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Festival Coverage - Cannes 2013: First Dispatch

Mon, 20 May 2013 17:13:03 +0200

Feature by: Kenji Fujishima

As far as the weather goes, the 66th Cannes Film Festival certainly started out with a bang, raining on and off here in the French Riviera during the first three days of the festival, leaving many moviegoers and film critics/journalists clutching their umbrellas for dear life, especially as they’ve waited to get into screenings of new films by such renowned auteurs as Sofia Coppola, Jia Zhang-ke, Arnaud Desplechin, the Coen Brothers, Claire Denis and many others. Film-wise, though, it was a slow start for me in this, my first trip to Cannes, with nothing quite reaching out from the screen, shaking me out of my sleep-deprived stupor and boasting of its greatness in my face (though, as of this writing, I’ve seen a couple of films that have changed the game for me—more in my next dispatch). Even the relative disappointments, though, have offered at least something to chew on, which is merely indicative of the general high quality of Cannes’s selections. Anyway, here’s hoping you will all follow me in my Cannes-based explorations here at In Review Online!

The Bling Ring / Sofia Coppola
At what point does a movie about shallowness simply become a shallow movie itself? Many wondered about this fine line with Sofia Coppola’s 2006 historical drama Marie Antoinette, with its relentlessly glittering surfaces and unapologetic immersion in an extravagantly high-class lifestyle. To my mind, though, these directorial choices were Coppola’s clever way of masking an underlying tragic pathos, one that eventually blindsides us with its poignancy in its last half hour. (Imagine a cross between Stanley Kubrick’s detached empathy in Barry Lyndon and Terrence Malick’s impressionistic filmmaking style slathered with the visual aesthetic of slick magazine ads.) Unfortunately, Coppola is much less successful in locating a similar sense of empathy in her latest film, The Bling Ring, which at best plays like a spiritual successor to Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers and at worst like a merely undercooked character drama with a bunch of hollow voids at its center.

Of course, it could be argued that the hollowness of the young characters in The Bling Ring is precisely the point. Somewhat like Spring Breakers, Coppola's film takes the pulse of a generation bred to believe in a particularly modern form of the American Dream, one which dictates fame and the amassing of high-end goods as roads to happiness—not for any particular personal enrichment, just to be able to say you have them. Coppola’s jumping-off point is the true story, recounted by Nancy Jo Sales in a Vanity Fair article entitled “The Suspects Wore Loboutins,” of a bunch of Los Angeles teenagers who were caught and convicted of breaking into the homes of celebrities they admired and stealing their fancy shoes, clothing items and the like. What could possibly inspire them to do this, even though many of them seem to come from distinctly well-off backgrounds? Sales, in her article, suggests none of the teenagers involved had any idea why they did it, and Coppola follows suit, seeming less interested in psychology than in invoking a feeling of spiritual aridity amidst the surface gloss (all of it slickly captured by the late Harris Savides and Christopher Blauvelt). To that end, The Bling Ring often plays like a horror film of sorts; rarely have slow-motion shots of characters dancing at a fancy nightclub felt so freighted with apocalyptic doom.

And yet, like Spring Breakers—and with a similar level of admittedly impressive formal ambition—Coppola's analysis of this societal state of affairs never cuts especially deep beyond predictable easy targets and the occasional heavy-handed line of dialogue. News outlets like TMZ get the usual digs, especially when, in an ironic twist that will be unexpected only to those who have never seen Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy, the criminals end up becoming celebrities themselves, some of them—most notably, Emma Watson’s Nicki—taking full advantage of the privilege at first. More worrying than the skin-deep sociology, however, are the razor-thin characterizations-verging-on-caricatures. Her failure to fully imagine the one male teenager of the thieving group, Marc (Israel Broussard), suggests the fundamental failure at the heart of The Bling Ring. Marc is, in some ways, meant to be the character from whose perspective we see these events, the yearning-to-connect, fascinated-yet-horrified center of this slick amoral hellhole. And yet, the only thing we know about Marc going in is that he's a troubled outcast at a new high school and that he latches onto Rebecca (Katie Chang) when she and her friends are the only one that shows him any attention; his subsequent transition to some kind of male fashionista type doesn't make any psychological sense beyond the underdeveloped suggestion that he’s as seduced by (his words) “the lifestyle that everyone else wants” as anyone. That's the problem with The Bling Ring in a nutshell: Coppola, for once, seems to have only the most superficial grasp of this material, seemingly hoping her impressionistic style will cover for the fatal gaps in her vision this time around. The end-credits usage of Frank Ocean’s “Super Rich Kids” only underscores her failure this time around: Ocean more or less says acutely in five minutes what it takes Coppola 90 intermittently engaging minutes to express.

A Touch of Sin / Jia Zhang-ke
After 24 City (2008) and I Wish I Knew (2010, still unreleased in the U.S.), one couldn’t help but wonder where else Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke could take his increasingly direct hybridization of fiction and documentary. Well, now we have the answer in his new film, A Touch of Sin: He has gone back to narrative filmmaking with a brutal vengeance.

By brutal, I mean physically so. The China that Jia essays in A Touch of Sin is marked by bloody violence perpetrated by working-class ordinary Joes amidst a society dominated by abuses of power and general indifference to human life. He illustrates this with four vignettes: Miner Dahai (Jiang Wu) is eventually pushed to wield a shotgun and revolt against his leaders’ corruption; stoic migrant worker Zhou San (Wang Baoqiang) discovers the power of firearms as a weapon to get what he wants; sauna receptionist Xiao Yu (Zhao Tao, Jia’s wife) goes on a knife-wielding rampage after a rich client assaults her; and much younger Xiao Hui (Luo Lanshan, whose acting debut this is) escapes from trouble at a factory job to a high-end escort service and finds satisfaction in neither.

Jia details this cold environment with his usual acute eye for landscapes and preference toward omniscient long takes. Beyond the four-part narrative structure, however, the harsh violence—he doesn't hold anything back when it comes to onscreen bloodshed—and gestures toward action-genre tropes are new ingredients for him. You won’t be quite prepared for the moment, for instance, where a lengthy handheld shot of a brutish male client slapping a woman on the head repeatedly is suddenly followed by a close-up of a knife and a shot of said knife thrust straight towards the camera in the manner of many a martial-arts flick. The last time Jia tackled anything like crime material in a film of his was back in 2003 with Unknown Pleasures, and that had nothing like the eruptive violence of A Touch of Sin; if anything, some of the film's invigorating thrill no doubt comes from seeing the maker of generally quiet and contemplative films like The World and Still Life unleash an id-blasting angry side that some may not have thought him capable of expressing.

Not that Jia has compromised his usual wide-ranging vision one bit. His critique of power and class inequalities in modern Chinese society is pretty obvious, but A Touch of Sin goes even deeper with its cynicism, empathizing with his working-class victims/killers but also fascinated in a social-scientist way with the limits of human empathy. (In this context, hearing a television broadcast in the film claiming that “animals are not the only advanced people on earth” comes off as highly ironic.) Religion isn't too far from Jia's mind as well, most notably in its final vignette, in which Xiao Hui falls for a female co-worker with strong Buddhist convictions. “I need to do a lot of good deeds to make it in the next life,” she says. Whether the acts of violent revenge in A Touch of Sin constitute the “good deeds” of which she speaks is something Jia leaves disquietingly open as the strains of live Chinese opera—one in which a woman regains her freedom after having been framed for murder—closes the picture.

The Past / Asghar Farhadi
For those who found Asghar Farhadi’s last film, A Separation, more of a screenwriter’s movie than a director’s movie, his new one, the Paris-set, French-language The Past, may well prove to be even more frustrating in that regard. In A Separation, there was that one cutaway from a grandfather crossing a busy street to an unrelated event that some found indicative of an overly schematic quality to Farhadi’s writing, with that glaring elision paying off in a big twist late in the film. If anything, The Past is even more predicated on deliberate omissions and payoffs, giving off a feeling of an overt tidiness of construction battling with its sense of realism.

And yet, for the most part, I’m inclined to give Farhadi more of a pass than I might be with other filmmakers of this sort, mostly because of the unsentimental yet soulful humanist vision his films express, one that, more often than not, transcends such relatively technical matters. “The terrible thing is, everybody has their reasons,” Jean Renoir famously uttered in his 1939 classic The Rules of the Game, and aside from its excellence as a piece of storytelling, the brilliance of A Separation lay in Farhadi’s sympathetically clear portrayal of the various characters’ motives, offering all sides and thus making the human drama that much more compelling and, in the end, heartbreaking.

Those virtues are very much in abundance in The Past, which functions as a kind of spiritual sequel to A Separation in its clear-eyed depiction of the fallout of a divorce in all its agonizing emotional complexities, in this case manifesting themselves in the form of inward and outward resentments; shifting loyalties; and buried secrets, both literal and psychological, that are dragged, kicking and screaming, out into the open. All of these are the elements of a classic domestic melodrama, and essentially that is what The Past is. Thanks to Farhadi’s sensitive attention to character nuances, however—helped in no small measure by the intensely committed performances from its cast—the film, more often than not, transcends its soapy trappings and becomes terrifically involving, at times even devastating.

Which is why the overtly schematic moments that don’t entirely come off in The Past stick out like sore thumbs; its last 20 minutes, especially, with the sudden reemergence of a seemingly minor character and her own skeletons, seem more contrived than anything in A Separation. Farhadi’s thematic reach may exceed his grasp this time around, but once again he finds a beautifully inconclusive note on which to end his film. These characters may not be able to completely forget their pasts, but what make us more human than the memories we hold onto, however painful?

Like Father, Like Son / Hirokazu Kore-eda
Like Father, Like Son, the latest film from Hirokazu Kore-eda, is a domestic melodrama as well, a switched-at-birth tale that ends up mostly focusing on Ryota (Masaharu Fukuyama), the father who discovers that Keita, the kid he and his wife Midori (Machiko Ono) raised as a son for six years, isn’t his flesh-and-blood after all, thanks to a nurse at the hospital giving them the wrong baby. But whereas Farhadi’s The Past is emotionally explosive, the drama in Kore-eda’s film is subtler and quieter, its surfaces relatively placid yet nonetheless coursing with underlying tensions. This is the eclectic Japanese director working in his Yasujiro Ozu-like Still Walking mode, and that is all to the good in this case.

“Nature vs. nurture” is one of the film’s broad themes, as Ryota decides, upon learning that Keita is not his actual son, that he’ll simply turn off his affection toward him and redirect them toward his actual son, named Ryusei by the parents who raised him. This sounds rather appalling on the face of it, but this kind of cold calculation comes easily for the detached, workaholic Ryota, who was raised to believe in the power of sheer hard work in achieving success in life, and who has always wondered why Keita has never exuded the same level of drive he does. Fitting, then, that one of the first words to come out of his mouth when he learns that Keita is not his son is, “Now that makes sense.”

Naturally, though, Ryota’s idealized conception of a perfect life ends up clashing with more complex realities of the situation. Kore-eda details Ryota’s gradual paternal maturation with warm patience and lovely delicacy, right down to its usage of the Aria of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations (in Glenn Gould’s ethereally slow 1981 rendition) and Friedrich Burgmüller piano studies as recurring musical motifs, slyly suggesting Ryota’s own education process in becoming a better parent. The end result is a film of unforced profundity, one that wisely implies that mere biology means little in the face of complicated human emotions.

Stranger by the Lake / Alain Guiraudie
Now, here’s something completely, enchantingly different. Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake eschews the realism of The Past and Like Father, Like Son and emphasizes, by sheer virtue of gorgeous scenery and immersive sound design, a near-mythical aura to its idiosyncratic, beguiling mix of love story and murder mystery. Much of the film takes place by the shores of an unspecified lake, one that is popular among cruising gay men. Franck (Pierre de Ladonchamps), however, is looking for something deeper than a mere hook-up; after meeting Michel (Christophe Paou), he believes he’s found the romance that he seeks. Contrasting his youthful idealism, however, is the much older and paunchier Henri (Patrick d’Assumçao), a recent divorcé and perpetual loner only now getting in touch with his homosexuality while expressing to Franck an anti-romantic weariness. The murder-mystery elements start subtly popping up after Franck goes to the lakeshore one day and finds no one there, only a helicopter hovering above; Franck gradually begins to suspect Michel may be involved in some way.

Stranger by the Lake could be seen as a coming-of-age tale, one in which Franck has his ideals about true love challenged by Michel, who seems only interested in temporary sexual pleasures (which Guiraudie isn't shy about depicting in graphic detail, going at one point for the kind of cumshot one usually only sees in pornography) rather than forging any long-lasting connections. Henri adds another wrinkle to this film's meditation on love, expressing a desire for Franck that is wholly non-sexual in nature. But the real delights of Guiraudie’s film lie in its playful details: the recurring comic-relief character seen with his pants down desperately jerking off in front of men with whom he desires to hook up; the police inspector who always seems to appear out of the shadows at inopportune moments. All of this helps enforce a light alternate-universe vibe that thankfully never detracts from the seriousness of its themes, its final shot of Franck trapped in the natural dark packing an unexpected punch in its expression of a man dealing with the implications of his smashed illusions.

COMING UP IN THE NEXT DISPATCH: Johnnie To’s Blind Detective, Joel & Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis and a documentary about life under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia involving wood-carved figurines.

• For more Festival Coverage features, see our Feature Articles section.

The 2013 InRO Awards

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 14:26:42 +0100

Ah yes, awards season: that time of year when Hollywood engages in a two-month orgy of glamorous self-congratulation, and a time when pop-cultural discussion shifts away from the movies themselves to talk of possible winners, losers, spoilers and so on. It’s horse race as cultural discourse…and, as is the case every year, it all comes to an end tonight with the granddaddy of them all: the Academy Awards, aka “The Oscars,” now in its 85th year of existence.

For me, at least, it has become all too easy to cultivate an above-it-all air and thumb my nose at all the hype. But then, I remember how into this kind of thing I was back when I was a budding teenage cinephile, and how, even now, I still find myself occasionally caught up in the game of picking winners and losers—especially this year, as I find myself with not a whole heck of a lot to root for (sorry, Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty fans). As long as we can all agree on the frivolity of it all, the hoopla can sometimes be inconsequential fun.

Instead of joining the fray with our own predictions as to who will take home the precious golden statuette, however, we here at In Review Online decided to take some of the major Oscar categories and come up with our own staff-wide list of nominees and victors, based not on what Hollywood, in its oh-so-infinite wisdom, deems worthy of showering with praise, but on what we all consider among the legitimate best that cinema in 2012 had to offer.

Welcome to the 2013 InRO Awards!

[Thanks to contributors Alex Engquist, Luke Gorham, Matthew Lucas, Sam C. Mac, John Oursler, Calum Reed and Andrew Welch for participating!] —Kenji Fujishima

To start off, some of the “other” categories:

Best Music—Original Score
Jon Brion, ParaNorman
Alexandre Desplat, Moonrise Kingdom
Jonny Greenwood, The Master
Dario Marianelli, Anna Karenina
Dan Romer & Benh Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild

Winner: Jonny Greenwood, The Master

Best Cinematography
Roger Deakins, Skyfall
Florian Hoffmeister, The Deep Blue Sea
Mihai Malaimare Jr., The Master
Dariusz Wolski, Prometheus
Robert D. Yeoman, Moonrise Kingdom

Winner: Mihai Malaimare Jr., The Master

Best Documentary Feature
The Central Park Five
Crazy Horse
5 Broken Cameras
Jiro Dreams of Sushi
This is Not a Film

Winner: 5 Broken Cameras

Best Foreign Language Film
The Day He Arrives
Holy Motors
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
Oslo, August 31st
Tabu

Winner: Holy Motors

Best Animated Feature Film
Consuming Spirits
Frankenweenie
It’s Such a Beautiful Day
ParaNorman
Wreck-It Ralph 
Winner: Wreck-It Ralph

Best Writing—Original Screenplay
Paul Thomas Anderson, The Master
Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola, Moonrise Kingdom
Miguel Gomes, Tabu
Whit Stillman, Damsels in Distress
Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained

Winner: Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola, Moonrise Kingdom

Best Writing—Adapted Screenplay
Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
David Cronenberg, Cosmopolis
Terence Davies, The Deep Blue Sea
Tony Kushner, Lincoln
Joachim Trier & Eskil Vogt, Oslo, August 31st

Winner: Terence Davies, The Deep Blue Sea

And now, to the big ones…

Best Actress in a Supporting Role
Amy Adams, The Master
Anne Hathaway, Les Misérables
Nicole Kidman, The Paperboy
Ana Moreira, Tabu
Emma Watson, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Winner:

Winner: Anne Hathaway, Les Misérables

Best Actor in a Supporting Role
Dwight Henry, Beasts of the Southern Wild
Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master
Matthew McConaughey, Magic Mike
Ezra Miller, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Bruce Willis, Moonrise Kingdom

Winner:

Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master

Best Actress in a Leading Role
Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty
Nina Hoss, Barbara
Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook
Rachel Weisz, The Deep Blue Sea
Michelle Williams, Take This Waltz

Winner:

Rachel Weisz, The Deep Blue Sea

Best Actor in a Leading Role
Anders Danielsen Lie, Oslo, August 31st
Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln
Denis Lavant, Holy Motors
Joaquin Phoenix, The Master
Jean-Louis Trinitgnant, Amour

Winner:

Denis Lavant, Holy Motors

Best Directing
Paul Thomas Anderson, The Master
Wes Anderson, Moonrise Kingdom
Leos Carax, Holy Motors
Terence Davies, The Deep Blue Sea
Miguel Gomes, Tabu

Winner:

Winner: Paul Thomas Anderson, The Master

And finally [drumroll please]...

Best Picture
Amour
The Deep Blue Sea
Holy Motors
Lincoln
The Master
Moonrise Kingdom
Oslo, August 31st
Tabu
The Turin Horse

Winner:

Moonrise Kingdom

Feature by: InRO Staff

Festival Coverage - Sundance 2013

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 14:11:49 +0100

Feature by: Sky Hirschkron

[EDITOR’S NOTE: For the first time in the history of In Review Online, we went to Sundance! Or at least, filmmaker/film critic Sky Hirschkron did—and he was kind enough to write about his experience for us. Here below are his four major cinematic discoveries during his own visit to the prestigious film festival at Park City, Utah. Thanks for contributing this to us, Sky (and totally unrelated side note: Go watch him in Dan Sallitt's terrific new film The Unspeakable Act, to be released theatrically and on video soon)! —Kenji Fujishima]

Considering its reputation as a festival of discoveries and low-profile mainstays, the 2013 Sundance Film Festival was fairly large on name directors. Alumni like Richard Linklater and David Gordon Green—both of whom had big premieres at this year’s festival—need no preamble, and while return competition entrants like Lynn Shelton, Shane Carruth and James Ponsoldt aren’t quite as established, their names carry a lot of weight in Park City’s buzz-sensitive climate. But the ratio of sure things to gambles remains decidedly slanted towards the latter; an auteur-centric Sundance means a necessarily abbreviated one, and mine, alas, was both. While sympathetic to those critics sifting through Dramatic Competition and Next for this year’s buzz items and/or under-the-radar gems, I narrowed my scope this year, with mostly pleasing results.

Before Midnight / Richard Linklater
While a little sadder and wiser than their surfaces let on, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004) are nothing if not nice, intelligent times spent with nice-looking, intelligent people—and the opening moments of the latest installment in this series, Before Midnight, plays things shakily safe at first. Ethan Hawke’s Jesse, struggling to bond with his estranged son, sentimentally overreaches as much in fatherhood as he does in his relationship with Julie Delpy’s Celine, with whom he is now entrenched. But that initial coziness doesn’t last; a darker side first manifests itself in a remarkable long take in which Celine chafes at the bigwig funding her non-profit job prospect, Jesse bitches about missing his son’s best years, and both offhandedly resign themselves to stasis. At this point, the movie could simply continue spinning permutations on the intermingling of finality and possibility in late-life plans, and nail those modest aims.

But the biggest asset of Before Midnight, it turns out, is the sheer multitude of issues it addresses and the lightness of touch with which it juggles them. The clincher comes in an uneven yet captivating sequence in which Jesse and Celine entertain a wide swath of largely Greek company. The panoply of anecdotes these characters offer ranges from simplistic contrast—provided by the Skype-bound relationship of young Anna (Attenberg’s Ariane Labed)—to charming reverie, as delivered by elderly Natalia (Xenia Kalogeropoulou), who trades off between acutely distinguishing perceptual and actual loss, and openly grieving for faded memories.

Best of all is a Waking Life callback in which Jesse, straining to defend his novel-in-progress, ruminates on perception and mortality with the enthusiasm of an obnoxious undergrad. Jesse’s immaturity, in fact, is brought to the fore in Before Midnight, as is Celine’s feminist leanings. Linklater deftly avoids turning them into mere ideologues, however: Jesse surprises Celine by showing some genuine paternal instincts (in spite of his unapologetic philandering); even more surprising is Celine’s remark that the absence of female role models is perversely liberating, insofar as it allows one to sidestep the shoulders of giants.

A master of negotiating ideas, Linklater is less adept when it comes to emotional nuance. When Celine, referencing the previous films in the series, plaintively mourns the sunset, Before Midnight compares unfavorably to the titular climax of Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray, underscoring how, even at their best, the Before films threaten to merely repackage Rohmer’s greatest hits. But Before Midnight soon carves out its own path. If earlier entries in the series have suffered slightly from coasting on the pleasantness of Jesse and Celine’s conversations, this new entry, more interestingly, swings the pendulum way in the other direction. Teetering uneasily between eliciting uncomfortable laughs and Bergman-deep reserves of unhappiness, Before Midnight gradually becomes a film at odds with its gentler self, mirroring its couple’s constancy and eventual decline.

It Felt Like Love / Eliza Hittman
The biggest surprise of my Sundance experience this year, Eliza Hittman’s It Felt Like Love is a beautifully rendered take on rote material that presents something of a contradiction in terms. A kind of feminist response to the films of Larry Clark, Hittman’s film, more often than not, hits a sweet spot between lurid frankness and endearing awkwardness.

If nothing else, the film contains a teenage friendship of startling nuance, between lonely and inexperienced Lila (Gina Piersanti) and the more sexually frank Chiara (Giovanna Salimeni). Chiara is neither particularly cruel nor deceptive; her greatest sins include presuming accurately that Lila is a virgin and breaking up with her boyfriend for “no good reason” (actually, there is a good reason, but by that point Chiara knows Lila well enough to lie.) She’s the kind of friend that calls Lila’s hair pretty and holds back her head when she vomits, but also makes a face when Lila asks for help, leaving her abruptly in the lurch. The friendship’s strangeness is never fully explained, yet it all somehow feels authentic onscreen—a wonderfully textured take on relational aggression.

Though Lila spends much of the film observing the relationship between Chiara and her boyfriend Patrick (Jesse Cordasco) from afar, Hittman focuses on aspects of that relationship that Lila, in her naïveté, conveniently ignores: Chiara is evasive when confronted about her former lovers, and declines to answer a question about masturbation outright, playing it conspicuously cool despite hints at a wealth of experience. At one point, Patrick slowly counts down the number of men Chiara has slept with (which eclipses his) as he leans in for a kiss, encapsulating the contradictory nature of the “slut” label—that which draws him in and drives him away—in one gesture.

But though Chiara and her boyfriend Patrick (Jesse Cordasco) are major presences in the film, the immensely promising newcomer Piersanti is unmistakably the star here, and Lila is the most vivid character I saw at a Sundance film this year. Making failed attempts at playing truth or dare, or coming up with a childish stab at emasculation (“You’re scared of everything” is her line), Lila brushes up not so much against the indifference of boys as against a cosmos that devours her attempts to summon up an aura of sexual experience out of nothing. But just when Lila seems to be approaching buffoonish levels of oblivion, she’ll occasionally surprise us with a moment of sharp observation—most notably, when she tells her crush, the older Sammy (Ronen Rubenstein), that Chiara’s string of boyfriends is evidence that her friend is “needy”: a blatant display of one-upmanship to us, an offhand insight coming from her.

About Sammy: a callow girl pining for an older, muscular guy in a tank top is, sadly, no more novel in movies than a scrawny kid pursuing a generic hot chick. It Felt Like Love spends a bit too much energy giving Lila’s infatuation an impressionistic sheen, and the opening and closing moments, while perfectly pleasant, offer a quasi-arty flirtation with fourth-wall-breaking that serves no distinct overall purpose. Somehow, Hittman’s specifics—deeply idiosyncratic yet oddly believable stylistic and character details—are way more compelling than her broader outlines. I have a feeling that in the future, the less Hittman concerns herself with plot, the more compelling a filmmaker she’ll be.

Computer Chess / Andrew Bujalski
Though Andrew Bujalski’s first three films were distinctive in turning fairly banal subjects like dating perils and friendship-ruining hookups into the stuff of high drama, his deliberate disregard for conventional story mechanics meant that those films also lacked much in the way of narrative tension. Bujalski’s characteristic looseness in still in evidence in his latest film, Computer Chess—but this time, everything else has been supplanted by a sensibility at once pioneering and guileless.

There are early signs of willful, gleeful contempt: for HD technology, in Bujalski’s employment of archaic videography; and for the conventions of most misfit-driven comedies, in which the underdogs are assholes and the assholes underdogs. At the heart of the film is a rough trinity of competing programmers. Pudgy, eloquent Les (James Curry) defends a purely hypothetical stance of utilizing computer-chess technology for military purposes in a pot-fueled, self-effacing rant. Even more self-effacing is Peter (Patrick Riester), a brilliant proponent of the prevailing “brute force” method who nonetheless comes to find his own reasoning suspect. Throwing a second wrench into the mix is tetchy, ridiculous Michael Papageorge (Myles Paige channeling Jon Heder), who attempts to dismantle “brute force” by declaring himself perceptive to programming’s “feminine side.” His bumbling search for shelter and companionship punctures the first of many holes in the movie’s credibly knotty universe, its use of music evoking Godard by way of first-generation MTV.

And down the rabbit-hole goes Computer Chess, one of the more tonally jarring narrative features I’ve ever seen, its third-act tailspin vacillating between broad, raunchy stoner comedy and avant-garde riffage ranging from the crude—think single shots solarized and upside-down—to recursive, sound-image dissonance that wouldn’t be out of place in, say, Michael Snow's experimental epic Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen. In a sense, Bujalski’s film adopts the superficial trappings of a low-budget Moneyball to ponder existential plights like a suicidal king rushing to his death, a knight whose movement suggests teleportation and a primitive A.I. program blithely shrugging off the Turing test in favor of addressing the human soul. Computer Chess is a complete original, yet while it’s thrilling to contemplate from afar, onscreen it’s yet another contradiction in terms: a movie strenuously, meticulously hard to take seriously.

Upstream Color / Shane Carruth
Shane Carruth’s 2004 debut Primer is known for having an immensely complex inner logic, but that has always struck me as secondary to its thesis that the goodness of one’s own psyche, subjected to mathematical analysis, is unknowable. Along with an interest in depicting complex mental fissures, his sophomore feature Upstream Color shares with Primer a painstaking search for the implacable spirit of destruction in moral people. Here, though, chaos steadily leads back to good, serving as a unifying force rather than a side effect of self-interest. Primer’s Abe and Aaron were fundamentally apart; Upstream Color’s Kris (Amy Seimetz) and Jeff (Carruth), despite being forcibly exiled from their own identities, are linked souls.

The beguiling montage that opens Upstream Color makes Primer look positively unassuming, stylistically at least. A pair of young boys concoct a beverage using maggots, appearing to sync minds in a blind dance; a man inserts the same maggots into covert vessels in order to do…something. After this mystifying opening sequence, we become witness to Kris’s transformation from high-powered, driven career woman to high-strung, resourceful woman-child. If this section of the film offers little more than a narrative of victimization, it nevertheless benefits from a lyrically subjective tone, bizarrely specific means of degradation and passages where mania and psychosis outweigh tragedy.

And then the wall completely crumbles. More recognizable than the first act in its general outline but several degrees stranger in its particulars, the second act of Upstream Color brings Jeff into the fray. Questions that would register as rhetorical psychobabble in any other movie land with creeping literalness; it takes a second viewing, for example, just to discern that Jeff isn’t coyly flirting with Kris when he asks, “What do I say to that?” Elsewhere, an archetypal rom-com climax is repurposed as the socially unacceptable behavior of damaged goods. It takes the combined impact of an ostensibly humorless remark about a hamburger and a tactless bit of displaced blame to even begin to fully grasp the lack of emotional proportion in Kris and Jeff’s world.

This section peaks in a montage in which the repeated phrase “They could be starlings” initiates a rediscovery of the foundations of memory; another highlight involves a fellow mental exile reliving an argument either by process of social acclimation or poetic association, punctuated by numerous inspired deliveries of the line, “I hope today is better.” Carruth’s allegory essentially re-enacts the process by which day-trippers painfully regain their egos post-acid, with the sum of socialized behavior in the ego’s place. As for the Sampler—who either controls, feeds off, or innocuously corresponds with victims via ambient recordings—I am frankly even more at a loss to designate one sensible role after two viewings than I was after one. He’s not even the least accountable element in this perplexing, amazing movie: a Primer for those more captivated by transcendence than science.

• For more Festival Coverage features, see our Feature Articles section.

Year in Review 2012 - Top 20 Albums

Wed, 2 Jan 2013 08:18:36 +0100

The year may be over, but we here at InRO still have one last list for you. As many of our readers already know, we'll be reverting back to an exclusively film-based site in the new year, with plans to cease publishing regular music-related content. InRO has traditionally been a film site; it only branched out to cover music in 2009, the result of its founders' expanding interests. Personally, I'm quite proud of the content we amassed, in particular several year- (and even decade-) spanning features we put together. So as a little farewell gesture, we as a staff took a vote on our Best Albums of 2012, and the list we came up with presents a good balance of popular and indie fare, and their homogenization, with a few niche genres creeping in on the strength of one or two staffers’ concentrated passions. This well represents a year that saw two clear consensus favorites (our own number one and two albums, duh), and a sharp dissolve of so-called party lines, as tastemakers seemed genuinely thrilled and relieved to champion the likes of 90s-indebted R&B and teen pop, trends that have, in recent history, been deemed largely appropriate only for radio-listening drones, or however that narrative goes. Of course, radio culture isn’t even really a thing anymore, and the demographic-creating institutions that have taken its place leave little room for any kind of music incapable of testing the full force of a listener's subwoofer, meaning R&B finds itself ripe for critical reclaiming, and that the music itself can attract a range of enterprising new talents' with their own ideas for its revision. Suddenly Pitchfork is BNM'ing Usher’s “Climax” and putting Carly Rae Jepsen's totally adorable and earnest “Call Me Maybe” on their best tracks of the year list; the venerable indie site still hasn't penned a fucking Taylor Swift piece, but their move to diversify is welcome and very indicative of a critical community repairing its relationship with popular music, a division which seemed at its most embittered sometime in the mid-Aughts and now seems just about as friendly as it's been in a decade. This is a trend we're happy to see, and one we'll certainly miss being able to shape in some small way ourselves. Here’s our final transmission on the topic, for now. —Sam C. Mac

20. The xx: Coexist
19. Julia Holter: Ekstasis
18. Spiritualized: Sweet Heart Sweet Light
17. Scott Walker: Bish Bosch
16. Nicki Minaj: Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded

15. Death Grips: The Money Store
14. Chromatics: Kill for Love
13. Passion Pit: Gossamer
12. Iris DeMent: Sing the Delta
11. Quantic & Alice Russell: Look Around the Corner

10. Swans: The Seer
09. Taylor Swift: Red
08. Usher: Looking 4 Myself
07. Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!
06. Cloud Nothings: Attack on Memory

05. Bob Dylan: Tempest
04. Lana Del Rey: Born to Die
03. Grimes: Visions
02. Kendrick Lamar: Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City
01. Frank Ocean: Channel Orange

• For more Year in Review features, see our Feature Articles section.

Feature by: InRO Staff

Year in Review 2012 - Top 20 Films

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 04:20:15 +0100

All one needs to do is look at the many and varied riches cinema had to offer on theater screens in 2012 to disprove the crowing—yes, once again this year—from certain quarters about the “death of cinema.” Digital may be overtaking celluloid as the medium of choice for many filmmakers, but films like, say, Ang Lee’s 3D spectacle Life of Pi demonstrate that, in the hands of real filmmakers, there are still plenty of visual wonders and expressive possibilities left to explore. Shooting on digital certainly didn’t stop imprisoned Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi from making one of the most heartbreaking and inspiring moral documents to grace movie screens this year in the subversively titled This Is Not a Film. And what of Alex Ross Perry and Paul Thomas Anderson, both of whom, in The Color Wheel and The Master respectively, went back into movie history, using analog film—16mm in Perry’s case, 70mm in Anderson’s—to stylistically revisit the cinema of their forbears while forging ahead with their own distinctive visions? Maybe it’s fitting, then, that In Review Online’s best film of 2012 is a work that uses the digital medium to meditate on cinema’s past, present and future. It’s a film that may exude a measure of skepticism toward cinema going forward, but also revels in the kind of sheer creative freedom that suggests there’s no stopping an artist’s imagination, whatever the medium or the budget. [Note: Because of the fact that it is still only in limited release, many of our staffers have not yet seen Zero Dark Thirty as of the publication of this list; we’re confident, however, that the absence of Django Unchained is indeed reflective of the thoughts of the staff as a whole.] —Kenji Fujishima

20. Magic Mike / Steven Soderbergh
Steven Soderbergh turned out a better microcosm/critique of the Great Recession-era free market than Andrew Dominik in Killing Them Softly, and without a single C-SPAN sound bite. His Trojan horse of a male-stripper movie shrewdly concealed its insights behind a patina of A-list flesh and then went further, exposing its own façade. Yet all that would have been for naught had the movie not offered such a bounty of surface pleasures: newly anointed box-office savior Channing Tatum reliving his semi-sordid past and giving his most effortlessly charismatic performance to date; Matthew McConaughey flipping his clean-cut image into a fearsome vision of sweaty, assless-chapped megalomania; and self-consciously performative dance sequences staged with all the verve of Golden Age musicals. The fantasy at the heart of Magic Mike—the idea that all you need to succeed in America is a dollar and a dream—was at once ridiculous and tantalizingly attainable. But we’re living in Soderbergh’s America, and in Soderbergh’s America, you’ve got to work/twerk. —Alex Engquist

19. The Perks of Being a Wallflower / Stephen Chbosky
An introvert freshman dealing with mental illness and the recent suicide of his best friend finds himself constantly picked on by his peers as he starts his freshman year of high school. He ends up finding solace, however, in a small band of outcast seniors who take him under their wing. If this sounds like the set-up for any number of high-school coming-of-age movies, it's anything but; Stephen Chbosky’s big-screen adaptation of his own best-selling 1999 novel distinguishes itself from the pack not only in its tenderly empathetic depth of feeling, but in the way it poignantly evokes main character Charlie’s desire to break out of his shell and finally experience the world, in all its joyous highs and crashing lows. Few moments in movies this year were as purely ecstatic as the sight of two of this film’s characters, at two separate moments, driving along a highway, top down, raising their arms to the sky and feeling a sense of freedom literally whooshing through them—a fleeting but precious moment to treasure for a lifetime. —K.F.

18. The Comedy / Rick Alverson
The best way to approach Rick Alverson’s film is as a kind of perverse sketch-comedy anthology centering around an extreme version of a particular—and for some, strangely recognizable—type: the hipster douchebag who, perhaps as a result of his privileged upbringing, can’t help but take life as one big joke. Class issues, racial differences, religious belief, even others’ physical ailments: Swanson (Tim Heidecker) treats it all with an irreverence bordering on nihilistic contempt. Does he take anything seriously? The Comedy isn’t so much a serious analysis of this particular type as it is a kind of black-comic tap dance on the edge of an abyss, positing scenarios in which Swanson is presented with the potential to break through his persistent ironic veneer and forge an honest human connection. Whether he actually achieves such a breakthrough is for the viewer to determine; maybe irony is the only way he knows how to reach out to anyone. Along the way, The Comedy manages to conjure up an unexpected side effect: In navigating its course from one abrasive joke to the next, it demands that viewers question their own connection to the world around them. —K.F.

17. Barbara / Christian Petzold
German filmmaker Christian Petzold impressed many in the critical community with his striking 2009 film Jerichow, but even his fine work there might not prepare you for the brilliance of his newest one, Barbara—a paranoid thriller with the heart of a domestic drama. A 1980-set tale of a big-city doctor who is relocated to the provinces of East Germany for daring to apply for a visa to the West, Petzold’s film is steeped in the dread and uncertainty of the Iron Curtain era, anchored by Nina Hoss’s quietly steely lead performance. With a heavy sense of dread and a keen sense of time and place, Barbara offers a veritable master class in building suspense and genuine emotional heft from the deceptively mundane, forgoing the quick cuts and jarring camerawork that has become the hallmark of Hollywood thrillers. This electrifying, startlingly assured drama is clearly the work of a major filmmaker. —Matthew Lucas

16. The Kid With a Bike / Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne
Forget the naysayers who complain about yet another Dardenne Brothers movie; we are in dire need of their brand of humanism right now. Devoid of religious platitudes, The Kid with a Bike instead presents a tale of a kind of secular saintliness. Abandoned by his father with a brutal nonchalance, young Cyril (Thomas Doret) is sent to a boy’s home where he spends weekends with Samantha (Cécile De France), a kind of a foster parent. We’re never given a reason for her devotion to this furious bundle of energy (as usual, the Dardennes eschew pat psychology), but Samantha seems determined to care for this child regardless of the cost to her personal life. Cyril meanwhile spends much of his time with the titular bicycle, a gift from his father that he clings to obsessively, transferring all his familial devotion to it. Though Cyril gradually succumbs to the allure of criminal life, the Dardennes are less interested in suspense than in consequences, using a startling act of violence to condemn the cycle of retribution that seems at times ready to engulf us all. Deceptively simple, The Kid with a Bike quietly builds to a devastating climax and an ultimately hopeful resolution. —Daniel Gorman

15. Girl Walk // All Day / Jacob Krupnick
Shot in purposefully dull black-and-white, the opening couple minutes of Girl Walk // All Day watches an unnamed female dancer goes through the classical-ballet motions. Suddenly, black-and-white becomes color, the female dancer snaps out of her creative doldrums and Jacob Krupnick’s feature-length music video—set to the entirety of All Day, the latest album from the DJ known as Girl Talk—erupts into a joyous celebration of not only the creative spirit but also the possibility of forging connections in a potentially alienating urban environment such as New York City. Not that Girl Walk // All Day is all fun and games; most pointedly, the female dancer runs into an Occupy Wall Street rally after having glammed herself up through a shopping spree, becoming the target of protesters’ jeers. But, light social commentary and all, Krupnick’s film exudes an unabashedly buoyant spirit that culminates in a large crowd in Central Park dancing to the strains of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” A more inspiring middle finger to cynicism is difficult to imagine. —K.F.

14. Neighboring Sounds / Kleber Mendonça Filho
Contained to a claustrophobic urban grid of a couple blocks in the seaside Brazilian town of Recife, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s impeccably crafted debut feature is a study of subtle atmosphere cantilevered over a sociometric melodrama. With a sound design that breathes an ambience of fear, Neighboring Sounds holds the threat of violence in the balance right alongside the social schisms cultivated by family, race, class and the burden of history. João is the apathetic yet enlightened median of his privileged middle-class family, trapped between the identity of his patriarchal grandfather who built his wealth and subsequent power from a sugarcane plantation and the self-absorbed persona of his delinquent younger cousin who breaks into cars for thrills. João and his upwardly mobile neighbors inhabit newly constructed apartment towers while an army of servants work to fulfill their needs of protection and comfort. The co-dependent relationship between classes is pulled silently taut in Neighboring Sounds as the tension manifests itself sublimely within the mundane trivia of everyday life. Filho deftly constructs a theorem of invisible cataclysm beneath progress and modernity, where a psyche-shaking nightmare still lurks behind a locked door, a locked gate, a guard dog and a private-security crew. —Kathie Smith

13. Oslo, August 31st / Joachim Trier
While Robert Zemeckis’s Flight sits as the biggest Addict Film of 2012 in the public’s eye, Oslo, August 31st—a genuine masterpiece—has sadly been overlooked by most. Flight serves up a largely clichéd character—full of pride, anger and denial—relying almost solely on its fantastic lead actor to convince its audience to overlook the facileness of the proceedings. By contrast, Oslo unflinchingly fixes its gaze on a more fully developed protagonist, Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie), fresh out of rehab and preparing for a job interview as the film opens; the trail he blazes for himself over the next 24 hours outlines the trajectory of the film, one that is as honest and heartbreaking as any this year. As Anders struggles internally, his carefully manicured façade of impassivity and self-deprecating humor combating his unbalanced sensitivity and low self-esteem, the wellspring of ambiguity regarding his character only deepens our emotional investment. Ultimately, it’s as much Anders’s perceived superiority as his inferiority that shapes his character, leaving the audience to wonder whether he’s as much afflicted by the toll of living as he is by the power of addiction. —Luke Gorham

12. The Day He Arrives / Hong Sang-soo
Former film director Seongjun (Yu Junsang) has returned to Seoul for a couple of days to visit a friend; after a tumultuous evening of drinking with a trio of strangers and showing up drunk on his ex-girlfriend’s doorstep, Seonjun finds himself trapped in a cinematic portal where he cycles through three finely drawn visions of fate, highlighted by the delicate shifts of mood he and his companions experience. Random things happen for no reason within the monotonous patterns of life, and South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo has been studying these indiscriminate moments for more than 15 years. Shot in black and white, The Day He Arrives packs his familiar tropes of soju-soaked remorse and piercing yet tender satire in a playful narrative of keenly observed possibilities. In nearly all of Hong’s films, the fragile hero is a film director of varying failure, and it is never too much of a stretch to consider them autobiographical characters. But this particular portrait is an especially self-deprecating confession of erratic and accidental perfection. —K.S.

11. The Color Wheel / Alex Ross Perry
Misdirection is central to The Color Wheel’s appeal: Its drastic last-act tonal shift is such a game-changer, emotionally speaking, that it’s enough to convert the otherwise unimpressed. That director/writer/co-star Alex Ross Perry—making only his second film, incredibly—can guide us so capably from improvisatory mumblecore witticisms to heartfelt, entirely deliberate histrionics is a testament to his gifts as both a comedian and a dramatist. And as a visual stylist, too; shot in black-and-white on rich, grainy 16mm, The Color Wheel is the rare independent feature to not only embrace but relish a wistfully antiquated aesthetic. The results are as gorgeous as they are unique. As with his debut, the loose and offbeat Gravity’s Rainbow adaptation Impolex, The Color Wheel’s comic and dramatic sensibilities are very much Perry’s own—and while its abrasive style will no doubt alienate those not accustomed to its very particular rhythms, its difficulty is ultimately what makes it so rewarding. —Calum Marsh

10. Cosmopolis / David Cronenberg
In the year of “Big Data” and Nate Silver, the best film to speak to today’s world is the completely artificial one of David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, a work as radical as anything he’s made since Videodrome. A rip-roaring comedy about the psychology of data and capitalism, Cosmopolis takes us through the journey of a billionaire whose belief in digital patterns is questioned when he is unable to comprehend a disastrous fall in the yuan. In Cronenberg’s world, digital life is a cracking façade: monotonous dialogue pops like a screwball comedy, the limousine slowly deteriorates into a piece of junk, and our protagonist’s body physically corrodes in the most absurd of ways. Edited and shot with razor-sharp skill, Cronenberg’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel might seem like the film the Occupy Wall Street movement has been waiting for, but it’s more of an attack on our constant investment in the signs, symbols and patterns of digital life today. Two characters realize they both have asymmetrical prostates, and one demands to know its meaning; the response: “Nothing…a harmless variation.” The most unsettling thing in Cronenberg’s vision of the future is realizing that not everything can fit neatly into models. —Peter Labuza

9. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia / Nuri Bilge Ceylan
With its lush cinematography and somber tone, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s slow-burn procedural Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is the Turkish director’s masterpiece, a culmination of his thematic interests crystallized into a deeply melancholic examination of people who appear to be getting by, but struggle with inner turmoil, much of it spiritual. Ceylan paces the film deliberately, but Anatolia is by no means a quiet film; character plights are more explicitly immersive here than say, the cinematic telepathy in Antonioni’s films that communicates characters’ emotions to the viewer, or the quiescent surroundings that emanate spirituality in Tarkovsky’s films. In Anatolia, the main characters—a doctor, police commissioner, prosecutor and murder convict—are all subject to visions, memories and monologues that make them question their place in the world upon the sudden demands of their respective responsibilities concerning the murder: finding the body, preparing it for autopsy, and completing all the corresponding paperwork. The film’s best quality is its ponderous tone, which enables characters to seamlessly indulge in brief catatonic existential crises as their world cycles transiently from night to day. —Tina Hassannia

8. Lincoln / Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg’s audacious Lincoln is founded on the same principles of the final five minutes of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence: What appears to be a grandiose sentimental moment cunningly subsumes a devastating vision of political methods and consequence. Lincoln shows Spielberg’s formal technique at his best: Sweeping camera movements and bold lighting beckon us into a mythic narrative of a hyper-conscious political moment, as the weight of history bears down on these characters in every scene. But screenwriter Tony Kushner invests us in the necessity of these political dealings, which include backroom agreements, semantic deceptions and, most abhorrently, putting lives in harm’s way for a belief in “history.” Even if the consequences are burning cities, bodies lying in the waste and the assassination of an idol, Spielberg and Kushner create a vision of Hegelian history in which the rights of others are created by so many wrongs. With its emphasis on transcendence, every moment of awe-inspiring grace in Lincoln is undercut by its visual nods to the questionable methods of politics. As Spielberg and Kushner provocatively suggest, however, that is the backbone of America. —P.L.

7. The Master / Paul Thomas Anderson
Frustrating as many viewers as it hypnotized, The Master is, like There Will Be Blood and Punch-Drunk Love, another of Paul Thomas Anderson’s deep dives into interiority, a character study fueled by the roiling, unknowable and often bad tempers of its lead characters. The pace waxes and wanes, with long stretches of silence punctuated by loud, angry, often random and inscrutable outbursts. The meticulous visuals seem to alternate between placing tiny, vulnerable bodies against vast forbidding backdrops and imposing close-ups of troubled faces. For some, it’s a Rorschach test, ripe with potent context (post-WWII masculinity, alcoholism, Scientology) that, depending on who you talk to, either refuses to answer for itself or simply fails to cohere. Others see a romance of sorts, simply the story of two men who see themselves in one another. However one looks at the film, The Master, for all its formal control and narrative looseness, is at heart a simple film about the struggle to locate oneself in a scary world. —Matt Lynch

6. This Is Not a Film / Jafar Panahi & Mojtaba Mirtahmasb
As the old adage goes, when put in extraordinary circumstances, man will adapt, attempting survival, often thriving under oppression. Life and art collide with grave consequence in Jafar Panahi’s This Is Not a Film, the oppressed Iranian iconoclast’s unthinkably resourceful docu-dispatch from his life under house arrest (which to this day continues unabated). Left to his own devices, yet with an inherent passion to create, Panahi transforms his apartment into a film set, literally outlining unrealized scenes from a future film of unknown fortune. Handcrafted on portable DVs and iPhones alike, from footage of Panahi’s day-to-day routine and his prior work under government sanction, this unclassifiable work of political and cinematic radicalism takes form, genre, aesthetic, mise en scène—even the roles between actor, producer, director and distributor (lest we forget, this “film” was smuggled out of the country on a USB drive, hidden inside a cake)—and collapses the boundaries separating these considerations from our more privileged existences. A singular work of life during wartime, it’s the year’s only production that can truly be classified as a heroic act on the part of its creator. —Jordan Cronk

5. The Turin Horse / Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzky
If The Turin Horse is indeed Bela Tarr’s final film, as he has stated numerous times, cinema will be the poorer for it. But this somber black-and-white dirge about hopelessness is a fitting note on which to go out. Jumping off from a story by Nietzsche—in which he once encountered a man viciously beating a horse that refused to move—Tarr imagines the fate of the beast, its cruel existence mirroring that of its owner, an enfeebled old man living with his grown daughter in destitution. Tarr films them unflinchingly, alternating fluid tracking shots that seem to go on forever and static compositions that emphasize a kind of existential stasis. Repetitions abound; routine is a crushing banality and even sustenance brings no joy, only existence for another day. But there’s gallows humor here as well, and the entire world seems contained in the film, with these two people in the throes of an uncaring universe. Tarr seems to be laying all the messy contradictions of life on the table here: He can’t go on, he goes on, forever. We can’t go on, and yet we do; the act of making art in and of itself constitutes a heroic struggle. —D.G.

4. Tabu / Miguel Gomes
Forget The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius’s pale silent-film homage from last year; this year brought us Miguel Gomes’s mesmerizing Tabu, which restores faith that true silent cinema is not just some charming relic to be memorialized in Oscar-winning comedies. Spanning decades, Tabu weaves a tale of an elderly woman named Aurora, whose life has descended into a paranoid fog. A dying wish opens up a tale unknown to any of her friends or family, and that is when Gomes switches gears from sound to silent (save for ambient sounds and a narrator who replaces dialogue or intertitles). The two halves of the film are completely distinct but also inseparable from one another, distilling love, aging and Portuguese colonialism into a powerfully rendered whole. By turns absurdly funny and deeply moving, Tabu caps off a banner year for black-and-white cinema, what with the achievements of both Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse and Alex Ross Perry’s The Color Wheel. Instead of simply repeating what has come before, Gomes stretches the boundaries of silent film into something thrilling and new, just like the great silent-era auteurs of yesteryear. —M.L.

3. The Deep Blue Sea / Terence Davies
Little about his adaptations of Edith Wharton and John Kennedy Toole—wherein he opted for guarded emotion and calculated stateliness—suggested the vision Terence Davies would conjure up in tackling Terence Rattigan’s post-World War II play, The Deep Blue Sea. Here, we are treated to a study in the awakening of passion and a wonderful marriage of narrative and aesthetic sensibilities—a testament to his artistry and a bold affront to complacency. Not quick to wholly abandon his auteurist stamps, Davies’s preoccupation with memory is organically and affectingly appended to the source material thanks to some narrative tinkering, while his fondness for pop makes for one of the most moving sequences in film this year. The credit isn’t quite Davies’s alone, though; Rachel Weisz manages to surprise as a woman as possessed of newfound conviction as she is of vulnerability. A more powerful combination of director and performer could not be found on movie screens in 2012. —L.G.

2. Moonrise Kingdom / Wes Anderson
The children in Wes Anderson’s movies are often more mature than the adults, and the same is true in Moonrise Kingdom. Sam and Suzy, the movie’s central couple, may be young, but their sense of alienation has given them insights to which the adults around them are oblivious. That gap in maturity and their love for each other are the engine that drives this movie’s conflicts. On one level, their obstacles are as small as anything from childhood, and yet the stakes feel enormous. Like Benjamin Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, which functions as the movie’s theme even more than Alexandre Desplat’s score, Moonrise Kingdom is alternately playful and grandiose, rising to a dramatic crescendo that brings together all of its players. Community, even more than love or maturity, is the theme of Anderson’s film; granted, it’s a key to his entire oeuvre but, as with just about everything in this film, it feels more pointed here. Moonrise Kingdom sees Anderson exercising his talents with greater confidence as he crafts a cinematic experience rich in humor, melancholy and beauty. —Andrew Welch

1. Holy Motors / Leos Carax
2012 saw no shortage of thinkpieces proclaiming the death of film: Whether defeated at the hands of cable television or lapsed cinephilia, movies were being prematurely eulogized. Enter dormant French auteur Leos Carax—suddenly too busy crafting cinema to lament it—and his marvelous muse/avatar Denis Lavant. Allegedly cobbled together from a decade’s worth of abandoned projects, Carax’s film is episodic by design; it’s no surprise that so much of the praise focuses on individual sequences like the accordion-jam entr’acte and the motion-capture pas de deux. But Holy Motors is greater than the sum of its parts. Whether the elements presented are strange or familiar to us, Carax has arranged them in order to not only show us things we’ve never seen before, but also to remind us why we watch movies in the first place. Lavant makes Carax’s thesis thrillingly physical through his journey of reinvention and self-destruction, greasepaint applied and removed. Dead or alive? Who cares? Let my baby ride. —A.E.

• For more Year in Review features, see our Feature Articles section.

Feature by: InRO Staff

Political Nonsense - The Final Presidential Debate

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 20:19:52 +0100

First, an overview of the third and final Presidential debate, which was to focus on Foreign Policy. Then, some personal observations and preferences concerning future presidential debates. As to Foreign Policy, the exchanges in last week’s debate were reasonably predictable. Obama defended the record of his Administration’s behavior in the face of world events. Romney attacked the record, stating with his now familiar assurance that he would have done it “sooner, bolder and better.” If there were any surprises (or, perhaps to some, disappointments), they were to be found in the ultimate similarity of the two candidates positions. They tried hard to argue against each other but found disagreement elusive without returning, as they did, again and again, to domestic policy. So, when discussion turns to the Middle East or to China or Russia rather than dig into detail I prefer an effort to assess each candidate’s “world view.”

They were asked this directly: “How do you see America’s future role on the world stage?” Their answers both included the obligatory patriotic blustering about American exceptionalism and American values. After all, this is an election battle. But, beyond the propaganda, how are we to view each man’s personal vision of how America should behave as a citizen of the 21st century world? Here’s my take.

One man believes that the United States, through military strength and superiority, should “manage” events in the world. We should vigorously protect American “interests,” and aggressively support, if not impose, American values and beliefs. He would step in to “control” situations that were moving away from this paradigm. He is dedicated to leading a world that looks just like us, free market economies, free elections, freedom of speech, etc. He believes deeply that America must be the model for international behavior—social behavior, economic behavior and religious behavior. The other man would maintain a strong military, strong enough to defend this nation and its allies. He would vigorously join the debate on world events as a member of the international community of nations. He would promote American values and beliefs and speak on behalf of American “interests.” He would recognize and respect the multi-cultural realities of a changing world, and would try to work in harmony with the beliefs and aspirations of others. He realizes that the 21st Century world will not be a world with one leader, but a world where a number of powerful nations will have to work together to preserve the peace.

Who would you pick as Commander-in-Chief?

And as to future debates, if I were King...

1. There would be no debates where the candidates are allowed to wander about the stage. Both would remain standing behind their podiums and speak only when recognized by the moderator. Double screens on television will not be permitted. We will be shown one candidate at a time or both, if taken from a distance and thus appearing on the same screen.
2. We will enlist stronger, more professional moderators who will do a better job enforcing the time rules and keeping the debaters on subject. They will have sufficient authority to ring a bell or bang a gavel when a candidate grossly exceeds his or her time allotment or hopelessly wanders off into campaign talking points that are not relevant to the question at hand.
3. The questions (or topics) need to be prepared much more carefully with the sole goal being to draw out the candidates’ detailed positions on the major issues of the campaign, thereby educating the voters. If possible, questions will be designed to bring out differences between the candidates. Selecting the questions is not an easy assignment, and it will not be left to the moderator or to random members of the audience.

Finally, this is to be be my final piece under the banner of Political Nonsense, prepared exclusively for In Review Online. I have enjoyed working with the site’s Editor-in-Chief, Sam C. Mac, and, as he too will be moving on to other endeavors following the publishing of this article, I wish him the very best.

• For more Political Nonsense features, see our Feature Articles section.

Feature by: John Snow

Political Nonsense - The Second Presidential Debate

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 18:55:12 +0200

OK, so President Obama “won” the second debate by about the same slim margin that Governor Romney “won” the first. One to one, the series is even, and everything hinges on the all-important, deciding third debate. Right? Wrong! Oh, bliss, were it that simple. Two red-blooded American patriots step into the ring and slug it out. As my local paper headlined after this round, “Obama, Romney, land punches!” Perhaps in round three one will land a haymaker and the referee can step in, count to ten and exalt the next president. Or at least the judges will award a split decision, and this will all be over. Right? Wrong again. Campaigns aren’t that simple, and the electorate that decides them is not that dazzled by debates.

Yet, we must have learned something from the first two encounters. We have some takeaway as to each candidate’s style, energy, determination, persuasiveness and, yes, temperament. These, however, are intangibles, often quite differently filtered through the eyes of each beholder. We, perhaps, have learned something of the two men’s core beliefs and character. But any assessments tends to be subjective and influenced by previously held convictions. Still, the debates have helped to identify central issues of the campaign, and, despite often conflicting and confusing rhetoric, we now have a reasonably focused view of where the candidates stand. Good stuff that will, in the end, make for a more informed voter.

It's my impression, as we draw closer and closer to Election Day, that two critical areas of voter concern have not been addressed by the candidates. They appear to be serious omissions, chinks in the candidates' respective armors: one by President Obama and a quite different one by Governor Romney. Each man has an obvious and troubling void in their campaign rhetoric. Interestingly, both candidates seem to have recognized the deficiency in the other and tried to capitalize on it by pointing out the weakness to the voters. But, when confronted with pertinent questions each in turn has ducked and weaved while overtly avoiding and/or obfuscating the subject. We, the voters, are still in the dark.

For Romney this troubling question is “how?” How is he going to deliver on what he promises? He promises 12 million new jobs. How will he produce them? He promises to bring us back to the days of a booming economy. How will he accomplish that? He promises to lower everybody’s taxes and the deficit at the same time. How will he do that? Romney has two stock answers. The first (repeated ad nausea) is “I understand job creation, and I know how to do it.” No plan, no details, just “I know how to do it.” The second stock answer is “by getting the government out of the way.” And there you have it, the Romney Plan: (1) He knows how to do it and (2) Get the government out of the way. The details are not forthcoming, and we are asked to take the matter on faith. That is the “void” in the Romney platform.

For Obama the troubling question is “what?” What is your agenda for a second term? What goals will you set for the next four years? What do you want to accomplish? What are you going to do about the deficit? He has been so busy defining and defending what he has accomplished, or tried to accomplish, in his first term that he has not bothered to tell us what he plans to do next. What would an Obama second term look like? We need to hear that. It’s what leaders do; they tell us where they’re going to try and lead us… and why. And that is the “void” that’s posing just as significant a problem for the Obama platform.

Will the two candidates address these deficiencies in the few weeks remaining before the election? I sure hope so, but don’t count on it. We're not likely to get any clarification next Monday night during the all-important third debate, where the topic is to be Foreign Policy. That topic, one would think, should be to the President’s advantage; his record is not so easily assailed unless, of course, you're a Neocon. So, I pick Obama to win number three. If you’re a sports fan, that's the series—but not necessarily the election.

• For more Political Nonsense features, see our Feature Articles section.

Feature by: John Snow

Political Nonsense - The First Presidential Debate

Tue, 9 Oct 2012 00:13:46 +0200

We have a sport’s mentality in America. Every sporting event produces a winner, and we love winners. A game can go into overtime or be won by a field goal in the last two seconds, and still, for the fans, there is a winner and a loser. The winner is celebrated and the loser is, well, just that, a loser. In sports minded America no one is more admired than our winners and none more quickly forgotten than the losers. So when consensus agrees that Romney “won” the first debate, where does that leave us?

First, debates are not athletic contests. They really aren't meant to be about the debaters, but about the issues being debated. Things like body language, energy level, who delivered the most memorable zingers or who was the most aggressive shouldn’t overshadow substance… but hey, this is America, and we’re sports fans. Still, setting aside who won and lost, let's examine substance. The debate focused largely on two issues (admittedly that's ignoring Obamacare and Medicare, where positions are quite clear). Those two topics were Jobs and Taxes, and much of the rhetoric circled around those subjects.

The Jobs discussion was straight forward enough: both men seemed to agree that it's issue #1 this election. We need jobs to put “hard working Americans” back to work. Mitt Romney promises us 12 million new jobs. How? Don’t worry, he knows how! He understands the job creators; he is a job creator. He will get the economy growing again and THAT alone will create jobs. We have to accept all this on faith: in Romney’s business experience and/or a deep seated belief in Reagan trickle-down economics. President Obama, on the other hand, points out that progress has been made, but tells us it’s likely to be a long slog. He calls for “economic patriotism,” whatever that is (one would think the spindoctors’ euphemism for sacrifice)? The President assures us that his administration is doing its best in the face of Republican obstructionism. Be patient; we’re getting there. Maybe it’s not so simple; after all, jobs are numbers, but not math, jobs are dependent on theory, policy and execution. Who knows?

The Tax discussion was not so simple either. Taxes are complicated. When talking taxes, it's necessary to consider the federal deficit. Most Americans, all across the ideological spectrum, take the burgeoning federal deficit very seriously. During the debate President Obama charged (repeatedly) that Governor Romney’s tax plan will add five trillion dollars to the deficit over ten years. Romney (repeatedly) flat out denied that. Who’s to say? I heard two tax experts, talking heads, subsequently analyzing these claims and counter claims. They couldn’t agree on who was right and who was wrong. Taxes are complicated—very complicated. Point for Romney, it’s his plan, after all. But wait, he does use one phrase (repeatedly) in reference to his own plan, “revenue neutral.” That means–and he's emphasized this—that his plan will generate no additional revenues to help bring down the deficit. At one point he promises a 20% tax cut (in rates) across the board in a revenue neutral plan. It sounds like everyone pays less, but the government still gets as much. Smoke and mirrors? No, "loopholes and deductions”; taxes are complicated. However, under Romney’s plan two things are certain: he will not raise new revenues to help reduce the deficit and the wealthy will not be paying any more than they are now.

On the subject of taxes and the deficit, President Obama was somewhat clearer. He advocated a “balanced approach”: he'll use the tax code to increase revenues as part of his long term plan to reduce the deficit. Some citizens will pay more. He would start by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire on those very high income earners. From there, his recipe, too, is somewhat mysterious. Again, “loopholes and deductions” are floating around in the soup. Obama has been consistent, however, in his call for additional tax revenues (as per Simpson/Bowles) as a part of any serious plan to bring down the deficit. Both candidates vociferously claim that the other’s plan will cruelly and unreasonably burden the Middle Class, this year’s Holy Grail, but I think we can chalk that up to politics as usual.

So that’s my carry-away from the debate—with one further comment. In fairness, I must observe that one debater had only the campaign on his mind, the other a whole set of responsibilities far greater. The red-blooded sports fan in me agrees with the consensus: Romney was the winner of game one. Were minds changed? Were undecided voters sold? It’s hard to predict; keep your eyes on the polls. And it is, as we American sports fans well know, not a sudden death playoff, but a best of three series. Stay tuned.

• For more Political Nonsense features, see our Feature Articles section.

Feature by: John Snow

Festival Coverage - Toronto 2012

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 06:04:13 +0200

The 37th Toronto International Film Festival stayed the course of evolving toward a more market- and awards-driven environment (the result of "Slumdog Millonaire" and "The King's Speech" seeing TIFF premieres turn into Best Picture Oscars) without actually sacrificing any integrity or quality. In fact, the most radical changes to the programming this year were felt in the Wavelengths sidebar (essentially home to the avant-garde selections)—and not for the worse. The always fuzzily-defined Visions section is gone and Wavelengths has expanded, retaining its core essence (programs largely made up of short pieces curated by the invaluable Andrea Picard), but broadening its reach to feature-length films as well. Those tended to be among the festival's best ("Leviathan," "Tabu," and "Viola"), and it's a shame we didn't get to cover more of them in this modest festival retrospective. But by forgoing the mini-capsule format we tried out last year, we've been able to write a little more in depth on those films for which we felt we had the most to say. And you'll be hearing from us on the others soon enough. Sam C. Mac

Tabu / Miguel Gomes
It's been five years since we last heard from Hou Hsiao-hsien (how's that martial arts epic coming, bud?) and six since Tsai Ming-liang's had a film with any substantial theatrical presence (his great 2009 Cannes competition entry "Face," still a forever-ago three years in the rearview now, proved too challenging for most, evaporating altogether shortly after its festival run), making it look as if the grip these Taiwanese titans once had on the whole of world cinema may be loosening. That has left a big open position for another country to claim, and while both Argentina and the 'Berlin School' directors have submitted worthy resumes, it's Portugal that's proved the most compelling applicant. The country can call birthrights on the world's oldest—and arguably greatest—living filmmaker, Manoel de Oliveira, along with a host of outlier talents (notably Pedro Costa and João Pedro Rodriguez) who've enjoyed enthusiastic acclaim in certain circles. What Portugal's lacked, however, is a kind of crossover talent, a director who can at least appeal to a broader arthouse audience, if not a mainstream one.

Portuguese former film critic and theorist Miguel Gomes never seemed like the man for this job; his first two features constituted a quasi-musical ("The Face You Deserve") and a two-hour-plus freeform docudrama ("Our Beloved Month of August"), both considered 'deep cut' arthouse items. But the director's latest, "Tabu," is a departure; it took home the Silver Bear (top prize) at this year's Berlin Film Festival, and all told it might be the greatest Portuguese film in a decade. It's also one of the most accessible Great Portuguese Films ever. Shot entirely in black-and-white, on 35mm and Super 16, in the weirdly-popular-of-late academy ratio, and with more than half of its runtime devoid of dialogue—a silent film but for an exquisite narration and selective foley sounds—it wouldn't seem to be a popular favorite on its surface. But then there had to be something good to come out of "The Artist" existing, and this film's relative, growing popularity seems to be it. It's also, at least in one its many readings, a deeply felt romantic reverie: Gomes disguises, both sincerely and ironically, a complex evocation of national identity within the traditional bifurcated narrative of an old, white woman exoticizing her past.

Needless to say, then, Gomes's understanding of cinema, and his interpolation of silent film specifically, is more sophisticated than was Michel 'The Artist' Hazanavicius's. In fact, unlike Hazanavicius's more generalized and annoyingly hammy tribute to the silent era, Gomes draws specifically from F.W. Murnau by splitting "Tabu" into two sections: "Paradise Lost," then "Paradise"—a reversal of the titles that divide Murnau's "Tabu: A Story of the South Seas." (Gomes's film also pulls a lot of other elements from Murnau's, including some of its techniques for blurring documentary and fiction.) Preceding these two distinct passages is another self-contained narrative, a prologue about a melancholy European explorer who treks through the wilds of Africa, mourns his deceased lover, is taunted by visions of an ominous crocodile, and finally commits his body to the bottom of a lagoon. Natives look on with expressions of bemusement and indifference. And then a reverse shot reveals that these have all been the events of a film-within-a-film. We see Pilar (Teresa Madruga), a solitary, middle-aged woman illuminated by the light of a screen, patron to a cinema in modern-day Lisbon. "Paradise Lost" now begins in earnest.

Upon arriving home, Pilar receives a request to go and fetch her eccentric elderly neighbor, Aurora (Laura Soveral), who's stricken with dementia and has a penchant for gambling and making up paranoid stories about her long-suffering African housekeeper, Santa (Isabel Muñoz Cardoso, the memorably murderous face that greets us in Pedro Costa's "Colossal Youth"). Pilar finds her neighbor broke at a casino, and one of "Tabu's" two central monologues occurs: Aurora's batty account of a surrealistic dream she had, one loaded with racial shadings (the word "monkey" is repeated to an uncomfortable degree). Thereafter, Gomes devotes this first section to exploring the effects of a uniquely Portuguese condition. These characters seem to be experiencing the pangs of saudade, a sensation central to Portuguese culture, especially its art, and with no literal English translation. Loosely, the word refers to a kind of longing, but often for something that never was or could even really be defined, symptomatic of a deeply unmoored society that has suffered from something of an identity crisis since before even the Carnation Revolution. Gomes sensitively engages with these characters' melancholia, but he also gently suggests that their isolationism is their own doing. Eventually, a mysterious man from Aurora's past enters the movie and the rest of "Tabu" is given over to a visualization of his remembrance-cum-monologue.

The next section, "Paradise," transports us back 50 years, stylizing the events of Aurora's torrid youth spent in an unnamed African country (echoes of Claire Denis's "White Material") at the base of the (fictional) Mt. Tabu as a silent movie vis-à-vis the cinephiliac Pilar's imagination. However, Gomes's intelligence again permeates and penetrates this romanticized ideal, as it did in "Tabu's" prologue. While the young Aurora (Ana Moreia), her lover Ventura (Carloto Cotta)—whose older self is the aforementioned old man narrating this story—and the other European characters around them are all prone to expressions straight out of silent-era melodrama, the African natives and their environments are again depicted with a naturalism verging on docu-realism. This conscious choice registers as a sly critique of romanticized notions of colonialism—and of general cultural whitewashing in cinema—but one subtle enough not to disconnect us from the heartfelt-ness of the film's forbidden love affair.

Gomes walks a fine line, interrogating the surface pleasures of this romance with various intellectual subtexts, but the balance he strikes is pitch perfect. As frequently as he gestures toward criticism, he also invests in his protagonists' happiness. Aurora and Ventura, for instance, are allowed a rapturous moment of coitus; even more swooningly, most of "Tabu's" principles eventually come in contact with a Portuguese cover of the Ronettes' "Be My Baby." The song first appears in a film Pilar's watching and later surfaces in the "Paradise" section, strengthening the sense that what we're seeing is a kind of film of Pilar's imagining. Ventura hammers out a drum track to it—when his band is off recording in a studio, far away from his beloved Aurora—tearing up throughout. Gomes does like to goof, tweaking believability and authenticity (the best joke comes when Ventura's band mimes along to another Ronettes track, "Baby, I Love You"—except it's the Ramones' cover), and filtering things through Pilar's perception (hence lots of appearances of that ominous crocodile from the prologue). But he makes sure to note near the end that the peculiar outcome of Aurora and Ventura's story "sparked an uprising" in Africa.

Another joke, that—obviously. But this particular one resonates deeply with the reflexivity that is this film's masterstroke: There are many ironies to be found throughout “Tabu,” but they're never condescending. Instead, they make Gomes's takes on everything from European colonialism to cinephilia to the pure pleasures of cinematic storytelling that much more rewarding, rich, and true. SCM

Like Someone in Love / Abbas Kiarostami
Is it possible to write about a Kiarostami film after the initial viewing? Certainly, but the critic is bound to be caught up in a tizz of sheepishly expressed bafflement wherein words fail them—”the critic,” or me. The opening of "Like Someone in Love" is like that sensory deprivation guessing game; a mysterious jar with an intoxicating smell, the source of which cannot be determined as the viewer is blindfolded and unable to reach inside. The scene itself is a static shot of a club with little in focus. A voice offscreen has a one-sided conversation for an awfully long time before anything happens or before the viewer realizes the conversationalist is just offscreen. By the time this longtake finally cuts to Akiko (Rin Takanashi), the young woman who has been trying to discourage her paranoid, jealous boyfriend via cellphone from discovering where she is, the effect is so jarring that just seeing her (the first, but not last protagonist to be introduced) is an event. The narrative remains in this kind of constant one-step-forwards, two-steps-back momentum for most of the film thereafter. Akiko is soon persuaded by her pimp to see a client, despite having exams and a visiting grandmother whom she avoids in order to make the escort call. The client ends up being an old, timid sociology professor who’s less interested in sexual intercourse than treating her like a romantic date. Without spoiling too much, the rest of the film involves Kiarostami’s standard themes and devices, including several long scenes in cars, digressive conversations about nothing (and yet, everything), mismatched identities, and an ending that is unlike anything to be found in Kiarostami’s other works. If the opening is a mysterious unravelling, a teasing sensory deprivation, the ending is its direct opposite—a smack in the face, an electric shock, total sensory overload. This is a film not too easily understood; it will require multiple viewings before anything begins to register. For Kiarostami, that’s not only expected—it’s one of his greatest strengths as an auteur. Tina Hassannia

To the Wonder / Terrence Malick
Since Terrence Malick's films are still ostensibly telling stories, his deliberate move toward the avant-garde makes those stories increasingly hard to parse on first viewing, so "The Tree of Life" (now a film I'd cite, no joke, as possibly the best made since I was born) initially seemed problematic, and this one does too. I'm particularly interested in revisiting "To the Wonder" to suss out its timeline: while it all appears to be taking place linearly, in the moment, some signs suggest that a certain self-contained passage involving one of the few cast members to make it out of the editing room alive (Rachel McAdams) might be more unmoored from the plot's forward thrust than most seem to think. What isn't in question, however, is this film's formal beauty: like 'Tree of Life,' "To the Wonder" showcases a newly impressionistic form for Malick, with angular editing and moments of surrealism (characters stalk interiors that rarely resemble the homes they live in so much as a kind of psychological architecture) complicating the general prettiness of the images. There are elements of something thematically richer, too, as Malick presents what is essentially the B-side to 'Tree of Life's' portrait of a family surviving near-destruction. Here, it's a slow dissolution of a marriage (Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko's), backdropped by the various maladies of contemporary American suburbia and interwoven with the spiritual inquiries of a kind of Malick surrogate (Javier Bardem), a priest who bears witness to the everyday horrors of sickness and poverty he feels utterly powerless against. So Malick's most cynical movie, maybe? That would certainly give this film a space to occupy that's unique from Malick’s other work. SCM

The Master / Paul Thomas Anderson
Where "There Will Be Blood" careened around with a satisfying brute-force intensity, reveling in its displays of Darwinism and go-for-broke showmanship, Paul Thomas Anderson's latest is defiantly dull, light on narrative and things that actually happen. Theoretically, that could be fine; Anderson is a master craftsman capable of pulling off a visual spectacle, and from frame one "The Master" struts out like a boss, as immaculately gorgeous (especially in the 70mm format the director paid for and badly wants you to see it in) as any film in recent memory. But once it becomes clear that "The Master" means to be a character-on-character drama, much more so even than the Priest vs. Oilman face-off of 'Blood,' the dearth of definition given to its two principals becomes a problem. In this sense, Anderson, albeit staking out aesthetic territory totally and admirably his own, has acquired the most annoying attribute of the forebear he's most frequently compared to, Stanley Kubrick. Reviews of "The Master" have attributed more disparate Greater Meanings to it than almost any film since Kubrick's prime, but it's not so much that those meanings are explored with depth as they are suggested in the space of a logline: a returning WWII vet (Joaquin Phoenix) meets "The Master" (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the charismatic leader of a faith-based cult called the Cause (sometimes loosely, sometimes explicitly, based on Scientology), and falls under his spell, until eventually he begins to question everything he's been made to believe.

Phoenix plays his boozing, drug-addled, sex-addicted vet as a series of cartoon-like body and facial contortions, while Hoffman does his sharp-syllabled straight man thing, save for a few well-timed explosions ("PIGFUCK!"). Both actors are game to go deeper; Anderson ain't. After a promising first half including a riveting scene in which the Master probes his pupil's psyche via "processing" (an invocation of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard's method of 'auditing' in Dianetics), the film just sort of meanders, trailing off into repetition. Eventually, Anderson recycles the least successful bit of 'Blood'—a time lapse and wistful meeting in a well-appointed office between two long-separated male companions—and it rings as hollow as it did the first time. Maybe he just can't end a movie well, but I tend to think that isn't the case. All of the looseness here feels deliberate; like Kubrick, Anderson's learned that masterful surfaces are reason enough for people to project meaning onto them, and that with a setting as loaded as post-War America and a character as loony-inscrutable as Phoenix's, the cult will form itself. SCM

Seven Psychopaths / Martin McDonagh
The main character of Martin McDonagh’s second feature, Marty (Colin Farrell), is an aspiring screenwriter struggling to come up with material to fill a script which he’s titled…"Seven Psychopaths." McDonagh’s "8½," then? There is a similar sense of play that animates this film, though it’s a playfulness that derives not so much from Federico Fellini’s cinematic landmark as from "Pulp Fiction" and "Adaptation." But while 'Psychopaths' marries Quentin Tarantino’s gleeful movie-movie black-comic sensibility with Charlie Kaufman’s down-the-rabbit-hole self-reflexivity, the occasional moments of melancholy and juicy dialogue mark this as being most definitely the work of the "In Bruges" auteur. A scene-stealing Sam Rockwell, as Marty’s friend Billy (and a character who definitely has his own screws loose), offers the bulk of the running commentary as he vocally sends up various crime-genre conventions, but McDonagh’s film also works, more interestingly, as a perverse satire of the writing process. Just how far is Marty willing to go for psychological “authenticity” when it comes to the eccentrics he meets and ends up spending time with? That, among other questions, is part of what keeps "Seven Psychopaths" as thematically involving as it is wickedly entertaining. Kenji Fujishima

Dormant Beauty / Marco Bellocchio
This based-on-real-events drama revolving around the last few days in the life of Eluana Englaro—whose father waged a 17-year legal battle to have his daughter taken off life support after she became comatose as the result of a motorcycle accident—may remind American audiences of the Terry Schiavo controversy that erupted in 2005, a few years before the Englaro case in Italy. But the latest film from Italian master Marco Bellocchio transcends heavy-handed polemics: "Dormant Beauty" offers an object lesson in “issue” filmmaking that is genuinely intelligent, even-handed and, above all, deeply humane. The Englaro case is, it turns out, merely a backdrop for a deeper consideration of the often fraught intersections of the political and the personal, touching on everything from morality to religious belief in the process. One could call this a “network narrative” film: Bellocchio interweaves four major storylines into his tapestry, one including Toni Servillo as a politician torn between voting with his party and thus going against his conscience, another featuring Isabelle Huppert as an actress and devout Catholic caring for her own comatose daughter. But Bellocchio gives each character enough definition that, with the help of the fine ensemble acting all around, one responds to them as real, emotionally complex individuals rather than barely disguised thesis positions (ahem, "Crash," ahem). "Dormant Beauty" may not ultimately offer any clear-cut answers in the end, but the emotional clarity with which Bellocchio empathetically airs out the various positions is, in its own way, uplifting. KF

Spring Breakers / Harmony Korine
Harmony Korine's "Spring Breakers": In which cinema can not only mimic or reenact, but actually be a delirious, ecstasy-driven dream about drugs, money, and living large. Call it verisimilitude or whatever, but I walked out of the film feeling like a million bucks, like I was drenched in the characters’ manic sweat, like I could do anything. If ever a film could not only be about brash daredevil characters but itself be a brash daredevil character, this is it. With an opening shot that seems to simultaneously celebrate and satirize girls and boys gone wild at a spring break resort, the film commences as an inauspicious, tired critique of drunk college culture, but then ends up being not even remotely similar to a morality play—it's more about sending a sex-drugs-money narrative off the deep end into a bottomless fantastical expanse. Three fearless college girls (Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, and Rachel Korine) and their reserved religious roommate (Selena Gomez) save up money for (and burglarize their way into) the best vacation-cum-experience of their lives (so they aver) but when they're caught up in a bout of criminal activity, their miraculous savior comes in the form of a bad-news drug dealer (James Franco), whose licentious behavior and maligned cosmology with a drug turf warlord (Gucci Mane!) sends the girls home one by one, until it’s down to the two most bodacious members of the group, who cannot be beaten. It’s a strange story that involves as much debauchery and violence as it does naively earnest young love and the completely universal and identifiable search for purpose in life. TH

Anna Karenina / Joe Wright
With two adaptations of contemporary and classic works of literature already under his belt, Joe Wright has pretty well solidified his reputation as a middlebrow filmmaker with stray highbrow aspirations. It's only natural that he's now chosen to tackle a Leo Tolstoy tome; "Anna Karenina" caters to his love of lavish periods and their 'details,' and it offers a pair of doomed romantics—always torn apart, always by society—with the requisite literary coattails long enough to ride to Awards Night. Contrast the reception of his first two films, the Academy Award-nominated "Pride and Prejudice" and "Atonement" (which even got a Best Picture nod), with Wright's previous two stinkers, a midlevel prestige pic adapted from a book by an L.A. Times columnist ("The Soloist") and a bugfuck genre one by a first-time screenwriter ("Hanna"). What better way to reclaim the mantle of Director Who Matters than by adapting a work with more cumulative caché than anything he's ever attached himself to? That'd be the cynical way to approach "Anna Karenina," maybe the first major Oscar contender of the fall season, but whatever your feelings about its sincerity, it'd be a tough sell to say it rests idly on its prestige.

Wright's imaginative staging glides through brisk passages by imposing light Brechtian touches, expanding the temporal and spacial boundaries of a given scene. Raúl Ruiz, Jacques Rivette and even Baz Luhrmann got here first, but Wright's film offers much the same pleasures. His mise-en-scène becomes an extension of the stage—a typical sequence involves a man delivering a marriage proposal at a crowded, glitzy ball, being rejected, slouching off to the corner of the frame and ascending a staircase which finds him aboard a ship. It's a neat visual trick but also a clever means of transfiguring an incredibly long narrative into something fluid and exciting. The pedigree of the source was bound to make this choice divisive of course; one critic friend of mine quipped, "Was that the Cliff Notes 'Anna Karenina'?" And fair enough: as he did with "Atonement," Wright streamlines plot and trumps up spectacle, at best shaking the stodginess that might creep into a less kinetic film, at worst absolutely flattening actor chemistry, creating an emotional void that emphasizes his cinema's deep artificiality. So call this "The Anna Karenina Pop-Up Book," and accept its characters' then-appropriate flimsiness. As far as I'm concerned, you were skirting phoniness by casting Brits Keira Knightly and Aaron Taylor-Johnson (who just looks ridiculous here, by the way) as Russian aristocrats. Might as well go all the way with it. SCM

Stories We Tell / Sarah Polley
This third feature from Canadian Sarah Polley—following up "Away From Her" and "Take This Waltz"—finds the director using documentary to grapple with some deeply personal feelings regarding her own family—an inquiry that broadens to include the act of storytelling itself. Though most of the film’s first hour basically lays out the sometimes-painful facts of life that have led to its inception—chiefly, the discovery that the man Polley had thought was her father wasn’t in fact her biological one—an opening prologue offers a clue as to what Polley’s really interested in when she has her father, Michael, enter into a sound studio and read aloud portions of his own unpublished memoir, his memories filtered through the prism of a story being told. And in a stylistic maneuver that suggests a variation on Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke’s semi-documentary "24 City," Polley mixes authentic home-video footage with expertly faked dramatic reenactments, never bothering to clarify which of these is or isn’t “real.” But Polley doesn’t truly dive headlong into the more self-aware elements of her film until the last half-hour, as "Stories We Tell" gradually reveals itself to be something akin to the director’s own version of "Rashomon": a collection of shorter narratives from different points of view that all add up to a meditation on the elusiveness of an absolute truth. Most disarming of all, Polley even goes so far as to flagellate herself onscreen for her attempted truth-seeking, admitting that not even she fully understands why she’s making this film, or whether she thinks anyone in her audience would or should even care about her familial drama. Her brutal honesty is laudable, but all this last-act self-examination isn’t quite enough to completely shake off the narcissism inherent in pursuing a project like this. KF

• For more Festival Coverage features, see our Feature Articles section.

Feature by: InRO Staff

Year in Review 2012 - Jordan Cronk's Top Films

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 22:38:22 +0200

So it goes that another great first six months of cinema has and will continue to be overlooked in favor of the glut of prestige product coming down the pike. Sure, we at InRO are used to this by now, but it doesn’t take the sting out of knowing that some of the year’s best never travels outside New York, if it manages to find release on our shores at all. All fifteen of my selections below received at least a one-week run somewhere in the U.S.; for those not currently residing in one of the major metropolises, many of these films are now receiving Blu-ray and DVD release via a handful of companies dedicated to contracting the chasm between critical discourse and audience interaction. That’s a rather fortunate development for those curious about a number of the films we’ve highlighted at InRO—and even some of those that we haven’t—that are included below. Three films in particular feel like new benchmarks: Béla Tarr’s apocalyptic swan song "The Turin Horse," Jafar Panahi & Mojtaba Mirtahmasb’s inspiring, radically industrious experiment "This Is Not a Film" and, most impressively, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s ambitious curtailing of his primary thematic and narrative concerns, "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia." That said, these fifteen films aren’t even representative of how strong a year it has been for American film. In addition to those noted below ("4:44 Last Day on Earth," "The Color Wheel"), there’s also been wonderful work from contemporary mainstays Steven Soderbergh ("Magic Mike"), Wes Anderson ("Moonrise Kingdom"), Richard Linklater ("Bernie"), and Whit Stillman ("Damsels in Distress").

Films eligible for this list were theatrically released in the U.S. between Jan. 1 and June 31st, 2012.

• 4:44 Last Day on Earth / Abel Ferrara
• Attenberg / Athina Rachel Tsangari
• A Burning Hot Summer / Philippe Garrel
• The Color Wheel / Alex Ross Perry
• Crazy Horse / Frederick Wiseman
• The Day He Arrives / Hong Sangsoo
• The Deep Blue Sea / Terence Davies
• Goodbye First Love / Maria Hansen-Løve
• The Kid with a Bike / Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne
• Once Upon a Time in Anatolia / Nuri Bilge Ceylan
• Oslo, August 31st / Joachim Trier
• Post Mortem / Pablo Larraín
• The Turin Horse / Bela Tarr
• This Is Not a Film / Jafar Panahi & Mojtaba Mirtahmasb
• Whores’ Glory / Michael Glawogger

• For more Year in Review features, see our Feature Articles section.

Feature by: Jordan Cronk

Year in Review 2012 - Sam C. Mac's Top Albums

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 22:05:14 +0200

All the things most critics agree had a significant impact on music last year have only shaped it further in the first half of 2012. An indie-approved strain of R&B, birthed by a handful of forward-thinking crooners, continues to grow in popularity. The teen-to-early-twenties terror-squad Odd Future have been enjoying their ascent to a mainstream whose resistance to their confrontational, arguably noncommercial music is starting to falter. And most significantly, the careers of 2011's freshman class—which included names like Lana Del Rey, ASAP Rocky, Grimes, Azealia Banks, and Odd Future-affiliated up-and-comer Frank Ocean—have accelerated. Building on buzz from Internet-only freebies and calling-card singles, these artists all released their official debut albums in the last two quarters of this year (or will in the next two, says Azealia). Compare this enterprising ethic to that of an artist like Rye Rye; in fact, maybe Rye Rye herself did just that. After years of discouraging delays, Baltimore's singing/rapping/dancing triple-threat finally got her shit together and/or convinced Interscope to release her very tardy debut. Practically a veteran of the hype game at this point, Rye Rye still deserves mention here as much as any of the names above. These are names bringing about a sea change in American pop, a progressivism that takes full advantage of the global music landscape’s increasingly homogenous sounds. And each artist draws on their own unique influences, from kitschy Americana to UK dubstep, French chansons to the craze du jour (and another holdover from 2011), K-pop. To think that the next six months will see them continue to progress and see untold new artists materialize, well, that's what makes what I do exciting.

Albums eligible for this list were released anywhere in the world between Jan. 1 and June 31st, 2012.

• Loudon Wainwright III: Older Than My Old Man Now
• Neneh Cherry & the Thing: The Cherry Thing
• Quantic & Alice Russell: Look Around the Corner
• Vijay Iyer Trio: Accelerando
• Steven Lehman Trio: Dialectic Flourescent
• Usher: Looking 4 Myself (Deluxe Edition)
• Madonna: MDNA (Deluxe Edition)
• Rye Rye: Go! Pop! Bang! (Deluxe Edition)
• Lana Del Rey: Born to Die (Deluxe Edition)
• Fiona Apple: The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will ...
• Gretchen Peters: Hello Cruel World
• Kelly Hogan: I Like to Keep Myself in Pain
• Sara Watkins: Sun Midnight Sun
• Todd Snider: Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables
• Jack White: Blunderbuss

• For more Year in Review features, see our Feature Articles section.

Feature by: Sam C. Mac

Year in Review 2012 - Luke Gorham's Top Films

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 17:48:11 +0200

The predominant motif in 2012's best cinema has been the blending of dichotomies. Various directors have shown a willingness to go against the grain of their aesthetic and it’s resulted in a multitude of unexpected successes (or, successes for unexpected reasons). Steven Soderbergh perhaps most epitomized this path with “Magic Mike,” hitching his glitzy Hollywood production sensibilities to his micro-budgeting fetish, and to dazzling, thematically-germane effect. More consistent directors than Soderbergh have also challenged their audience’s perception of their work, most notably Terence Davies with his latest, “The Deep Blue Sea.” Sticking to familiar themes of personal fortitude and our complex relationship with memory, its Davies’s studied temperament that's nowhere to be found this time. In its place, the director's honed a volatile and raw emotionality appropriate for the eroding stuffiness of post-war Britain. Then there’s the opposite end of the spectrum: the industry’s outhouse, constantly pumping out remakes and adaptations of television shows. Thankfully for us, “21 Jump Street,” an update of that cheesy '80s pseudo-procedural about fresh-faced narcs, somehow momentarily displaced years of righteous anger and the stench of studio money-grubbing by delivering a high volume of laughs-per-minute. If oppositional forces like these can coalesce, who’s to say what the rest of the year may bring?

Films eligible for this list were theatrically released in the U.S. between Jan. 1 and June 31st, 2012.

• The Deep Blue Sea / Terence Davies
• Oslo, August 31st / Joachim Trier
• Moonrise Kingdom / Wes Anderson
• Extraterrestrial / Nacho Vigalondo
• Magic Mike / Steven Soderbergh
• Indie Game: The Movie / Lisanne Pajot & James Swirsky
• Prometheus / Ridley Scott
• The Kid with a Bike / Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne
• Take This Waltz / Sarah Polley
• 21 Jump Street / Phil Lord & Chris Miller
• Attenberg / Athina Rachel Tsangari
• The Avengers / Joss Whedon
• The Cabin in the Woods / Drew Goddard
• Crazy Horse / Frederick Wiseman
• The Five-Year Engagement / Nicholas Stoller

• For more Year in Review features, see our Feature Articles section.

Feature by: Luke Gorham

Year in Review 2012 - Jordan Cronk's Top Albums

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 17:23:36 +0200

With supply and access being what they are, every year seems to make the presumably simple task of list-making a hand-wringing endeavor. I continually expand the parameters of the practice to compensate: increasing from ten to fifteen, sometimes even twenty selections, designating or individuating between specific genres, etc. There’s simply so much music at our disposal. In this sense, 2012 has been par for the course; the fifteen albums listed below are just a small fraction of what I’ve enjoyed, let alone what I’ve actually listened to in total this year. What’s interesting, however, even at this early juncture, is that I don’t yet have an unqualified favorite. Grimes’s dizzying electro-pop opus Visions, Beach House’s majestic Bloom, Actress’s strident, uncompromising R.I.P, Laurel Halo’s aesthetic quantum-leap-into-the-void Quarantine, and Julia Holter’s hypnotizing excavation of the philosophical properties of drone-based pop theorization have all spent time as my de-facto pick-of-the-year. And it’s arguable that none have galvanized talking-points the way some recent favorites have (after all, this has been the year indie-rock struck back in a big way, which is represented by none of the aforementioned five in any sense). This is to say that it’s been another great six months of music, and that the best may still be yet to come.

Albums eligible for this list were released anywhere in the world between Jan. 1 and June 31st, 2012.

• Actress: R.I.P.
• Beach House: Bloom
• Burial: Kindred EP
• The Caretaker: Patience (After Sebald)
• Neneh Cherry & the Thing: The Cherry Thing
• Chromatics: Kill for Love
• Cloud Nothings: Attack on Memory
• Grimes: Visions
• Keiji Haino / Jim O’Rourke / Oren Ambarchi: Imikuzushi
• Julia Holter: Ekstasis
• Japandroids: Celebration Rock
• Laurel Halo: Quaratine
• The Men: Open Your Heart
• Spiritualized: Sweet Heart Sweet Light
• Dustin Wong: Dreams Say, View, Create, Shadow Leads

• For more Year in Review features, see our Feature Articles section.

Feature by: Jordan Cronk

Year in Review 2012 - Sam C. Mac's Top Films

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 01:59:14 +0200

2012 has been a strange year at the movies. The tone was set back in September, when the latest and apparently last film from Hungarian miserablist Béla Tarr screened at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival and managed to transcend years of a developing bias against his punishing longueurs and spiderwebbing narratives with a streamlined (and very funny) allegory about a man, his horse and some really, really bad weather. The film,"The Turin Horse," is something close to a masterpiece; I've seen nothing better in these last six months, and I won't mind if I still haven't in six more. But it's as much a surprise to see Tarr topping this list as it is to see other names—directors usually found on my shit-list, not a best-of—filling it out. It's been ten years since I’ve been able to manage much more than mild interest in whatever Steven Soderbergh was doing, but throw a dancing Channing Tatum into the mix and he’s come up with one of the best American films of the year. Likewise, neither Sarah Polley's nor Mary Harron's debut features hinted at the thoughtful and compassionate feminism that invigorates their respective second directorial efforts. Strange year indeed. So strange, in fact, that I came this close to leaving off imprisoned filmmaker Jafar Panahi's sobering latest, perhaps the most acclaimed film of the year, for the movie with a big food-fight between Queen Latifah and Dolly Parton...on second thought, maybe I'm the one that's strange?

Films eligible for this list were theatrically released in the U.S. between Jan. 1 and June 31st, 2012.

• The Turin Horse / Béla Tarr
• The Deep Blue Sea / Terence Davies
• The Day He Arrives / Hong Sangsoo
• Oslo, August 31st / Joachim Trier
• Crazy Horse / Frederick Wiseman
• Magic Mike / Steven Soderbergh
• The Color Wheel / Alex Ross Perry
• Take This Waltz / Sarah Polley
• Let the Bullets Fly / Jiang Wen
• The Moth Diaries / Mary Harron
• Moonrise Kingdom / Wes Anderson
• Attenberg / Athina Rachel Tsangari
• This Is Not a Film / Jafar Panahi & Mojtaba Mirtahmasb
• The Avengers / Joss Whedon
• Prometheus / Ridley Scott

• For more Year in Review features, see our Feature Articles section.

Feature by: Sam C. Mac

Year in Review 2012 - Luke Gorham's Top Albums

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 01:58:41 +0200

Working from established expectations can prove imprudent, and never has that been more clear to me than when reflecting on the first half of 2012’s music releases. For instance, who would've thought the best Shins album of the year would come not from the band themselves (who did release a record of their own into the market), but from from little-known indie outfit Said the Whale. Or that R&B’s most boundary-pushing work would come not from some young (probably Canadian) downtempo crooner, but from an established veteran (Usher) who has, of recent, been all too contented with his catchy but uninspired output. Or that a broadly-defined folk genre populated more by artifice than art in recent years would produce a healthy handful of singular albums proudly wearing such diverse, subcutaneous influences as gypsy-punk (Beth Jeans Houghton and the Hooves of Destiny) and neo-hippie psych-folk (Anaïs Mitchell). And all of this on top of the revelation Frank Ocean dropped on us regarding his sexuality, and the impact that has and will have on his affectingly raw second album (sadly, released just after this year's halfway point). After such a stellar start to 2012, I’m keeping expectations low for the remainder of the year. And in doing so, I hope to find myself surprised once again come year’s end.

Albums eligible for this list were released anywhere in the world between Jan. 1 and June 31st, 2012.

• Lana Del Rey: Born to Die (Deluxe Edition)
• Grimes: Visions
• Of Monsters and Men: My Head Is an Animal
• Usher: Looking 4 Myself (Deluxe Edition)
• Death Grips: The Money Store
• Anaïs Mitchell: Young Man in America
• Alabama Shakes: Boys & Girls
• Perfume Genius: Put Your Back N 2 It
• Fiona Apple: The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will ...
• First Aid Kit: The Lion’s Roar
• Cadence Weapon: Hope in Dirt City
• Beth Jeans Houghton: Yours Truly Cellophane Nose
• Said the Whale: Little Mountain
• Alt-J: An Awesome Wave
• Cloud Nothings: Attack on Memory

• For more Year in Review features, see our Feature Articles section.

Feature by: Luke Gorham

Year in Review 2012 - Alex Engquist's Top Films

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 19:42:35 +0200

2012 is already a year full of surprises. A hyperkinetic teen movie from the director of “Torque” ranks above Béla Tarr’s swan song. Steven Soderbergh (a director whose work I’ve admired but never loved) has two films on this list, one of which stars Channing Tatum as a stripper. Dane Cook is prominently featured in one of the top five. What appeared to be a found-footage genre cash-in revealed itself to be a perceptive take on a young generation’s need to craft its own narrative. Jack Black emerged from years of effects-heavy, family-targeted studio junk to do career-best work. Whit Stillman emerged, period. One of the year’s best refused to be called a film at all. Even “Moonrise Kingdom,” a film I fully expected to enjoy, caught me off guard with its formal rigor and thematic richness. Here’s to the next six months.

Films eligible for this list were theatrically released in the U.S. between Jan. 1 and June 31st, 2012.

• Moonrise Kingdom / Wes Anderson
• The Color Wheel / Alex Ross Perry
• Once Upon a Time in Anatolia / Nuri Bilge Ceylan
• The Day He Arrives / Hong Sangsoo
• Detention / Joseph Kahn
• Oslo, August 31st / Joachim Trier
• Bernie / Richard Linklater
• Magic Mike / Steven Soderbergh
• The Deep Blue Sea / Terence Davies
• This Is Not a Film / Jafar Panahi & Mojtaba Mirtahmasb
• Haywire / Steven Soderbergh
• Post Mortem / Pablo Larraín
• Damsels in Distress / Whit Stillman
• The Turin Horse / Béla Tarr
• Chronicle / Joshua Trank

• For more Year in Review features, see our Feature Articles section.

Feature by: Alex Engquist

Year in Review 2012 - Kyle Fowle's Top Albums

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 19:37:46 +0200

Trimming down a list of potential nominees for a 15-album halftime list served as a welcome reminder of how crowded a year this is. There have been strong releases across a variety of genres; a few game-changers (Death Grips), some genre boundary-tinkers (Daughn Gibson, Vijay Iyer), and some familiar faces confirming longevity and consistency (Jack White, The Walkmen). My personal list certainly favors a lot of garage rock; a distorted guitar and a front-mixed drum set warms this heart well beyond my days of teenage rebellion—mild, Canadian teenage rebellion, mind you. Not only were we treated to White’s exceptional Blunderbuss this year, but groups such as the Screaming Females, the Ty Segall Band and the Men through their hats in the ring, their developing aesthetics nodding to ‘60s garage music and reviving it with a smirk and a snarl. And though those overdriven, grungy records occupy most of this list, there was still plenty of room for the dreamy consistency of Chromatics, the gritty return of El-P and the richly layered, intimate musings of Grimes. Here are the 15 albums that I’ve worn out in the first half of 2012.

Albums eligible for this list were released anywhere in the world between Jan. 1 and June 31st, 2012.

• Spiritualized: Sweet Heart Sweet Light
• Death Grips: The Money Store
• Ty Segall Band: Slaughterhouse
• Japandroids: Celebration Rock
• Grimes: Visions
• Cloud Nothings: Attack on Memory
• Chromatics: Kill for Love
• El-P: Cancer 4 Cure
• King Tuff: King Tuff
• Daughn Gibson: All Hell
• Screaming Females: Ugly
• Jack White: Blunderbuss
• The Men: Open Your Heart
• Killer Mike: R.A.P. Music
• Action Bronson: Blue Chips Mixtape

• For more Year in Review features, see our Feature Articles section.

Feature by: Kyle Fowle

Festival Coverage - Cannes 2012: Holy Motors

Thu, 31 May 2012 20:54:26 +0200

In the inky arena of a motion-capture studio, eccentric French actor Denis Lavant writhes, kicks, flips, wields various weaponry, and gyrates on top of his equally nimble female counterpart. It’s all in a day's (and night's) work for Lavant's chameleonic Monsieur Oscar, who’s shuttled to and from a melee of "appointments" by his loyal limo driver, Céline (Edith Scobb), in Leos Carax's glorious "Holy Motors." That conceit can seem like a superficial excuse for the versatile Lavant to don some dozen different faces: The actor's gnarled frame is repeatedly seen here hunched over an old-Hollywood vanity in his limousine-cum-dressing room as he preps for each of his various 'roles.' More pointedly, though, "Holy Motors" captures the melancholy of a classicist performer fighting for control over his medium.

It's kind of like "The Artist" for contemporary cinema, only (generally) non-narrative and freed of that Cannes competitor's self-consciously cute, kowtowing aesthetic. Throughout, Carax considers the role new technology (including some audaciously gaudy CGI) plays in a medium becoming at once more hyper-real and static, alienating. And he interrogates the implied Death of Cinema charges by being critical of Oscar's stubbornly persistent ethic, his obliviousness to his career's shifting tides. Each of the brilliant vignettes that make up “Holy Motors”—self-contained stories of physical limitation, emotional remoteness, unrequited desire, and self-destructive jealousy—serve to chip away a little more of Oscar’s occupational mercenary facade to reveal the suffering soul of an artist coming to terms with the end.

The mo-cap sequence in particular—our first glimpse of this enigmatic shapeshifter’s surreal line of work—crucially underlines a diminishing sense of self. Carax entombs Oscar in a prison of darkness, save for the few glints of light reflecting off tiny translucent gizmos rigged to his hi-tech bodysuit. The result is a kind of performance nirvana, a state of anonymous, kinetic motion that Lavant's compulsive outbursts in Claire Denis's "Beau Travail" and Carax's own "Bad Blood," among others, now retrospectively seem to have been leading toward. And Carax punctuates the sequence with manic camera zooms and a barrage of green-screen effects. It's all ineffably gorgeous, but sobering too: as Oscar tumbles off a speeding treadmill he can no longer keep pace with, gasping for breath, the implications are clear enough.

Even in a film filled with striking physicality (Eva Mendes's statuesque beauty queen; Michel Piccoli's scar-faced doomsayer; and Australian pop star Kylie Minogue, gracefully ascending a spiral staircase, mid-serenade), the abstraction of Lavant's bodily form is a unique revelation. Ever since the mid-'80s, Carax has willed his favorite leading man to move: sprinting down the sidewalk to David Bowie's "Modern Love" (1984's "Bad Blood") and prancing across the Pont Nouf (1991's"Lovers On the Bridge"). "Holy Motors," then, distills these most visceral elements of Lavant's craft down to their basest essence. Were it only kinetics the actor brought, it would still make for an impressive feat, but this performance is career-best caliber; it rivals even Lavant's twisted Chaplin/Hitler transformation in Harmony Korine's "Mister Lonely" and his ferociously green Foreign Legion officer in "Beau Travail." The actor mines the deep reserves of pain resonating within all eleven roles here, even though he only inhabits each briefly.

"Holy Motors" is likewise a career-best for Carax, returning to filmmaking after more than ten years of absence (his last feature was 1999's "Pola X"). That hiatus was broken only a couple of times, marked most recently by the omnibus "Tokyo," to which Carax contributed the metaphorical monster-movie short "Merde." That one’s titular flower-eating, cigarette-puffing sewer-dweller gets a suitably bizzaro cameo in "Holy Motors"—the only truly explicit reference here, though it tends to feel no more crucial than the steady procession of more ambiguous ones. This is because "Holy Motors" creates a fetishized world wherein Carax's creations can co-habitate with ghosts from the works of Georges Franju and Nagisa Oshima. It's the most liberated entry yet in a filmography spent scribbling outside the lines, subverting the neo-noir, romantic melodrama, talky art-film and overt socio-political commentary. Carax's latest is each of these and countless more inventive genre hybrids, co-mingling in a singularly lucid, all-inclusive text. It's Denis Lavant, flinging himself from wall to wall in the dark, with religious-like conviction to his craft. It's Crarax's adoring ode to the indefatigable spiritualism of the cinema.

• For more Festival Coverage features, see our Feature Articles section.

Feature by: Sam C. Mac

Festival Coverage - Cannes 2012: Opening Night

Thu, 17 May 2012 01:18:13 +0200

Wes Anderson gets flack sometimes for a perceived superficiality in his films, and fair enough; his ornate style cultivates a carefully manicured aesthetic, paying ample consideration to every minute detail down to the color-coded characters and the wallpapered backgrounds that frame them. But Anderson's always found a way to transcend those limitations, balancing the scales of his style, so to speak, by counterweighting his exacting compositions with an understated humanism. Those scales finally tipped, however, with his last feature, the stop-motion "Fantastic Mr. Fox." As it turns out, lose the actual humans in a Wes Anderson picture and so too goes the humanism. "Moonrise Kingdom," then, returns Anderson to flesh and feeling, to the emotional stakes and some of the patience of sprawling, 'less perfect' films like "The Royal Tenenbaums" and, my personal favorite Anderson, "The Darjeeling Limited."

“Moonrise Kingdom” is set during the summer of 1965, on the fictional New Panzance Island, and it concerns a romantic tryst between two sullen twelve-year-old runaways in the days leading up to a cataclysmic, deus ex machina-style storm. Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) is a boy scout bedazzled in merit badges; his sad-eyed paramour, Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward), is a borderline depressive who sometimes resembles Emma Roberts and Lana Del Rey (she even shares the latter's affection for chansons). As the two indulge in each other's company, sharing all their favorite hobbies—she, reading fantasy novels; he, painting watercolors ("mostly landscapes, and some nudes")—a search party mobilizes to force their immediate return. Interested parties in this venture range from Captain Sharpe (Bruce Willis), the Island's lone, lonely law enforcer, Suzy's quarreling parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand), Sam's skittish Scout Master (Edward Norton) and a cabal of Camp Ivanhoe's most precocious preteens, all distinguishable by their eye-patches, dog side-kicks, and other assorted quirks.

What this extensive ensemble comes to represent, however, is a kind of family. The intricacies of the family bond have become the definitive theme of Anderson's work, and their nuances supply the gravity his best films boast. 'Moonrise,' for instance, seems at first blush to be Anderson's lightest confection yet, all puppy love and innocent wilderness adventuring. But the film toes darker waters too, delving into the prickly details of a crumbling marriage and the painful trials and traumas of childhood (a soulful ache well captured by Anderson's main soundtrack man Randall Poster, whose curated a trio of Hank Williams's finest wallowers). Like 'Fox' before it, "Moonrise Kingdom’s" airtight pacing and structure don’t allow for much down time, which will likely appease those who thought 'Darjeeling' meandered too much. To me, the taut tempo isn't always a virtue, but at least it never induces whiplash quite like 'Fox' did, and ultimately it was probably the right approach for this sweet, modest coming-of-age story.

• For more Festival Coverage features, see our Feature Articles section.

Feature by: Sam C. Mac

Political Nonsense - Let's Talk About Immigration

Fri, 6 Apr 2012 20:41:03 +0200

Immigration is a true conundrum, a political issue with no easily discernible ideological right, left or center—and a perfect subject for some Political Nonsense. When looking at immigration, let’s begin by setting aside the platitude of “secure the borders.” Just about everyone, regardless of their political stripe, has pretty much jumped on that bandwagon. There may be disagreements and even minor skirmishes over how to secure the borders, but there is a general agreement on the need to do so.

Further, in a continuing bit of bipartisan harmony, most would agree that a comprehensive review and overhaul of our national immigration policy is long overdue. However, right there the harmony ends; immigration is often aptly called “the third rail of politics.” Central to any discussion of this topic is the unpleasant fact that our country currently houses over eleven million illegal immigrants. Wow! How’d that happen? It must have taken decades of indifference, imprudence and malfeasance to arrive at such an impressive undocumented population. And now, of course, nobody agrees on how to deal with those eleven million very real non-citizens, least of all our beleaguered politicians.

From these beginnings the topic gets increasingly murky, fraught with complexity and multiple side issues. Looking to our political leaders for answers finds them all over the place… and in peculiar places at that: right, left and center. Pundits who can normally be counted on to be way out there on the fringe somehow end up in the middle. Many centrists are at the extremes. We find lefties on the right and righties on the left. What gives? This is, indeed, a brand new kind of gridlock, not necessarily Republican vs. Democrat, but still a gridlock that apparently prevents us from getting anything done.

Here are some factors that seem to further muddy the water. Increasingly we hear of corporations seeking workers that they can’t find. Not enough skilled applicants. At the same time many politicians and political analysts are calling for more high skilled immigrants. Yet we have an enormous American unemployment problem and are frequently being told that the “good” jobs have gone overseas and that those jobs being added by our economy are low skill, low wage opportunities. How can all this be true? Isn’t there a major disconnect here? Aren’t we seeking more high skilled immigrants at a time when instead we should be subsidizing (either publicly or privately) the training of our own unemployed? Should we not be freezing quotas on high skilled immigrants until our unemployment crisis has abated?

True, it’s a global economy and corporations must be allowed to hire talent from wherever they can find it. But there's a huge philosophical question embedded in all this. During hard times, say when national unemployment is over some pre-fixed figure, should citizens be given preference over non-citizens? Should the burden of training or retraining Americans be forced upon the government (and, yes, upon the private sector as well) before we open our doors to foreign talent? What and who should drive the answer to that question, corporate profits or societal concerns, the free market or the nanny state?

At the other end of the immigration spectrum, we’re often asked, “Who will do the jobs that Americans won’t do?” (It seems fair to add: “…at the low wages that we are willing to pay,” but that’s a further discussion.) Most senior citizens can remember a day in America when high school seniors and college kids tried to out-hustle each other in the search for summer employment. Washing dishes, waiting tables, working construction, working on a farm, on and on—these were jobs sought after by American kids, to save money for the approaching school year, to buy their first car or just to see the country.

These first summer jobs taught many in our generation what “work” was all about. Where have they gone, these American kids? Nowadays those summer jobs that we struggled to find are filled by youngsters from Russia, the Balkans or elsewhere in Europe, here on student visas, while seasonal workers on a variety of short term visas come by the thousands from Jamaica and South America to keep our resorts running. It can’t be fair to say that American kids don’t work anymore, but one wonders.

These are only two very small aspects of a hugely complicated subject. Any national dialogue needs to address a host of highly specialized immigration issues, issues like migrant workers, national quotas, family members, entry requirements, the selection process, and what to do about the “illegals” already here. Like many Americans, I can’t say I hold a strong position on immigration. Like many others, I don’t live in a border state. I don’t belong to an ethnic community that's directly impacted, and I readily confess to a certain degree of bewilderment, if not ignorance, on the subject. Looking to our political leadership doesn’t seem to help. What most of us need, before the debate can begin in earnest, is a primer on our existing policies, in the vernacular of the day, an “Immigration for Dummies.” Perhaps then we could have an educated national dialogue without the usual high emotions and lack of civility.

• For more Political Nonsense features, see our Feature Articles section.

Feature by: John Snow

Political Nonsense - In Search of American Exceptionalism

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 19:17:58 +0100

During this campaign season there have been multiple references to “American exceptionalism.” Some politicians mourn its decline, some accuse others of hindering its free expression, while every politico promises policies that will encourage and nurture it. Exactly what is American exceptionalism? My spellchecker tells me there's no such word, so what are we dealing with here? Does the term imply that Americans possess talents and qualities that others (non-Americans) don’t, or is the reference purely systemic, referring to our economic capabilities? In these days of globalization and, one might say American manufacturing decline, the latter definition, pointing to the country’s economic proficiency, seems inadequate. Listening to the politicians, it's clear their use implies that the American character is endowed with certain superior qualities, among them: creativity and entrepreneurship. Is this possible? Are Americans born with such gifts? Are they a product of our social environment? Do they exist at all?

In a search for answers, let’s first discard the assertion that Americans, somehow at birth, possess these special capabilities; such in-born advantages would seem particularly dubious in light of our extraordinary diversity. It’s just not scientifically plausible. We have to look beyond nativity for the answer; we have to look to social, cultural and environmental influences. However, there too, the source seems problematic. We are, and have always been, a land of multiple cultures, religions, ethnicities, geographic differences and political ideologies. It's hard to see how, out of such extreme diversity, a concept like “American exceptionalism” can gain acceptance. Yet, the politicians don’t hesitate to use it in their speeches. They continue to extol it, promising that the pursuit of their particular doctrines will encourage and nurture it. Then, under their stewardship, this “American exceptionalism” will solve the problems of our struggling economy and triumph over the challenges encountered on the world stage.

Is all this just so much nationalism, pure partisan cheerleading, or are we as a society exceptional? If, in fact, there is truth in the concept, then these superior qualities must somehow be inculcated in us by the shared beliefs of our society. And yet, those beliefs—cultural, religious, and political—are all over the place, anything but shared. We are a huge country; our geographic differences alone are enormous, almost tribal in nature. We are clearly not a homogenous society! So, finding what might contribute to this general “exceptionalism” is not so simple. We must look for the influences that shape all of us, for forces that work on all Americans, to forge a national character.

The common ground we share starts with our Constitution. From this foundation come the laws of the land generated over the years by Congress, the Presidency and the Supreme Court. These laws are the framework of our national society. Their construction, modification and maintenance is the main business of our Federal Government. Certainly, as a people, we are influenced by local, regional and state authorities. As individuals, we are influenced by parental, religious and cultural forces. But our common influences, as Americans, are the laws of the land as initiated, promulgated and enforced by the Federal Government. It is that body of rules that defines our society and makes us uniquely American. As citizens of the United States, it is the Federal Government that binds us together and it is the Federal Government that defines our national character. While each State, rightfully, has its distinctions and its local pride, we are not here trying to identify “Texas exceptionalism” or “California exceptionalism.” We are searching for the source of a national trait. The concept of “American exceptionalism,” if it exists, must owe that existence to our national character, a product of our national society.

Without the Federal Government we would be tribal or, in less dramatic terminology, simply divided, by region, by state, by religion, by ethnicity…but wait, you say, “We are divided!” Yes, but how much more divided would we be without the Federal Government? It is for this reason that today’s fiery political rhetoric is so deeply disturbing. Contempt, disrespect and distrust for the Federal Government seem to run deep in the ideology of all the Republican presidential candidates. Each tries to outdo the other not only in their support of states’ rights, but in their vociferous enmity towards the Federal Government, ironically, a body they are seeking to lead. These days it would be difficult, indeed, to find any American who believes that our Federal Government is perfect. Most would join in continuing efforts at improvement. Striving for responsible change is legitimate. That said, vitriolic disrespect and a bellicose contempt are not—at least, not if “American exceptionalism” is to ever be a reality.

• For more Political Nonsense features, see our Feature Articles section.

Feature by: John Snow

Political Nonsense - A Liberal's View of the Republican Primaries

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:33:00 +0100

Here's a little Political Nonsense for the campaign days to come, the first in a series of short commentaries on the presidential race as it unfolds. Let's start with a brief, film-style blurb on each of the remaining five Republican candidates, an admittedly liberal assessment of what each is promising.

Candidate #1 — The Massachusetts Moderate: A Venture Capitalist who promises to “save the soul of America”—it’s hard to get more pro-unfettered Capitalism than that. And this bold promise comes from a man whose personal net worth exceeds 250 mil. As President, he will do his best to see that the Federal Government “gets out of the way,” thereby flooding the economy with jobs. He’s a bit vague on details, but he assures the voter that his experience with downsizing in the private sector will enable him to quickly downsize the government. Thus, eliminating the deficit and doing this without raising taxes or cutting the Defense Budget. He views the end of the war in Iraq and our impending exit from Afghanistan as colossal Obama foreign policy blunders. His social values, while suspect by the far right, are vigorously articulated by the candidate. His stance on Healthcare Reform is a bit muddled, but he is vociferously anti-Obamacare. He looks presidential and is considered highly electable.

Candidate #2 — The Washington Outsider: A state’s rights struggle will be at the heart of the presidential election, and this Governor is state’s rights to-the-max: He doesn’t want the Fed involved in much of anything except national defense. He wants to go to Washington and dismantle the Federal Government, make it, in his own words, “completely irrelevant.” He's suggested Congress be comprised of part-timers, people who have real jobs back home. He has a laundry list of federal functions he intends to eliminate and departments he will immediately dissolve. However, he makes an exception for the Military. The military he would beef up. Because, when elected, he intends to send those troops right back into Iraq until they finish the job. This guy claims to spend most of his spare time on the “shootin’ range.” He does have a nice presidential swagger faintly reminiscent of a certain former occupant.

Candidate #3 — The Libertarian: So that we might have a full range of choices, Candidate #3 would have us reduce the deficit by abolishing all overseas expenditures, including the military. Get rid of foreign aid, downsize the embassies, and bring boys home from all 137 foreign countries we have a military presence. This would certainly take down the deficit. But, wait a minute, he wants to abolish all income taxes as well. Up goes the deficit again. Not to worry: His plan to reduce the size of the Federal Government is even more draconian than that of his rivals. While a hostility towards the Federal Government is a common theme deeply woven into the rhetoric of all the candidates, #3 advocates a uniquely quick and terminal fix. He's particularly focused on the “money supply,” dedicated to a return to the gold standard. It is somewhat unclear to the layman exactly what that means or how these policies might impact the economy, but “fasten your seatbelts”—this is political Darwinism in the extreme.

Candidate #4 — Formerly Knows as Senator Slash: Here comes a fresh new face from somewhere in Pennsylvania. This man is a staunch Conservative, with a consistent voting record, and the only authentic social Conservative in the race (so he tells us in every speech, again and again). He's a passionate pro-lifer, adamantly opposed to gay marriage, a man of faith and an ardent supporter of family values. He presents himself as a military “hawk” on foreign affairs, perhaps a bit too hawkish to have his finger on the red button. He seems a forthright young man recently emerged from way, way back in the pack thanks to a serendipity connect with Iowan Evangelicals. We don’t really know much about how he plans to deal with the economy, but we do know he hates the deficit, federal regulations and President Obama. After New Hampshire, he may leave the circus as quickly as he has arrived.

Candidate #5 — The Reagan Conservative: Our final candidate is a Southerner overflowing with endless ideas, a swashbuckling, articulate speaker never at a loss for words or solutions. Like his fellow candidates, he's generally hostile towards the Federal Government and its attempts to regulate the free market or to “redistribute wealth” via a progressive tax code. He's a fervid advocate of immediately developing domestic energy sources wherever and however possible. He's a self-proclaimed historian with an uncomfortably aggressive worldview. The author of the Contract for America, he's a true Washington insider, well known to everyone on Capital Hill. Here’s the rub: The rap sheet on him (from those on both sides of the aisle) is more than a little disconcerting. We repeatedly hear things like “emotionally unstable,” “loose cannon,” “unpredictable,” and always the caveat, “too much baggage.”

• For more Political Nonsense features, see our Feature Articles section.

Feature by: John Snow

Year in Review 2011 - Top 15 Films

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 21:00:12 +0100

Life and death. God and a Godless world. Cancer. Heartache. The collapse of Europe. The rise of the apes. The Big Bang and the end of days. Filmmakers had a lot on their minds in 2011. In this great year for cinema—the greatest in a decade—it wasn't hard to put the movies that mattered in conversation with one another. Ten years after 9/11, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” milked the fall of the towers for tearjerking bathos, while Kenneth Lonergan's long-delayed “Margaret” mined a proxy tragedy for prickly pathos. Armageddon was melodrama in “Melancholia,” metaphor in “Bellflower” and a punchline in “Kaboom.” Memory itself served as a common thread: There were autobiographies (“Beginners”; “50/50”), affectionate nostalgia trips (“Midnight in Paris”; “Pearl Jam Twenty”), stories within stories (“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”; “Mysteries of Lisbon”) and more new movies about old movies than you could count. (From “The Artist” to “Hugo,” “Drive” to “Super 8,” “My Week With Marilyn” to “The Muppets,” 2011 often felt like one big Hollywood tribute reel.) The grand and the intimate seemed constantly in concert, which makes our number one choice something of a no-brainer. There were more than two paths through this year in film, but they all seemed to lead back, like a mind racing through histories personal and universal, to the story of a boy, his parents and infinity. A.A. Dowd

15. 13 Assassins / Takashi Miike
In a year that saw filmmakers old and new paying tribute to bygone cinematic traditions, this rip-roaring samurai epic felt like the purest and most exhilarating throwback. Relegating the characteristic depravities to the first reel, Japanese jack-of-all-genres Takashi Miike inverts "Seven Samurai" by putting his titular band of warriors on the offense. The obvious highlight is the climatic 45-minute battle royale—truly an action sequence for the ages—but Miike sweats the small stuff too: The feudal intrigue and suicide-mission camaraderie prove nearly as entertaining as the derring-do. Endearingly old-fashioned in both its narrative architecture and its surprisingly moving vision of honor among swordsmen, "13 Assassins" proves that sometimes they do make 'em like they used to. AAD

14. Weekend / Andrew Haigh
Haigh's understated debut drama has officially raised the bar for romantic film of any sexual orientation. "Weekend's" young gay men, Russell and Glen, hookup at a bar expecting nothing more than a one-night stand, but then they connect. Once Glen informs Russell he's leaving overseas for school, the two, realizing their time is precious, treat it as such—philosophizing, getting high, and of course fucking. Their tryst in Russell’s flat is tender, fun, soul-searching, naked—the complete opposite of the sterile, ominous, and loudly heteronormative outdoors, where Russell finds it increasingly difficult to breathe. The seemingly effortless naturalism with which these two characters come so quickly to bond and love each other feels almost staggering in its realization. One hopes this will be the first of many deeply felt, emotionally sophisticated romantic relationships Haigh brings to the screen. Tina Hassannia

13. Le Quattro Volte / Michelangelo Frammartino
Frammartino evokes the spiritual philosophies of Pythagoras while relying entirely on the ambient language of a village in Southern Italy. Life, death, and the earthbound rhythms that connect them flow from a man to a goat to a tree to a chunk of coal. But Frammartino’s observational tableau gains as much sustenance from notions of God’s (with a capital ‘G’) creations and the Buddhist cycle of suffering and rebirth as it does the transmigration of the soul. Unconscious gestures of existence were never so graceful as in images of snails teeming from a pot, goats inexplicably exploring their terrain, and an unbelievably orchestrated, nine-minute shot of a persistent dog attempting in vain to communicate. It’s appropriate that the final stage of Frammartino’s visual schema finds the smoldering, coal-producing mounds that open and close the film become an archetypal symbol of the past, present, and future. Kathie Smith

12. Mysteries of Lisbon / Raoul Ruiz
"Mysteries of Lisbon" may have tragically turned out to be Ruiz's final film, but what a glorious swan-song it is: A sprawling family epic about a young orphan whose quest to discover his true identity leads him into three decades or searching and to multitudes of fascinating people, who drift in and out of his life, each with their own unique stories to tell. Featuring a massive cast of characters and nearly Dickensian narrative depth, 'Lisbon' is a wholly immersive experience that unfolds like a great novel. Even at nearly four hours long, it never wears out its welcome. Ruiz pays loving homage to Ingmar Bergman's seminal masterpiece, "Fanny & Alexander," which his epic resembles somewhat in both form and content. If you're going to borrow, borrow from the best, and Ruiz has taken his familiarly stodgy period trappings and crafted a new and emotionally rich work of his own. Matthew Lucas

11. Martha Marcy May Marlene / Sean Durkin
"Martha Marcy May Marlene" may have an awkward title, but there's nothing awkward about Durkin's smart and assured debut, which depicts a unraveling psyche with disquieting precision. Elizabeth Olsen gives a haunted, star-making performance as a young woman who has escaped from a charismatic cult leader (an unnerving John Hawkes) to live with her sister, only to descend into paranoia and near madness from the fear he will one day hunt her down. Even the audience begins to question its own sanity as the line between fear and reality becomes irrevocably blurred. Olsen's performance is a marvel of internalized terror and confusion, and Durkin puts us square in the middle of her pained inner turmoil. As a narrative it may seem somewhat disjointed; as an evocation of madness and mental collapse, it's absolutely harrowing, and the most impressive and dynamic debut film of the year. ML

10. Margaret / Kenneth Lonergan
Much has been made of the post-production hell and legal issues surrounding the shot-in-2005, released-in-2011 “Margaret.” The real story, however, is how wildly successful this reportedly second-rate cut of the film is. Detailing the psychology of its young heroine in the aftermath of a bus accident, Lonergan’s film is content to follow said character, Lisa Cohen (an Oscar-worthy Anna Paquin), down many untidied subplots to capture every facet of her rapidly-changing internal life. At times well-spoken and preternaturally insightful, at other times infuriatingly boorish and impudent, Lisa's obsessive pursuit of justice (as she sees it), blatant mommy issues, and constant attention-seeking all blur the line between adolescent angst and psychological trauma, leaving a portrait of a girl’s bruised naïveté and battered sense of self. Lonergan has crafted a film of challenging coarseness which, much like Lisa, is all the richer for its imperfections. Luke Gorham

09. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy / Tomas Alfredson
Alfredson showed great promise with his intriguing debut, "Let the Right One In,” but nobody could have guessed he'd produce a bona fide masterpiece just three years later. Throughout "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” adapted from the popular John le Carré novel of the same name, Alfredson boasts the authorial confidence and technical virtuosity of a filmmaker ten times as experienced, delivering an uncommonly smart thriller that's among the genre's very best. And though its framework is the stuff of textbook procedurals, ‘Tinker’s’ execution—exposition rattled off like bingo numbers, the narrative's blink-and-you'll-miss-it rapidity—feels downright revelatory. Throw in a first-rate performance from Gary Oldman—and nearly every working actor in Britain—and you've got a film that elevates itself way beyond your average spy story. And I haven't even mentioned the crucial but oft-missed queer subtext, which makes the whole thing richer still. Calum Marsh

08. Film Socialisme / Jean-Luc Godard
From the confines of a luxury cruise ship that becomes a (literally) floating metaphor for European society to an intimate, small-scale family drama, Godard charts the modern world in both macro and micro, from superstructure to substructure; from state-of-the-art hi-def video to YouTube to low-res cell phone cams, an entire universe of images is displayed for us. Several critics have compared "Film Socialisme" to a visual Tower of Babel, and while they're not wrong, it's not a dodge to suggest that being confused is largely part of the point: It's a potent metaphor for how we create and consume images with virtually no limitations. Godard's typically cryptic, gnomic pronouncements rub shoulders with partial (Navajo English) subtitles and purposeful verbal distortions, anything to disrupt our comfortable, co-opted viewing habits and lazy reliance on simple narrative. And there is a narrative here, make no mistake: Godard's insistence on 'No Comment' isn't a curmudgeonly refusal to explain himself, but an open challenge to his viewers to do some of the work themselves. Daniel Gorman

07. House of Pleasures / Bertrand Bonello
Any film that soundtracks Otis-on-uppers soul belter Lee Moses basically has me at the jump. But Bonello's cracked-mirror projection of a period piece is more than the sum of its intentionally jarring deep cuts. Perched at the precipice of modernism—the waning days of the 20th century—and luxuriating in the lavish interiors of a high-end Parisian brothel, this distinctly European descendant of Hou Hsiao-hsien's gracefully elegiac "Flowers of Shanghai" is keyed to a unique temporal lucidity. Bonello's anachronistic soundtrack is complimented by nearly imperceptible details nagging at the film's already questionable period authenticity, like when one character makes reference to the Paris Metro before it even existed. This unmooring of time isn't a gimmick but rather an ingenious organizing principle: The whores of "House of Pleasures" are all vivid, vivacious, and emotionally acute vessels of feminine agency refracting the complexities of sexual politics across two centuries of change and stagnation. Sam C. Mac

06. Drive / Nicolas Winding Refn
"Drive" substitutes the taciturn professional you might expect to find at the heart of a terse, minimalist crime thriller for an outright psychopath. Ryan Gosling, identified only as “Driver,” wants to protect innocent Carey Mulligan and her son from vicious gangsters, but there’s every reason to suspect that Gosling is his own brand of predator, a demonstrably violent loner and part-time stuntman who may in fact be picturing himself as the "real hero" of one of the many action movies in which he anonymously stands in for the good guy. Refn interrupts the novelty of his crime story pastiche in two key ways: by never letting go of Driver’s savior fantasy (the violent defenses of his would-be lover often seem like sudden but satisfying tantrums) and by lingering on every luscious and tactile surface, every drop of blood on the pavement, as if Driver’s own fear and awe were rumbling beneath. Matt Lynch

05. A Separation / Asghar Farhadi
The best societal critique is one that doesn’t point any fingers, which is partially why Farhadi’s “A Separation” works so well. The title refers to the separation of Nader and Simin but this is only the bare bones of the film’s narrative—a labyrinthine drama about an accident involving Nader and his father’s pregnant caretaker. Criminal charges, threats and potentially false testimonies reveal the very human desire to save oneself when faced with moral ambiguity. Setting a story like this in Iran is a bold and apt move—its theme of moral reasoning is complicated by religious doctrine (which governs individuals in addition to theocracy). “A Separation” is not necessarily critical of the Iranian government or of religion, but of an entire culture that’s been taught to lie as a stipulation for simply living a normal life. TH

04. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives / Apichatpong Weerasethakul
There’s no shortage nowadays of strange films leaning on gimmicks or genre trappings to compensate for a lack of truly unique thinking. Rare is the movie that not only crossbreeds its various thematic and visual strains but circumvents its obtuseness to the point where every film in its vicinity appears skewed and unnatural by comparison. The dazzlingly original, riveting modern masterpiece “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” enriches, embodies, and erodes all such classifications, teeming with insight and vivid clarity into the soul of a man not necessarily nostalgic for but enlivened by the capacity of the human spirit. Apichatpong’s first largely linear narrative dives headfirst into premonition, apparition, and reincarnation with a Buddhist’s serenity, emboldening the director’s themes as he subtly galvanizes his aesthetic. Ominous, playful, and consistently riveting, ‘Uncle Boonmee’ stands as the most transcendent work yet from the world’s most vital young filmmaker. Jordan Cronk

03. Meek’s Cutoff / Kelly Reichardt
Reichardt’s most ambitious and precisely drawn work to date is a genre film by classification only, stripped of ornamentation and extraneous expositional conceits. It’s also, paradoxically, her most aesthetically impressive and engaging work, an observational, revisionist western with stronger ties to Italian neo-realism than to the John Ford school of classical filmmaking. The sun-bleached vistas, crystal blue horizons, and primary-hued dresses of the female-anchored wagon train—captured indelibly by Chris Blauvelt’s Academy ratio lensing—embolden the threadbare narrative, which grows evermore intangible even as events and motivations come into focus. An unexpected, extremely impressive stylistic leap beyond her previously intimate, small-scale work, “Meek’s Cutoff” retains Reichardt’s acute dedication to character while expanding her narrative purview, dissolving the schematic construction that would traditionally mark this as product instead of the mytho-poetic portrait it truly is. JC

02. Certified Copy / Abbas Kiarostami
Many critics balked at "Certified Copy’s” seemingly stubborn lack of closure, since its central narrative question—whether or not the lead couple are actually strangers pretending to be married—was left frustratingly unanswered. But there's an important ontological difference between an unanswered question and an unanswerable one, and that distinction is fundamental to Kiarostami's oblique film, which has more to say about the nature of art and its meaning than any other film since...well, Kiarostami's own "Close-Up." It's no coincidence that "Certified Copy" invokes a defense of art forgeries; like the relationship at the center of the film, a forgery's meaning is only fixed if we choose to impose one upon it. "Fake" only means something if we say it does. Is it any surprise that Kiarostami doesn’t? CM

01. The Tree of Life / Terrence Malick
The ambitions of a movie like this one—which takes us from the beginning of time to its ostensible end, stopping off to admire dinosaurs and get spiritual on a beach—are easy to mock. But the most audacious passage of Malick's great film—a birth of the universe that synthesizes creationism and the Big Bang—is a necessary inflation: It not only hews closely to the aesthetic and thematic principles which have always been connotations of the critical shorthand 'Malickian,' but it engenders a kind of humbling rack-focus akin to that feeling some of us get when we zoom-out from a blurry picture of our house on Google Earth. In fact, Malick's supposedly autobiographical odyssey would be an exercise in narcissism if it wasn't so damn expansive. In juxtaposing the birth and maturation of Malick surrogate Jack with the beginning of all life, our view of not only Jack's world but our own is broadened. You could criticize the extent to which Malick goes to achieve this—a 20-odd minute avant-garde interlude in an otherwise narrative film—but it's something you have to experience. It's like the Google Earth thing: I can tell you about how insignificant it makes me feel, but you really need to see that little pixelated planet for yourself. SCM

• For more Year in Review features, see our Feature Articles section.

Feature by: InRO Staff

Year in Review 2011 - Top 15 Albums

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 20:59:55 +0100

2011 was a strange year for music criticism, if not for music itself. We at InRO heard many great albums, to be sure, but it's harder to point out the definitive ones—we lacked a unifying force, a consensus pick to rally around (at least for most of the year). But without any dark twisted fantasies to galvanize us as a group, we seemed more free to explore, to look elsewhere for classics of our own designation. Disparate tastes reigned in 2011, and that's more significant than it sounds: It means my list and your list and your dad's list of the best albums of the year can be completely different but equally canonical, because there's nothing towering over us, our lists in its shadow. My own favorite album of the year is nowhere to be found on the list below. And our staff number one didn't even see release until most publications had already filed their lists, effectively reducing its chances of year-end domination to zero. We've also got avant-rap, a punk-rock concept record, a free post-R&B mixtape, and an improvised solo saxophone album about the apocalypse. It was that kind of year. Here's hoping 2012 is too. Calum Marsh

15. Tyler, the Creator: Goblin
Ever since Lil Wayne got out of jail and found himself too tired to care about being the best rapper alive, demented Odd Future ringleader Tyler has been the most compelling figure in hip-hop. And Tyler proves he'll be a big deal for the foreseeable future by remaining mainstream-relevant despite releasing the year's most challenging, radio-unfriendly rap album. Over beats that sound like what I thought a David Lynch album might sound like before I heard one, Tyler conducts an enthralling, hour-plus therapy session wherein he's both patient and analyst and invites his friends to hang around and crack wise about dicks. It's sad and sick and Tyler totally fucking knows it—he knows it's diabolically clever, too. To experience Goblin in its entirety is to dare your conscience to bunny hop off your shoulder; more enjoyably, it's to expose yourself to irreverent brilliance like the line I just paraphrased. Sam C. Mac

14. Fucked Up: David Comes to Life
The year's best rock record gave me plenty of preemptive reasons to hate it. It's got Damien Abraham's shredded-windpipe growl (the thing I find most shitty about metal music; the reason records by Mastodon and Isis keep missing these lists), and it's a concept album, so it actually expects you to pay attention to what that voice is saying. Previous Fucked Up records hit me in the gut only when aiming for it, so the strings and pianos that open David Comes to Life sent me back to the flute solos of Chemistry of Common Life and cringing. But Fucked Up usually makes navigating the wrongheaded experimental shit they do worth it. That said, David is Fucked Up at their best, consistently: each song channels righteous working-class aggression, and no band in 2011 was so committed to making an hour of music this relentless. It gives me a headache sometimes; it probably should. SCM

13. Braids: Native Speaker
The first record from this much-buzzed-about Calgary band is another in a long line of stellar 2011 debuts. Some have been quick to label their experimental pop as “shoegaze,” but there’s more going on here. Take singer Katie Lee, specifically the tension between her beautiful voice and dark, thorny lyrics: with a slight scat, she goes about cataloguing the ways in which she’s hopelessly fucked-up on album standout “Glass Deers.” Lee’s words are cynical and sometimes depressing, but they contrast with the predominately bubbly music. With lush textures, calculated time changes, and heavy emphasis on atmosphere, Braids take time to get where they’re going, but their music never feels slight or dispassionate. It’s no wonder Native Speaker has found itself among the titles shortlisted for this year’s Polaris Prize. Kyle Fowle

12. Tune-Yards: Whokill
Merrill Garbus is blessed with the most elastic set of pipes since Mike Patton—she can shift from bellow to croon, caterwaul to whisper—but it's what she's saying with that mighty voice that really registers. For the second album released under her Tune-Yards moniker, Garbus satirizes white boys who move to "bad" neighborhoods to feel dangerous, confesses to fantasizing about the cop who arrested her brother, and turns a plea of the marginalized ("Don't take my life away, don't take my life away!") into an anthem of empowerment. She's still letting her pan-cultural freak flag fly, but the avant-clutter of Bird-Brains now comes equipped with dance-party hooks. In a perfect world, all pop music would sound something like this: Idiosyncratic, impassioned, totally infectious despite (or maybe because of) its glorious weirdness. Our world is imperfect, so we'll have to make do with ten tracks and the promise of more blissful spazz-outs to come. A.A. Dowd

11. Kurt Vile: Smoke Ring for My Halo
Smoke Ring carries a generous amount of the laid-back, lo-fi vibe that defined Vile’s previous work, yet something feels more complete this time. You could point to the excellent production—which is certainly noteworthy—but it's in the songwriting where Vile has really grown by leaps and bounds. So improved is the singer’s craftsmanship that Smoke Ring is a mostly unexpected delight, a collection of tunes filled with quirky introspection and casual observations that fulfill the artist’s early promise and then some. Factor in the oft-mellow yet undeniably skillful and consistently engaging guitar playing and these songs cohere into a record that flows from song to song with a gracefulness and harmony unmatched in contemporary troubadour rock. This is an album in the truest, most complete sense. Chris Nowling

10. The Weeknd: House of Balloons Mixtape
What Abel Tesfaye accomplishes on House of Balloons, the mixtape he recorded under his stage name the Weeknd, is an honest lyrical and sonic portrait of disaffection. Infusing R&B with the estrangement and dissatisfying hedonism that has become a somewhat tired and poorly executed staple of indie-rock works in his favor here; House of Balloons is both carnal and eerie, a portrait of the on-the-edge growing pains of a preternaturally insightful singer. Indebted both to mainstream American R&B and Canadian indie-pop, Tesfaye has crafted a wholly original mixtape somehow more honest for the transparency of his obvious influences. Like fellow up-and-coming crooner Frank Ocean, Tesfaye brings a much-needed humanism and edge to the typically obtuse R&B genre. Not convinced? Give Drake’s Take Care a listen and witness the influence of Tesfaye and his burgeoning style of hesitant romanticism. Luke Gorham

09. Bon Iver: Bon Iver
Justin Vernon’s follow-up to his quietly beautiful but comparatively slight debut (For Emma, Forever Ago) offers up a broader, more textured sound. Straying from his folk origins into more soulful, wholly original territory, Vernon likewise abandons his wounded-puppy vocal stylings for a more affecting, emotionally ambiguous falsetto, now capable of evoking more than just mournful yearning. Like fellow folk artist Sam Beam, Vernon’s lyrics often wax oblique; but when his impossible tenor proclaims “And at once I knew I was not magnificent,” his true growth as a songwriter becomes evident. That such a revelation can seem equally deterministic and liberating amidst his more layered yet increasingly focused arrangements gives evidence of an emotional and musical evolution that borders on the extraordinary. While Vernon’s introspective eye made his debut a rewarding experience, Bon Iver challenges listeners to employ the same pensiveness, resulting in an altogether transcendent undertaking. LG

08. Jenny Hval: Viscera
On paper, Viscera reads like an internalized narrative about external phenomenon, a song cycle riddled with images of vaginal dentata, sexual secretion, and, yes, decaying viscera. It’s appropriate, then, that so much of its power resides just below the surface, in the details. And what details: Hval’s expert fusion of avant-folk, industrial grind, and free-improv noise manifests itself like a thousand mental synapses reacting off the body’s intrinsic tensions in a single outward heave of physicality. Even amidst canyons of negative space—kneaded, textured, and burnished by Supersilent producer Deathprod—the music maintains a palpable carnality, like those moments just before an animalistic encounter when things have the potential to go either exceedingly right or horribly wrong. And yet, as we reach climax right with Hval—most viscerally on “Portrait of the Young Girl as an Artist”—the horribly wrong instead feels exceedingly pure, an addictive sensation as galvanizing as it is inspired. Jordan Cronk

07. Gillian Welch: The Harrow and the Harvest
It had been nearly eight years to the day since Welch released an LP and 10 since her last masterpiece, Time (The Revelator). Following in the footsteps of that album, Harrow is a sparse yet powerful record; Welch and guitarist/vocalist David Rawlings have their brand of minimal folk and country down to a science, drawing on the synergy of fingerpicked acoustics and voice. The songstress tells a tale of dread and inevitability on “The Way It Goes,” and tempers similar feelings on the more traditionally arranged “Six Horses” with handclaps and harmonica. She and Rawlings craft a brand of Americana that feels rustic and well-worn but still contemporary. It’s not quite nostalgia; rather, it evinces comfort through the duo’s understanding of their style. Few albums this year were as welcomingly familiar as this one. KF

06. James Blake: James Blake
In two short years, Blake has changed direction so many times that the adjectives I once used to describe him—abstract, elusive, austere—are almost the exact inverse of how I’d characterize his debut LP. Still nominally tied to the post-dubstep diaspora, James Blake is, in actuality, a fairly straightforward singer-songwriter effort from a preternaturally talented beat scientist. In that sense, the self-titled designation is less an encapsulation of aesthetic proclivities than a platform for personal disclosure. There’s more of James Blake in these eleven tracks than in any of the obtuse soundscapes he previously constructed; family life (“I Never Learnt to Share”), interpersonal relationships (“Why Don’t You Call Me”), and reconciliations with death (“Measurements”) are all presented in equally stark, hollowed productions. With his debut, Blake has beautifully, if briefly, blurred the line between intimate and universal. JC

05. Kanye West/Jay-Z: Watch the Throne
“I’m ‘bout to call the paparazzi on myself.” This acerbically self-effacing proclamation, from album standout and single-of-the-year contender “Otis,” functions as a synecdoche for Watch the Throne’s defining glory: namely, the pure exuberance and posturing ‘Ye and Jay bring to their collaborative effort. Is it a seamless alliance? Beat for beat, line for line, no; missing here is the unparalleled ambition of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and the rags-to-riches earnestness of Jay-Z’s fabled career. The uniting factor, then, is the unrestrained dynamism the two emcees are able to bring to any joint. Successful both when celebrating their own greatness and the thrills of self-indulgence (“Otis,” “No Church in the Wild”) and more socially conscious fare (“Murder to Excellence,” “Made in America”), Watch the Throne offers nothing more and nothing less than two geniuses combining efforts for a sufficiently substantive entertainment. When you’re delivering at this level, less than perfection is more than enough. LG

04. Colin Stetson: New History Warfare, Vol. 2: Judges
Depending on your religious beliefs, this is either soundtrack to the apocalypse or aural accompaniment to the rapture—either way, shit just got real. What doesn’t seem real, or the least bit human, is the extraordinary technique Stetson displays in his solo saxophone work, which approximates the sound of a stampeding cavalry in the throes of bullet-induced hysteria. The scorching, blast-furnace improvisations which comprise Stetson’s second album are at once invective and gauntlet, ornery exhortations pitting humanity against itself in a battle of righteous indignation. Circular breathing, close-mic’d keys, whatever—this thing will fucking crush you before you realize dude played on an Arcade Fire record. And while there are voices within the maelstrom—Laurie Andersen heralding end times like an apparition, Shara Worden conjuring the very soul of our discontent—the prophecy seems clear: no one gets out alive. JC

03. PJ Harvey: Let England Shake
Of all the albums I came to love in 2011, none was more challenging than this one. Harvey's latest is dark, strange, and never a comfortable listen, but it's a gripping, inventive record unlike any she's previously offered. This is music that can't be relegated to the background—it demands your full attention and holds it for the entirety of its 40 minutes, as Harvey spins tales of the heartbreak and anger caused by the futility of war. That subject might be an especially familiar one, but Let England Shake is anything but your typical protest record: Harvey’s vocals, which range from lofty croon to full-throated roar, reflect the breadth of influences, insights, and styles she so handily arranges into cinematic stories. Harvey depicts the way war has effected one nation in particular, and the world more broadly. CN

02. Shabazz Palaces: Black Up
After hearing Shabazz Palaces’ first two 2010 EPs—both of which flaunt an ethereal, bass-heavy take on hip-hop that, at the time, sounded unlike anything else out there—expectations were high for their eventual debut. But even then, Black Up managed to feel like it came out of left field: a record filled with little moments that coalesce into a total, immersive experience, infusing hip-hop with an intoxicating sense of innovation and political/social poignance that hasn’t really been felt since the ‘90s. It’s the biggest, most exciting statement of the year. With Ishmael Butler at the helm—an unequivocally smooth, brash, and instinctive emcee and frontman—Black Up becomes a progressive vision of the possibilities of hip-hop, an album that's liberating in its exploration of black identity and sonic exploration. KF

01. The Roots: Undun
Biting an album-length concept from Prince Paul, pivoting on a brief instrumental from a Sufjan Stevens album, you wouldn't think Undun would be the best Roots album in nearly decade, but it is. Synthesizing the concise song-craft of midlife manifesto How I Got Over with the avant-weird ambitions of Phrenology (there's a gorgeous, four-part instrumental coda), the Roots' latest is the record they've been working toward for the entirety of their long, vital career. And it makes quick work of the concept-album-as-tedious-bore, fashioning less a coherent narrative (though there's that: fictional Redford Stevens loses his life on the hustle, journeys back to reflect on the mistakes that got him there) than an impressionistic collection of gritty narrative details. Drummer Questlove's production instincts are as impeccable as ever, but it's frontman Black Thought who steals this one, mining personal and cultural tragedies to create one of the least encumbered, most affecting concept records in the history of the form. SCM

• For more Year in Review features, see our Feature Articles section.

Feature by: InRO Staff

Year in Review 2011 - Home Movies

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 19:35:16 +0100

Cataloguing and keeping up with the world’s DVD and Blu-ray releases is an overwhelming and obsessive job that both Jordan Cronk and I relish with a hoarder's delight. The internet may be changing the face of home distribution, but, for my money (literally), nothing comes close to replacing the DVD or Blu-ray on my shelf for instant and flawless home viewing. And when a film is restored halfway around the world, with little chance of an accessible theatrical screening, the resulting release is nothing short of priceless. Jordan and I have chosen ten such releases, including three imports, for this outstanding year. Although it might seem that we are fairly biased for Japanese films—which lock-up half this list—I would argue that we're entering an era where these films, many ignored or dismissed in the realm of English-language friendly releases, are finally getting their due, and our eight-disc number one pick is a perfect example. If you're looking to start a collection, start here, start now. Kathie Smith

10. DVD/Blu-ray: Tokyo Drifter (1966); Branded to Kill (1967)
Distributor: Criterion
Director(s): Seijun Suzuki
Amazon Price: $27.99; $35.99
Like a one-two punch to the face, Seijun Suzuki’s two best-known films stateside received a much deserved 1080p sprucing up this year. These releases represent not the story of two newly discovered films, but rather Criterion’s unbelievable improvement on their own previous releases. Suzuki eschewed the theorizing of his New Wave contemporaries and shot his distinctive take on nihilism directly from the hip; “Tokyo Drifter” and “Branded to Kill” set the bar for style, fetish and jump-cut abstraction, but they also got him fired from Nikkatsu for being “incomprehensible.” The color wheel gangsters of “Tokyo Drifter” and the chiaroscuro assassins of “Branded to Kill” never looked so good. KS

09. DVD/Blu-ray: The Complete Jean Vigo (1930-34)
Distributor: Criterion
Director(s): Jean Vigo
Amazon Price: $22.76
Jean Vigo made only four films before he died at the age of 29, in 1934, but his visual ingenuity and discerning awareness for human drama made him one of the most influential and greatest directors of all time. Criterion’s Blu-ray release of Vigo’s modest but monumental oeuvre, remastered and supplemented to the hilt, should be an essential purchase for any cinephile. From the aerial views and seashore meditations of “À propos de Nice” to the delicate portrayal of a transitory relationship in “L’Atalante,” Vigo displayed what François Truffaut called a secret of unsurpassed “reality of the flesh.” Even more, however, his films display a unique poetry of exploration and experimentation of the medium. KS

08. DVD/Blu-ray: Histoire(s) du Cinema (1988-98)
Distributor: Olive Films
Director(s): Jean-Luc Godard
Amazon Price: $37.99
Never covered in the pages of Home Movies as it was released just this month, Olive Films’ long-overdue Region 1 debut of Jean-Luc Godard’s mammoth, eight-part video essay “Historie(s) du Cinema” fills a major gap in the digital landscape, representing what one can only hope will be the first of many such unveilings of Godard’s major post-1968 works. Conceived as early as the mid-‘70s and stitched together in segments across a ten year period from 1988 to 1998, 'Historie(s)' embodies its title to an almost dizzying degree, overlaying dense visual montage with Godard’s verbal and textual explications on the role(s) of the cinema in various political and societal spheres. The feature is a supplement itself, to nearly everything cineastes continue to hold as true in regards to the medium of moving pictures. Jordan Cronk

07. DVD/Blu-ray: Senso (1993-94)
Distributor: Criterion
Director(s): Luchino Visconti
Amazon Price: $24.73
This year, Luchino Visconti’s brocade historical melodrama “Senso” finally received the attention it's always deserved with a glorious digital restoration from the Film Foundation and a go-for-broke Blu-ray release from Criterion. Much has been made about the cast Visconti didn’t get, but there is an undeniable yin/yang hum between the handsome Alida Valli and the beautiful Farley Granger (who sadly passed away shortly after this was released), culminating in that devastating finale. Operatic in nearly every sense of the word, Visconti acts as historical troubadour to ill-fated love. Save for a rare big-screen viewing, the opulence of “Senso” finds near perfection right in the comfort of our own homes. KS

06. DVD/Blu-ray: Blue, White, Red: Three Colors (1993-94)
Distributor: Criterion
Director(s): Krzysztof Kieślowski
Amazon Price: $55.49
Physical copies of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s highly influential ‘Three Colors’ trilogy have remained out-of-print for some time now. The wait would prove worthwhile, however, as Criterion ultimately offered up all three films to the glories of 1080p this Fall. Coming off the back-to-back landmarks of “The Decalogue” and “The Double Life of Veronique,” Kieślowski dedicated what would prove to be his final artistic flourish before his untimely death to three aesthetically delineated yet thematically unified films about such broad subjects as love, death, revenge, and sacrifice, keying in on tangibly articulated emotions which he heightened via consistently ambitious stylistic gestures. Criterion’s appropriately stacked Blu-ray set amends hours of bonus material, solidifying these films’ stature for generations to come. JC

05. DVD/Blu-ray: The Warped World of Koreyoshi ... (1960-67)
Distributor: Eclipse
Director(s): Koreyoshi Kurahara
Amazon Price: $46.49
Chaos reigns supreme in this snapshot of Koreyoshi Kurahara’s career as populist genre shapeshifter. Eclipse has done immeasurable work in lifting Kurahara from near obscurity, at least to Western eyes, with a five-film set encapsulating his free-form '60s work. Included in that is a psychological pot-boiler (“Intimidation”), an anarchistic Sun Tribe riff (“The Warped Ones”), an unexpectedly sunny rom-com (“I Hate But Love”), a chaotic drifter buddy film (“Black Sun”) and Kurahara’s master stroke “Thirst for Love”—a stunning family drama, adapted from Yukio Mishima’s novel, driven by one woman’s magnetic libido. Kurahara’s warped world is one of the biggest discoveries and best releases of the year. KS

04. DVD/Blu-ray: A Man Vanishes (1967)
Distributor: Masters of Cinema (Region 2)
Director(s): Shohei Imamura
Amazon UK Price: £11.99
Continuing to give Criterion a run for that cinephile money, the UK-based Masters of Cinema had an impressive twelve months, capped by the release of Home Movies favorite Shohei Imamura’s 1967 docu-fiction rarity “A Man Vanishes.” Conceived as a documentary on the missing persons phenomenon in mid-‘60s Japan, “A Man Vanishes” eventually took shape as a prescient kind of procedural, wherein Imamura probed the ambiguities of one man’s disappearance via evidence, interviews, and slyly captured confessions. Available for the first time in any sort of English-friendly format, Imamura’s subversive cinema verité experiment, which prefigured an entire movement of hybridized narrative, argued for the continued relevance and more cost effective production of standard DVD. JC

03. DVD/Blu-ray: Silent Naruse (1931-34)
Distributor: Eclipse
Director(s): Mikio Naruse
Amazon Price: $25.70
This year’s most unexpected digital release is also the most historically and cinematically vital. The five Mikio Naruse silents collected in Criterion’s 26th Eclipse set were made between 1931 and 1934, and together ably outline the Japanese master’s quickly solidifying thematic and stylistic inclinations. Establishing straight away his spry visual sense and already working expertly with montage, Naruse would focus almost immediately on what would turn out to be his greatest theme, the role of the working-class female in an ever-modernizing Japan. In such devastating works as “Every-Night Dreams” and “Street Without End” one can bear witness to the flowering talents of an artist whose stature only continues to grow as more of his work becomes available. JC

02. DVD/Blu-ray: Terrorizers (1986)
Distributor: Sony Entertainment (Region-free)
Director(s): Edward Yang
YesAsia Price: $34.99
Seemingly flying just beyond the view of even the most watchful digital connoisseur, Sony Music Group’s roll-out of six key Taiwanese New Wave classics nevertheless proved to be the most essential Blu-ray enterprise of the year. Anchoring the series is Edward Yang’s complexly structured thriller “The Terrorizers,” which stands apart from much of the late master’s work in style and narrative schematics. Yang’s films streamlined their narratives in the year's following this one, yet he ultimately would find unique ways of drawing new dimensions from emotionally dependent characterizations. Sony’s import-only Blu-ray is graciously region-free, and includes a short documentary on Yang, but it's commendable first and foremost for bringing this film into the digital realm for the first time anywhere. JC

01. DVD/Blu-ray: Late Mizoguchi - Eight Films (1951-56)
Distributor: Masters of Cinema (Region 2)
Director(s): Kenji Mizoguchi
Amazon UK Price: £35.97
If releasing a DVD box set that includes eight newly restored films from Kenji Mizoguchi seems like stacking the deck, I implore other distributors to follow suit. UK’s Masters of Cinema continues to be ahead of the curve when it comes to restoring, presenting and supplementing underserved masterpieces nonpareil. Packaging eight of Mizoguchi’s last eleven films he made between 1951-56, this set includes two of his most well known films (“Ugetsu Monogatari” and “Sansho the Baliff”) as well as six slightly more obscure, underseen masterpieces. All, however, represent Mizoguchi at the pinnacle of his very organic and emotionally resonant craft. The import rate is stiff, but worth every quid. KS

• For more Year in Review or Home Movies, see our Feature Articles section.

Feature by: Kathie Smith
Jordan Cronk

Year in Review 2011 - Sam C. Mac's Top Films

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 16:24:01 +0100

Well that was something, wasn't it? Twelve months and nary a week without a challenging film full of ideas and feelings hitting US theaters, vying for a place on the below list. I can't remember ever being this overwhelmed by contemporary cinema; not in 2007, when American directors rallied around an aesthetic revision of the classic western, not even in 2005, when new voices around the globe reinvigorated traditional genres and expanded their borders. If there was any commonality among 2011's most enduring films it was the same unifier that defined the previous, largely negligible moviegoing year: that of the delayed release. Even putting aside the standard one-year-removed rollout of last season’s festival premieres, there were quite a few late-bloomers in 2011 that trumped nearly everything of a fresher vintage. If your name wasn't Hong Sang-soo or Johnnie To, chances are your long-languishing masterpiece got an overdue stateside theatrical bow. Edward Yang's "A Brighter Summer Day" rode the coattails of a full Yang retrospective and earned its first weeklong exhibition in the US; and it would feature here, too, were it not over two decades old (remember: InRO permits only a five-year buffer between international and domestic releases). Instead, other, less ancient offerings from world cinema's great unsung geniuses offered the sternest competition to this year's twin American masterpieces.

10. Beginners / Mike Mills
"Thumbsucker" being the interminable, static assemblage of witticisms it is, Mills's second feature ranks among the most eyeopening improvements any filmmaker has achieved in recent years. A semi-autobiographical drama that whips its whimsy and its affectations into an essayistic roll-call of neuroses, contextualized by histories both personal and cultural, "Beginners" is calmly intelligent and emotionally acute. The world of Mills stand-in Oliver (Ewan McGregor) feels lonely and fractured after his elderly father, Hal (Christopher Plummer), comes out of the closet and dies of cancer in quick succession. In his sadness and confusion, Oliver attempts to process the memories of his late patriarch, liberated from repression after decades of unhappy marriage, and wonders why he can't also escape the emotional purgatory the same man's neglect put him in to. Mills brilliantly visualizes this reconciliation with earnest, intuitive montage, and his technique will resonate with anyone who has ever looked outward for internal peace.

09. Le Havre / Aki Kaurismäki
With economies declining the world over, the mood du jour in cinema has been one of cynicism and sadness, looking at what we've wrought with a kind of mournful resignation. Kaurismäki's "Le Havre," then, offers an opposing view of these hard times, one that suggests that the moral righteousness of the proletariat will fortify a shared sympathy in small communities. Or at least that's the context in which the Finnish filmmaker's latest seems the most satisfying and meaningful—and with news footage of war and general societal decline intercut at key moments in the film, it seems to be the implication as well. Like much of Kaurismäki's work, "Le Havre" begins as hardboiled noir and blossoms into a warm affirmation of humanistic perseverance, stylized with intuitive swatches of color and striking symmetrical compositions. Last we saw Kaurismäki (2007's "Lights in the Dusk") he seemed to be following Pedro Almodovar and Wong Kar-Wai down the path of style over substance. "Le Havre" fiercely rebukes that perception.

08. Certified Copy / Abbas Kiarostami
In truth this doesn’t even rank in Kiarostami's top five films, so I do mean it when I say his second tier work is better than just about anyone else's anything. Fingerprints of stubborn ambiguity are all over this arty romantic tête-à-tête, but its ideas—about the authenticity of emotional engagement, the validity of any emotional response to something that is fundamentally artificial (like cinema)—necessitate just such a remove. The ever-luminous Juliette Binoche and silver-haired opera star William Schimmel walk the cobblestones of a small Tuscan village, all the while referring to the relationship between them in lucid, shapeshifting terms. They're tentative new lovers; they're married; they're on the brink of divorce. Are they role-playing? Are these imperceptible shifts evidence of surrealism? These are the questions we ask and that Kiarostami never answers, but no film provoked more of them this year than "Certified Copy."

07. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy / Tomas Alfredson
Being a spy in the '70s might've been attractive to some for the anonymity it offered, the chance to slip into a stealth existence that would allow a person to hide who they were in times of pervasive paranoia. This is the crux of Alfredson's murky, fevered espionage yarn. Adapted from the 1974 bestseller by John le Carré, 'Tinker Tailor' embeds us in the upper echelons of "The Circus," a cabal of the British Secret Intelligence Service’s most powerful agents, and emphasizes the novel's queer subtext: Alfredson strengthens the pathos invested in these lightly sketched characters with an understanding that the paranoia of his film is about more than the looming threat of a third World War. But it's the director’s hawk-eye for unnerving compositions—framing through windows, doorways and other discreet vantage points—and his grimy, seemingly rotting-in-real-time mise-en-scène that makes his film so visually rich and immersive.

06. House of Pleasures / Bertrand Bonello
Any film that soundtracks Otis-on-uppers soul belter Lee Moses basically has me at the jump. But Bonello's cracked-mirror projection of a period piece is more than the sum of its intentionally jarring deep cuts. Perched at the precipice of modernism—the waning days of the 20th century—and luxuriating in the lavish interiors of a high-end Parisian brothel, this distinctly European descendant of Hou Hsiao-hsien's gracefully elegiac "Flowers of Shanghai" is keyed to a unique temporal lucidity. Bonello's anachronistic soundtrack is complimented by nearly imperceptible details nagging at the film's already questionable period authenticity, like when one character makes reference to the Paris Metro before it even existed. This unmooring of time isn't a gimmick but rather an ingenious organizing principle: The whores of "House of Pleasures" are all vivid, vivacious, and emotionally acute vessels of feminine agency refracting the complexities of sexual politics across two centuries of change and stagnation.

05. Margaret / Kenneth Lonergan
With its fractured, episodic structure built around a seemingly tedious legal-issues plot, "Margaret" shouldn't be as rich as it is. But such is the power of a great performance, and Anna Paquin most definitely gives one: her mercurial, tormented young woman chokes back narcissistic tantrums as a sudden, devastating tragedy—the death of a passerby through her own inadvertent fault—forces her out of adolescence and into a premature adulthood. Paquin strikes such a perfectly volatile imbalance in her role that the rest of the film falls into place around her, even at its most compromised (this 150-minute cut isn't the four-hour-plus one Lonergan would've preferred to see released, and some connective tissue may be lost in the truncation). Unmistakably framed by the densely populated cityscape of a spiritually wounded post-9/11 New York City, "Margaret" views cultural tragedy through the prism of personal moral crisis.

04. Love Exposure / Sion Sono
Sono dropped two savage satires of modern moral frailty on American moviegoers this year: a four-hour 'rom-com' encompassing religious fatalism and sexual repression (“Love Exposure”) and a brisk, two-hour-plus dismantling of contemporary family values marked by lurid horror (“Cold Fish”). Both are brilliant expansions of the Japanese filmmaker's bleak worldview, but it's ‘Exposure,’ with its maverick mix of black comedy and grueling violence, that finds this mad genius at his peak. Some take the film to reflect Sono's own sadism, but he didn't infect society—he means only to diagnose its ills. With urgent melodrama and dazzlingly nimble handheld camerawork, he suggests we must confront the evil that rots away at us if we're to beat the cycles of self-destruction his characters try so hard, in vain, to overcome. These are works of passion and intelligence and they cut deeper than the acts of violence they unsparingly depict.

03. To Die Like a Man / João Pedro Rodrigues
The 2009 Cannes comp was a breeding ground for disappointment, but attendees found solace in the eclectic Un Certain Regard sidebar. Some of these films ("Dogtooth") found acclaim and US distribution in short order; others have taken their sweet time to arrive stateside. Pedro Rodrigues's 'difficult' third feature is among the latter. A plodding musical with few, if any, proper songs, this elegy to an aging Lisbon transsexual is possessed by many of the qualities that made the Portuguese up-and-comer's first two features so special—queer ennui, a nocturnal carnality, flamboyant melodrama—but with even more on offer. A heavy character piece packed with weird, compelling cinematic techniques and at least one stunning set-piece—a forest, bathed in red, blissing-out to Baby Dee's hymnal "Calvary"—this is the kind of bold contemporary art Cannes and any other fest should be spotlighting, not relegating to runner-up status.

02. Meek’s Cutoff / Kelly Reichardt
Dust and dirt cake the faces of Reichardt's men and women of hope and heavy hearts. It’s 1885, and a wagon train on the Oregon Trail crosses miles of cracked, parched earth, its riders longing for the land of good fortune their guide promises them. From this lucid premise Reichardt induces no shortage of tension. She exploits the earthly needs of her travelers in their journey through the nothingness: the search for water, shelter, and the question of who to trust and who to blame when that trust is misplaced. A superficial assessment might suggest that nothing happens, that the film—in its brilliantly allegorical conclusion—winds up where it began. But attentive viewers will find a tautness that never lets inaction become tedious. Reichardt's images possess a painterly beauty, but her landscapes are only as picturesque as they need to be to lure her weary travelers further into a vast, endless expanse.

01. The Tree of Life / Terrence Malick
The ambitions of a movie like this one—which takes us from the beginning of time to its ostensible end, stopping off to admire dinosaurs and get spiritual on a beach—are easy to mock. But the most audacious passage of Malick's great film—a birth of the universe that synthesizes creationism and the Big Bang—is a necessary inflation: It not only hews closely to the aesthetic and thematic principles which have always been connotations of the critical shorthand 'Malickian,' but it engenders a kind of humbling rack-focus akin to that feeling some of us get when we zoom-out from a blurry picture of our house on Google Earth. In fact, Malick's supposedly autobiographical odyssey would be an exercise in narcissism if it wasn't so damn expansive. In juxtaposing the birth and maturation of Malick surrogate Jack with the beginning of all life, our view of not only Jack's world but our own is broadened. You could criticize the extent to which Malick goes to achieve this—a 20-odd minute avant-garde interlude in an otherwise narrative film—but it's something you have to experience. It's like the Google Earth thing: I can tell you about how insignificant it makes me feel, but you really need to see that little pixelated planet for yourself.

• For more Year in Review features, see our Feature Articles section.

Feature by: Sam C. Mac

Year in Review 2011 - Sam C. Mac's Top Albums

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 14:58:04 +0100

The most troubling trend to be found in this year’s most critically acclaimed music wasn't the emergence of some ill-fated new genre, but a general lack of anything being said that was worth a damn. The advent of fresh technology over the last few decades has led to plenty of fine music, but it's also weighted the emphasis against lyricism in favor of sonics. And to be fair, 2011 saw great innovations in genre and sound deserving of praise, at least to a point; but those Weeknd mixtapes I like and that Bon Iver album I don't all have vacuous spaces at their center where substantive writers would engage us with something other than drunkenly innocuous babbling about liquor and drugs, or cringe-inducing expressions like (say it with me now, in the whitest falsetto you can muster) "For once I knew/I was not magnificent." My favorite records of the year didn't all overflow with poetry, but they tended to be at least as praiseworthy for their language as they were for their music. No subwoofer shook me harder in the last twelve months than did the line "That big fucking bomb made me deaf," a piercingly timely screed from a certain, scruffy veteran; and no pillowy synths were ever as sensual as Rihanna's ploy to "tell me how much you need me by the way that you please me." The “We Found Love” singer’s latest record missed my list this year, but she did issue a challenge that her competition and just about everyone else should heed: Talk that talk.

10. Tyler, the Creator: Goblin
Ever since Lil Wayne got out of jail and found himself too tired to care about being the best rapper alive, demented Odd Future ringleader Tyler, the Creator has been the most compelling figure in hip-hop. And Tyler proves he'll be a big deal for the foreseeable future by remaining mainstream-relevant despite releasing the year's most challenging, radio-unfriendly rap album. Over beats that sound like what I thought a David Lynch album might sound like before I heard one, Tyler conducts an enthralling, hour-plus therapy session wherein he's both patient and analyst and invites his friends to hang around and crack wise about dicks. It's sad and sick and Tyler totally fucking knows it—he also knows it's diabolically clever. To experience Goblin in its entirety is to dare your conscience to bunny hop off your shoulder; more enjoyably, it's to expose yourself to irreverent brilliance like the line I just paraphrased.

09. Beyoncé: 4 (Deluxe Edition)
The year's best pop album put its author's blandest in the rearview and bucks a trend of lazy retro-fetishism with a willingness to update genres. On 4, afrobeat, disco, and funk find their way into Beyoncé's minimalist synthesizer ballads and glitchy rave-ups, resulting in a record with reverence for the past—particularly the evolution of R&B over the last 50 years—that never feels less than contemporary. It's also just a total joy of vocal versatility: soon-to-be-baby-bumped Bey bursts with love for her (Jigga) man, caterwauling herself raw on "Best Thing I Never Had" (where her voice quivers and cracks all over a song that'd otherwise scan as typical, condescending kiss-off) and sighing a feminine flip-side to D'Angelo's "Untitled (How Does It Feel)." Gaga's album was probably more consistent, but her calculating provocation would never allow for a chorus as warm and resonant as "Come on, make love to me."

08. Fucked Up: David Comes to Life
The year's best rock record gave me plenty of preemptive reasons to hate it. It's got Damien Abraham's shredded-windpipe growl (the thing I find most shitty about metal music; the reason records by Mastodon and Isis keep missing these lists), and it's a concept album, so it actually expects you to pay attention to what that voice is saying. Previous Fucked Up records hit me in the gut only when aiming for it, so the strings and pianos that open David Comes to Life sent me back to the flute solos of Chemistry of Common Life and cringing. But Fucked Up usually makes navigating the wrongheaded experimental shit they do worth it. That said, David is Fucked Up at their best, consistently: each song channels righteous working-class aggression, and no band in 2011 was so committed to making an hour of music this relentless. It gives me a headache sometimes; it probably should.

07. PJ Harvey: Let England Shake
Polly Jean Harvey's latest is a literate and poignant expression of fatigued nationalism, weighing the Dorset native's affection for her English homeland against her disgust for its war-prone exploits. It's a different theme than that which M.I.A. took up on her scathing critique of American excess last year, but it shares its anxiety, its outrage bridging the polemical and the compassionate. PJ nails the sadness of soldiers leaving behind home and family ("Their arms as bitter branches/Spreading into the world") and delivers a moving mediation on combat ("Death was everywhere/In the air, and in the sounds"), and while she's accumulated many bold statements in her career, she hasn't favored tunefulness this much since 2000's Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. Don't call it a comeback—her less immediate records offer plenty of rewards. But this is PJ's most fully-realized album in a decade, and one of her best.

06. Tom Waits: Bad as Me (Deluxe Edition)
Rolling with heat, Tom Waits's first collection of all new material since 2004's Real Gone blends together that usual gumbo of bawlers and brawlers we've come to expect from the gruff showman, but with a punch-up in focus. Bad as Me is the shortest Waits set in decades; none of its tracks, on the regular edition or the deluxe (which goes two-for-three in delivering album-worthy outtakes), clock in at much over four-and-half minutes. The sleight of hand is in the way Waits finds merit in familiarity. This material doesn't attempt anything new, but it never feels drudged-up or tired: The best weepies stand tall next to those from Mule Variations and Swordfishtrombones and roiling rockers like "Get Lost" receive an added jolt from a prime-form Keith Richards. The Stones axeman's participation tips us off early as to exactly what this album is for Waits: The record that revitalizes his rock.

05. Pistol Annies: Hell on Heels
Friend and critic Phil Coldiron describes the title-track and lead single from this little record as "the year's most empirically perfect pop song." I'd extend that sentiment to the album’s other nine songs. Made up of country superstar Miranda Lambert and two of her closest songwriting pals, Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley, Pistol Annies have delivered the best country record of the year by embracing the genre's minimalism. While Miranda's latest solo offering felt the teensiest bit bloated at nearly an hour, the Annies' record is a shit-hot 30 minutes, masterminded by three intelligent songwriters given just enough to do between them to guide each of their contributions toward perfection. Hell on Heels comes off so flawlessly its precision could go unnoticed at first (it did for me). But around the time it hits you just how impeccably crafted it is, the timeliness of its lyrics should start to register as well.

04. Frank Ocean: Nostalgia, Ultra Mixtape
Mixtapes have gradually become a 'thing' hip-hop savvy critics are obliged to contend with, and 2011 enforced that notion twofold: Toronto-based Drakealike the Weeknd put out two acclaimed 'tapes, and a host of trendsetting viral rappers (Danny Brown, A$ASP ROCKY) slagged off new material. Rarer is the gifted pop crooner capitalizing on the format, and if we narrow that list down to those with the balls to sample the Eagles for seven minutes, we're talking one name. Frank Ocean is the sole decent dude amidst the amorphous teen-terror squad Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All; his voice would lure D'Angelo into bed and his music taps into a thoughtful perspective on American life that’s particularly empathetic toward young romantics treading water in a cynical world. Ocean can be naive, but his Nostalgia, Ultra is never less than compelling as a calling card for one of our most promising new talents.

03. Gillian Welch: The Harrow and the Harvest
Like each of Gillian Welch and sideman/guitar virtuoso David Rawlings's other carefully crafted records, Harrow and the Harvest is informed by old conventions, with an emphasis on Appalachian folk and the biblical reverence found in Robert Johnson's work. Their latest stands as a corrective to their previous album—the messier, more indulgent Soul Journey—returning to the minimalist template of their fantastic early diptych (1996's Revival; 1998's Hell Among the Yearlings), and improving on it in subtle ways. These are some of the duo's most vividly told stories: "Dark Turn of Mind" summons the seductively macabre images of Yearlings' seedier songs and "Hard Times" offers a sensitive dialogue between plowman and cattle. But what's most welcome here is the newfound wry sense of humor, a necessary levity in the face of all that's grim and inevitable. I like the way Welch puts it: "That's the way the cornbread crumbles."

02. Me’Shell NdegéOcello: Weather
Me'Shell NdegéOcello—that smokey chanteuse who's been spinning soulful, eclectic songs as a solo artist since the mid-'90s—pulls all her talents together on Weather, a thorny collection of languid love songs taking on various forms of needling uncertainty. The first eight of the record’s 13 tracks are perfect, and in a weak year for music, the rest come close enough: Me'Shell lingers on her lover's doorstep (an act meant more metaphorically) and soldiers through her regret, groping for a new start on "Feeling for the Wall." She gender-bends Leonard Cohen's classic "Chelsea Hotel," vacillating between breathy falsetto and leering baritone to sell both sides, and pens a gorgeous piano-voice thesis on "Oysters": "World ain't never gonna change/But you could always change it for me." Other NdegéOcello records are tripped up by ostentatiousness; this one, with Joe Henry's limber, minimalist production, is scaled just right.

01. The Roots: Undun
Biting an album-length concept from Prince Paul, pivoting on a brief instrumental from a Sufjan Stevens album, you wouldn't think Undun would be the best Roots album in nearly decade, but it is. Synthesizing the concise song-craft of midlife manifesto How I Got Over with the avant-weird ambitions of Phrenology (there's a gorgeous, four-part instrumental coda), the Roots' latest is the record they've been working toward for the entirety of their long, vital career. And it makes quick work of the concept-album-as-tedious-bore, fashioning less a coherent narrative (though there's that: fictional Redford Stevens loses his life on the hustle, journeys back to reflect on the mistakes that got him there) than an impressionistic collection of gritty narrative details. Drummer Questlove's production instincts are as impeccable as ever, but it's frontman Black Thought who steals this one, mining personal and cultural tragedies to create one of the least encumbered, most affecting concept records in the history of the form.

• For more Year in Review features, see our Feature Articles section.

Feature by: Sam C. Mac

Year in Review 2011 - Luke Gorham's Top Films

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 02:50:28 +0100

This has been an unusually generous year for superior films—not since 2005 has the outside-Hollywood set made such an impact on year-end lists. With such varying (and sometimes diametrically opposed) artistic voices as Terrence Malick, Alexander Payne, Lars von Trier, and Jean-Luc Godard all releasing new films, one distinct pattern has emerged: that of the dissident. Subverting genre was a favorite past-time of idiosyncratic directors this year, notably Tomas Alfredson (“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”) and Nicolas Winding Refn (“Drive”). Some directors played adversary to themselves (Pedro Almodovar's "The Skin I Live In" felt overtly out-of-character, at least compared to his recent work); others toyed with niche genres to unexpectedly strong effect (“Like Crazy,” “Cold Weather,” “Beginners”); and, on the other side of the screen, concerned critics and cinephiles banded together to demand increased exposure for the once-buried treasure that is “Margaret.” While not all dissident activity was for the best this year (I’m talking to you, Lynne Ramsay), its very presence in and around Hollywood is cause for celebration. As a real genius once said, it’s the thought that counts, and when there’s money at stake (now I’m talking to you, Hollywood), it counts all the more. Cash cows aren’t going anywhere, but that doesn’t mean big business cinema can’t squeeze out a little art as well. Last year I swore I’d suspend my cynicism for the mainstream as long as “The Tree of Life” was on the horizon. Having finally witnessed that hotly anticipated event after years of waiting, 2012 gets a pass as well. Your move, Hollywood.

10. Weekend / Andrew Haigh
Though we live in an age that has made significant strides toward social equality, gay culture has never been explored as succinctly and affectingly as it is in Haigh’s modest chamber drama. As members of a society, we learn to define ourselves through our interactions with the world around us and the relationships we forge. This notion of human communication saturates “Weekend” as two gay men—one bearing forceful self-assurance born of pain, the other a willing innocence and openness—bond, feud and jointly evolve over the course of a few days' acquaintance. The two bob and weave their way through objective, theoretical discourse on romance and more naturalistically intimate smalltalk before finally beginning to find themselves in each other. That the sexual orientation of the two feels less like the point of "Weekend" than a mere detail is something all together profoundly progressive for such a small-scale film.

09. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo / David Fincher
No character this year, not the sleek psychotic at the black heart of “Drive” nor the mysterious prisoner of “The Skin I Live In,” has been festishized more emphatically than Lisbeth Salander. Fincher transforms his goth-girl, proto-feminist super-hacker into one big bundle of cool—from her effortless cigarette flicks to her perfectly coifed anti-coif to her impossibly dexterous typing, Lisbeth exudes pure, ferocious verve. This shift in emphasis Fincher cultivates, dismissing the Swedish original’s more earnest treatment of Lisbeth’s badassery, is critical to his film’s runaway success, allowing Rooney Mara to imbue Lisbeth with a shade of theatricality and affectation which underscores her evident vulnerability. Supported throughout by Fincher’s lustrous visual style, at its most skillfully chilly, ‘Dragon Tattoo' treats its lurid mystery narrative as a mere set-piece for the only real mystery of consequence here: who is Lisbeth Salander?

08. Melancholia / Lars von Trier
“Melancholia” has been dismissed by some self-serious critics as a trifle built solely on ham-fisted metaphor. But to think von Trier takes his metaphors too seriously—in this case that of a giant, blue planet named Melancholia crashing into earth and ending all life, meant as an externalization of a young woman’s depression—is problematic. This provocateur understands both the sobriety of depression and its hyperbolic self-consumption; his well-documented struggles it the sickness obviously factor in heavily here, and it isn’t hard to see him poking fun at himself even while regarding the troubled Justine (a career-best Kirsten Dunst) with affectionate respect and keen insight. And if that isn’t enough, the opening eight minutes of “Melancholia,” a sequence of bleakly beautiful slow-motion tableaus which encapsulate von Trier’s themes and solidify his painterly craft, contain some of the most visually stunning moments of cinema this year.

07. Margaret / Kenneth Lonergan
Much has been made of the post-production hell and legal issues surrounding the shot-in-2005, released-in-2011 “Margaret.” The real story, however, is how wildly successful this reportedly second-rate cut of the film is. Detailing the psychology of its young heroine in the aftermath of a bus accident, Lonergan’s film is content to follow said character, Lisa Cohen (an Oscar-worthy Anna Paquin), down many untidied subplots to capture every facet of her rapidly-changing internal life. At times well-spoken and preternaturally insightful, at other times infuriatingly boorish and impudent, Lisa's obsessive pursuit of justice (as she sees it), blatant mommy issues, and constant attention-seeking all blur the line between adolescent angst and psychological trauma, leaving a portrait of a girl’s bruised naïveté and battered sense of self. Lonergan has crafted a film of challenging coarseness which, much like Lisa, is all the richer for its imperfections.

06. Meek’s Cutoff / Kelly Reichardt
Resembling an arthouse adaptation of the "Oregon Trail" computer game, “Meek’s Cutoff” is a claustrophobic anti-western detailing the travails of a pilgrimage toward unsettled terrain. Deliberately paced, and shot in longtakes of prolonged silence, Reichart’s film is nonetheless underscored by a sense of mounting tension that the characters have to work at to keep unspoken. Surreal at its edges, imbuing its narrative with mirage-like uncertainty, "Meek's Cutoff" is a decidedly un-romanticized rendering of the western myth. Despite this, it proves to be as much an acting showcase as it is an aesthetic experience. Michelle Williams is predictably superb as the reluctant backbone of the pioneers, but it’s Bruce Greenwood, nearly unrecognizable as the eponymous guide, whose prideful loutishness and eerie inscrutability threaten to thwart the weary travelers in their efforts for a better life. Hey, modern world, sound familiar?

05. Heartbeats / Xavier Dolan
Emotionally superficial and visually overt, “Heartbeats” concerns a very specific, transient moment in development, highlighting the impatient, disaffected phase of young adulthood. Naysayers will assert that its directorial flourish negates its more redeeming merits; they're missing the point. Dolan pairs bombastic, capital 'A’ art—a flamboyant color palette, slow-mo glances of pure yearning, and a classical-heavy soundtrack—with lovingly deprecating humor for his characters that creates an equally funny and affecting portrait of youth’s last days. “Heartbeats” is a faux-maudlin comedy attuned to the melodrama of modern twentysomething living, both quick to acknowledge its subjective relevance to ones maturation and keenly aware of its objective absurdity. Too many critics have condemned Dolan’s perceived indulgence, and what they're missing is some of the most playful, intelligent and beautiful filmmaking of 2011.

04. A Separation / Asghar Farhadi
Competing notions of truth take center stage in Farhadi's searing portrait of modern Iran. Miraculously balancing big-picture political and social implications with small-scale ethics, “A Separation” offers no less than five supremely sympathetic characters, all struggling with individualized perceptions of morality and self-interest. Farhadi’s camera acts as impartial voyeur—as well as our own personal surrogate—gaining us access to the various conflicts that play out between these people. His closeups during the many closed-door legal proceedings capture immediacy in each pained expression, while the way in which he elides certain crucial narrative goings-on suggests the indefinite function of truth in situations so thorny and complicated. As the final extended shot continues into the credits, it is precisely this refusal to offer easy answers to hard questions which leaves us gut-punched and heartbroken.

03. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 / David Yates
Any question as to who the ‘Potter’ series belongs to should be laid to rest once and for all after a single viewing of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.” Since David Yates took over directing duties the visual and emotional resonance of these films has soared. And that pattern continues with the final installment of the saga, a fully adrenalized testament to the co-existence of commerce and art (and quality blockbusters). Approaching the visual palette of black-and-white films as a buttress to the series’ growing thematic darkness, Yates paints with gray and azure hues without sacrificing any of his film's striking vibrancy. It’s the performances, however, which cement this finale's greatness; from the at-last vulnerability of Alan Rickman’s Snape to the cracking confidence of Ralph Fiennes’s Voldemort, ‘Deathly Hallows’ smacks of the disconcerting realizations brought about by the end of childhood.

02. Certified Copy / Abbas Kiarostami
Kiarostami's latest is shrouded in a haze of mystery and doubt. It's thematically and structurally akin to the best Modern American Drama though void of the garishness which sometimes plagues works bound for the stage. Decidedly low-key and disorienting, it unfolds over a single day, as the specifics of a relationship between an unnamed man and woman are continually questioned. Far from unfocused, it follows a clear progression, allowing the bond at its center to evolve through prolonged conversations between the two principles and other couples. Nimbly managing its built-in theme—the question of artifice vs. authenticity—“Certified Copy” allows its romance and its ambiguous implications to act as a sphere of inquiry into the nature of human connection. If the short answer is ultimately unknowable, it's because the long answer is suffused with such powerful honesty as to expose the inconsequence of easy conclusions.

01. The Tree of Life / Terrence Malick
Malick’s microcosm as macrocosm exploration of one boy’s Texas-raised childhood is both supremely epic and heartrendingly intimate, a hallucinatory mosaic of cerebral and emotional memory. Juxtaposing a twenty-odd minute sequence of the creation and evolution of the world with one of the creation and evolution of a person (which constitutes the remainder of the film), its is an illusory, abstruse portrait of the artist as a young man, one in which Malick parallels his own spiritual birthing with that of all humanity. While this may sound wildly self-indulgent, “The Tree of Life” is a philosophically rich and aesthetically unmatched dissection of nature vs. grace and order vs. chaos. Malick’s POV seems to suggest that families, relationships (both with the natural world and with our fellow man), and life in general are organisms all their own, infinitesimal but destined for growth, change and, hopefully, transcendence.

• For more Year in Review features, see our Feature Articles section.

Feature by: Luke Gorham

Year in Review 2011 - Luke Gorham's Top Albums

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 02:50:02 +0100

After careful consideration of the year in music, the descriptor which jumps to this critic’s mind is “retro.” This may seem initially misleading when weighing the glut of unique objets d'art produced during 2011, but from the year’s best emcees to its boundary-pushing crooners to its idol-worshipping indie rockers, this notion of retro rings defiantly true. In the world of rap, standout acts like Shabazz Palaces and the Roots employed plenty of ‘90s throwback flair, while the Cool Kids delivered on their already-defined brand of ‘80s hats-and-sneakers spitting. Traditional folk artists such as Bon Iver and Iron & Wine also infused a clear ‘80s aesthetic into their picking-and-pining Americana sound, while PJ Harvey traveled even further back into the annals of English musical tradition on her latest. The common denominator here is a brazen willingness to risk polarization for the chance at honest, distinctive self-expression. From acts like ambient folk outfit the War on Drugs to headline-grabbing hip-hop collective Odd Future and their ubiquitous frontman Tyler, the Creator, these performers may not be your cup of tea, but they are refreshing, innovative and, most importantly, absolutely necessary.

10. Shabazz Palaces: Black Up
Intensely original and almost equally inscrutable, Shabazz Palaces’ debut isn’t without precedent. Brief, mostly vocal glimpses of jazz-rap influences like De La Soul and emcee Ishmael Butler’s own Digable Planets remind us of the genre’s history, all the while resolutely progressing hip-hop with each minute of this LP. Looping, layered, always moody, the production here is as memorable as that of any alt-rap album. Butler, however, is the real luminary. His flow is effortless and playful, alternating between nimble cooperation with the beats and all-out domination of them, while his often enigmatic pontificating always resonates thanks to his proclivity for recurring maxims. With Butler’s deeply humanist themes and the album’s droning, near-robotic production balanced to perfect effect, it isn’t hard to see the future (or at least a more comprehensive future) of hip-hop in every repeated mantra and synthetic drum kick.

09. Florence Welch: Ceremonials
If you’re prepared to counter the following praise by condemning Florence Welch’s unadulterated extravagance, don’t bother—it is precisely this indulgence which so captivates and endears us to Ceremonials, Welch & co.’s second, superior LP. Florence suffers no subtlety amidst her sensory attack of baroque pop and overflowing spirituality, and like fellow 2011 standouts and obvious points of comparison Adele and Tori Amos, but with more flounce, Florence’s tremendous vocal power is less harnessed than delivered with an uncanny understanding of pure musicality. Neither as mystic as Amos nor as overtly intimate as Adele, Welch hovers somewhere in between, crafting a confident and tellingly eccentric expression of herself through an impossibly catchy arsenal of tracks. If it’s an imperfect album, it’s imperfect in all the best ways—and a truly exciting signifier of what’s still to come from this 25 year-old wunderkind.

08. The Roots: Undun
From the first spoken lines of the Roots’ Undun, a Keatsian juxtaposition of sleep and death, to the album’s prolonged orchestral riff on Sufjan Stevens’s “Redford,” the reverse chronology of fictional hood Redford Stevens and the death-inspired reflections of his life are rich in ambiguity and unexpected beauty. Lyrically spearheaded by Black Thought, mixing the provocative and the cerebral, this concept album’s narrative is easy to follow but far from pat in its conclusions. Exploring Redford’s constantly shifting self-perception, from tortured desperation (“Lighthouse”) to swollen and prideful fatalism (“Kool On”), Undun creates such a believable character that it leaves its audience with the sense of so much yet unexplored. Tightly reined in by Questlove and his gift for effortlessly intricate arrangements, the Roots have delivered that most difficult of beasts—the concept album—by culling their career-long themes of choice into a record that is seemingly destined to prove the defining work of the band’s inimitable career.

07. Tyler, the Creator: Goblin
What elevates Tyler (de facto ringleader of indie-rap’s OFWGKTA) above base provocation is his near-absolute lack of inhibition. “I’m a fucking walking paradox/No I’m not,” the opening declaration of album-topper “Yonkers,” encapsulates the appeal of this idiosyncratic emcee—his willingness to explore all facets of himself and the persona he has manufactured for the public. Violent, misogynistic, and misanthropic, Goblin is an admittedly bleak and exhausting trip, though also thrillingly brazen in its sardonic willingness to explore even the most off putting elements of its creator’s still-developing worldview. Like Kanye, only angrier and possessing a greater sense of introspective objectivity, Tyler relishes holding up a magnifying glass to his seemingly unending contradictions and wellsprings of anger. Though far-surpassed by fellow Wolfgang'er Earl in technical skill, Tyler’s aesthetic sensibilities, and his shameless artistry, have likely and deservedly erased all accusations of irrelevance for good.

06. PJ Harvey: Let England Shake
Never one to shy away from provocation, Harvey has matured and deepened her tactics. On Let England Shake, her sights are squarely set on her country of origin: the horrors of World War I, the travails of post-war diplomacy, and the death of pastoral living. Her approach, however, more classically melodic and vacillating between darkly comic resignation and righteously angry realism (“soldiers falling like lumps of meat”), is a far-from-unfamiliar mindset to those of us living across the pond. Utilizing her upper register more exclusively than on recent albums, and infusing her sound with remnants of English folk and ‘60s goth-pop, Harvey offers listeners a more generous version of herself by dialing down forcefulness in favor of unobtrusive assurance. By trusting herself and her audience more fully, she has created a timely and insightful album about the large and small scale necessity of reflection and accountability.

05. Yuck: Yuck
The constancy and efficiency of the wheel negates the need for its reinvention, but slight fine-tuning can renew its wonder. Following this analogy, Yuck offers up a captivating revision to that specific breed of ‘90s fuzzy shoegazer rock-'n'-roll. At barely 20 years old, the members of Yuck are likely a product of internet-bred nostalgia and retroactive musical tastes rather than the influences of a specific decade, but their uncluttered sound and more melodic take on the stylings of Dinosaur Jr. and Mellon Collie-era Smashing Pumpkins prove their place at the forefront of nu-gaze bands. Whether it’s the wailing guitars and dissonant distortion of “Get Away” or the yearning vocal whispers and unassuming acoustics of “Shook Down,” Yuck is an album rich in emotional tenor and youthful abstraction. The band may not be authentic lo-fiers, but, against the odds, they are something equally impressive: fresh.

04. Bon Iver: Bon Iver
Justin Vernon’s follow-up to his quietly beautiful but comparatively slight debut (For Emma, Forever Ago) offers up a broader, more textured sound. Straying from his folk origins into more soulful, wholly original territory, Vernon likewise abandons his wounded-puppy vocal stylings for a more affecting, emotionally ambiguous falsetto, now capable of evoking more than just mournful yearning. Like fellow folk artist Sam Beam, Vernon’s lyrics often wax oblique; but when his impossible tenor proclaims “And at once I knew I was not magnificent,” his true growth as a songwriter becomes evident. That such a revelation can seem equally deterministic and liberating amidst his more layered yet increasingly focused arrangements gives evidence of an emotional and musical evolution that borders on the extraordinary. While Vernon’s introspective eye made his debut a rewarding experience, Bon Iver challenges listeners to employ the same pensiveness, resulting in an altogether transcendent undertaking.

03. The Weeknd: House of Balloons Mixtape
What Abel Tesfaye accomplishes on House of Balloons, the mixtape he recorded under his stage name the Weeknd, is an honest lyrical and sonic portrait of disaffection. Infusing R&B with the estrangement and dissatisfying hedonism that has become a somewhat tired and poorly executed staple of indie-rock works in his favor here; House of Balloons is both carnal and eerie, a portrait of the on-the-edge growing pains of a preternaturally insightful singer. Indebted both to mainstream American R&B and Canadian indie-pop, Tesfaye has crafted a wholly original mixtape somehow more honest for the transparency of his obvious influences. Like fellow up-and-coming crooner Frank Ocean, Tesfaye brings a much-needed humanism and edge to the typically obtuse R&B genre. Not convinced? Give Drake’s Take Care a listen and witness the influence of Tesfaye and his burgeoning style of hesitant romanticism.

02. Jay-Z/Kanye West: Watch the Throne
“I’m ‘bout to call the paparazzi on myself.” This acerbically self-effacing proclamation, from album standout and single-of-the-year contender “Otis,” functions as a synecdoche for Watch the Throne’s defining glory: namely, the pure exuberance and posturing ‘Ye and Jay bring to their collaborative effort. Is it a seamless alliance? Beat for beat, line for line, no; missing here is the unparalleled ambition of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and the rags-to-riches earnestness of Jay-Z’s fabled career. The uniting factor, then, is the unrestrained dynamism the two emcees are able to bring to any joint. Successful both when celebrating their own greatness and the thrills of self-indulgence (“Otis,” “No Church in the Wild”) and more socially conscious fare (“Murder to Excellence,” “Made in America”), Watch the Throne offers nothing more and nothing less than two geniuses combining efforts for a sufficiently substantive entertainment. When you’re delivering at this level, less than perfection is more than enough.

01. Wu-Lyf: Go Tell Fire to the Mountain
Heavily hyped indie-rockers Wu Lyf burst onto the scene boasting both a familiar ethos and an altogether new bravado with their debut LP, Go Tell Fire to the Mountain. The title alone, suggesting a scorching appeal to the masses, evinces the band’s core unpredictable glory: an anthemic, revolutionary spirit devoid of cynicism. Ignoring the group’s histrionic, “screw you” public persona, their forceful esotericism, and the guttural, almost primal gruntings of lead singer Ellery Roberts, there’s a chant-friendly tenderness to their brand of middle-finger murmurings and disaffected camaraderie. Their expansive sound is focused and tight, a precise assemblage of ugly-beautiful renderings amongst the chaos of acidly melodic guitar chords and crashing percussion. Like Explosions in the Sky and Sigur Ros before them, Wu Lyf has created an honest, unabashed statement of purely emotional musicality that (and this is the highest compliment I can give) temporarily rendered this critic’s cynicism impotent.

• For more Year in Review features, see our Feature Articles section.

Feature by: Luke Gorham

Year in Review 2011 - Jordan Cronk's Top Films

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 02:48:27 +0100

When I consider the hand-wringing that usually goes into these lists, it’s interesting that in 2011—the single best year for cinema in at least a half-decade—it would prove so decidedly easy to carve out a top ten. I greatly admire a few dozen films that opened in the U.S. over the last twelve months, some just now seeing the light of day after years in distribution limbo (“United Red Army,” “Go Go Tales,” “Love Exposure,” even “Margaret,” which is as inspired as it is messy), others arriving on a wave of festival hype and meeting those expectations (“Of Gods and Men,” “Poetry,” “A Separation”). But when I think of the handful of films in direct threat to my top ten (“Le Quattro Volte,” “El Sicario: Room 164,” “To Die Like a Man”) none would feel right dislodging any of my favorites. And this was, above all, a year where feeling really coursed through the best of cinema, a fact I find difficult to reconcile with the general acclaim meeting a certain subset of the year’s films (“Melancholia,” “Shame,” “We Need to Talk About Kevin”) which were utterly vacant and devoid of any tangible emotion or insight. What follows, then, are ten works of genuine passion and consistently enveloping formal ingenuity, nearly all worthy of anchoring their own respective year as opposed to sharing space with nine equally impressive films.

10. Le Havre / Aki Kaurismäki
This Deadpan Finnish master's career-long concern with the lives of the disenfranchised finds its most humanistic manifestation yet in his latest, unassuming fable “Le Havre.” With the eponymous French port town reflecting the larger burdens of modern Europe, Kaurismäki blithely yet pointedly traces an odd-couple relationship between an immigrant African adolescent and an aging shoeshiner who perhaps recognizes a bit of his younger self in the boy’s plight. A series of protracted gestures and a color coordinated visual palette once again undergird Kaurismäki’s tight narrative mechanics, his Bresson-like discretion facilitating a dialogue between thematic topicality and intergenerational camaraderie in a manner reminiscent of Jean Renoir or Marcel Carné. Another entry in his politically—and, just as importantly, cinematically—conscious proletariat series as well as a worthy spiritual successor to his 1996 masterwork “Drifting Clouds,” “Le Havre” instantly rises to the top tier of Kaurismäki’s oeuvre.

09. Tuesday, After Christmas / Radu Muntean
Shortsighted critics proclaiming the end of the Romanian New Wave were proven woefully wrong this year, as the country gave us three superb works: Andrei Ujică’s epic found footage doc “The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu,” one elliptical anti-procedural we’ll get to further on down this list, and this shattering marital drama. Retaining the movement’s signature longtakes and formally dynamic compositions, Muntean expands thematically with his fourth feature, staging a tense love-triangle narrative that breaks free of the internalized singularity of many of his compatriot’s most celebrated works. Muntean’s carefully plotted film moves in a roundabout manner, introducing and redefining characters almost scene by scene. And by allowing these people the space (within the frame) and time (within the narrative) they need to reveal their secrets and motivations, he adds to the complexity and the quietly engaging nature of his film, one of the year’s most emotionally devastating.

08. Film Socialisme / Jean-Luc Godard
This French-Swiss iconoclast's first all-digital feature is in many ways his most cinematically and politically engaged since 1998's “Historie(s) du Cinema.” A three-part symphonic essay on life during wartime and the decline of the European Empire, "Film Socialisme" examines political responsibility via aesthetic reconciliation, as an array of sound editing and montage techniques piece together the greater narrative of Godard’s place within the maelstrom. As a filmmaker equipped only with what current technology has to offer—and in a self-imposed race towards the realization of a cinematic reconfiguration of the form’s responsibility and potential for change—Godard continues to argue for a complete rebirth of a classic aesthetic model. Equal parts prismatic cruise around Godard’s stylistic harbor, landlocked travelogue across greater war-torn Europe, and cinematic reconstruction of humanity’s cyclical atrocities, “Film Socialisme” spins something beautiful, provocative, and confounding from the mess we’ve wrought.

07. Aurora / Cristi Puiu
A nightmare serial-killer narrative with almost zero disclosure offered across its vast, three hour expanse, Puiu’s provocatively minimalist “Aurora” observes mundane human activity through a succession of alternately claustrophobic and expansive compositions. Casting himself as the blank-faced subject of his own saga, Puiu provokes a brave dialectic between audience and director, further implicating himself in the methodical exposition of his elliptical anti-procedural. The banal becomes loaded, motivation becomes a means unto itself; and the aesthetic has already proven influential, with Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s masterful “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” bearing traces of a similarly guarded, richly ambiguous approach to narrative. Together, these filmmakers are rewriting the rules of film grammar, and as the ripples continue to be felt, it stands to reason that “Aurora” could be seen as a watershed, the work that heroically pushed things that much further toward the unknown.

06. Meek’s Cutoff / Kelly Reichardt
Reichardt’s most ambitious and precisely drawn work to date is a genre film by classification only, stripped of ornamentation and extraneous expositional conceits. It’s also, paradoxically, her most aesthetically impressive and engaging work, an observational, revisionist western with stronger ties to Italian neo-realism than to the John Ford school of classical filmmaking. The sun-bleached vistas, crystal blue horizons, and primary-hued dresses of the female-anchored wagon train—captured indelibly by Chris Blauvelt’s Academy ratio lensing—embolden the threadbare narrative, which grows evermore intangible even as events and motivations come into focus. An unexpected, extremely impressive stylistic leap beyond her previously intimate, small-scale work, “Meek’s Cutoff” retains Reichardt’s acute dedication to character while expanding her narrative purview, dissolving the schematic construction that would traditionally mark this as product instead of the mytho-poetic portrait it truly is.

05. The Tree of Life / Terrence Malick
Appropriately enough for the year’s most ambitious statement, Malick’s messianic epic attempts to encompass everything messy, beautiful, intimate, and overwhelming about life. Few working directors, let alone one toiling within the Hollywood system, would undertake such a project, which literally moves us from the inception of the universe to the afterlife in under 150 minutes. But for Malick, our most deeply spiritual and consistently visionary filmmaker, ‘Tree’ feels like a logical end point, a summation of everything grand, transcendent, and occasionally frustrating about his process projected into a single, staggering work of intense commitment. In juxtaposing a thought-to-be autobiographical ‘50s family narrative with the maneuverings of the cosmos, Malick strikes a unique chord most anyone can identify with. Anyone who’s ever felt overwhelmed by their place in the grand scheme of existence will surely see themselves reflected somewhere within the film’s shimmering surfaces or its yearning familial dynamic.

04. House of Pleasures / Bertrand Bonello
In transposing some of the key thematic and aesthetic preoccupations of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “Flowers of Shanghai” from 19th century China to the sex trade in a fin-de-siècle brothel in Paris, Bonello both spiritually enriches and subverts the artifice of the traditional period piece. A boldly sensual, near psychedelic awakening to a more shrouded corner of Parisian high society, “House of Pleasures” hypnotizes via languorous pace, poetic dialogue, and left-field soundtrack accompaniment (the Moody Blues have found an unexpectedly apt posthumous venue), tilling the succulent vein of a cloistered existence wherein each personality is devoured by a society it gives so much of itself to. “If we don’t burn, how will the night be lit?” one prescient young lady ponders during the film’s most searing sequence, and Bonello, now working at heights equal to any other European filmmaker, answers sympathetically, allowing these transient souls an opportunity to ignite the possibilities of a chamber-based cinema.

03. Certified Copy / Abbas Kiarostami
Bravely exporting his singular method, Iran’s most influential and important filmmaker has found renewed passion in the potential of narrative, thereby embarking on what promises to be a fascinating new act in a career marked by repetition, authenticity, and variations on very specific themes. In this sense, “Certified Copy” is a reconciliatory work for Kiarostami, though a sumptuous visual palette and a distinctly European sense of narrative elision moves the film into uncharted aesthetic territory. The director’s increasingly cerebral, sometimes playful, always evolving dramatization of a pair of ambiguously defined verbal sparring partners takes on contrasting meanings and proposes fresh implications when approached from different perspectives, inviting the viewer in while privileging individual interpretation in uncommonly gracious terms. Through an inversion of his fundamental text, Kiarostami has constructed a key work in the grand tradition of the European art film.

02. Mysteries of Lisbon / Raoúl Ruiz
Before passing away this past August, Chilean filmmaker Raoúl Ruiz left us with what could be seen as the defining work of his nearly five decades-long career. This breathtakingly grandiose, epically staged 19th century drama bears witness to a changing of the guard, an end of an era, the collateral effect of one man’s existence on the lives of a privileged generation. In attempting to encompass all the many facets of an antiquated European society, Ruiz has constructed a frighteningly detailed, ravishingly dramatic tale of thwarted love, festering jealously, simmering anger, and vitriolic contempt. Working at a height only sporadically tapped since his mid-‘80s apex, Ruiz fashions a visual novel from the most intrinsic of human emotions, invigorating staid period practices with an aesthetic flair both reverent and valiant. As a standalone statement, “Mysteries of Lisbon” is a landmark achievement; as a capstone to one of the greatest careers in modern cinema, it’s both lament and testimony.

01. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives / Apichatpong Weerasethakul
There’s no shortage nowadays of strange films leaning on gimmicks or genre trappings to compensate for a lack of truly unique thinking. Rare is the movie that not only crossbreeds its various thematic and visual strains but circumvents its obtuseness to the point where every film in its vicinity appears skewed and unnatural by comparison. The dazzlingly original, riveting modern masterpiece “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” enriches, embodies, and erodes all such classifications, teeming with insight and vivid clarity into the soul of a man not necessarily nostalgic for but enlivened by the capacity of the human spirit. Apichatpong’s first largely linear narrative dives headfirst into premonition, apparition, and reincarnation with a Buddhist’s serenity, emboldening the director’s themes as he subtly galvanizes his aesthetic. Ominous, playful, and consistently riveting, ‘Uncle Boonmee’ stands as the most transcendent work yet from the world’s most vital young filmmaker.

• For more Year in Review features, see our Feature Articles section.

Feature by: Jordan Cronk