We Need Cinema

Today an essay I wrote & edited about The Hudsucker Proxy ran over at Rogerebert.com. Today Philip Seymour Hoffman died. Today Eduardo Coutinho was killed. A few days ago it was Pete Seeger, Maximilian Schell and Miklós Jancsó. I have no energy to write. Nothing to say. I'm defeated by all of this. I'm going to post some thoughts I'd already written about Hudsucker because I want to do something with myself before I retire from today, content as I am to watch The Long Day Closes and not speak another word. It really was a shit day. Today we need cinema.

After years of hearing about what a joyless slog Intolerable Cruelty was, imagine my surprise when I discovered it was a delicious confectionary of expertly crafted wordplay and near-explosive levels of chemistry between its two quite flappable leads. "How had this happened?" I wondered, while laughing my ass off, "how could a film this good by America's cinematic sweethearts have been swept under the rug like that?" The Coen Brothers were at least used to that sort of disappointment. After all, they'd made The Hudsucker Proxy. Intolerable Cruelty is a delight, to be true, an homage to Howard Hawks, Leo McCary and Preston Sturges' comedies of remarriage centering appropriately enough on a divorce attorney who tastes his own bitter medicine and as well as it works just as well as tribute and stand alone comedy (George Clooney's comedic prowess never gets enough notice for my liking). Next to Hudsucker, however, Intolerable looks more like the work of Mitchell Leisen than Preston Sturges. Sturges was the genuine article in American comedy. In his best films, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, Hail The Conquering Hero and Unfaithfully Yours (As long as we're sticking up for the underdog here I'll just say that Unfaithfully Yours is a gem and I will hear no one besmirch it), he balanced humour so bold you wonder how it slipped past the censors, scabrous satire of values unique to wartime America and romance that shot past heartwarming into gripping. He had such a perfect hand with sentiment that he could appear to be making fun of the very notion of it, even as he freely indulged. He was one of a kind. But leave it to The Coen Brothers to make a film that pretends to his throne and earns the right to sit there. Painstakingly crafted through nostalgia-colored glasses and set in a place we recognize as our past but in no definite moment (despite the assurance that we're in the 1958 of Coen favourite Separate Tables), corporate stooge Tim Robbins rockets to the top of a toy company despite having no knowledge of the job or that he's being set up for a literal and metaphorical fall by his handler, a never-sleazier Paul Newman, cashing in on his impossible-to-dislike irascibility and charm. The boardroom antics, Sturges-esque wordplay and bureaucratic chutes-and-ladders are hilarious, but once Jennifer Jason Leigh enters the story, this stops being a comedy no one laughed at and becomes a masterpiece whose failure isn't just baffling, it's a tragedy on par with the sinking of the Titanic, the execution of the Rosenbergs or the cancellation of Pushing Daisies. Leigh's portrayal of a savvy journalist who goes undercover to scoop Robbins' rise to fame mirrors Jean Arthur in Mr. Deeds Goes To Town but without hiding her unscrupulousness so disingenuously as Frank Capra does. It's a testament to the Coen's writing and feather-light direction (rendered on resplendent art deco production design, for my money their best, through the prism of Roger Deakins dark-matter-heavy photography) that they pursue a route that out-bleaks famous Scrooges like Capra and Sturges, and still manages to seem more lighthearted than Meet John Doe or Unfaithfully Yours, which flirt with murder and suicide as aggressively as Leigh does with Robbins. Leigh's feisty journalist is a more endearing proto-feminist trouser-sporter than Cate Blanchet's Hepburn impersonation; better still, she brings a soft sexuality to her role that outstrips even the Claudette Colberts and Barbara Stanwycks of the golden age, and again, genuinely. Through the performance, through her palpably masked longing, through her robust personality. She maybe a shade of fast-talking-dames past, but she's a fully realized character, and if you don't want to marry her by the time the credits role, you must be a Franklin Pangborn character. Or worse, William Demarest. I still marvel at the level of detail that went into making Hudsucker Proxy such a loving, feel-good tribute to loving, feel-good comedies so dipped in sarcasm you could drown in it. And that's even without taking into account how fucking funny it is. It's that rare film that gets nearly everything right (wouldn't be on this list if it were actually perfect). When the film failed at the box office, I bet Preston Sturges took a belt for both Joel and Ethan Coen in auteur heaven. "Don't worry, boys. They didn't get me, either."

Three hours from Chicago. Inside Llewyn Davis.

I have a piece on Inside Llewyn Davis over at Mostlyfilm.com this week in time for its UK release. And below is what I wrote about it for my best of the year list. It would have been my best film of the year if I hadn't seen the other great dark, romantic period piece of last year, The Immigrant. Though that won't see proper release for another few months. The thing about Llewyn Davis is that even having said all I've said, there's an inexhaustible quality to the film; you could write ten thousand words a day for a month and still it would reward repeat viewings. For instance I never got around to mentioning until right now that every single song in the film is about leaving and dying. That Llewyn's journey is toward annihilation. Toward a dark, uncertain tomorrow. It rejects the future. It rejects anyone else's notion of success. It rejects bullshit. No film has ever shown me how I, we, live today. If it can't say anything about the future it's because none of us know and we're all scared. The film's finest moment of reflection comes in a road-side diner. Llewyn sits opposite two strangers, miles from home or fortune, in a room echoing the sound of passing cars like the howls of rage and disappointment he's been hearing all his life, racing by like every single opportunity he's missed. And he's here. Three hours from Chicago, in the blinding dark. 

"Guys, we can't ALL identify with Llewyn Davis." wrote Matt Prigge after a few weeks of everyone in the world walking out of Joel & Ethan Coen's latest dark night of the soul and feeling like they'd lived some part of it before. In defense of everyone else, if you're a man who's as used to failure as success, or more accurately, have gotten so used to failure that success must be taken in microscopic doses, you understand what it means to be Llewyn Davis. Who's Llewyn Davis? He's the wrong cat. He could have made it but the pool was too full of contenders just like him who knew how to play the game a little better, or didn't know there was a game to play. Davis knows only too well that the game is real and rigged to boot. Anyone else who ever figured this out and said "no" was going to get an extra barb in their heart whenever he slips and falls, whenever he realizes his loved ones are getting fucked over, whenever he pushes his family away, everytime he nails one of his songs to no applause, and especially when he sits at that lunch counter with no money to his name, taking his feet gently out of his sopping wet shoes hoping they'll dry faster. That particular close-up broke my heart in six places. I lost count of the injustices he suffered that I'd also lived through; when I left it was into pouring rain, feeling like there was lead in my shoes. If there's solace, and there is, it's that the Coen Brothers know how to render the struggle for acceptance and the cruelty of fate better than just about anyone. They've returned to the colour palette that made Hudsucker Proxy feel immortal; director of photography Bruno Delbonnel's humane camera turning even the worst demons on Llewyn's shoulder into angels. And then there's the music. I'm definitely someone who's had more than his fill of Marcus Mumford and have on occassion hoped he would pack up his guitar and leave me alone, but his voice works as the broken promise of achievement. That radio-ready voice could and may well have been Llewyn's ticket to fame, but he'll never know that world. All he has is the bittersweet sound of Mumford (or Mike Timlin) to taunt him. Nevermind that it's their saddest screenplay, their most breath-taking evocation of any time period and that in Oscar Isaac one of the greatest performances they've ever directed, the Coens made me understand and even come to appreciate Mumford's voice. If I didn't already think this was their best film, that fact alone would have pushed it into classic territory. Forget that, though, it's too personal. Inside Llewyn Davis combines the lovely Folkways-styled soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the often terrifying depths of human behavior, drive and solitude of No Country For Old Men, the Job-like suffering and hysterical dark humour that drove A Serious Man, the frustration and injustice at the heart of The Man Who Wasn't There and somehow manages to keep alive the romantic worldview that kept Hudsucker afloat, not to mention following just three years after that film's 1958 New York setting. It's like a greatest hits record, but every cut sounds brand new. Who doesn't wish they could achieve that. In the meantime, we can settle for feeling like Llewyn Davis, putting the guitar down to finish the last verse unaccompanied knowing that no matter how good we're doing, there's no money in it.

The Rosenbaum Test: The Greatest Living Narrative Filmmakers

A little while ago Jonathan Rosenbaum, in whose direction myself and most other critics genuflect, reposted an article of his on the master director Michelangelo Antonioni he wrote in the early 90s. The interesting thing is that he starts his article with a quick list of who he thinks might be the 12 greatest living narrative filmmakers, and of course the director of Red Desert and The Passenger made the cut. He'd have made mine too at the time. This got me and many others thinking about how to answer that question today. Kevin B. Lee got a discussion going and Richard Brody posted his own list with a complete set of guidelines. I cribbed a bit from those guidelines and tried to make my own list, which proved sensationally difficult. I love a lot of directors, but are they "the greatest"? Can their work never be equaled? Could anyone else even pretend to their style? It took some incredible concentration to get it down just to 16. Never one to suffer alone, I asked everyone else to throw their two cents in and here's what we came up with.


Scout Tafoya

1. Marco Bellocchio
2. Terence Davies
3. Claire Denis
4. Philippe Grandrieux
5. Terrence Malick
6. Chantal Akerman
7. Tsai Ming-Liang
8. Agnès Varda
9. Wes Anderson
10. Alain Resnais
11. Francis Ford Coppola
12. PT Anderson

Honorable Mentions: Manoel De Oliveira (who'd be in my top 12 but I don't want to jinx him - I want him to live forever), Léos Carax, Tomas Alfredson, Catherine Breillat, Dan Sallitt, David Lynch, Werner Herzog, Jim Jarmusch, David Cronenberg, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Matteo Garrone, Paolo Sorrentino, Takashi Miike, Richard Lester, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Terry Gilliam, Volker Schlöndorff, William Klein, Roman Polanski, Sofia Coppola, & Gene Wilder.

Noah Lyons 

1. David Lynch
2. Jean-Luc Godard
3. Lars von Trier
4. Michel Haneke
5. Woody Allen
6. Werner Herzog
7. Roman Polanski
8. Alejandro Jodorowsky
9. PT Anderson
10. Steven Soderbergh
11. Yorgos Lanthimos


Dan Khan

1. Steven Soderbergh
2. P.T. Anderson
3. Lars Von Trier
4. Agnès Varda
5. Jim Jarmusch
6. Mike Leigh
7. Wong Kar-Wai
8. Terrence Mallick
9. Jean-Luc Godard
10. David Cronenberg
11. Michael Mann
12. Alejandro Jodorowsky


Gifford Elliott

1. Lars Von Trier
2. Wong Kar-Wai
3. PT Anderson
4. Jean Luc-Godard
5. Werner Herzog
6. Woody Allen
7. Roman Polanski
8. Martin Scorsese
9. Jane Campion
10. The Coen Brothers
11. Wes Anderson
12. Alfonso Cuarón

Honorable Mentions: Mel Brooks, Sofia Coppola, Terrence Malick, Steven Soderbergh, Steven Spielberg, Hayao Miyazaki, David Cronenberg, Francis Ford Coppola & Agnès Varda.


Tim Earle

1. Pedro Almodóvar
2. Park Chan Wook
3. Hayao Miyazaki
4. Steven Soderberg
5. Wes Anderson
6. Terence Malick
7. Joel and Ethan Coen
8. Steven Spielberg
9. Martin Scorsese
10. Terry Gilliam
11. Edgar Wright
12. Tomas Alfredson


Fox Johnson

1. David Fincher
2. PT Anderson
3. Joel & Ethan Coen
4. David Cronenberg
5. Ridley Scott
6. Martin Scorsese
7. Michael Mann
8. Steven Spielberg
9. Terrence Malick
10. Wes Anderson
11. Roman Polanski
12. Steven Soderbergh

The Top Ten Films (Maudit) of the 90s.

The 90s. The last era about which the phrase "they don't make 'em like they used to" can plausibly be used. Because, and many people will blame/thank digital replacing or at least competing with celluloid, the medium has changed storytelling. In microcosm, look at Jonathan English's film Ironclad. Here are some characters, here are their weapons, here's the king they oppose, here's a castle, they will defend it and die one at a time, one of them lives, the end. Efficiency? Maybe. It's easy to be efficient when you hire actors so good they're practically stock types and forget character development. Entertaining? Sure, yeah. I don't regret watching it, only that it made me see without doubt that the rules have changed. Ten years ago, Ironclad wouldn't have necessarily been a better film, just one that left a stronger imprint in its goodness or badness; Highlander or First Knight leave no room for meh's. They're fucking awful or you watch them with your friends in rotation next to Point Break and Lost Boys. With film there is a weight to every close-up and the best directors of the era knew it. Robert Redford may have lost his flair for suspense, but he still understands the weight of a shot and how to pace, which is why I didn't hate The Conspirator as much as everyone else did. Not a great movie, but it has the sturdiness of a man who learned the craft several generation changes ago. Gregg Araki still struggles with these very basic concepts; Larry Clark has actually gotten better because he had no idea about how to use film for anything other than image capture; digital's ease with light has made him a more discerning director of images. Gaspar Noe, whatever his faults, I think is still probably capable of weight if he'd slow his fucking camera down a minute. To combat the inherent drop in depth, Leos Carax has actually rooted his usually flight-prone steadicam to focus more on the faces of his protagonists, rather than following them as they float through space or run through the streets like wild animals; he's deliberate on digital in a way he only ever hinted at in his best moments on film. And no, it is not randomly that I use these names. For when the true effect of the close-up diminished by a thinness of the image so goes the power of film to really shock.

Take The Human Centipede, please. How can something that looks less substantial than a lot of senior thesis films have any power to shock or disgust, except by mere suggestion alone. Would I care to undergo the surgery myself? No. Is watching it worth the suggestion? No, because it fails to live up to its outlandish premise in execution and leaves you nothing to think about when the filth's been shed. The only thing I can think of with less formal value or narrative energy is a Jim Wynorski/Roger Corman made-for-syfy cheapie or possibly a straight-to-obscurity Geno Mcgahee horror film. I'd wager good money that the reason Ken Russell's The Devils and the few other films he produced that decade were so truly hated was because Russell's style had remained intact from his productions of The Music Lovers, The Boyfriend and Women In Love. Not only were audiences who wanted him to do justice to classic novels with modern implications disappointed by his move away from romance and into psychedelic torture and scalpel-sharp satire, they were tricked by his images, which had the same texture and moved in the same fleet way as his earlier crowd-pleasers. A fantastic rug-pull from a man who made rug-pulling his life's work. Ditto Carax, whose audiences wanted something with the same joyous air, and were instead rewarded with an accurate representation of what their expectations had done to his psyche. He used their expectations against them and brought them further into his mind than they would have ever asked to go. This was at once the definition of cinema, and so much more.

And now, the inspiration for this piece - The AV Club and Slant firing off dueling best of the 90s lists and Peter Labuza in Film Comment offering his take on the film maudit (for those who don't know the handshake, that means 'cursed film'), using Dennis Lim and Criterion's recent appreciations and restorations, respectively, of Heaven's Gate. I disagree with both of the lists strongly, because for the sake of doing the same that some of our most heralded auteurs do - throwing out the rule book for the sake of it - place the work of Paul Verhoeven higher than people who truly mastered the form to do something more than fuck with you for an hour and a half. I'm not saying Verhoeven isn't capable of great art (Black Book is really fantastic and his best film in my mind is the staggeringly awesome Flesh + Blood) but I resent anyone who tells me that Starship Troopers is a better film than Ed Wood. Subjectively speaking - they're wrong. Objectively speaking - give me a fucking break. Being in on a joke the filmmakers didn't fully comprehend doesn't make the film better, it just makes you on its wavelength, at best. If the director of that bullshit Red Dawn remake had come out and said "I'm a marxist and this is a joke," the movie wouldn't suddenly become a fucking masterpiece. But then, I suppose, that's what critics are here for. To exhume, to re-evaluate, to push their personal films above the accepted canon. Labuza points out that Andrew Sarris probably took greater pride in telling people how much he loved Lola Montès because of how poorly it had fared with critics upon its initial release. And time has vindicated both Sarris and Lola. It's a masterpiece in more than one set of eyes with a Criterion release to go with its new status, just like Heaven's Gate. And for the record I agree. Lola Montès is, to me, Ophuls' most beautiful and heartbreaking movie, and the man made more than a few beautiful, heartbreaking movies.

Which brings me to my real question, and it's nagged at me for months now. There are more film critics today than there ever have been (don't ask to see my research on this bullshit claim) which means that the odds that a film, no matter how wrongheaded, will be Universally panned are impossibly small. I grew up hating people like Paul W.S. Anderson, Michael Bay, Tony Scott and Dennis Dugan and largely the critical establishment had my back, but thanks to the internet, every one of these guys has a champion in 
'print'. In consulting reviews for Pola X from its turn-of-the-century release date, the overwhelming consensus is "it's a failure, but still worth watching." So, my question is, why? Why does a film that does not subscribe to narrative logic as we typically understand it (and film critics ought to have a broader understanding these days), have to be called a failure? Labuza cites Margaret as a film that was rescued from Maudit status in a matter of months. Of the six critics who saw it (which made up something like 34% of its first-run audience) four of them liked it enough to recommend it. The other two found it not terrible but too broad, which they failed to realize was the point. Soon the six became twelve, and so on and so on and now it's very nearly canonized. So, to quote Labuza, "One might wonder if there are even bad movies anymore..." The Kafka-esque truth is almost definitely no. I have a problem with tastemakers martyring Tony Scott, who made one masterpiece and a few good movies besides (not great, merely good) movies in a thirty year career, and lauding Brian De Palma who never once made a good film, while Margaret and Pola X have trouble getting their due because a handful of critics and distributors don't have faith in them. Heaven's Gate was blamed for the Iranian Hostage Crisis in its day; it still has its detractors, but at least now its viewed outside of the context of the curbstomping it received back when. In the age of the internet, as Labuza points out, distributors will have to try very hard to create circumstances where a film needs rescuing and can't get it. Thank god because I'm tired of reading decades old reviews that cost artists their faith in the seventh art. I fear for John Carter and Andrew Stanton, two men I want to succeed more than anything. So, while the obvious choice in response to both of these pieces was to ask my friends for their favourite films of the 90s, I also decided to go one step further. Below their choices, based solely on love and appreciation, are my selections of the best (whatever the fuck that means these days) Film Maudits of the 90s, the last decade capable of producing them. Whatever your thoughts about these 'failures,' they at least had the power to be hated.

First, our personal lists of favourites from the 90s:

Sean Van Deuren

Eyes Wide Shut
Bringing Out The Dead
Groundhog Day
Being John Malkovich
Rushmore
Magnolia
Schizoplis
The Thin Red Line
Sweet And Lowdown
Fargo

Noah Aust

The Celebration
Europa
City of Lost Children
12 Monkeys
Fight Club
Princess Mononoke
Night on Earth
Delicatessen
Being John Malkovitch
Akira Kurosawa's Dreams

Tim Earle

Miller's crossing
Fargo
The Big Lebowski
Fight Club
Porco Rosso
Toy Story 1 and 2
LA Story
Schindler's List
Being John Malkovitch
Goodfellas

Fox Johnson

Saving Private Ryan
Pulp Fiction
Fargo / Big Lebowski
Forrest Gump
Se7en
Toy Story
Jurassic Park
The Matrix
L.A. Confidential
Fight Club

Dan Khan

Three Colors: Red
Three Kings
Boogie Nights
Before Sunrise
The Sweet Hereafter
Heat
Pulp Fiction
Goodfellas
Abre Los Ojos
Breaking the Waves

Scout

The Long Day Closes

Sleepy Hollow

The Double Life of Veronique

L.A. Confidential

Rushmore

Last of the Mohicans

Trainspotting 

Pulp Fiction

Heavenly Creatures

Topsy Turvy

And now onto the maudits!

1492
by Ridley Scott

You'd think the man who reinvented/revitalized/restarted Sci-fi in the 80s could do no wrong. But Ridley Scott loves a challenge. Blade Runner and Alien back to back is a feat almost no one in his generation can touch. So we can forgive him picking the script for Legend, if it existed in any other form than cocktail napkin scribblings, because it afforded him the chance to show off majestically. Ralph Bakshi and whoever was manning the autopilot at Disney must have very seriously contemplated faking their own deaths when Legend was released and was nearly the most dazzling and diverting piece of visual art the decade produced. Did it make sense? There was no internal continuity, but that didn't stop Lord of the fucking Rings, did it? Fantasy, horror, sci-fi? What next? The erotic thriller, of course. Not exactly bountiful visual stuff, but at least he could ground them in realism and conduct stake-outs like ballet. Then the 80s action film. Still in Legend territory as far as the script's concerned, but in anyone else's hands it would have been much, much worse. One 'women's picture' later and he's ready to dive headlong back into the big budget period film he made his reputation on. Another challenge, Maestro? Make a film about Christopher Columbus, who may actually deserves the mantle reserved for Jimmy Carter as history's greatest monster, where he's the hero. Easier said than done, according to everyone but me. Do I have a complaint? The Vangelis music. Lightning didn't strike twice on that collaboration. Beyond that, 1492 feels like it was shot in 3D, such is its visual splendor and the ebullience of the sound design. It does manage to be that rare film about hubris that suffers from it, which is its own reward. Thanks to the nightmarish color corrected visuals, the foreign (to its heroes) setting of the main conflict, the practical effects and handcrafted sets, and that truly bizarre electronic score, 1492 has the distinction of being the Sorcerer of its decade. Did the world need a remake of The Wages of Fear? No, but William Friedkin turned in his one bonafide art film when given the task. Did the world need three simultaneous films about Columbus? No, but I would never have professed to being capable of feeling sympathy for the man, either, and Scott made me. That is his genius. Existing in the shadows of major studios, executives, and great big stacks of money, Ridley Scott was the lone artist capable of coming out unscathed, turning standard issue genre fare into human interest stories-cum-films noir. Can't seem to turn down a bad script, but when he can take an idea as misguided as an adventure film about the world's most famous murderer and make you empathize with him (a trick he'd repeat in Hannibal), even feel sorry for the man when his dreams are in danger of slipping away from him, then I forgive his hubris everytime. I should always like to be led astray by something so gorgeous.

Alien³
by David Fincher

Not many people know I have an unpaid internship defending Alien³ on the internet. I get paid nothing and go around looking for people who write it off or disparage it in the vain hope of one day being able to talk to David Fincher about it. This sounds like a joke, but if I could put it in on my non-existent resume, I would. In a heartbeat. Few Hollywood disaster stories interest me as much as that of the third Alien movie. On paper the names they got make sense. Ridley Scott, James Cameron, David Fincher, Jean-Pierre Jeunet. At one time or another these men could meld visual artistry with gut-level genre filmmaking that made audiences the world over swoon and empty their pockets in the same gesture. Of course the truth makes far less sense. Cameron has since dissolved into a harmless populist with no better an idea of how films fit together than George Lucas. Jeunet's film founders badly as he was, in a decision that uncannily echoes Anglo hiring François Truffaut over Jean-Luc Godard to direct Fahrenheit 451, picked to direct the most icky and philosophical film of the franchise over his much darker collaborator Marc Caro, who would have committed to the task more fully. Fincher was simply lucky or unlucky, depending on how you look at it. A film student who'd charmed his way into a career directing adverts and music videos was chosen to handle a franchise of such importance, I assume because producer David Giler assumed he'd be grateful for the job and do whatever was asked of him. Not so. Fincher immediately set about claiming his first big budget film for himself. The edit would mangle his baby beyond repair, but the initiated know that the Assemble Cut of Alien³, featuring most everything they removed from the theatrical, is the prototypical work of its creator. With Se7en, The Game and Fight Club he would push his camera beneath the surface of wealthy America (like the one occupied by his Alien³ producer/tormentors) and find the grimy secrets we all keep. His knack for dressing horrific environs was so legendary that in 2003, after Panic Room's release, marking the end of the first phase of his career, Patton Oswalt could reference "a dank, David Fincher-esque kitchen" in a stand-up bit and everyone in his audience knew what he was talking about. That all starts here. Alien³ is a fantastic directorial achievement, even if the script is aimless bullshit written by executives on a deadline. The filthy set dressing is here in full force as are the spiderweb like interiors, the air of helplessness, the sense of a higher power fucking you over for the sport of it and a color scheme that comes out from underneath Ridley Scott's legacy on the Nostromo to become something unique: a gothic fever-dream of orange hue so intense it's as if the prison is lit by Hieronymus Bosch's hellfire. Playing like a big budget sequel to Ghosts...of the Civil Dead with the rough edges sanded down or a Sci-Fi take on Heaven's Gate, Alien³ follows a group of not very convincingly repentant prisoners who've turned to jesus for salvation from themselves as they fight first temptation in the form of a never-hotter Sigourney Weaver and then face her protector/lover/rapist/creator, a phallic alien that runs around on all fours, a bastardized mutant from the first film's more elegant designs. The effects weren't ready for this film and date it badly, the performances range from sublime to dire, and the edit is one of the worst on record (if the film had any more noticeably mismatched ADR, all the dialogue would all be voice over), but none of that is on Fincher. His achievements are myriad and are the reason the film has become something of an obsession for me. Take the genius scene that properly starts the assemble cut: a lone man in a coat deliberately too big for him walks alone on a beach looking tiny next to disused construction and foundry equipment, the air so thick with pollutants it could be Pompeii circa 79. These men are all alone in the universe and Fincher finds the simplest ways of hammering home their existential dilemmas, only ever crossing the leaden symbolism line in the last minute of the movie (which definitely has the feel of a studio note). These are the angry men he'd find later in basements and in police stations. Looking for Fincher in Alien³ is hard but rewarding. David Cairns brilliantly points out that between the baldness,low-angles and oppresive lighting, Fincher was trying to make a sci-fi version of the The Passion of Joan of Arc. Picture Cameron trying that for a second. It's difficult imagining what his experience was like making the film, but when you see his fingerprints in there, it becomes hard to look away. I once watched it ten times in a week, paying careful attention, as I always do, to the stunningly strange climax in the leadworks. I've never been able to adequately explain what about this sequence I find so fascinating. Something about the inevitability of death and the way it manifests itself on the faces of the convicts who've survived everything their god can throw at them, now lining up in a labyrinth to give it away. I think maybe I love it so much because it's endemic of the whole film. Here they are on a deserted planet, underground, no less, doing something that may well save all life in the universe and no one (not even the audience of the movie, thanks to the fucking editing) will ever know about it. No one was aware that the trials of this  misbegotten, ill-advised, unnecessary sequel would pave the way for the spiritual heir to Stanley Kubrick, responsible for more trends in modern cinema than you can count one hand, untold billions of dollars and dozens of Academy Award nominations. Just as the game is about to start, one prisoner casually asks another "do you believe in this heaven shit?" I could picture that line coming from any of Fincher's heroes right on through to Noomi Rapace's Lizbeth Salander. I could picture heaven for Fincher looking a lot like a man being nominated for the highest honor we have for a director in North America, for a film he'd had complete control over. He's learned a lot in the intervening years, but I think the time has come to give credit to the man for turning a nightmare into a work of art and back again.

The Rainbow Thief
by Alejandro Jodorowsky

Of his two final films, Santa Sangre is more obviously the work of its director, Chilean madman Alejandro Jodorowsky, but The Rainbow Thief, its comparatively mawkish companion piece, is a side of the master I can't resist. Back in the 70s and between pre-production phases of his failed Dune adaptation, Jodorowsky directed Tusk, a heartfelt and completely forgotten adventure film that played like Au Hazard Balthasar by way of The Jungle Book. Tt had nothing of its auteur caustic surrealism, which probably killed it. In point of fact it's downright sentimental, something only visible in a half-second's aside in El Topo when the gunslinger cheers up his dwarf lover after they're forced to make love for some gunslingers' entertainment. This movie could have played to kids if it weren't shot entirely in extreme wide angles that destroy any sense of its human characters. They're tiny figures in a huge landscape, the titular elephant the film's only real hero. Santa Sangre is brilliant, but returns to the well that Jodorowsky dug for Fando Y Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain, but with a different rhythm to guide it. The Rainbow Thief is an unabashed heart-string tugger, even if its filtered through abstraction (long sections pass without dialogue, the side characters never get names or jobs beyond providing bite-sized whimsy, characters' motivations are hardly worthy of the name) and the director himself has disowned it. But I give him more credit than he gives himself. As an avid El Topo and Holy Mountain fan, you can imagine my sensibilities are a little cynical and harsh, but even my heart melts for The Rainbow Thief. How can you not love a film that reunites Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif for only the second time following Lawrence of Arabia and Night of the Generals? How can you not love a film that worships the maligned and forgotten in ways that anticipate The Fisher King and doesn't make you suffer Robin Williams? How can you not love a film in which Christopher Lee plays not only a sympathetic character for once, but a lovable, billionaire whore monger? How can you not a love a film that brings a dog back from the dead? Jodorowsky might not want to own up to having a heart, but here's exhibit A and I respect the man all the more for taking a chance on showing it to us. He may never make another film and that would be tragic, but I feel blessed to have seen the last gift he's given us.


Bram Stoker's Dracula
by Francis Ford Coppola

Nothing I'll ever say will make Keanu Reeves' performance better. There is no healing that scar, forever on the face of this singular achievement. Many people wished it had been silent, that there'd been last-minute casting changes, that Francis Ford Coppola had never stooped back into the genre he'd started his career with, that the whole affair would have been deemed folly and smothered in its infancy. It would have saved them the time and attention they spent killing it later. I don't pretend the film's a misunderstood masterpiece, only that it is the most cinematic and unforgettable adaptation that Bram Stoker's novel received since its first, F.W. Murnau's illegal and bountiful Nosferatu. And as much as I love Nosferatu (by any measure one of the most important horror films in history), its style can't compete with star Max Schreck's performance; Bela Lugosi's hammy pantomime was the most energetic thing about the first film to have the word 'Dracula' spoken aloud; in seven movies, Hammer never gave Christopher Lee a vehicle worthy of his performance as the count; and the less said about the John Badham version, the fuckin' better. Coppola in essence gave the film the mechanized, expressionistic treatment it missed out on by being directed by Murnau, a naturalist, instead of showmen like Robert Wiene or Fritz Lang, as if George Melies himself shot second unit. Coppola and his son did all the effects in camera and their work is nothing short of magic, the kind of thing Scorsese would rhapsodize in Hugo (not many people connected the two films last year, but they're practically siblings). Nevermind the performances, Coppola had the modern equivalents of Clara Bow and Rudolph Valentino on his hands, who gives a shit if they embarrassed themselves a little? The film was the thing and it would outlive any single element. Dracula is like one of those giant clocks that Scorsese's boy hero keeps winding. The public knows the time, but can't see the gears turning. All they know is that when they're late it's the clock's fault. So when no one bought what they were seeing, Coppola walked home with the blame. Fine, sure, yeah, but has anyone who's seen this blood red adaptation ever forgotten its more bizarre tangents? Have these moments of pointed unreality ever left your nightmares for good? I'd rather go up river with Coppola anyday than watch someone spin their wheels in a genre they don't appreciate. My time will forever be his to waste.


Dead Man
by Jim Jarmusch

With each passing year I come to see Dead Man as an essential American masterpiece, warts and all. I've also come to see that there may be no such thing as a perfect western. The closest anyone's gotten would be The Searchers, followed closely by The Wild Bunch, which is the more effecting of the two. After that we run into grey areas. Surely Boetticher's paranoid chamber dramas The Tall T and Ride Lonesome deserve credit for their painterly aesthetics and ingenuity? Monte Hellman used the western to throw darts at our psychological complacency in low budget success stories Ride The Whirlwind and The Shooting. Anthony Mann surely deserves a little credit for bringing out the darkest side of Jimmy Stewart in the westerns they made together? Or how about more recent fare? James Mangold's 3:10 To Yuma kicks the shit out of the Delmer Daves original for sheer excitement, craft and performance; it's final minutes are almost too exciting for words. Andrew Dominik seems to captured more beauty in Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford than a lifetime of watching could ever appreciate. I'd argue that if you took the best things from these movies, you might arrive at the perfect western, but who the fuck wants perfection when all these jagged edges are so mesmerizing? Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man is his most successful toe-dipping into a genre (Ghost Dog is rough, even for a samurai film; The Limits of Control, however breath-taking, is barely the lone-killer film it masquerades as) and he gets far more mileage out of its inherent elements than he ever could breaking out of jail or into a gangster's mansion. Simply put, the western landscape he drags through is the perfect compliment to his style. Surrounded by dilapidated buildings or beautiful Spanish architecture, your mind could wander from the characters that these vistas dwarf. Not so here, where the land is the crux of its heroes journey. To paraphrase Mike D'Angelo on This Must Be The Place, every new scene is the reason the movie exists. Johnny Depp hops into the wrong bed to find comfort in a town he foolishly believed could hide any, and winds up gutshot for his sins. With the help of a sidekick who knows what it's like to lose the meaning in his life (and is thus almost as much a ghost as the dead man of the title), wanders through an unconventional western expanse to get to his point of departure, both physically and spiritually ready to die. Not for nothing was this the movie that Jonathan Rosenbaum coined the phrase 'Acid Western,' which then slid nicely into critical diction. It's almost too heady for its own good, but between Neil Young's haunting guitar accompaniment (I would also have accepted Nick Cave moaning softly) and Jarmusch turning the forest into the externalized depths of Depp's bruised and impacted psyche, it never gets ponderous; indeed, I was unexpectedly galvanized as Depp learns in his last moments to take up arms against the white men who stood in for the legacy of rape and genocide on which the country was founded. I find that in my memory, the film is simply a flood of images playing slowly over what I remember Young's guitar sounding like; a plaintive piano roll of images forever spinning in my brain. That is the power of the film. Anyone hoping for the jaunty adventures of earlier Jarmusch, the Freudian catharsis of John Ford or Howard Hawks, or the live painting demo quality of Sergio Leone will leave even more philosophically unbalanced and distressed than those with their expectations leveled properly.


Pola X
by Leos Carax

I have yet to encounter an undivided review of Pola X. Peter Bradshaw hated it, Scott Tobias praised its gynmastic camerawork and emotions but still used the word failure. Roger Ebert was the most emphatic in his praise, but even he couldn't come outright and say it, like he was worried what people would think of him if he gave his two digits to this mad chapter of French cinema. Their opinions now seem quaint, unnecessary, as they're the only people who've seen the movie - they were talking to themselves and Leos Carax. You could almost divorce Pola from its cinematic achievements and still this would be a crucial film, a one-of-a-kind artistic autopsy on a still-living subject. From the top, the one-two punch (the sort delivered by Jacques Tati in Soigne ton Gauche) of Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais Sang. The former was a cool slice of post-punk co-option; an Epstein-double exposure here, a Bressonian dialogue there. The plot is incidental except that it happens to Denis Lavant and registers on that pouting, once-a-generation face of his. Carax struck harder,  in color and in love with Juliette Binoche, in Mauvais Sang. Here he painted a paranoid, claustrophobic world in Black, Red and Whites for Lavant and Binoche to (literally) spread their wings; Nicholas Ray and Godard in one lithe body. They were so loved that when it came time to send Alex, Lavant and Carax's shared form, on his next adventure, no expense was spared, leading to the heartbreakingly raw, mega-satisfying and unbelievably romantic Lovers on the Bridge. But because of the runaway costs (shades of Cimino) and its refusal to adhere to narrative conventions or New Wave chicanery, it wasn't enough for his supposedly adoring public. This was the film Carax had threatened to make without any constraints and it was insufficiently loved (at least for my liking). It sent Carax into a depression; losing Binoche couldn't have helped. Pola X was what it was like in his mind, and thus while many people point to Lovers as the superior film, to me they're inextricable. The story, despite following the plot of the Melville novel it takes its name and story from fairly closely, is as pure an autobiography as it is a syringe full of pure cinema. The story starts on an estate in Normandy rendered in even more effulgent  detail than the hero's angelic bride. Nothing's happening at first, but it's intoxicating; circumstances built from assured, unforgettable images. Pierre, played by the almost unreally gorgeous Guillaume Depardieu, is due to wed Delphine Chuillot's almost virginal Lucie, until dark haired gypsy Isabelle, played by Yekaterina Golubeva, finds him and explains she might be his sister. And thus he finds the excuse he'd been looking for to shatter his moneyed, complacent existence in one alluring and sexy package. What follows is a descent into self-imposed madness unlike anything ever depicted. Pola X is exactly what was inside Carax's unconscious mind at the time of its creation, rendered in razor sharp detail. When Lovers failed to live up to the impossible expectations the public had built up for it, they all paid for Pola X, which was nothing short of artistic crisis and personal turmoil burned onto celluloid. And in the burning, some unearthly things are captured. Depardieu, who through what cannot be coincidence (Carax has taken my belief out of the very notion of coincidence), looks like the spitting image of Sharunas Bartas, Golubeva's husband, who plays the orchestrator of the commune Pierre and Isabelle hit rock bottom at, and is Pierre with no connection to the outside world, just Isabelle is Marie without money or privilege. When Pierre and Isabelle consummate their impossible, undeniable love, the world seems to cave in on itself. Who are watching? Depardieu? Bartas? Golubeva? Some anonymous body doubles? Who does the director want it to be, fumbling erotically in the near darkness. Carax made sure that if this was the last film he made before being immolated by his own unrequited love and ambition, he was taking the world with him.


Khrustalyov, My Car!
by Aleksei German

Imagining Werkmeister Harmonies directed by Ken Russell would still leave you inadequately prepared for this banquet of paranoia and black hilarity. Sure, there are shades of a dozen films, not the least of which are Zulawski's Devil,  Zbynek Brynych's ...And The Fifth Horseman is Fear and Piotr Szulkin's Ga-Ga - Glory to the Heroes, but there's something else at play here that defies precedent, even in that esteemed company. It seems to come from another era entirely, like it was shot around 1970 while the equipment was free between The Witches' Hammer and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. For all I know the film stock may have expired back when the soviets had to ration it. And in the complex history of Russian cinema, Aleksei German has had a harder time getting his films viewed than probably any of his peers, if he can be said to have any. Knowing that his movies had been banned and almost burned everytime out, he left not a single image or idea on the floor when he entered his fourth decade as a director, meaning that often some of the most brilliantly warped imagery of the 90s is simply tossed off in any given three seconds of Khrustalyov - a dog in a basket stuck to a zipline in a dining room is gone before we've quite realized what we've seen. And perfectly none of this imagery ever interferes with the story, or ever seems to bother its Soviet Superofficial hero. The surreal nature of a falling empire is lost on him, as it would have been on anyone in the inner circle of a madman, as he seeks desperately for how to avoid the fall of an empire adversely effecting his power and dignity. There hasn't been a narrative film like this in many moons (for a while, the darkly comic Nero-fiddled road-movie was almost its own genre in European cinema until digital made tracking shots, the greatest weapon in their arsenal, less impressive), perhaps because by they are by their nature, too ugly? Too honest? Too near the bone? Irrelevant? Whatever the reason, German's film fell on deaf ears and resulted in more Cannes walkouts than L'Avventura. The wounds were still fresh for German who had to make movies under a repressed and deeply ashamed regime's watchful eyes (indeed, many of the film's tangents were based on his own experiences with state surveillance), but the world had moved on. Up the alley, and out of the screening room door. Cannes, for their part, was stinging from Angelopoulos's barbed 1995 dismissal of the jury and had no interest in doing anything but repairing their relationship by awarding the Palme d'Or to one of his least substantial films simply because it was his. If only they'd waited six years, he'd have given them something worthy of the honor. But back to German. Dennis Lim wagered that Michael Cimino would still be working on Heaven's Gate if he could. The same is true of German, for whom My Car! was not just autobiography, but a statement of purpose. His life as improvised roadmap for his camera, ever roving, ever following, along for a ride that seems too impossible to be true. And yet, German planned every second of this movie, and for his sins, all the time in the world to keep making it, even if only in his head.


Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas
by Terry Gilliam

There isn't much left to say about Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, which has been all but rescued from its disastrous origins, except to say that it is a case study in adaptation. Look no further than the muted response to Walter Salles' On The Road. Handsome, dependable, even occasionally great, but it never had a prayer of replacing its source material in the eyes of its fans. The reason? Salles is too much of a fan to do it any damage or let his own style (which isn't exactly blinding at the best of times) run roughshod over the prose. So what does it become? A Merchant Ivory film in beat clothing. Harmless. The opposite of what it should be. For the record I enjoyed On The Road, but it's worth mentioning that the best director can do in adapting a book is fill up the space where prose lives between words and actions and replace it with their own demons, neuroses and obsessions, filtered through a style only they can provide. Gilliam's Fear and Loathing did the unthinkable - rendered its source material irrelevant. Hunter S. Thompson's book was nothing shy of a cultural avalanche when it first arrived, apparently coughed out during a hangover in blistering, inimitable style. Now imagine a movie that actually bests it. Gilliam's stylistic hallmarks are at their most voracious here, dutch tilts eating the frame, images of such stark oddity that they deserve whole films to themselves, and the camera all the while attached like a conjoined twin to the vicious lunatic spirits (Johnny Depp giving his best and most iconic performance as the author and Benicio Del Toro, barely recognizable behind a hundred pounds of beer gut, dark glasses and the most threatening mustache of the decade) who serve for two hours as Vegas' worst tour guides. And yet it's also maybe the most faithful adaptation since The Maltese Falcon. Gilliam came to praise Hunter Thompson and the runaway decade that spawned him, not bury them. He didn't throw the book out, he opened his brain up with a hacksaw and painted over the pages with what fell out. If that sounds like something you want to put yourself through, "Get innnn!"


Crash
by David Cronenberg

I didn't get it either when I first saw it, either, so forgive those who condemned it. Joe Bob Briggs brought this film to my attention in his unmissable tome, Profoundly Disturbing (spoiler, Crash is anything but). I watched it, as I did every other film in its pages I'd yet to see, and wondered just what in god's name I'd watched. Why did no one ever raise their voice? Why did no one seem to feel anything, even in the throes of acrobatic sex? Why the pornographic lingering over car crashes? This was before I'd discovered Bresson, mind you. So, after a lot more viewing (including every other Maudit hiding in director David Cronenberg's closet), I gave it another shot. The clouds parted and the grey skies of Toronto had never looked clearer or brighter. Cronenberg had taken the emotions and the behavior of modern North Americans and inverted them. The emotional detachment he and author J.G. Ballard witnessed behind the false smiles of most people was externalized in Crash. Their affect reflected their troubled minds and unrequited libidos. They were all desire and no release - even in a world where random sex was normalzed, politeness and conservatism had forced it underground. So people move about their day at the speed of ignorance and repression. So Cronenberg halts them in their fucking tracks and watches the sparks fly. Note: puns are hard to avoid when talking about this film, but I'll try my best. Many people are going to misunderstand a film that, as Briggs put its, is a love story told through sex scenes, especially in a culture that paved the way for 50 Shades of Grey being a housewife cause celebre. They cannot deal with the subject honestly, let alone when Cronenberg presented it in such stark, cold light. He wasn't going to busy up the frame, nothing to get in the way of the confrontational nature of the discussion of sexuality, which no one can seem to own up to. What chance did a film that uses an underground cult of people turned on by car accidents stand with Newt Gingrich trying to keep women and their periods out of trenches? But more than honest Crash is a much sweeter and more romantic film than its ever given credit for (and frankly it's rarely given credit for existing outside the pages of Film Comment, Cahiers and Senses of Cinema). Is there any more tender image than James Spader licking Patricia Arquette's leg-wound in the backseat of his car? Don't answer yet. Remember that I also think the blood-soaked kiss between two 12 year olds in Let The Right One In is the most heartwarming thing I've ever seen. Crash is a film that goes into our brains to shock us back into feeling, so naturally, we forbid children from seeing it. Heaven help us if they ever realize what we've done to intimacy.


The Hudsucker Proxy
by Joel and Ethan Coen

After years of hearing about what a joyless slog Intolerable Cruelty was, imagine my surprise when I discovered it was a delicious confectionary of expertly crafted wordplay and near-explosive levels of chemistry between its two flappable leads. "How had this happened?" I wondered, while laughing my ass off, "how could a film this good by America's cinematic sweethearts have been swept under the rug like that?" Well, anyway, The Coen Brothers were at least used to that sort of disappointment. After all, they'd made The Hudsucker Proxy. Intolerable Cruelty is a delight, to be true, an homage to Howard Hawks, Leo McCary and Preston Sturges' comedies of remarriage centering appropriately enough on a divorce attorney who tastes his own bitter medicine and as well as it works just as well as tribute and stand alone comedy (George Clooney's comedic prowess never gets enough notice for my liking). Next to Hudsucker, however, Intolerable looks more like the work of Mitchell Leisen than Preston Sturges. Sturges was the genuine article in American comedy. In his best films, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, Hail The Conquering Hero and Unfaithfully Yours (As long as we're sticking up for the underdog here I'll just say that Unfaithfully Yours is a gem and I will hear no one besmirch it), he balanced humour so bold you wonder how it slipped past the censors, scabrous satire of values unique to wartime America and romance that shot past heartwarming into gripping. He had such a perfect hand with sentiment that he could appear to be making fun of the very notion of it, even as he freely indulged. He was one of a kind. But leave it to The Coen Brothers to make a film that pretends to his throne and earns the right to sit there. Painstakingly crafted through nostalgia-colored glasses and set in a place we recognize as our past but in no definite moment, corporate stooge Tim Robbins rockets to the top of a toy company despite having no knowledge of the job or that he's being set up for a literal and metaphorical fall by his handler, a never-sleazier Paul Newman, cashing in on his impossible-to-dislike irascibility and charm. The boardroom antics, Sturges-esque wordplay and bureaucratic chutes-and-ladders are hilarious, but once Jennifer Jason Leigh enters the story, this stops being a comedy no one laughed at and becomes a masterpiece whose failure isn't just baffling, it's a tragedy on par with the sinking of the Titanic, the execution of the Rosenbergs or the cancellation of Pushing Daisies. Leigh's portrayal of a savvy journalist who goes undercover to scoop Robbins' rise to fame mirrors Jean Arthur in Mr. Deeds Goes To Town but without hiding her unscrupulousness so disingenuously as Frank Capra does. It's a testament to the Coen's writing and feather-light direction (rendered on resplendent art deco production design, for my money their best, through the prism of Roger Deakins dark-matter heavy photography) that they pursue a route that out-bleaks famous Scrooges like Capra and Sturges, and still manages to seem more lighthearted than Meet John Doe or Unfaithfully Yours, which flirt with murder and suicide as aggressively as Leigh does with Robbins. Leigh's feisty journalist is a more endearing proto-feminist trouser-sporter than Cate Blanchet's Hepburn impersonation; better still, she brings a sexuality to her role that outstrips even the Claudette Colberts and Barbara Stanwycks of the golden age, and again, genuinely. Through the performance, through her palpably masked longing, through her robust personality. She maybe a shade of fast-talking-dames past, but she's a fully realized character, and if you don't want to marry her by the time the credits role, you must be a Franklin Pangborn character. Or worse, William Demarest. I still marvel at the level of detail that went into making Hudsucker Proxy such a loving, feel-good tribute to loving, feel-good comedies so dipped in sarcasm you could drown in it. And that's even without taking into account how fucking funny it is. It's that rare film that gets nearly everything right (wouldn't be on this list if it were actually perfect). When the film failed at the box office, I bet Preston Sturges took a belt for both Joel and Ethan Coen in auteur heaven. "Don't worry, boys. They didn't get me, either."

Best Films of 2009

Well, as things go, this wasn't a particularly good year for film. By which I mean the stuff that made it to first-run theatres tended to suck out loud; not all of it but, you know, most of it. In fact even the stuff that was a little left of center which critics fawned over (Inglorious Basterds, say) left me cold. This was a year of directorial titans giving it their all. Modern art house giants Ang Lee, Stephen Soderbergh, Park Chan-Wook, Tom Tykwer, Lars Von Trier, Jim Jarmusch and Wes Anderson all gave us their latest opuses alongside old favorites Marco Bellocchio, Alain Resnais, Agnés Varda, Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Mann. Granted there are a few films I still haven't seen that will have to be appraised with next year's crew. Resnais Les Herbes Folles remains tantalizingly out of reach and I've yet to find a theatre near Doylestown, PA showing either The Lovely Bones, A Single Man or The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. Though I will say that despite my complaints there were a lot of very interesting movies that found their way to me, in fact I count 61+ in all that I really enjoyed. I'm going to focus on twenty specifically that were a cut above the rest and then I'll list the others below. Oh, and they go in ascending order, so I Sell The Dead is #20 and so on; it looks a little confusing, sorry. I'll get into specific things when the Oscars come around and fuck everything up. Until then, these are just the best, most satisfying over-all films I saw this year.

I Sell The Dead

by Glenn McQuaid

The first of two entries by my favorite production house, Glass Eye Pix, I Sell The Dead is a knowing pastiche of a number of different eras of horror cinema that never tries to do anything but entertain you. Dominic Monaghan and Larry Fessenden (in the role he was born to play) are resurrection men with a long and storied career. Monaghan spins many a yarn to priest Ron Perlman while waiting for his turn at the gallows and a lot of tongue-in-cheek horror clichés are sent up beautifully. McQuaid's direction and writing are efficient, knowing and lovingly carried off. He works around a small budget with panache and makes sure that the focus remains on our love and fixation on the horror genre. His hilarious treatments of vampires, zombies and aliens are just as winning as his nods to die-hards like when he ends the film with this most charming bit of post-modern tribute "A good cast is worth repeating;" as are viewings of the movie.

Black Dynamite

by Scott Sanders

This year saw a number of great pastiche films and I have to say that Scott Sanders' Black Dynamite has the most research (and fun) evident in its every scene. Sanders and star Michael Jai-White clearly did their homework as to what usually lights up the blaxploitation films of the 1970s and used nearly every cliché in the book to hilarious ends. There are poorly edited pursuits on foot, kung-fu set to brass and wah-wah guitar, a posh hideaway staffed with girls, a pimp council, a criminal conspiracy led by whitey that goes straight to the top (and I mean the very top) and of course lots and lots of gettin' it on. Black Dynamite, like Shaft, Black Sampson, Dolemite, Slaughter, Savage and Sweet Sweetback before him knows when to kick ass and when to tap it - a crass joke, sure, but that's this movie's knowingly goofy mentality. It takes a real connoisseur of blaxploitation films to get the importance of the scenes of Black Dynamite dressed up to go to the park after he's 'cleaned up the streets'. Everything from the clean blue shirt to the hitherto unseen suburban setting is pure 70s cutaway and that it could have fallen out of Coffy or Foxy Brown is really what measures Black Dynamite's success. I hadn't laughed so hard in months.

Drag Me To Hell

by Sam Raimi

One of the only things as good as being scared to death is being able to laugh at yourself for being scared. Drag Me To Hell, Sam Raimi's first proper horror film in 22 years, is full of winking terror. Even as he presents obvious scares, he outmaneuvers us by making them still more terrifying and cruel than we imagined. The story of a girl trying outwit a gypsy's curse is blackly hilarious as the terror intensifies by the minute providing classic jump-out-of-your-chair moments the likes of which rival the best moments from Raimi's first two Evil Dead films. Wonderfully cheesy performances from Dileep Rao, Justin Long, Reggie Lee, David Paymer and Lorna Raver compliment feisty farm girl Alison Lohman's hilarious lead performance. It's a rare horror film where knowing the outcome and seeing the semi-cheesy set-pieces before they happen just makes for a more endearing viewing, like a joy-buzzer, but instead of getting a mild shock, a giant horned goat demon jumps out of a closet...wait, that doesn't make sense...

Lorna's Silence

by Jean Pierre & Luc Dardenne

Though sadly this is my first film by the brothers Dardenne, I understand that they're aces at this sort of thing. This sort of thing is painfully honest portrayals of lower class relationships and the pain of needing other people who take and take and take. Lorna has married a drug addict so that she can get Belgian citizenship. Once she's done that she'll try and get rid of him (her mob connection wants to kill him) so that she can then turn around and do the same to gangsters. Arta Dobroshi as Lorna and Jérémie Renier as her drug-addled sham husband Claudy are achingly good as they use each other to achieve new lows. When Dobroshi bashes her head into a hospital wall to make a case for abuse that isn't happening it's just about the most tragic thing you'll ever see. To fill that one moment (and it looks like she's really hurting herself) with so much sombre tension is no small feat. Lorna's Silence is a story full of humanity that happens to focus on the injustices that greet those with dreams. Like the best of Ken Loach, the Dardennes have taken a sad story, someone you pass on the street but don't give a second thought to and given it the full breadth of understanding everybody deserves.

Where The Wild Things Are*

by Spike Jonze

Like Fantastic Mr. Fox, Spike Jonze's beautiful children's film isn't strictly for kids. Unlike Fantastic Mr. Fox, kids shouldn't really have any trouble understanding all of it. This is because Jonze managed to create not only a beautifully winding narrative but he managed to replicate the mindset of a child. The tone shifts are set to the rhythm of a child's mood swings and the non-sequiturs (my favorite involving a dog) are all skillfully played reminders that the movie takes place in a child's psyche. At a time when Avatar is bringing critics and nerds alike to their knees, I think it particularly appropriate to have a film whose main characters are gigantic puppets with CG faces that act circles around everyone in James Cameron's film. Jonze manages to wring an insane amount of pathos from disembodied voices (James Gandolfini deserves an oscar) issuing from giant teddy bears. Best of all is the doubly heart-breaking ending. Like another film on this list, Where The Wild Things Are knows the one surefire way to make me cry: a kid, an adult and an almost silent scene of tenderness and understanding that fills the room with warmth.

*Basho's Pick

Revanche

by Götz Spielmann

Whatever your preference cinematically, fantasy, romantic comedy, horror, western, there is an objective truth to be found in direction. You may enjoy broad comedy or slapstick or a campy slasher film but one must see that those films are not truthful, they speak a language that has nothing in common with reality. Revanche is how it is. It is an honest film even though it presents artifice and 'superficial' action; everything rings true. For a film with as promising a title as Revanche (Revenge) Götz Spielmann's portrait of a man driven by guilt and hatred is surprisingly placid for much of its running time (albeit tense). Johannes Krisch is Alex (whoever said he's inexplicably mesmerizing was absolutely right. Something about him screams 'likeable' even as he acts like a heel) who has a plan to get him and his prostitute girlfriend Tamara (Irina Potapenko in a similarly subtly awesome performance) out of their financial trouble. He tries to rob a bank but thanks to rookie cop Robert things don't go as planned. Alex holes up at his grandfather's farm contemplating revenge but discovers that maybe he isn't such a scoundrel after all. It's a complicated look at a not-so-complicated situation that becomes all the more fascinating as things level out. I think the strength ofRevanche is indefinable; I can't say exactly why I love any particular aspect, but I know I do. The film, like Alex's life, just unfolds and we have to make of it what we will; it's an honest look at a dishonest world.

Red Cliff

by John Woo

Told like a folk tale with a huge budget, John Woo's epic Red Cliff is a return to form even as it blows his previous work away. Not since his Hong Kong action days has he been this good and the reference to Hard Boiled at the start of the film tells me that he knows he's on fire. The Battle of Red Cliff is a famous Chinese battle fought in the year 208 and Woo renders it gorgeously (though his CG effects occasionally fail him). Red Cliff is about the art of the epic and the unbridled masculinity that usually carries it. Unlike, say, The Two Towers or Letters From Iwo Jima, the focus is on romanticizing nature and the love between people. The reason given for why the battle is ultimately fought is over a woman and unlike many on screen wives, she takes the offensive out of love for her husband. The reason that one side prevails isn't because they love their country more or have some convoluted notion of honor or patriotism, its through devotion to each other and to an understanding and love of the land and reading into every clue the earth gives them. It's a blast to watch and though, yes, there is a good deal of violence, Woo does get to the tragedy of just that. This is not violence for the sake of it because every death is a loss and we are made to feel it.

The White Ribbon

by Michael Haneke

Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon is a troubling and tense experience but ultimately rewarding. To see that Haneke's methods have matured and that he can both indict society and craft a classically beautiful movie capable of producing many kinds of stunned silence is worth any horror he has in store. A school teacher remembers a particularly harrowing chapter in his life in which unspeakable things started happening to pillars of his small village community. This isn't the first out-and-out mystery that Haneke's written but unlike Caché the answer isn't the thing that preoccupies us. As it becomes clearer who's actually behind the acts we want less and less to do with it because their targets become more sympathetic. The final clue is one of the more unnerving things you're likely to see even though so little actually happens. The White Ribbon plays like Cormac McCarthy's Our Town and is unsettling in the utmost but the quiet moments that break up the tension are so wonderfully underplayed that you come away feeling better than you have any right to. watching Christian Friedel's school teacher courting Eva (played with awkward charm by Leonie Benesch) is a little strange at first but very ends up being very sweet, and that Haneke can find both terror and loveliness (necessary when families are on trial) is a new direction for him.

Mother

by Bong Joon-Ho

Bong Joon-Ho is a terrific director with gonzo personal baggage. Taking the oddball dynamic of The Host and the subject matter of Memories of Murder, his previous two films, Mother is David Lynch weirdness and subtext given the rhythmic quality he's become dependable for. From Kyung-Pyo Hung's dusky cinematography to the lovingly applied technique (I don't think anyone's quite so in love with what a camera can do as Bong Joon-Ho. His tracking shots and POVs are awesome) Mother is like a theory textbook paraphrased by someone at Cahiers du Cinema. Taking familiar routes to unfamiliar territories there is enough at play for casual observers to see Hitchcock, Twin Peaks & Blue Velvet, Takashi Miike, Insomnia and other unsettling crime stories but there is a clear voice dictating the proceedings. I may not like everything that happens in Joon-Ho's films but I love the distinctness of his vision and that despite the tangents it goes on Mother's message is quite touching and the characters ultra-compelling. Mother is one of the most engaging (while simultaneously jarring) films of the year and it stops at nothing to deliver its message: we'll stop at nothing to save the ones we love.

Il Divo

by Paolo Sorrentino

Or as I like to call it, the film that Guy Ritchie wishes he had made. Il Divo is one of the most flashy and stylish movies ever made but for once that isn't the kiss of death. Rocketing from hyper-kinetic society bashes to rumbling horse races to quiet church interiors at four in the morning, Il Divo tells the story of Giulio Andreotti one of Italy's most corrupt and sinister Prime Ministers or political figures of any kind. As a companion piece to Matteo Garrone'sGomorrah (see below), Il Divo illustrates that not only is Italy one of the most dangerous places in the world to be poor but politicians and journalists are just as susceptible to crooked practices and murder as working class 40 somethings and teenagers. Caring less about verisimilitude than Garrone, Paolo Sorrentino spins a tangled web of intrigue about the facts and myths around Andreotti during his famously hellacious reign. Toni Servillo gives an unsettlingly unreadable performance, half Noseratu, half Hirohito, and he remains the unchanging face as Sorrentino turns up the crazy and calls the truth into question, by the end the only thing certain is that Il Divo is wild as hell.

Bronson

by Nicholas Winding Refn

It should stand as some testament to this film's power that I wrote a nearly twelve page essay on it the day after I saw it. No one read it but no matter, Bronson is about violence and our fixation on violence as a people. Using the body of Tom Hardy playing Charles Bronson née Michael Peterson, Britains' most famous convict, director Nicholas Winding Refn creates a world focused on and propelled by violence and our acceptance and indeed reverence for it. The film brims over with stylistic brio that matches Hardy's energetic performance punch for punch. To root for Bronson is to root for Tom Hardy is to root for Refn pulling the strings it to root for the movie and the success of charismatic trailblazers doing what they do best. A Clockwork Orange done right.

The Escapist

by Rupert Wyatt

Like a classic man's story a la John Sturges or Howard Hawks, Rupert Wyatt's The Escapist has a lot of hard-boiled conventions and one bitchin' conceit that isn't clear until the very end. You realize then that you haven't just been watching one of the more exhilarating prison break films on record but also a film as smart as it is taut. Brian Cox is Frank Perry who's settled into a life sentence until he hears that his only daughter is in trouble. Now he wants out so he can help her get off her drug addiction and out of her troubles. He turns to his cellmate Liam Cunningham and down-and-out cons Seu Jorge, Dominic Cooper and Joseph Fiennes for help breaking free from bondage, each of them delivering terrifically natural performances. Standing in there way is deranged informant Damian Lewis, playing the polar opposite of his Major Winters character from Band of Brothers, who has designs on Cooper's timid inmate Lacey and of course the prison itself. Art director Irene O'Brien and production designer Jim Furlong created an awesome prison underbelly, a gothic labyrinth that rivals David Fincher's in Alien³, another underrated English film driven by character actors. A dark and beautiful film with a grim and tough story but a starry-eyed philosophy; a crime film with ambition.

Bright Star

by Jane Campion

Maybe I'm just totally susceptible to this kind of story but I think Bright Star is actually one of the most devastating love stories ever told. John Keats and Frances Brawne's romance only lasted long enough for him to propose to her before he fell ill and died. Jane Campion's shows us love in good times and bad, in sickly pallor (cold and dull brown interiors) and good health (brilliant pastel summer landscapes). Abbie Cornish works on so many levels; her unbalanced teenaged worldview and moodswings are carried off tremendously. Her physical presence is also a refreshing departure from English and American starlets. Aside from Paul Schnieder who's performance as the Scotsman Charles Brown is just as good, she's the most captivating in a very capable cast. That Cornish's Brawne feels like a real person is one of the movie's greatest successes and it makes her heartbreak all the more effecting. A film that gets to the root of young love's problems, that there are older and in some ways wiser people over your shoulder who don't take you seriously. Not only does Brawne have to fight just to see and be near Keats, she has to beg and plead for everyone to validate her feelings. It's the saddest kind of love story but it's worth the struggle to understand how greatly she felt for him. Their final scene together is tragic and stunning and like all of Bright Star makes you feel for impossible love.

The Road

by John Hillcoat

I think the difference between the two kinds of filmgoers can be tested with films like The Road. If you hate it or can't understand it, you're in one camp, if you enjoyed it, you're in the other. Needless to say I loved The Road and found it poignant, hopeful and overall a tremendous experience. I love post-apocalyptic movies, I love movies that relish in depictions of dead natural occurrences, I love movies about family that do not take obvious routes at showing their connections and love. The Road, on top of looking gorgeous, featuring an amazing sound design, a terrific score by Nick Cave & Warren Ellis, has a myriad of excellent performances that ensure the film's realism in spite of its premise. John Hillcoat manages to fill in the gaps between McCarthy's prose with haunting visuals and quiet moments that illustrate the distance between people, even those linked by blood. It says the same thing that the novel does but in a purely cinematic form, never relying too heavily on the words of the source novel but always remaining true to its spirit.

Vincere

by Marco Bellocchio

Since his debut film Fists In The Pockets in 1965, Marco Bellocchio has been persona non grata in his home country. Picking apart the political and social problems and contradictions that have defined modern Italian life, Bellocchio has been an outspoken critic for his entire working life and he has never compromised. Going back 50 years from his last political film Good Morning, Night about the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, Bellocchio turns his attention to Ida Dalser, one of Mussolini's mistresses, and the illegitimate son she named for his father. Played with rapacious determination and fascinating, ferocious sexuality by Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Ida Dalser has more of her freedom stripped from her and soon her quest shifts from demanding that her husband recognize her to being allowed to ever see her son again. Though her struggle can be read as allegory, it's hard not to see it as the destruction of fascism from within. The Italian politics of the day were based around hatred and superiority but they cannot afford humanity in their own lives because fascists were fundamentally imperfect but had to pretend to godlike status. Dalser is the tragic castaway of human skin when Mussolini relinquished reality for a life of fiction and power and murder. Set to Carlo Crivelli's driving score, flush with bold colours and frames that could be art deco paintings thanks to Danielle Cipri's cinematography, Vincere is a rich and sumptuous work.

The House of the Devil

by Ti West

Samantha is in need of money and though babysitting for the Ulman's smells like trouble she can't say no to the $400 Mr. Ulman offers her for one night's work. Even after he admits that he and his wife don't actually have children and that it's his mother that the hapless sophomore will be watching, she agrees. Now she'll spend the rest of the night regretting she ever answered the babysitting ad. Ti West's most recent entry into the Glass Eye canon, The House of the Devil is a stunning recreation of 1980s horror films. Everything from the look to the music to the costumes is a pitch-perfect reproduction of old fashioned production values. For every film that purports to deliver old-school horror, The House of the Devil is the only one I've seen that actually delivers. Not only is it a hyper-real reproduction of any number of slasher films from thirty years ago, it is also a better and altogether more effective film than any of those movies ever managed to be. Ti West has become a master at using a small budget to his advantage and House of the Devil is his masterpiece.

A Serious Man

by Joel & Ethan Coen

Though I was concerned, that this would be another Burn After Reading and all the early buzz comparing this film to Barton Fink was not encouraging. I like every other Coen Brothers movie and that wasn't what I wanted to hear. In point of fact this is much closer to a less whimsical Hudsucker Proxy. Michael Stuhlbarg plays Larry Gopnik whose life gets worse by the minute. His wife is leaving him for famous windbag Sy Ableman, his kids hate him, his brother's using up his money and good credit with the community, one of his students is threatening to blackmail him, the list goes on. Each scene is progressively funnier and Stuhlbarg sells his ridiculous unluck with such wonderfully twitchy energy that even as his life goes further and further into the toilet, you enjoy yourself more and more, like an episode of Arrested Development stretched to feature length and given a great period setting. The message is delivered in the prologue, an episode involving a dybbuk played by Fyvush Finkel. A man brings home a demon and he's worried about being courteous to it; she's worried that it means they're cursed. Weirdly it's the least experienced of three rabbis that Stuhlbarg visits in search of answers who gets it right: you just need a little perspective. "Just look at the Parking Lot!"

Gomorrah

by Matteo Garrone

If Revanche is a film that depicts people in an honest and involving light, Gomorrah is like a slap in the face through the screen; a wake-up call. Between Roberto Saviano's book of the same name which gave the film it's five story framework and Matteo Garrone's stunning movie there is enough evidence to indict almost every corporation on earth for murder. In order to truly communicate the savagery of Saviano's work and of what really goes on in Naples, Garrone let the stories tell themselves. The performances are either pitch-perfect or they aren't performances; I've never seen an ensemble cast portray fuck ups quite so convincingly. The combined effect of Garrone's roving camera and the naturalistic performances makes it seem as if we're eavesdropping on some of the most heavy and horrifying things on the planet earth. There is never a moment's doubt watching Gomorrah that what you're seeing is real and that we should be afraid that the food we're eating didn't pass through Naples first. Though Garrone employs beautifully orchestrated plan-séquences and Marco Onorato's cinematography is frankly amazing in spite of what it captures, there isn't a self-indulgent moment to be found. It's only at the end of the film when the small print tells us that it's all real does it occur to you that everything you just saw was a movie; an incredible achievement.

The Beaches of Agnès

by Agnès Varda

Agnès Varda is one of cinema's most important figures; she was one of the first successful female directors, an important forerunner of the French New Wave, one of the most experiment-oriented filmmakers to date, and just over-all her films are marvelous. The Beaches of Agnès is a tell-all that never seems indulgent or egotistical, a beautiful tribute to the people who have shaped Varda's life and to the power of film. Varda's lucious waltz through her past, noting every little detail, is one that engages you with its humour and sadness. It's impossible not to feel for Varda as she weeps over her late husband, the great Jacques Demy and shares the footage she took just days before he died of AIDS. It's also never anything but a loving and honest portrait of a touched and incredible life. Beaches shows that not only has Varda lived well but she remains just as capable a filmmaker as she was in 1957 when she made her stunning Cléo de 5 à 7 or 1965 when she made Le Bonheur one of the most interesting and beautiful films of all time. The Beaches of Agnès is a film that adds to a prolific life while looking back on it; wildly inventive, touching, sensual, lovely, a film as beautiful as any.

And the best film of the year...

Hunger

by Steve McQueen

I may find in a few months when Hunger gets a Criterion DVD of its own that maybe I was wrong. Maybe it isn't one of the most intense films ever made, maybe it was just me, that I was in the right frame of mind, tired, alone, cold and hungry. I remember waiting for Hunger for months; it was all I could think about. Then it was out, at a theatre not a few subway stops from the apartment I was staying in at the time. I saw it, stayed until the end credits, stumbled back to the apartment wordlessly. Before I got there I had sworn off eating anything living, promised that nothing should ever suffer on my behalf again. The story isn't easy to understand at first glance: guards and prisoners in the Maze prison in 1981 fight bitterly. It's not easy to sympathize with either. Bobby Sands discusses a proposed hunger strike with his priest and then goes ahead with it, dying 66 days later. Steve McQueen turns suffering and filth into poetry; I could heap hyperbole onto it until my fingers gave out but you really need to just see it. I'll just say that I'd never reacted that way to any film in my life.

And The Rest...

21. Flame and Citron
22. Summer Hours
23. The Headless Woman
24. Zombieland
25. Moon
26. Tony Manero
27. Fantastic Mr. Fox
28. The Young Victoria
29. Brothers Bloom
30. The Hurt Locker
31. District 9
32. La Danse de la Paris Opera Ballet
33. Baader Meinhoff Complex
34. Broken Embraces
35. Up 

36. The Limits of Control
37. Pontypool
38. Sherlock Holmes
39. Big Fan
40. Star Trek
41. Coraline
42. Mesrine Parts 1 & 2
43. Tetro

44. Everlasting Moments
45. Thirst

46. Antichrist

47. Just Another Love Story

48. Tulpan

49. The Informant/Girlfriend Experience

50. The Good, The Bad, The Weird

51. In The Loop

52. Me & Orson Welles

53. Police, Adjective

54. 35 Shots

55. Three Monkeys

56. The Age of Stupid

57. The International

58. Public Enemies

59. Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince

60. Not Quite Hollywood!