lincoln (dir. Steven Spielberg)
A masterclass in writing, acting, directing, cinematography, and lighting, Steven Spielberg's best movie in years is a heady look at one of history's most exalted figures. Lincoln, as portrayed by Daniel Day Lewis (in what is sure to net him another Oscar win), is a remarkable man, who struggles against intense conflict and ambiguous motivations amid his own personal grief. Tony Kushner's wonderful screenplay sets up Lincoln as a man who must manipulate the system for the good of the people, even if it's against the wishes of those people.
16. Moonrise Kingdom (dir. Wes Anderson)
If one were to make a list of the best directors of the past 16 years, Wes Anderson would invariably be on that list. Of his seven films not one has been bad. On the contrary they have all been on the level approaching masterpieces. His newest, and most self-reflexive film, very well could be his best. It is certainly his most personal, as can be seen in the opening scene, which is like a pastiche of all Anderson’s films, condensed down into one colorful, quirky, and oddly hilarious credit sequence. Certain scenes are some of the best Anderson has ever filmed, and this is a sweet, hysterical, and poignant meditation on young love.
15. Holy Motors (dir. Leos Carax)
A wildly episodic, meta-movie, Leos Carax's film, which was nominated for the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, is like a gonzo sketchbook of every genre, every kind of set-piece, and seemingly every movie ever made. It is a movie that begs to be experienced, and it proves to be a dizzyingly successful venture, even if certain parts of it are impenetrable. Holy Motors belongs to Denis Levant, in a staggering performance, as a man who's at once transparent and opaque, complicated and unfettered, and, like all of us, altogether unknowable. He rides around in his limo, performing various scenarios, that only get stranger as the movie goes on. There's even an interlude where Levant plays the accordion in a big band that triumphantly marches through the streets. A movie that is as endearing as it is strange, just think of it as Fantasia, but with erections and graphic violence.
14. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (dir. Neveldine/Taylor)
The overwhelmingly negative critical response to Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is not surprising. After all, it is a sequel to a less than stellar original Ghost Rider, and it comes nearly five years after that first film. Seemingly an afterthought, the critics have written it off as such, failing to recognize that the directors of the film, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (Crank, Crank: High Voltage, and Gamer) are working in a way that subverts the standard comic book film, favoring avant-garde visual expressions and rich evocations of the disintegration of affect and morality over the standard exposition heavy narratives that usually plague these types of films.
Neveldine/Taylor achieve all this on their way to creating one of the best comic book adaptations of all time. The action scenes are brilliantly realized, with Neveldine/Taylor delivering non-stop, in your face thrills that top even those of the Crank films. The cinematography is breathtaking, bypassing the shaky cam craze that plagues modern action movies, and instead delivering action scenes that are chaotic, yet composed. The camera is fluid, capturing action scenes in a manner that is entirely effective. The action scenes are surreal, carnivalesque, including images and sequences that are rarely ever seen in mainstream action films. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is a masterpiece of the genre, delivering a new, expressionistic take on the comic book film.
13. The Comedy (dir. Rick Alverson)
Throughout Rick Alverson's daring film, Tim Heidecker slumps around Brooklyn and the surrounding suburbs, surveying a world that bores him with a vacant, middle-distance stare. Hedeicker's Swanson and his buddies (including Eric Warheim, James Murphy, and Gregg Turkngton) relate to each other through ironic exchanges, their conversations tainted by a mean-spirited disingenuousness. Here, humor is a way to keep the world at arm's length, while flattering an inflated, egotistical sense of self-worth. In its way, The Comedy is intensely funny, gratifying, and slowly soul-crushing. An instructive lesson in the waning of affect, and the use of humor not only as a defensive mechanism, but a lens for viewing the world, maybe The Comedy's title isn't so much dishonest as deeply ironic.
12. Looper (dir. Rian Johnson)
Looper, is filled with clichés. From an unlikely relationship with a precocious child, to an aimless assassin in need of a father figure, right down to the exotic Western woman coming to the aid of a broken man, and helping to fix him. It’s despite all of these clichés, or perhaps because he manages to use them to create something wholly fascinating and exhilarating, that Rian Johnson has crafted what will soon become a classic of the Sci-Fi genre. His film is a portrait of violent loners, and the pain that they have inflicted upon them. The only way they know to release this pain is to inflict violence upon others, and Johnson’s future is one that has been decayed by guns and murder, and the weak men that don’t have the conviction to do any better than a life of violence. They may think they are killing for noble reasons, but their violence is merely a means of pacifying themselves. This is why the film’s climax works so well, because it suggests that the only way to end the vicious circle of violence is by choice, not chance. Though the ending may be telegraphed from the very opening shot, it is nonetheless extremely effective, highlighting that singular moment where a violent, cold-hearted man faces a revelation; that he must, for the first time in his life, put the needs of the community (in this case the whole world’s future well being) over his own.
11. The Turin Horse (dir. Bela Tarr)
A grand, sweeping cinematic gesture from one of cinemas most revered figures, Bela Tarr's film is a magnificent, towering achievement, a two-and-a-half hour meditation on death. As daunting as that may sound, Tarr's images are utterly transfixing, and the film's lengthy, monumental opening shot is enough to draw any cinephile in. Tarr is a master filmmaker, and he holds us in his grasp throughout the film's run time. Bringing to mind the films of Bresson, Bergman, and Dreyer, The Turin Horse is a vision of a world going inexorably into a final darkness.
10. The Kid With a Bike (Jean Pierre & Luc Dardenne)
A sort-of modern day Bicycle Thieves, the Dardenne Brothers' profoundly humane film follows Cyril (Thomas Doret), an 11-year-old boy who refuses to acknowledge the hurt and pain that the abandonment of his dad is causing him. He acts out, pushing away the woman, Samantha (Cécile De France), whose love he can't accept. Cyril pushes his bike throughout the film, the bike serving as a constant reminder of all that he's inherited from a father he refuses to believe no longer wants him. In the film's final, devastating scene, Cyril is resurrected from what looks like certain death, given a chance at rediscovering his humanity and inherent goodness.
9. Killer Joe (dir. William Friedkin)
The most intense and darkly subversive American comedy since Fargo, Killer Joe is Friedkin's sinister, darkly funny look at the downfall of the American family. In a year that saw Matthew McConaughey's resurgence (Bernie, Magic Mike), here he plays a traditionalist, breaking into monologues about the good old days of the Oklahoma-Texas border, and, in the film's climactic, 20-minute scene in the trailer home, the importance of a traditional family dinner. Things spin out of control in this final act, and the violence and sexual depravity are turned up to 11 (you'll never look at a piece of fried chicken the same again), and after all the bloodshed and perverse sexual acts, the film ends on what is the most comically tragic bit of irony seen in a film this year.
8. Oslo, August 31st (dir. Joachim Trier)
A deliberate, chilling, piercing snapshot of one man's struggle to survive a day-long trip out of rehab for a job interview, Joachim Trier finds new ways to study the struggle of the now overly familiar cinematic terrain of drug addiction. The film opens with a series of people, set in voice over, talking about their memories of the titular Norway capital, while images, past and present, flash before us. Oslo, August 31st then becomes a richly evocative film, exploring Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie) interactions with his old party buddies, and his interactions with the city, which Trier portrays as a place of both perpetual change, and inescapable memories.
7. Killing Them Softly (dir. Andrew Dominik)
Opening with an avant-grade, experimental credit sequence, Killing Them Softly immediately positions itself as this year’s Drive, an art-house action film that has got more on it’s mind than the advertising campaign, which promoted the movie as a straightforward Hollywood actioner, would have led one to believe. Guttural, industrial sounds and quick cuts to black are intercut with images of Frankie (Scoot McNairy) walking out of a tunnel, smoking a cigarette and looking disheveled, while billboards of Barack Obama and John McCain can be seen in the background. The film is set in 2008, amidst the economic meltdown and lead-up to the presidential election. Andrew Dominik is an incredibly visual filmmaker, and his last film, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, was a meditative, existential, Malickian journey about myth-making in a time where the quest for fame and fortune will inevitably lead to death. Dominik’s new film aligns with the thematic bent of Jesse James, and Brad Pitt, who played James in that film, plays a similar character in this film. Pitt does not show up until a half-hour into the film, and when he does, Johnny Cash’s apocalyptic “The Man Comes Around” plays him in.
Pitt owns every scene he is in, and his character storms through the film as a stand-in for everything that is wrong with America. He is brash, charismatic, and unrelenting, a larger-than-life figure who only comes into a situation when the established order has been broken. This is a world emptied of emotion, and dominated by impersonal greed and blunt violence. Greig Frasers gorgeous cinematography leads to several stunning set-pieces, including the initial holdup, which is accomplished with several intricate Steadicam shots, and one of Cogan’s hits, scored by Ketty Lester’s “Love Letters,” turning the violent hit into a slow-motion ballet of shattered glass and flying bullets. Dominik’s story of graphic bloodshed and a heist-gone-wrong is close in spirit to a 70’s art-house flick, making this chilly and nerve-wracking experience one of the bleakest portraits of America seen on screen in quite some time. This is only the third feature from the 45-year-old New Zealander, positioning Dominik as a director who works deliberately, and only releases a movie when he feels his vision has been accomplished. Killing The Softly is an uncompromising vision, and it shows that Dominik is one of the most unique directors working today.
6. Magic Mike (dir. Steven Soderbergh)
Audiences, specifically female ones, that rushed out to the theater to have a light-hearted, fun time were likely sorely disappointed with Magic Mike, as acclaimed director Steven Soderbergh pulled a fast one on unsuspecting movie-goers with this dark, sinister, and wholly successful film about how we live our lives in this day and age of instant gratification. If Stanley Kubrick were still alive this is the movie he would make. Magic Mike is a lot like Kubrick’s final film Eyes Wide Shut, in that it puts on a front like it is about sex, but it only uses that as a means of probing deeper into the way our society functions. In a way it is about sex, and how this current generation uses it, and drugs and alcohol as an answer to all our problems. Even the stripping scenes have sinister undertones, as every character in the movie is, in some way, growing ever more shallow and cold-hearted every time they strip, or they watch somebody strip. Matthew McConaughey turns in an Oscar worthy performance, and Channing Tatum and Alex Pettyfer deliver performances that are staggeringly affective. Magic Mike is the real deal, and the crowning achievement of Soderbergh’s illustrious filmmaking career.
5. Alps (dir. Giorgos Lanthimos)
Lanthimos’ film, though not as perversely polarizing as his previous film, Dogtooth, is a confoundingly effective film about the process of acting. A group of people start a business where they impersonate the recently deceased in order to help their clients through the grieving process, and the film becomes an absurdist tragicomedy, where the actors begin to lose themselves in their new roles, until eventually, they have lost themselves, and their identities, and are left searching for meaning in a world that they do not know.
4. The Dark Knight Rises (dir. Christopher Nolan)
A masterpiece of sound and fury, Christopher Nolan’s final installment in his Dark Knight trilogy is, like a Wagnerian Opera, about feeling and momentum, which crescendos in grand gestures of beauty and destruction. Including an ending that may not be as cut-and-dry as most viewers think, Nolan’s farewell to the Bat is filmmaking on the grandest of scales.
3. Zero Dark Thirty (dir. Kathryn Bigelow)
At heart a police procedural, Kathryn Bigelow’s follow-up to the Oscar winning The Hurt Locker, is as much about one woman’s (Jessica Chastain in a terrific performance) battle with her personal demon’s as it is about a nation searching for it’s own demon. The film’s realistic portrayals of torture, and the powerful ending, suggest that the film is ultimately about the unknowable cost of maintaining order with deplorable violence.
2. Django Unchained (dir. Quentin Tarantino)
Shockingly violent, wickedly funny, absurdly entertaining, Quentin Tarantino’s Spaghetti Western is also a thoughtful rumination on the causes and repercussions of slavery. It is Tarantino’s most mature movie, boasting some of the year’s best performances, and several jaw-dropping set-pieces. This is about as off the chain as they come.
1. The Master (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)
In Paul Thomas Anderson’s kaleidoscopic, hypnotic vision of megalomania, two broken men search for acceptance from society, but, tragically, only gain acceptance from each other. Joaquin Phoenix is a force of nature, all id, and animalistic instinct, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman is a paternalistic, charming liar, as the two men form a father-son relationship that culminates in the film’s defining moment, and perhaps Anderson’s crowning achievement, as Dodd (Hoffman) sweetly serenades his prodigal son (Phoenix) with a rendition of "(I'd Like to Get You on a) Slow Boat to China." The Master is profound cinema, the work of a director who may just be this generation’s most gifted auteur.
So what say ye? Agree, disagree? Please join in and post your own favorite movies of the year.
20. Dredd (dir. Pete Travis)
An exercise in genre that recalls John Carpenter's work, Dredd is a gritty, stylized bit of fun that didn't receive the audience that it deserved.
19. Take This Waltz (dir. Sarah Polley)
A less devastating feature than the similarly themed Blue Valentine, this is nevertheless an affecting, terrifically directed and acted look at a marriage falling apart, and a woman searching for something more.
18. Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie (dir. Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim)
With this absurdist, surrealist comedy, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim suddenly find themselves emerging as important comedic voices in an era of improvised, non-sequitor comedy. Seemingly a series of disparate gags, Tim and Eric manage to thematically tie all the loose bits together, creating a movie that may cross all lines of conventional comedy, and enter into the territory of manic genius.
17. Lincoln (dir. Steven Spielberg)
A masterclass in writing, acting, directing, cinematography, and lighting, Steven Spielberg's best movie in years is a heady look at one of history's most exalted figures. Lincoln, as portrayed by Daniel Day Lewis (in what is sure to net him another Oscar win), is a remarkable man, who struggles against intense conflict and ambiguous motivations amid his own personal grief. Tony Kushner's wonderful screenplay sets up Lincoln as a man who must manipulate the system for the good of the people, even if it's against the wishes of those people.
16. Moonrise Kingdom (dir. Wes Anderson)
If one were to make a list of the best directors of the past 16 years, Wes Anderson would invariably be on that list. Of his seven films not one has been bad. On the contrary they have all been on the level approaching masterpieces. His newest, and most self-reflexive film, very well could be his best. It is certainly his most personal, as can be seen in the opening scene, which is like a pastiche of all Anderson’s films, condensed down into one colorful, quirky, and oddly hilarious credit sequence. Certain scenes are some of the best Anderson has ever filmed, and this is a sweet, hysterical, and poignant meditation on young love.
15. Holy Motors (dir. Leos Carax)
A wildly episodic, meta-movie, Leos Carax's film, which was nominated for the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, is like a gonzo sketchbook of every genre, every kind of set-piece, and seemingly every movie ever made. It is a movie that begs to be experienced, and it proves to be a dizzyingly successful venture, even if certain parts of it are impenetrable. Holy Motors belongs to Denis Levant, in a staggering performance, as a man who's at once transparent and opaque, complicated and unfettered, and, like all of us, altogether unknowable. He rides around in his limo, performing various scenarios, that only get stranger as the movie goes on. There's even an interlude where Levant plays the accordion in a big band that triumphantly marches through the streets. A movie that is as endearing as it is strange, just think of it as Fantasia, but with erections and graphic violence.
14. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (dir. Neveldine/Taylor)
The overwhelmingly negative critical response to Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is not surprising. After all, it is a sequel to a less than stellar original Ghost Rider, and it comes nearly five years after that first film. Seemingly an afterthought, the critics have written it off as such, failing to recognize that the directors of the film, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (Crank, Crank: High Voltage, and Gamer) are working in a way that subverts the standard comic book film, favoring avant-garde visual expressions and rich evocations of the disintegration of affect and morality over the standard exposition heavy narratives that usually plague these types of films.
Neveldine/Taylor achieve all this on their way to creating one of the best comic book adaptations of all time. The action scenes are brilliantly realized, with Neveldine/Taylor delivering non-stop, in your face thrills that top even those of the Crank films. The cinematography is breathtaking, bypassing the shaky cam craze that plagues modern action movies, and instead delivering action scenes that are chaotic, yet composed. The camera is fluid, capturing action scenes in a manner that is entirely effective. The action scenes are surreal, carnivalesque, including images and sequences that are rarely ever seen in mainstream action films. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is a masterpiece of the genre, delivering a new, expressionistic take on the comic book film.
13. The Comedy (dir. Rick Alverson)
Throughout Rick Alverson's daring film, Tim Heidecker slumps around Brooklyn and the surrounding suburbs, surveying a world that bores him with a vacant, middle-distance stare. Hedeicker's Swanson and his buddies (including Eric Warheim, James Murphy, and Gregg Turkngton) relate to each other through ironic exchanges, their conversations tainted by a mean-spirited disingenuousness. Here, humor is a way to keep the world at arm's length, while flattering an inflated, egotistical sense of self-worth. In its way, The Comedy is intensely funny, gratifying, and slowly soul-crushing. An instructive lesson in the waning of affect, and the use of humor not only as a defensive mechanism, but a lens for viewing the world, maybe The Comedy's title isn't so much dishonest as deeply ironic.
12. Looper (dir. Rian Johnson)
Looper, is filled with clichés. From an unlikely relationship with a precocious child, to an aimless assassin in need of a father figure, right down to the exotic Western woman coming to the aid of a broken man, and helping to fix him. It’s despite all of these clichés, or perhaps because he manages to use them to create something wholly fascinating and exhilarating, that Rian Johnson has crafted what will soon become a classic of the Sci-Fi genre. His film is a portrait of violent loners, and the pain that they have inflicted upon them. The only way they know to release this pain is to inflict violence upon others, and Johnson’s future is one that has been decayed by guns and murder, and the weak men that don’t have the conviction to do any better than a life of violence. They may think they are killing for noble reasons, but their violence is merely a means of pacifying themselves. This is why the film’s climax works so well, because it suggests that the only way to end the vicious circle of violence is by choice, not chance. Though the ending may be telegraphed from the very opening shot, it is nonetheless extremely effective, highlighting that singular moment where a violent, cold-hearted man faces a revelation; that he must, for the first time in his life, put the needs of the community (in this case the whole world’s future well being) over his own.
11. The Turin Horse (dir. Bela Tarr)
A grand, sweeping cinematic gesture from one of cinemas most revered figures, Bela Tarr's film is a magnificent, towering achievement, a two-and-a-half hour meditation on death. As daunting as that may sound, Tarr's images are utterly transfixing, and the film's lengthy, monumental opening shot is enough to draw any cinephile in. Tarr is a master filmmaker, and he holds us in his grasp throughout the film's run time. Bringing to mind the films of Bresson, Bergman, and Dreyer, The Turin Horse is a vision of a world going inexorably into a final darkness.
10. The Kid With a Bike (Jean Pierre & Luc Dardenne)
A sort-of modern day Bicycle Thieves, the Dardenne Brothers' profoundly humane film follows Cyril (Thomas Doret), an 11-year-old boy who refuses to acknowledge the hurt and pain that the abandonment of his dad is causing him. He acts out, pushing away the woman, Samantha (Cécile De France), whose love he can't accept. Cyril pushes his bike throughout the film, the bike serving as a constant reminder of all that he's inherited from a father he refuses to believe no longer wants him. In the film's final, devastating scene, Cyril is resurrected from what looks like certain death, given a chance at rediscovering his humanity and inherent goodness.
9. Killer Joe (dir. William Friedkin)
The most intense and darkly subversive American comedy since Fargo, Killer Joe is Friedkin's sinister, darkly funny look at the downfall of the American family. In a year that saw Matthew McConaughey's resurgence (Bernie, Magic Mike), here he plays a traditionalist, breaking into monologues about the good old days of the Oklahoma-Texas border, and, in the film's climactic, 20-minute scene in the trailer home, the importance of a traditional family dinner. Things spin out of control in this final act, and the violence and sexual depravity are turned up to 11 (you'll never look at a piece of fried chicken the same again), and after all the bloodshed and perverse sexual acts, the film ends on what is the most comically tragic bit of irony seen in a film this year.
8. Oslo, August 31st (dir. Joachim Trier)
A deliberate, chilling, piercing snapshot of one man's struggle to survive a day-long trip out of rehab for a job interview, Joachim Trier finds new ways to study the struggle of the now overly familiar cinematic terrain of drug addiction. The film opens with a series of people, set in voice over, talking about their memories of the titular Norway capital, while images, past and present, flash before us. Oslo, August 31st then becomes a richly evocative film, exploring Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie) interactions with his old party buddies, and his interactions with the city, which Trier portrays as a place of both perpetual change, and inescapable memories.
7. Killing Them Softly (dir. Andrew Dominik)
Opening with an avant-grade, experimental credit sequence, Killing Them Softly immediately positions itself as this year’s Drive, an art-house action film that has got more on it’s mind than the advertising campaign, which promoted the movie as a straightforward Hollywood actioner, would have led one to believe. Guttural, industrial sounds and quick cuts to black are intercut with images of Frankie (Scoot McNairy) walking out of a tunnel, smoking a cigarette and looking disheveled, while billboards of Barack Obama and John McCain can be seen in the background. The film is set in 2008, amidst the economic meltdown and lead-up to the presidential election. Andrew Dominik is an incredibly visual filmmaker, and his last film, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, was a meditative, existential, Malickian journey about myth-making in a time where the quest for fame and fortune will inevitably lead to death. Dominik’s new film aligns with the thematic bent of Jesse James, and Brad Pitt, who played James in that film, plays a similar character in this film. Pitt does not show up until a half-hour into the film, and when he does, Johnny Cash’s apocalyptic “The Man Comes Around” plays him in.
Pitt owns every scene he is in, and his character storms through the film as a stand-in for everything that is wrong with America. He is brash, charismatic, and unrelenting, a larger-than-life figure who only comes into a situation when the established order has been broken. This is a world emptied of emotion, and dominated by impersonal greed and blunt violence. Greig Frasers gorgeous cinematography leads to several stunning set-pieces, including the initial holdup, which is accomplished with several intricate Steadicam shots, and one of Cogan’s hits, scored by Ketty Lester’s “Love Letters,” turning the violent hit into a slow-motion ballet of shattered glass and flying bullets. Dominik’s story of graphic bloodshed and a heist-gone-wrong is close in spirit to a 70’s art-house flick, making this chilly and nerve-wracking experience one of the bleakest portraits of America seen on screen in quite some time. This is only the third feature from the 45-year-old New Zealander, positioning Dominik as a director who works deliberately, and only releases a movie when he feels his vision has been accomplished. Killing The Softly is an uncompromising vision, and it shows that Dominik is one of the most unique directors working today.
6. Magic Mike (dir. Steven Soderbergh)
Audiences, specifically female ones, that rushed out to the theater to have a light-hearted, fun time were likely sorely disappointed with Magic Mike, as acclaimed director Steven Soderbergh pulled a fast one on unsuspecting movie-goers with this dark, sinister, and wholly successful film about how we live our lives in this day and age of instant gratification. If Stanley Kubrick were still alive this is the movie he would make. Magic Mike is a lot like Kubrick’s final film Eyes Wide Shut, in that it puts on a front like it is about sex, but it only uses that as a means of probing deeper into the way our society functions. In a way it is about sex, and how this current generation uses it, and drugs and alcohol as an answer to all our problems. Even the stripping scenes have sinister undertones, as every character in the movie is, in some way, growing ever more shallow and cold-hearted every time they strip, or they watch somebody strip. Matthew McConaughey turns in an Oscar worthy performance, and Channing Tatum and Alex Pettyfer deliver performances that are staggeringly affective. Magic Mike is the real deal, and the crowning achievement of Soderbergh’s illustrious filmmaking career.
5. Alps (dir. Giorgos Lanthimos)
Lanthimos’ film, though not as perversely polarizing as his previous film, Dogtooth, is a confoundingly effective film about the process of acting. A group of people start a business where they impersonate the recently deceased in order to help their clients through the grieving process, and the film becomes an absurdist tragicomedy, where the actors begin to lose themselves in their new roles, until eventually, they have lost themselves, and their identities, and are left searching for meaning in a world that they do not know.
4. The Dark Knight Rises (dir. Christopher Nolan)
A masterpiece of sound and fury, Christopher Nolan’s final installment in his Dark Knight trilogy is, like a Wagnerian Opera, about feeling and momentum, which crescendos in grand gestures of beauty and destruction. Including an ending that may not be as cut-and-dry as most viewers think, Nolan’s farewell to the Bat is filmmaking on the grandest of scales.
3. Zero Dark Thirty (dir. Kathryn Bigelow)
At heart a police procedural, Kathryn Bigelow’s follow-up to the Oscar winning The Hurt Locker, is as much about one woman’s (Jessica Chastain in a terrific performance) battle with her personal demon’s as it is about a nation searching for it’s own demon. The film’s realistic portrayals of torture, and the powerful ending, suggest that the film is ultimately about the unknowable cost of maintaining order with deplorable violence.
2. Django Unchained (dir. Quentin Tarantino)
Shockingly violent, wickedly funny, absurdly entertaining, Quentin Tarantino’s Spaghetti Western is also a thoughtful rumination on the causes and repercussions of slavery. It is Tarantino’s most mature movie, boasting some of the year’s best performances, and several jaw-dropping set-pieces. This is about as off the chain as they come.
1. The Master (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)
In Paul Thomas Anderson’s kaleidoscopic, hypnotic vision of megalomania, two broken men search for acceptance from society, but, tragically, only gain acceptance from each other. Joaquin Phoenix is a force of nature, all id, and animalistic instinct, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman is a paternalistic, charming liar, as the two men form a father-son relationship that culminates in the film’s defining moment, and perhaps Anderson’s crowning achievement, as Dodd (Hoffman) sweetly serenades his prodigal son (Phoenix) with a rendition of "(I'd Like to Get You on a) Slow Boat to China." The Master is profound cinema, the work of a director who may just be this generation’s most gifted auteur.
So what say ye? Agree, disagree? Please join in and post your own favorite movies of the year.
