Best of 2015

In 2015 I got a gig writing for THE paper of record in Sonoma valley and boy has that established for me that Hollywood is worse than I thought...and the requirement to watch the biggest releases each week impacted my ability to write on the WTT about other, better films (thankfully, the gig has not impacted my ability to make excuses about not writing). That said, read all my reviews! I'm working up a lather now and getting stronger even if the films aren't--bet on it.

In paging through WTT "Best of" posts from years past (in a desperate attempt to put off work on this new post), the films sort of reorder themselves around the ones I've had the biggest urge to watch since. For 2015 I tried to rank less on what I consider the best in this moment and more on which films will obsess me moving forward. 

Best Supporting Actor

I have more clarity on certain subcategories of this section--the best costumes for a supporting actor goes to Isaach de Bankole in The Last Witch Hunter, the best supporting voice acting is Sam Elliott in The Good Dinosaur, the best ensemble supporting acting is a fierce competition between Michael Sheen and Tom Sturridge in Far from the Madding Crowd and Joe Manganiello, Matt Bomer, Kevin Nash and Adam Rodriguez in Magic Mike XXL. For some reason, Jeff Daniels' "Mark Watney is dead" line from The Martian still kills me, I don't know why. (I do know why. I wish Matt Damon were dead.) But the prize goes to Benicio del Toro, because his character in Sicario plays exquisitely off his Traffic statuette-winner and because he runs off and hides with the narrative in the last half hour of the film.

Best Supporting Actress

With apologies to Ilsa Faust in M:I5, Lea Seydoux wins for the best supporting actress name--Madeleine Swann--in Spectre. The most surprising supporting actress turn belongs to Monica Bellucci in The Wonders--one cannot imagine the American analog of her fabulous guest appearance in a film about rural Italian beekeepers. Praise be the ensemble of Turkish Coppola virgins in Mustang--Güneş Şensoy, Doğa Doğuşlu, İlayda Akdoğan, Tuğba Sunguroğlu and Elit İşcan--they are charm and wallop together. Lola Kirke is excellent smirks and turns of phrase against Greta Gerwig in Mistress America but really the only performance one sees is Kristen Stewart's in The Clouds of Sils Maria--her personal assistance to Juliette Binoche dominates the landscape and then recedes in the most affecting retreat of the year. 

Best Actor

2015 was a year of #hottiealerts. I must put order to my objectification, so, with apologies to Chris Hemsworth's faux Moby-Dick pecs In the Heart of the Sea and Jake Gylenhaal's phenomenal Southpaw abdominals, the best topless performances are by Michael B. Jordan in Creed (astonishing, truly astonishing that this film is left on the outside by the Academy) and Channing Tatum with so, so much Magic in his Mike. Shoutouts to the scruffier sex symbols Viggo Mortenson in Jauja and Vin Diesel in The Last Witch Hunter working their way handsomely through various portals. But in Far from the Madding Crowd Matthias Schoenaerts' Gabriel Oak is that most special heartthrob: women want him, blogging men want to be in (much smaller sizes of) his impeccable shepherd wear. To paraphrase J. Lo to Clooney in Out of Sight: "you really wear that scarf." I'm just thankful that now all theaters have those high-backed seats so I didn't snap my neck swooning when Gabriel sorted all those bloated sheep and got tarps over the haystacks in the rain.

Best Actress

Salute to Angelina Jolie for directing and starring in By the Sea--her excellent work was dismissed as vacuous and narcissistic with a viciousness that would never apply to male actors/directors--but I'll long remember her face in the film, a gorgeously-photographed mask of pain. Another hat tip to Kristen Stewart in American Ultra, as the straw that stirs Jesse Eisenberg's drink. One wonders how in the world Charlize Theron wasn't nominated for Mad Max: Fury Road and if one had any hopes to save #OscarsSoWhite, it would have been noms for the extraordinary cohorts in Tangerine, Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor--they burn that motherfucker to the ground. I must credit longtime WTT-enemy David O. Russell for wising up and getting everything (Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro, plot logistics) out of Jennifer Lawrence's way in Joy--her role shares the same electricity as that of the not-be-denied Naomi Watts in Mulholland Dr. 

Best Pictures

20-11
Spectre, By the Sea, In Jackson Heights, Mistress America, The Wonders, Jauja, Joy, Mustang, Timbuktu, Mad Max: Fury Road.

10. Tangerine - The first minutes of the film have a fantastic effect. My mind was full of questions like what am I watching? why is it shot like this? who ARE these people? what is HAPPENING?? Sean Baker directs this picture so aggressively it's probably as close as we'll get to a Ryan Trecartin film at a cinema near us. The aforementioned excellence of Kitana Kiki Rodriguez is apparent in a flash--when her friend explains her boyfriend's been cheating on her she clarifies that she's "an upper hoe" and sets the narrative in motion. Rodriguez and her costar Mya Taylor drag the film by the hair through the streets of Los Angeles, which have never looked harsher or more beautiful than they do shot by iPhone, the day turning yellow and blue to orange and pink. Oh, and it's Christmas Eve in a city that's just "a beautifully wrapped lie." 

9. Far from the Madding Crowd - I covered the main points in my review but there are many additional things I love about this fast-paced and not-too-stately adaptation of Thomas Hardy. As previously discussed, this is an all-time great film for enthusiasts of scarves and cravats, the best I’ve ever seen in terms of neckwear style and variety (take a bow, costume designer Janet Patterson). In addition to the life-changing style of Gabriel Oak, Bathsheba is not slouch in a sterling blue milkmaid outfit, complete with kerchief, shot against a breathing couture cowhide. I also appreciate that Carey Mulligan sings a folk song that feels about an hour shorter than her “New York, New York” in Shame. As her Bathsheba explains of a most difficult year, “I seem to cry a great deal these days. I never used to cry at all.” Tell me about it lady. 

8. Macbeth - Here's another adaptation of concision--director Justin Kurzel took a lot out of the play but the snatches he left are indelible. "O full of scorpions is my mind!" he says and no contemporary actor has a more scorpion-dense head than Michael Fassbender. He is well on his way to developing the harshest crow's feet in cinema history and his Macbeth dispenses proper, proper violence. His handwash is blood, his war paint is ashes and his crown is tarnished gravestones. Marion Cotillard's Lady Macbeth matches his intensity, her face essentially a constant death frieze. The witches are hair-raising, the music chills. Kurzel took a green and grey Scottish expanse and turned it defiantly red and black. And as I turned another year older while writing this recap, I appreciated Macbeth's comforting speech about aging:

I have lived long enough: my way of life
Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.

7. The Assassin - The black and white opening movements of this film are so perfect I wished for time to stop; I wanted to ask the projectionist for the replay. I gasped and wrote furious notes to myself to look up the cinematographer: Ping Bin Lee (In the Mood for Love, of course). We're introduced to the Assassin in question as she deals death with remarkable naturalness, like a cloud passing across the sun, much more vivid for being so brief. Lee is the longtime lenser for Hou Hsiao-Hsien and, like their work together on The Flowers of Shanghai, this film uses the slightest of camera movements to ratchet the tension of palace intrigues. The set design is gauzy curtains and candlelight--seemingly peaceful, Lyndon-esque compositions interrupted by cuts like the flash of a knife. I often find myself back with the advice of the Assassin's mentor: "your mind is still hostage to human sentiment." 

(The 8 PM screening I attended is also my favorite theatre moment of the year. I was surprised at the relatively full house at the AMC Metreon but the turnout was all based on the title--throughout the two-hour run time, wuxia fanbois with strappy sneakers and ill-coiffed hair paraded out in huffy disgust. An auteur sneak attack!)

6. Carol - The biggest relief of the year. It was set up to be the one film to save all the shittiness that came before and so it did. Like all red-blooded Americans, I adore Todd Haynes' Far from Heaven and was impressed by how different Carol looks--it's less reminiscent of Douglas Sirk Technicolor than Robert Frank's black and white Americans. The acting is all so fine, with Cate Blanchett lionessing and Rooney Mara Audreying her tiny bangs and Coach Taylor behaving terribly because he had to be named Harge. The smeary interior of the Midwest is exactly the right amount of ugly, just as Highsmith would've wanted it, a slightly unfocused backdrop to the love story. And the formulation of the central relationship is ideal for me: a young artist is drawn resistlessly to an older lover whose art is her life itself. "Take me bed." My only problem with the film is that Carol is such an uninspired title. You know what's a great title? The Price of Salt.

5. Magic Mike XXL - Some of my feelings are noted here but it's nice to revisit the film because the Magic Mike franchise is my favorite argument. How do we live in a culture that insists on taking Avengers films seriously but dismisses Magic Mike as too shallow for serious discussion? People who deny themselves the pleasures of XXL are like this gas station cashier holding off on smiling as long as she can. In part two of what I hope is an endless saga, there are some excellent laugh lines, my favorite being Ken's on the the departed Dallas: "Don't say his name, don't give him that power." As a road picture, a lot of pleasure comes from the casual conversations the guys have, on their plans as they grow up. When not stripping, they work low-level jobs, from running a fro-yo truck to moving furniture--they are American dreamers. The pleasure-center release of the dancing benefits the recipients (who, in XXL, have a beautiful variety of body shapes and colors) as well as the entertainers. I’d say it’s still their day.

4. Blackhat - I love Michael Mann left to his own devices. As I touched on in my In the Heart of the Sea review, Chris Hemsworth (like Colin Farrell in Miami Vice) is better as an exterior, a vacancy. Blackhat is a film about visions rather than words--characters speak in thick accents and shorthand with the meanings often glitched out. From Los Angeles to Hong Kong, they move through spaces that are like the inside of computers, prisoners tethered to technology, neon chips falling over their faces--even the gold chains on necks come to look like strings of data. Despite the abstraction of much of the film, Mann remains the best composer of gunfights ever, this time surpassing himself with a crosscut sequence where the bad guys retreat down a circular ramp as the good guys make right angle turns in a warren of apartment buildings. Mann features faces and locations no one else could find and set pieces no one else would conceive. I hope his next film bombs too so he can stay small, dirty, digital, violent--he's at his greatest at the edge of coherence.    

3. Sicario - While not a particular Denis Villeneuve fan before this film, I was thrilled with the look of the picture. There's a downright Mannian border crossing sequence and later a deep push into the realm of night goggles and body heat maps. Most of my praise is contained in the review I wrote at the time so I'll re-emphasize my appreciation for the good films and books that lend a better better understand the ongoing Ciudad Juarez apocalypse. Recently I've read Yuri Herrera's Signs Preceding the End of the World, the first chapter of The Story of Vincente and listened to Charles Bowden, all to say I'm more convinced than ever by the pitch blackness into which Villeneuve drops viewers. Critics of his film had similar difficulties with No Country for Old Men, in which many were put off by the surprise death of (the wonderfully resurrected in Sicario) Josh Brolin. But that's cartels, killing the protagonist of any counternarrative with their unslakable thirst for death.

2. World of Tomorrow - Across the 16 minutes of Don Hertzfeldt's short but capacious animated masterpiece, every frame is screenshot-worthy and every line is quotable. Emily Clone, speaking from the future to her much younger grandmother, Emily Prime, gave me both the hardest laugh ("I drew a snakeboy") and shared the darkest thoughts of 2016 ("I do not have the mental or emotional capacity to deal with his loss but sometimes, I sit in a chair, late at night, and quietly feel very bad"). As we watch World of Tomorrow, much like Emily Prime, we are enjoying ourselves and don't quite sense how serious it is all getting. As carefree 4-year old playing a carefree 4-year-old, the filmmaker's niece Winona Mae gives the best vocal performance...ever? Probably ever. The film is full of ideas, second to second, visual and intellectual and emotional ideas and I want all of it, I want to be it--learn it, love it, stream it, buy it. "I am very proud of my sadness because it means I am more alive." "Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle."

(A quick hat tip to David Ehrlich for alerting me that I needed to see this. And, while we're here, his yearly Best of videos are one of the greatest gifts to cineastes--the 2015 version builds to a climax worthy of any film.)

1. Clouds of Sils Maria - What I've come to understand is that the films I love best are the ones I must keep watching to try to understand--this is why Our Beloved Month of August and Certified Copy were perhaps underrated in previous years' lists. I saw Olivier Assayas' Clouds of Sils Maria three times in theatres and there's still something just out of reach. 

The first act is an introduction to actress Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) and her assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart) who consider whether Maria should take the role of aging Helena in a restaging of the play Maloja Snake--Maria made her name 20 years earlier playing Helena's young foil Sigrid. Of course she must say yes. The second act--an endlessly beguiling affair that takes place in the cabin where Maloja Snake was written--has Maria and Valentine running lines as Helena and Sigrid with no real clarity on where the play ends and their personal conflicts intervene, whether the tensions between them are written. The third act is back in tumult of life with the new Sigrid, Lohanesque paparazzi-magnet Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloe Grace Moretz), meeting and tormenting Maria/Helena with what is presumably excellent method acting.

All of this plays off of Moretz and Binoche and Stewart's real life notoriety. They ask themselves why an actress like Maria Enders (like Juliette Binoche!) would take a role in an X-Men film and their conversations about Hollywood compromises are not trivial--it feels like they are addressing the heart of my work, reckoning with the commercial pictures of 2015. More than any action film, these meta games had me on the edge of my seat with excitement. Stewart is so tremendous in this film (and in 2015 as a whole) that I want to watch the Twilight films. I cannot put that in starker terms. Binoche (revelatory as she shifts from slumping in a train car to glamming up for fashion photos) is the best selector of roles and directors alive. Moretz holds her own and even takes the lead in the best image from Cannes. 

Which role is Binoche? Sigrid or Helena? Helena and Sigrid? Can the present overwrite the past? Assayas makes the Maloja Snake eats its own tail. I will keep watching until I can tell you everything about the play within the play and movie within the movie and the actors within the actors--The Clouds of Sils Maria is my best obsession of the year. 

*

Remember: "Now is the envy of all of the dead." 2016 is going to be great--so cheer the fuck up.

Best of 2014

Allow the WTT to quote the WTT this time last year:

I am comforted by patterns. 2013 confirmed that in even-numbered years the Giants win the World Series and in odd-numbered years all the best films come out. 

All I'm saying is don't doubt science or my rectitude. Madison Bumgarner gave one of only two onscreen performances I couldn't live without in 2014. (Spoiler alert: If I had not spent a stray Sunday afternoon watching a four-hour Filipino film I might not have even had the will to generate my traditional "Best of" post.)

In 2014, my rapidly eroding patience with our cinema found words in T.I.'s summer jam "No Mediocre."

As is often the case with rappers, you have to see past the T&A, the veneer of misogyny and get to their artistic concerns. T.I. is tired of mediocre shit being praised for greatness and I'm right there with him. As he scans the Billboard Top 40, I scroll down the vista of movie listings, unmoved by the indistinguishable B-average prestige pictures that Rotten Tomatoes encourages one to see (which one is The Imitation Game and which one is The Theory of Everything again?). If what's left for me to love is American Sniper, Boyhood, Interstellar, Gone Girl, et al, I'm at sea, I'm Robert Redford last year--all is lost.

Best Supporting Actresses

The finest seven minutes of actressing in a supporting role were lip-synched by Emma Stone on Jimmy Fallon but I suppose I ought to confine myself to film performances. In Listen Up Philip, Elisabeth Moss's humorous cat ventriloquy is as necessary as oxygen between Jason Schwartzman's wannabe Philip Roth and Jonathan Pryce's Philip Roth. Minnie Driver does some excellent scene-chewing in Beyond the Lights, possibly because her jawline is so pronounced it appears she has mandibles on her like a stag beetle. I'll take a stab at rating the female performances in Inherent Vice which, as far as I can tell, exists only to provide zany supporting roles: 1. Joanna Newsom's voice, 2. Jena Malone's teeth, 3. Katherine Waterston's nipples, 4. Maya Rudolph's wig, 5. Hong Chau's eyeliner (though, in the end, Jeremy Renner wore it better in The Immigrant). But the finest performance is in Ida--Agata Kulesza gives us a character of sublime brilliance and self-hatred, an ideal foil for the young nun at the center of the story. Kulesza makes us feel the utter necessity of pushing the self-destruct button.

Best Supporting Actors

(Best supporting actor is a tough race but worst supporting actor is easy: Christian Slater in Nymphomaniac. Good god, that tree metaphor...)

I admire The Lego Movie because, in a film that is otherwise full of absurd cartoon characters, Will Ferrell gives a stunning bit of vérité as President Business, who would stroll to election in 2016 if only he were a real person. Because I like the occasional nod to actual Oscar candidates, I support J.K. Simmons in Whiplash--I found real menace there, remembering my own arrhythmic terror, not knowing whether I'm rushing or dragging. "Not quite my tempo, no worries." Credit has to be given to Neil Patrick Harris in Gone Girl--you really appreciate his throat being slit (though perhaps that was more about my giddy realization that the film was almost over). To return to the sketch comedy drive-bys of Inherent Vice, props to Josh Brolin, who brought actual heft to the film--I guess I'm voting for his haircut and pancake ordering style. The ultimate kudos go to the genuine chills provided by Stranger by the Lake sex panther Christophe Paou and his fine, fine mustache.

Best Actresses

As with Suzanne Clément in Laurence Anyways last year, Angeli Bayani's performance in Norte, the End of History is so immense I can't even deal. Bayani hit that Falconetti level and may now ascend directly to heaven. Prepare yourself by rewatching The Passion of Joan of Arc, then stream Norte, and then give yourself a couple weeks to recover. Elsewhere, Marion Cotillard's life is somehow even more fucked up in Two Days, One Night than it was in Rust and Bone, even though she didn't have her legs bitten off by an orca. Gugu Mbatha-Raw and her subtly-metaphored theme song "Blackbird," impressed in Beyond the Lights (even if the film is somewhat undone by the fact that her exploitative, faux-Top-40 single "Masterpiece" is a much better song). Charlotte Gainsbourg dragged the second half of Nymphomaniac to some semblance of competence. Congratulations as well to the three young Swedes (Mira Barkhammer, Mira Grosin and Liv LeMoyne) who star in We Are the Best! and elevate what would be a by-the-numbers indie with their closeup camaraderie and hair-based bonding.

Best Actors

I'll just get it on the record here: I think Miles Teller is going to be a great one and Whiplash will be one of his early landmark roles. Macon Blair looks alarming as a bearded and blood-soaked hobo and somehow even more frightening as a pudgy and clean-shaven junior insurance salesman on the lam in Blue Ruin. Still, Blair is handsomer than Timothy Spall, who made a grabby, smudgy, don't-give-a-fuck-y Mr. Turner. In Cannibal, Antonio de la Torre is an exquisite table manners and savage display of appetite type of a guy. He makes me want to be a better man or at least wear better suits (overall he seems like a chill dude and I wouldn't fear him eating me at all). But I'll give the prize in this tepid year to Ralph Fiennes, who at least takes on a big role like a dang ole movie star in The Grand Budapest Hotel.  

Best Pictures 

(But first, a confession of blind spots (I mean, blind spots to films that might have made this list, not blind spots like Into the Woods): Actress, Goodbye to Language, Horse Money, The Tale of Princess Kaguya, Winter Sleep.)

12. Two Days, One Night - The Dardennes have done it--they've made another film that's exactly as good as all of their other movies. This is praise that is also a criticism. Though perhaps if the directors had selected for Cotillard a white tank top rather than a salmon one this would be a couple of spots higher on the list. I still hold out hope that their next Cannes darling will feature hot Franco-Belgians fucking without consequence and eating decadent snacks.

11. Lucy - ScarJo's Lucy is a piece of meat, a human being based on a lecture by Morgan Freeman, conflated via intercuts with an antelope, spattered with blood on her cheetah-patterned coat, intergalactic fireworks before her eyes, following Romy Schneider into L'Enfer or Gaspar Noe Into the Void, restructured genomes like the finest graffiti, her limbs disintegrating into frosted doughnut sprinkles, strings of Matrix code tethering us to our cell phones, the cosmos of Luc Besson, the skin tag spots across Freeman's face. I got my eleven dollar's worth just for Lucy's excellent, direct summation of her motivation: "Someone put a bag of drugs inside me and I need you to get it out."

10. Citizenfour - On 26 December, 2014, I was politically radicalized because of this film. I'm done voting for presidents from the major political parties in the United States. Conscious Americans are all on a path like Edward Snowden's, where the day comes and we have to tell our loved ones, "I can't really speak out loud here." The documentary is depressing on two levels: we are fine with living in a surveillance state and we can't even be bothered to watch this crucial documentary about living in our surveillance state. As always, holler at your boy if you've got a lead on Norwegian citizenship. 

(This feels a little too serious for the WTT so I'll add this: the way Snowden's hair stuck up in the back drove me nuts. I know director Laura Poitras felt the same way because she included a scene of Snowden fussing with his 'do before going on the lam, perhaps for the rest of his days.)

9. Whiplash - Much as this list gives me a chance to allow only one Hollywood film in the top dozen, Whiplash afforded learned critics the ability to reveal themselves as jazz as well as film snobs (talking about you, Richard Brody, hilariously eager to expound upon all the things he's heard and you never will). For those of us who don't know any better, the film delivers pithy artist-at-work kicks and a climax as audacious as the last 15 minutes of The Red Shoes.

8. The Naked Room - This is a documentary film of relentless closeups, shots you'd expect to see in hostage videos, circumstances not unrelated to the children brought before the camera in this anonymous hospital in Mexico. Near the end of the film, one severely depressed teen, Hayde, is asked to promise that she will not hurt herself when she leaves the office but cannot state the affirmative. When she breaks down, she raises her arm to brush the tears from her cheeks and we see for the first time her left wrist wrapped in heavy gauze. It is a heartbreaking moment of grace. She wept, I wept.

7. Mr. Turner - There have been many great metaphors for what Timothy Spall looks and sounds like in his title role. I'm going to go with a lowland tapir in rutting season at the Brookfield Zoo (indelible childhood memory). A big thank you to Mike Leigh who, across decades of good work, continues to remind the viewing public that people over 40 still have sexual intercourse. The brilliance of this film, as with Topsy-Turvy, is not just in the climax (though shouting "The Sun Is God!" on your deathbed is a solid way to go out) but in the diminuendo that sketches the aftereffects of Turner's death, the shittiness for all of us lesser lights when the master's show is over.

6. Rich Hill - Tracy Droz Tragos' documentary is full of Malick, great following shots of cartwheeling kids and nighttime photography of fireworks hanging in the air above Rich Hill, MO. And much of the dialogue is as pungent as Kit's Badlands line, "I'll give you a dollar if you eat this collie." The three boys at the center of the story have surprising areas of knowledge. Harley explains that "you can get mango on food stamps." Appachey (that astonishingly American name!) expresses a stunning career plan: "I was thinking of moving to China...and becoming an art teacher." And Andrew says, wiser about his life in deep poverty, "I have no say in what happens; they're the parents, I'm just a kid." After watching this documentary you'll want to keep up with these boys as much as I do.

5. Ida - Pawel Pawlikowski made the most composed film of the year--without upsetting Wes Anderson I would buy a book of postcards of the shots from this movie first, from the mist on the rural fields to the grill work on dingy hotel windows (note the name of the cinematographer Lukasz Zal). The performances are also excellent: the aforementioned Agata Kulesza's Wanda as the long lost aunt to Anna/Ida, dark of eye, dimpled of chin, the Jewish nun, and the jazz musician (Dawid Ogrodnik) who charms them both, sort of a Polish Pattinson playing "Naima" by John Coltrane. It's the music you'll hear for the rest of your life, saving souls in a nunnery or drinking yourself to death in a Lodz apartment. 

4. Stranger by the Lake - Apparently the only sexy movies this decade are from France, far away from the Hollywood's flaccid, anti-dream factory. The death spiral attraction between Christophe Paou and Pierre Deladonchamps emphasizes the lengths to which I need to step up my mustache AND chest hair game. The film revels in the claustrophobia of only ever being at the lake and never indoors. The delirium of lust and cum in the afternoon is slowly replaced by fear in an endless dusk, enough to make the rabbit wish to be caught. Strangers builds to a climax that made my hair stand on end. A voice calls out, "I won't hurt you."

(Gillian Flynn and David Fincher are assuredly already plotting a ruinous Hollywood remake.) 

3. The Grand Budapest Hotel - The seventh best Wes Anderson film is still the third best film of 2014--it was that kind of year. Bu that doesn't mean Grand Budapest isn't excellent. As Ralph Fiennes' M. Gustave knows, the rudeness of Wes Anderson haters is merely an expression of their fear. I can only offer a rueful smile at someone who would take something as sumptuous, as beautiful, as well-crafted as a cake from Mendl's and say, "I don't like it, it's too sweet." 

2. Under the Skin - Scarlett's Johansson's Renaissance year allowed me to revisit a WTT post from 2008 (before the tabloids had even settled on ScarJo as a nickname!). It's a time capsule of my early approach: more pictures, more discussion of boobs. What's happened since? A tragic amount of films with colons in their titles. Iron Man 2, The Avengers, Captain America: The Winter Soldier and the impending drivel called, and I don't exaggerate: Avengers: Age of Ultron and Captain America: Civil War. This lucrative dross is interspersed with failed comedy vehicles He's Just Not That Into You, We Bought a Zoo, Chef and Hitchcock (that was supposed to be funny, right?). She's had, for ten years, a distinct inability to pick auteurs (Jon Favreau does not qualify). 

In popular conception, actors read scripts (or actors' assistants read scripts) to select their next films but what I'll always wonder is why they don't just choose by director. Juliette Binoche works globally, with the finest directors, and has had the best career of anyone in the past 25 years. How difficult is it? When Johansson finally arrived at Besson and then Jonathan Glazer this year there was a respite from the suck.

Like Stranger by the Lake, Under the Skin will discourage you from spending time on rocky beaches.
The best parts of the film are documentary, with non-actors being talked into a van by a very attractive someone they don't know is Scarlett Johansson. The ridiculous, porn setup dialogue shows us the bottom line--a Celtic fan will get into a car with ScarJo for any reason. The sexy voice, the trashy clothes and dull men willing to go to their death after that ass. A gorgeous sadism pervades the piece, as if Frederick Seidel decided to direct a picture. When her 20-film deal with Marvel expires, I hope ScarJo will take a ride with more auteurs.

1. Norte, the End of History - For director Lav Diaz, a four hour film is shortform. But this is slow cinema so good that I didn't need to check my cell phone, I didn't need to urinate. Norte is not just the longest film on the list but the most profound and, moment to moment, the most beautiful. Diaz begins with an adaptation of Crime and Punishment but far exceeds Doestoevsky in artistry. 

To quote Fabian (Sid Lucero), the film's protagonist, whose murder of a moneylender is the least of his problems, "How can I be at peace with the world's shallowness?" Joaquin (Archie Alemania) goes to jail for Fabian's crime and leaves his wife (the Falconetti-channeling Angeli Bayani) to survive without him.

To select a single sequence to set the mood: a long shot of a window propped open pre-dawn, insects whispering, a cock crowing, the putter of a motorbike that stops and allows a woman out, bags of vegetables piling on a cart, a dog observing, a younger sister appearing, a cooperative effort. A cut: the sky is lighter, bluer but it's still early, we look over the river as the women arrange the vegetables on the cart, trying to work the kinks out of their sore shoulders, a goat wanders by, a young daughter appears to help, they discuss the dawn of another day, their endless work.

As I wrote in my notebook many times, wow, wow, WOW. The digital camera is so crisp and bold you can't believe there aren't special effects involved. But it's just the blockbuster of Diaz's imagination. In the last hour you might ask yourself, as Ian Darke has deep into World Cup stoppage time, "how much more of this can their possibly be?" but the payoffs keep coming. This gorgeous suffering, this epic accomplishment.

Lav Diaz: no mediocre.

Best of 2013

I am comforted by patterns. 2013 confirmed that in even-numbered years the Giants win the World Series and in odd-numbered years all the best films come out.

Perhaps as importantly, last year also brought to my attention an anthem for our time:

The year in film was so good there is a countdown before the countdown. 

Four close-outs that don't make my best baker's dozen: Her>Inside Llewyn Davis>The Wolf of Wall Street>American Hustle (that's the ranking but it's a tight three-and-a-half-stars-y bunch).

Three fascinating misses: Only God Forgives and The Grandmaster (American Cut) and The Counselor.

Two excellent films from 2012 that I only saw in 2013: In Another Country and Tabu--Hong Sang-Soo and Miguel Gomes tell stories on film the way I'd like them to be told.

One legend who has lost me: Terrence Malick--after To the Wonder my anticipation for his releases moves from fevered to slightly piqued.

Best Supporting Actresses

If you've read the preceding reviews for The Counselor and Only God Forgives you know it's quite a battle between Cameron Diaz and Kristin Scott Thomas over the Most Scenery Chewing Award. Gun to my head I lean towards Diaz because of eye makeup. Zhang Ziyi is an excellent coiled weapon in The Grandmaster, poised to fight and full of swallowed pain. The best part of American Hustle is Jennifer "I put out the fire" Lawrence. I remember sitting down for Winter's Bone, hearing her say, "bred and buttered," and going full Dick Vitale: "She's a star baby! S-T-A-R, STAR!!" Scarlett Johansson has hopefully learned something from being sexier as a voice in Her than on screen in Don Jon. I thought the idea of nominating someone who never appears in the flesh was just the thing to make Academy voters feel clever (and think of the short term savings in their phone sex charges). But she'll have to settle for the WTT nod.

Best Supporting Actors

If Scarlett is recognized for her voice in Her then Rob Lowe should get it for his face in Behind the Candelabra ("Will I be able to close my eyes?" "Not entirely.") I begrudge Franco everything but have to give it up for Spring Breaker's Alien (Gucci Mane's method acting as Archie deserves further kudos). I enjoyed any number of tiny roles, including Giovanni Arcuri's Caesar in Caesar Must Die, Michael Shannon's stern and hilarious avuncular turn in Mud, and Clark Gregg, Nathan Fillion and Fran Kranz's uproarious collective in Much Ado About Nothing: There's a nice cumulative effect from Bad Coach Taylor as the repetitious alcoholic in The Spectacular Now and Good Coach Taylor shit talking DiCaprio on the yacht in The Wolf of Wall Street. But perhaps the most memorable supporting acting is Jonah Hill affecting a waspy rasp and hashing out those cousin-humping Punnett squares in Wolf. 

Best Actresses

There are only two types of people: those who know that Suzanne Clément is the best actress of the year and those who have not seen Laurence Anyways. Her window-rattling explosion at a grande dame dinette waitress is hair-raising: "Serve coffee, bring food, take money and shut the fuck up." She steals the film, and with ease, from WTT fave Melvil Poupoud. Her win comes with apologies to Rooney Mara styling, Greta Gerwig running, Amy Seimetz suffering and Adele Excharpolous and Lea Seydoux being great with each other. (And I'm still awaiting the final tallies on the competition between Shailene Woodley in The Spectacular Now and Brie Larson in Short Term 12 for Miss Indie Teen 2013.)

Best Actors

First, I give the annual award for Most Acting to Bradley Cooper in American Hustle--he is in illustrious company. Watching Her, it was fun to spot Joaquin Phoenix's scar under that sad sack mustache. Oscar Isaac certainly made it look cold Inside Llewyn Davis. Toni Servillo stands at the end of culture in The Great Beauty, looking at the great ugliness of Rome, his own unhandsome face so desirable against the distended bodies flexing unsexily around him. Shane Carruth gives a starmaking turn in Upstream Color, though I hope he doesn't go on to act in anything he hasn't also written and directed. I've reserved my highest praise for Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years a Slave--he pulls off a most dangerous thing for an actor, using his eyes to speak the most important lines.

Best Pictures

(I've done one of my better jobs of seeing all potential placeholders--the only caveat is there's a 95% Claire Denis' Bastards would have made this list because she makes my world go 'round.)

The "I Wanna Rob" Section

13. Spring Breakers - This film tastes like Sour Patch Kids. Harmony Korine's casting choices are fascinating--the aforementioned Franco and Gucci Mane, Jeff Jarrett as an evangelical preacher, wifey Rachel Korine as the most libidinous reveler and Selena Gomez, with her open revulsion to appearing in the film. St. Pete's beach is the most spiritual place of all, full of lizard brain GIFing, days coated in sweat and malt liquor, nights the color of Virgin America cabins with Gatsby lighting provided by an Outback Steakhouse at the end of a pier. And Britney, good Christ, the Britney.

12. Bling Ring - The protagonists of this film might be even dimmer or, anyway, less cunning than their counterparts to the southeast. The blankness of the text: "Let's go to Paris," and the Eiffel Tower key ring they find under Ms. Hilton's mat. For those teenage nitwits, being there is like rolling around in the treasures of the grail. It's a full immersion in reality culture, the way Emma Watson asks, "what did Lindsay say?" in her terrifying accent. Cinematography is not reduced all the way down to GIFs but, for Sofia Coppola, this is more intercut and less studied--intentionally disposable. 

The Soderbergh Section

11. Side Effects - The characters are lit in a haze, or the poisonous fog that blurs everything around the depressive Rooney Mara. She gives Channing Tatum the Janet Leigh MacGuffin treatment and participates in what, back in February, seemed a likely candidate for the juiciest lesbian hookup of the year (was Catherine Zeta-Jones channeling Laura Prepon in Orange Is the New Black or the other way around?). Soderbergh's willingness to push beyond the limits of a serious drama about our prescription-drug-addicted country into a nasty little potboiler is commendable.

10. Behind the Candelabra - Here the scene is lit like, well, a candelabra the size of my apartment, picking out the individual spots of glitter in Liberace's hair. Michael Douglas was smart to take a break from his cancer-inducing tonguework to do Lee--he has so many wonderful lines, about Sonja Henie's thighs and looking like his father in drag. It's such a fabulous moment when he realizes he can adopt someone he's fucking. His sequin-tastic ensembles are spot on (I say this a visitor to the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas to see the originals) and the ensemble cast is perfect, down to the rheumy, shitting lapdogs. 

Steven Soderbergh has retired from film directing at his pithiest, his most playful, when the maximum amount of people will beg to have him back. As he finishes work on the miniseries The Knick, I wonder if, 20 years down the line, we'll find this a key moment where longform television passed film.

The Top 9
9. Something in the Air - Continuing from Summer Hours and Carlos, Olivier Assayas moves his camera through large groups and houses like a better version of Robert Altman. Clement Metayer's Gilles deals with the typical (French) teenage concerns: making love (to Carole Combes' Laure, a real firestarter) and art. But then there's also revolution, in fits in starts "After May," to which his friends say he must be totally committed. As one explains, "Art is solitude." That tension informs the rest of the film, one that further stokes my rage at not growing up in French schools, where communist manifestos are handed out before class and most 17-year-olds are familiar with John Ashbery and Gregory Corso. The floppy-haired cast blows across Europe like it's the only thing in the world. And it is.

8. Mud - Seems rather a forgotten film this awards season--Jeff Nichols' work might always be too subtle. The young stars never make it past a narrow, riverine range. Ellis and Neckbone's small boat pokes through some lovely landscapes but they are shot unpretentiously, like the jungles in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's films. The story is more or less two kids tracing the arc of two fairly stupid adults in a death spiral together. But if the dumb grownups are Reese Witherspoon and Matthew McConaughey, I'd want to keep watching too. Plus Matt says fun things like, "it's tough to make a meal out of pumpkin pie filling" while his skin is a Pantone match to pumpkin pie filling. For bonus points, Nichols takes on the challenge of an extended snake metaphor, running it from live cottonmouths and water moccasins to McConaughey's tats to the Bible.

7. Museum Hours - I spend a fair amount of time wishing for more W.G. Sebald in my life and this is a film for that. Between Johann and Anne there is something fresher than a love story: a film about walking around in the cold and occasionally coming inside to gaze at masterworks. As a security guard, Johann's job is watching--but even when he is not at Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Art Museum he is out with a birdwatching group or playing online poker. Anne is good match, in that she also has a funny voice and enjoys inexpensive hobbies. I wish I had time for repeated visits to the same masterpieces, to allow for things I've never done, like finding all the easter eggs in a Breughel painting. With such exquisite moments--like Johann describing Rembrandt portraits to help a woman in a coma, or a young museum guard's theory that Dutch and Flemish still lives were depictions of burghers' bling, the equivalent of piling diamonds and flat screens on a canvas now--I wish it had gone on longer, or will pick up in another volume soon.

6. Like Someone in Love - A possible formulation:

Sebald : walking :: Kiarostami : shots in cars

This film is the observation a young call girl, Akiko, being shepherded from one glass enclosure to another over the course of 16 or so hours. It begins with a tense negotiation between Akiko and her pimp in a glassy, Murakami-short-story jazz bar. From there she's shuttled via cab to Professor Watanabe's apartment and its large bay window. Finally, in the professor's car, she is forced to meet with her unhinged boyfriend, Noriaki, who knows her as a student without evening employment. Akiko never laughs but does sort of smile, speaking like a ventriloquist's dummy even when shouting. She's shocked by the sound of her own voice, the dexterity with which she can sharpen and soften her eyes.

There is a definitive Abbas Kiarostami situation in the car where Watanabe--moving seamlessly from role of john to grandfather--tells young Noriaki all he needs to know about being married: "If you know she's going to lie, best to not ask." When Akiko joins them, Watanabe shifts again, to a kind of couples counselor--it's all for naught, but the effort is lovely. The first night in his apartment, Akiko talks charmingly to Professor Watanabe about how she resembles the young woman in his print of Chiyoji Yazaki's painting Training a Parrot--but she is always treated like the bird.

5. 12 Years a Slave - Wesley Morris wrote the only column you need on the film--it makes clear that every movie featuring slavery before this one was insufficient. I would make an additional compliment to Steve McQueen: I greatly admire the tension he creates by holding an establishing shot for an extra beat before the characters go in motion, making a beautiful tableau that shatters at the next threat. The shot that kills me occurs late in the film, when Chiwetel Ejiofor's eyes pass through stages of terror and sorrow and unwanted hope against the ever-humming lushness of the bayou. This is where my tears started rolling in earnest--at the potency of his performance and the power of wordless cinema. I will have an active interest in a potential Oscar winner for the first time since No Country for Old Men.

4. Leviathan - I always complain about the boring presentation of documentaries, the way they are graded on a curve, without proper criticism of their flat visuals. Leviathan does that have that problem. Cameras make seamless moves into the underwater litter of fish guts or closeups on the Peckinpah red of gasping gills. The wings of the gulls seem to beat nighttime stars into existence. Obviously, I spent much of my time making metaphors of the action on screen. There are men working of course, and the deep fatigue in the captain's eyes as he tries to stay awake while watching shark week on TV is a wonderful contrast to the inhuman speed of the guy who sorts the clam shells on deck. I have never been more shocked at the quick passage of 90 minutes--I was locked in to my notetaking and I thought the film was perhaps halfway over when the credits rolled. Director Lucien Castaing-Taylor has attained "must-see" status.

3. Blue Is the Warmest Color - I swear to you--with full awareness of the checkered, horndog archives of this website--that this film does not rank so high because of its explicitness, its NC-17 titillation. It's not even erotic at the highest level, nothing like Bibi Andersson's description of sex on the beach in Persona or Michelle Jenneke's pre-hurdles warmup routine. Plus, the hardest thing for me to admit is loving a film that Steven Spielberg also loved.

And Blue requires so much defending. As a straight white male, of course I find critiques about "the male gaze" annoying (though The Male Gaze would be a pretty good title for a book about the history of cinema). If you can read just one takedown, check out Eileen Myles' bile spewing in the Twitter rant of the year. She says it's a hate crime, that they don't even fuck. I think the former assertion is laughable and the second is more a condemnation of a porn film than a film film (see also: real lesbians reacting to the sex scenes). Then there's the backlash to Abdellatif Kechiche's hard-driving direction of stars Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux...all I can say is you have no right to complain about mistreatment unless Lars von Trier won't unlock the giant wheel chained to your neck.

Blue fetishizes, endlessly, a young girl's hair and lips--you have to get over that, the same way you get over the fact that the most influential love story in the Western canon is about two 14-year-olds fucking. Adèle (Exarchopoulos) lusts after Emma (Seydoux) and that lust is returned. There are 30 minutes of sex in a three hour movie, and they're not the best parts. You can read glib comments like, "OMG, even when they go to the museum they just look statues' butts!" But then they look at a work by Jean-Léon Gérôme, who does blue better, and perhaps warmer, than anyone else (not to mention Emma's surprising defense of Klimt over Schiele).

I agree with Myles that the sexiest thing about Adèle is her appetite at the table--her family's spaghetti is my favorite food I've never tasted. The strongest sequence in the film might be when Adèle cooks dinner for a party of Emma's artist friends, is a wonderful hostess, does all the dishes and, upon arriving in bed, receives instructions from her beloved on how she should also write, and be an artist herself. Kechiche captures the devastating reproach in the kind suggestion, the heartrending moments in life when you need your partner to say she loves you, she loves you just as you are and the words don't come.

Adèle and Emma break up and it's terrible. The film's rawness is not the sex, it's the ground giving way underneath Adèle's feet when Emma ends it and the horrendous bar scene where she tries to get her back. "I can pay in flesh and blood...I want you. All the time. And no one else." To have earned that. I saw Blue twice in theatres and would go again tomorrow. In France, this film is called La vie d'Adèle - Chapitres 1 et 2--I want to put the rent money into a Kickstarter for chapters 3 and 4 (after taking care of Zach Braff, obviously).

2. Post Tenebras Lux - Carlos Reygadas is switching places with Terrence Malick in my constellation of directors. In this film, all the scenes might not be in chronological order, but they work (and I say that as someone who generally doesn't like glowing red demons carrying toolboxes or Neil Young). If we are to take this as a self-portrait of Reygadas, it is self-lacerating. The protagonist's villa is isolated in violent countryside, filled with oddly-named and dangerous addicts. Juan himself engages in the unacceptable treatment of pets, explaining, "I always hurt the ones I love the most." His children, Rut and Eleazar, are charming, especially in the scene where the young man greets his parents by lobbing a used diaper at them like a hand grenade. 

Lux is less explicitly religious than Silent Light but still fills me with awe. There's the opening, where Rut toddles through the magic hour, speaking animals into existence, and the sweaty sauna Pieta, where Juan's wife is comforted under the ample bosom of a fellow sex tourist. The grandest scene of the year is an audacious pivot of memory at the beach--Rut and Eleazar stare out to rosy-fingered sea as teenagers and, by the time the camera pans back around to them, they have become children again.

1. Upstream Color - I saw this film under an auspicious star. I have a tradition of taking a redeye to NYC and powering through the first day, capping it with a film in the evening with my best friends in the world (among other notables, this series has included my first viewing of Silent Light). This April, Scott and I selected Upstream Color and it happened that we saw Kenneth Lonergan walking his dog on the way to the theatre in which Shane Carruth would be speaking after the screening. My sleeplessness, the La-Z-Boy reclinability of my seat and incredible film on screen gave me a rare sense of physical immersion in the picture. Was I watching sci-fi or horror or noir or romance or what?

I was first impressed with the complexity of the editing and sound design, the sharp starring role by the director and his willingness to respect a viewer's intelligence. Carruth acquitted himself well in responding to asinine audience questions and moved even further into my good graces by announcing that he picked Walden as a touchstone because he thought the book was dumb.

The gift and the curse of Carruth's films is not knowing exactly what you've just seen (Primer-watching supergeniuses excepted). But on the second and third and fourth viewings, Upstream Color moves higher and higher in my estimation. I'm still not certain of its genre but the film is like a thousand-year-old basket, handmade and still watertight. For now, the sequence that sticks with me starts with Carruth and costar Amy Seimetz, who are recovering from the same mysterious hypnotic violation, wondering whether the birds in the tree are grackles or starlings. Every time, the next two minutes make my scalp tingle. They chatter in circles, the idea of a shared past leading to confusion over whose childhood it is they're remembering. Just as I'm about to come unglued, a whistle blows and they stop talking. I pant together with them for a minute.

It's important to note that the best special effects of 2013 are mealworms and blue food coloring and the budget for this masterpiece was $100k. Allow me to make an overstatement for which I might very well be mocked--Shane Carruth can be our Orson Welles: inventive, fearless, iconoclastic. And Carruth was born at a better time--writing, directing and distributing the films himself. Long may he live on the outside.  

Best of 2012

2012 started off so well. From the first 2013 film I saw (the not terrible Wahlberg picture Contraband) to the fabulous domestic summer run of Moonrise Kingdom, Magic Mike and End of Watch, I thought this could be an epic year. But there were long award season stretches when there was nothing I felt I had to see. I will save some suspense: the Best of 2011 list is deeper than this one. And, as that link reminds me, there's also no music video as fabulous as the face-melting "All of the Lights." I was supposed to chill out with Frank Ocean and The Weeknd and Kendrick Lamar and go see inessential, didactic films from overrated directors: Lincoln, Django Unchained, Argo. Hard not to just read the Slant Magazine slams and save the $11.

(Two notable films have yet to reach these shores: I'm almost certain Miguel Gomes' Tabu would feature in the top 10 and Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse would have a good chance as well. But onwards...)

Best Supporting Actress: Redhead Division

I'm proud of the following actresses for overcoming their inherent ginger handicaps to persevere onscreen. Jessica Chastain classes up Lawless as a prospective femme fatale who turns out to be a den mother. My favorite lil scrapper Anna Kendrick is a nice match for Jake Gyllenhaal in End of Watch--her videotaped examination of her new beau's wallet is the best use of the camcorder gimmick in the film. To my eyes, Amy Adams stole thunder from her male leads with a Master-bating performance (too much? never!). She was believably on board with The Cause for billions of years. Leslie Mann is funny and legitimately frightening in This Is Forty, showing the lengths she'll go to in the name of self-improvement. And Isabelle Huppert receives her customary WTT Best Living Actress auto-nom for Amour--she slowplays a bewildered but respectful daughter, wisely staying away from the piano.

Best Supporting Actor: Bearded Division

As anyone walking past the Castro Starbucks has gathered, you're not a real man unless you've got a rugged beard. For my money, "El más macho" in 2012 was Tom Hardy in Lawless, whose sexy growling required so little lip movement it's possible that his beard was actually speaking. Hardy's Lawless brother, Jason Clarke, thickens his whiskers as an "enhanced interrogation" expert in Zero Dark Thirty. Perhaps the most telling moment is when, after everything else he's seen at black sites, his character is broken by the loss of his pet monkeys and packs it up (spoiler alert: when he's wearing a beard in ZDT he's being physically naughty and when he's not he's being politically naughty). Continuing Rian Johnson's penchant for showing powerful men running their shit from small rooms, there's the grizzled Jeff Daniels in Looper. I have high hopes for late-period Daniels--he's a big Detroit Tigers fan and his no nonsense Midwesterness helps that film. Okay Matthias Schoenaerts might be a lead in Rust & Bone but speaks about the same number of words as an average supporting actor. He makes for a compellingly bad parent and a pretty spectacular icebreaker. Finally, a round of applause to Bob Balaban, our hilarious guide to all things New Penzance Island.

(On to the best acting nods...these are different from most acting, which would feature Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Master and Rachel Weiss in The Deep Blue Sea.)

Best Actresses

While his category is waiting for Isabelle Huppert in Sang-soo Hong's In Another Country, credit to her Amour momma, Emmanuelle Riva. She steps into the unenviable "Anne" role in a Haneke picture and gives a performance that would make Susanne Lothar proud. Rashida Jones does the near-impossible in Celeste and Jesse Forever--she creates a nuanced, believable female lead in a romantic comedy. Marion Cotillard earns a nomination for winning sub-categories like "best looking naked" and "most instructive leg tattoos" and "best performance in a film featuring a killer whale rage flashback." And let's not forget Quvenzhané Wallis for Beasts of the Southern Wild! Just kidding--let's try to forget her. She wasn't acting and that movie is a bottomless crock of shit made by distressed Levi-wearing white people for distressed Levi-wearing white people.

 

Best Actors

Denis Lavant. Next category.  Okay, shoutout to Channing Tatum--his remarkable physicality and surprising wit in Magic Mike (and, for that matter, in 21 Jump Street)--and Anders Danielsen Lie for making the inevitable compelling in Oslo, August 31. But they've got nothing on Lavant who is (at least) nine different people in Holy Motors. His scenery- and finger-chewing sequence as an Eva Mendes-snatching satyr is truly "beyond the environment". It's so great that it overtops the wondrous motion capture inter-species fuck and the sizzling Entracte, which I'm just going to suggest is the hottest accordion track ever laid down in a motion picture (though I invite other nominations). TROIS, DOUZE, MERDE!

Best Pictures

10. The Master - It's here begrudgingly but I think when I look back at this (no doubt from my desk as a New Yorker staff writer) I'll want to have record of the 2012 Paul Thomas Anderson film. When it comes to PTA I paraphrase a line from my favorite Fleetwood Mac song: with every film that goes between, I feel a little less. In a previous post comparing this to film #3, I admitted that I grade PTA on a capricious curve. He is still the most talented filmmaker on this list but the problem is I would take his films of the 90s over his films since.

9. This Is 40 - The film that made me laugh hardest (or at least most recently (apologies to Ted)). In the month's leading up to its release I commented that this was a most-desirable sequel, a surprising understanding of filmmaker and studio on what what was really good in Knocked Up. With Katherine Heigl blessedly removed, there's more room for the great ensemble: Iris & Maude Apatow, Albert Brooks, Megan Fox, Melissa McCarthy, Chris O'Dowd, Charlyne Yi (who makes a great meth-Gollum). Not to mention Lena Dunham, as "Princess Labia."

8. Wuthering Heights - I'm higher on this one than most. Andrea Arnold, particularly in the first half, hammers home the all-enveloping elemental terror that's the real takeaway of the best Brontë novel. My affection for this dark, isolated, almost wordless cinematic struggle helps explain why I'm also looking forward to The Turin Horse.  

7. Cabin in the Woods - What a fun little package--95 minutes long, bursting with lust, violence, monsters and winking asides. Joss Whedon produced and co-wrote, Drew Goddard directed a horror film that's both an affront to and celebration of the genre. So it's hard to reconcile that Mr. Whedon is also responsible for the inconceivable bloat of The Avengers, a film well within the same fanboy-appeasing parade of wasted afternoons as The Dark Knight Rises: More Christopher Nolan Exposition and The Hobbit Part I: Give MGM All Your Fucking Money & Time, Nerds.

6. Oslo, August 31 - This one rather surprised me, as I found Reprise overpraised and Joachim Trier a little glib in his depiction of young writers. I do not think that any more. And if you flip through Paris Review #203 you can see Trier is now kind of a big deal. What sticks with me is the way Anders behaves as this writer would, a half-step removed from everyone else, observing all the time.

5. Amour - Michael Haneke's camera is as eviscerating as ever but, not unlike Lars von Trier's Melancholia, this film is made with a new foundation of compassion under a depressing surface. After the prologue, Amour is confined to the increasingly claustrophobic apartment where Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (ought to be Oscar-winner Emmanuelle Riva) have grown old. With the the outside world only glimpsed through curtains, Haneke lenses a masterful sequence of closeups on the landscape paintings the couple has hung on their drab walls. It's a fine way (that I would have never imagined) to lift the suffocating mood of that flat, however temporarily. Just before the climax of the film I thought of the Didion line "we tell ourselves stories in order to live." Then it surprised me how well the sentence works if you change the last word to die.

4. Magic Mike - The Drive of 2012, the most fun to be had in theaters, whooping it up with the Cock-Rocking Kings of Tampa. Mike is a hero for our age and I think Tatum might be due even more credit than he's received. How can Steven Soderbergh walk away from directing when it's this much fun? He again finds remarkable chemistry between his leads--as Clooney and J. Lo were helpless against their attraction in Out of Sight, so is Cody Horn (and her scorching hot sternness) worn down by the appeals of C-Tates. I'm breathless with anticipation for Magic Mike 2, in which Mike's handcrafted furniture business fails (because it's all unspeakably ugly) and he's forced back on to the stage...I can hear Ginuwine's "Pony" even now.

3. End of Watch - Earlier this year I praised the unshakable brotherhood between Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña. The intimate chop-busting from the comfort of their squad car diverges nicely from the fragmentary, unknown world of the street gangs and cartels outside their windows. It's shocking how quickly two smart guys are in over their heads. I have hopes that the director, David Ayer, might make more films with the same urgency, perhaps drawing out more of the cartel connections to the LA streets he shoots so well.

2. Holy Motors - Leos Carax made an action thriller I can stand behind (more so than Battleship even). From the moment I saw the director himself on screen, waking up in the birch-wallpapered room of my dreams, I knew we were on to something big. While the peak of astonishment arrives early in the film, in an underground Dionysian tableau, the shocks don't stop until the credits roll. Denis Lavant's protagonist carries method acting to extremes that would make Daniel Day-Lewis take pause. The impish but immense Lavant delivers a great line, directed at all of us non-actors: "your punishment is to be you." Holy Motors requires a second viewing before I can give it the full WTT treatment--I spent too much time in the theater slack-jawed and dumbly staring.

1. Moonrise Kingdom - After what is already an illustrious career, Wes Anderson found an even deeper reserve with Moonrise Kingdom. This blog is already enough of a gushing Wesgasm so I won't add much here. When the trailer hit, I thought this might be reaching too far, with the overt Pierrou le fou-ishness. But this film matches the Godard and the gifts continue--Wes has given us a gorgeous illustrated script. It makes me want to build a kingdom.