Top Ten of 2016

As it turns out, I never posted my top ten list for 2016. I had it mostly worked out at the time, but never got around to finalizing and posting it.

Very often, after a year has passed I come to regret certain decisions, but looking back I still think I can stand by this list.

10. El abrazo de la serpiente (Embrace of the Serpent) dir. Ciro Guerra - This was Colombia's entry in the Foreign Language Film category for the 2015 awards year. It was nominated, but opened commercially in the United States in early 2016, hence its inclusion on this list. Stunning black and white cinematography and a sedate tone make this one of the year's best, a meditative adventure story that weaves Heart of Darkness themes into a quest to find a mystical life-saving and mind-altering plant.

Top Ten of 2017

I had trouble this year putting together a top ten that I felt really excited about. My top two are hands down my favorite movies of the year and the two that struck the strongest emotional chord. After that we get into a few movies that I responded to strongly and then there's the movies that I perhaps admire more than feel enthusiastic about. I'm not entirely sure it's the movies that are changing.

10. Logan dir. James Mangold - Here's a director I admired much more early in his career until he went mainstream, but this unconventional take on the comic book superhero movie is refreshing.

9. Blade Runner 2049 dir. Denis Villeneuve - Expands on the themes first explored 35 years ago in Ridley Scott's original film. What does it mean to be human versus a synthesized human? It's a veritable masterpiece of technical filmmaking while also having an engrossing story.

8. The Square dir. Ruben Östlund - Biting satire about the intersection of the world of modern art and the human foibles that come with trying to live up to the moral standards that are explored in that art.

7. Call Me by Your Name - dir. Luca Guadagnino - Beautiful story of first love, self-discovery, growing up, and gorgeous Italian vistas.

6. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri dir. Martin McDonagh - 

5. Lady Bird dir. Greta Gerwig - A really tremendous first feature from Gerwig who paints a portrait (along with a stunning performance by Saoirse Ronan) of the American teenager.

4. Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool - dir. Paul McGuigan - My rather unconventional choice to include in a top ten, and so far up the list too. But I was completely drawn in by the romance between aging Hollywood icon Gloria Graham (beautifully portrayed by Annette Bening) and her much younger beau played by Jamie Bell.

3. The Florida Project dir. Sean Baker - A movie that forces audiences to confront a forgotten class of people who live on the margins of society. The underclass, the poor, the destitute - however you choose to refer to them, they exist in our country and they raise children in conditions that we lament from our lofty middle and upper class economic positions. But Baker attempts to show us that even these children whom we believe to be disadvantaged have imaginations as rich or even richer than any others. Living just outside Walt Disney World Resort and financially barred from entrance (an irony considering these children could benefit from Disney magic perhaps more than the well-off children who frequent it), they nevertheless make vivid use of their surroundings to create a rich and developed fantasy world of their own.

2. Wind River dir. Taylor Sheridan - Even on a second viewing, Sheridan's crime thriller about suffering through grief was deeply, deeply moving. Jeremy Renner gives what I consider to be his best performance. If this movie had been released in December, I think it would have found its way into several Oscar categories.

1. Coco dir. Lee Unkrich - This movie is magical, emotional, moving, uplifting. It's simply perfect. And frankly I'm getting a little tired of Pixar making the year's most perfect movie.

Top Ten of 2015

I've been putting this off and putting this off, but I've finally just got to go for it. Here's my top ten movies of 2015. As always, this is a snapshot of the films I enjoyed and admire the most.

1. Spotlight dir. Tom McCarthy - watching this again yesterday affirmed its placement at the top of my list. Sets a new gold standard for journalism movies, depicting what real investigative reporting is like: a long slog of digging deep on a story. Important subject matter, wonderfully acted and written.

2. Son of Saul dir. Laszlo Nemes - this Hungarian Holocaust film and nominee (and likely winner) of the foreign language film Oscar is surprisingly unnerving. The surprise comes from the fact that I wasn't sure the subject matter could still unnerve me in new ways. Nemes keeps his camera with the main character, an Auschwitz sonderkommando, a Jewish prisoner whose job is to usher newly arriving Jews into the gas chambers, then clear out their possessions and remove their bodies to make way for the next herd. The entire story, taking place over the course of a day, is from Saul's perspective giving the film an incredible feeling of tension and horror and confusion.

Spotlight Movie Review

Thankfully after the sour taste of Truth, a journalism movie with good intentions but very poor execution and understanding of proper journalism, Spotlight came along to remind us that there are people who get it. They get that investigative journalism can be a tool and a force for change and for good and that the ends in themselves are not always justified even if your story is right, or is most likely right. Good journalism requires good, fair, and accurate reporting. It’s about dogged determination in getting people to talk or reveal secrets. Spotlight, directed by Tom McCarthy and co-written by him and Josh Singer, sis the best movie about the process of investigation and what goes into reporting a story since All the President’s Men.

The Look of Silence Movie Review

The Look of Silence is Joshua Oppenheimer’s follow-up or companion piece to his 2012 documentary The Act of Killing. Where that film was shocking in its reveal of Indonesian perpetrators of genocide being so cavalier in their admission of what they did, this film is arresting in the way it personalizes the horror. Adi Rukun, the protagonist, is a younger brother of a young man murdered as a Communist in 1965. He confronts several of the commanders of death squads that operated in his province. Their boastfulness and rationalization of horrific crimes against humanity can only be explained as masking of tremendous guilt. There are powerful statements being made here about the need for national reconciliation and the ways in which families fail to fully heal or function without that acknowledgment.

Creed Movie Review

In an age of reboots and sequels galore coming to theaters and television, it’s easy to become jaded by the lack of originality and craven capitalist instinct to cash in on a known product. Most of the time these projects wind up utter failures because the success of a piece of pop culture entertainment, be it movie, TV show, music, or book is as much the product of the culture in which it was produced and released as the actual quality of the work. You can get the band back together, but you can’t recreate the external climate that contributed to their greatness or the public perception thereof.

Election Movie Review

Alexander Payne’s second film was a brilliant little gem called Election, a satirical look at electoral process through the prism of a high school student council election. The screenplay was adapted from Tom Perrotta’s novel by Payne and Jim Taylor and is as true to high school life and character as it is cynically observant of political ambition.

Reese Witherspoon achieved major breakout success playing Tracy Flick, the little bundle of gumption and up-start attitude that comes across as admirable in a teenager, but which has the potential to transition into an adulthood of stepping on everyone to achieve her goals. Matthew Broderick plays the popular history teacher, Jim McAllister, who oversees student government elections. He teaches the students civics and about the difference between morals and ethics – a line he would do well to consider later in the film when he manipulates the election results and cheats on his wife. Mr. McAllister is one of those teachers that students remember their whole lives. He is dedicated and enthusiastic and truly a stand-up guy, even standing beside his friend and colleague Dave Novotni after it’s discovered he’s been having an affair with sixteen-year old Tracy (the one detail I find sort of unbelievable in an otherwise perfect movie because girls like Tracy are not typically sexually ambitious and aren’t targeted by men like Dave.

From My Collection: Shakespeare in Love Movie Review

I just recently rewatched Shakespeare in Love and it was a s good, if not better than I remember it. John Madden’s film of the fictional and comic fantasy of how the greatest romantic tragedy in literary history came to be was my favorite film of 1998. I saw it Christmas Day, part of a moviegoing tradition I diligently maintained from 1997 through 2005, and then again a few weeks after. I bought the DVD in 1999 and have watched it a few times over the years and now I have the Blu-Ray (yes, I’m a dinosaur) so I can enjoy it in HD whenever I please. I was one of few people to accurately predict its victory in the Best Picture Oscar contest. In the Oscar pool I used to manage, only three people out of about thirty made that pick over Saving Private Ryan.

Top Ten of 2014

I guess I'm just about ready to call my best movies of 2014. It's far beyond the end of last year, but I'm only just now in a place where I feel comfortable enough that I've seen most of the movies that would be likely to make my list.
This is one of the strangest top ten lists I've ever made. I don't think I've ever had two documentaries on the list. And as you get into the second half of my list, it's populated by films that I am less enthusiastic about than I am in admiration of. In years past it was a struggle to not leave a movie I really enjoyed off my list. This year it was about struggling to include something worthy. 2014 left me feeling chilly. There wasn't much I really went wild for.

10. The Babadook - directed by Jennifer Kent - Certainly not one of the absolute best of the year and not even one of the greatest scary films or thrillers of all time, but supremely effective and left me chilled to the bone about the psychological horrors of parenting and losing your mind.

From My Collection: Up in the Air Movie Review

Jason Reitman made a name for himself (outside of trading on his father’s name) by directing two sort of quirky small-scale character-driven comedy-dramas. Thank You for Smoking and Juno both had enough oddball screwiness to their premises and characters to get noticed. But Reitman’s third feature, Up in the Air, based on the novel by Walter Kirn, for which Reitman shares screenwriting credit with Sheldon Turner, his attention is turned toward real life drama. This is a film about a man whose job is to go into other companies to tell their employees that they’ve been laid off so that the bosses don’t have to get their hands dirty.

Pleasantville Movie Review

I reviewed Pleasantville in 1998 for The Connecticut College Voice, but upon revisiting the film recently, decided that a new review was in order.

It’s so nice to return to a sixteen year old movie that you thought at that time was very good and find that it remains just as interesting and just as powerful now as it was then. I put Pleasantville in my top ten for 1998 and am happy to discover that it will remain there. I think the salience of the messaging of Pleasantville has only increased with time. Sure, the TV landscape has changed considerably since then. The Prime Time schedule hardly dominates anymore. Every basic cable station and even streaming providers have gotten into original content production. But TV’s roots still stretch back to the 1950s and a schedule full of wholesome plots directing family values toward the American public.

From My Collection: 25th Hour Movie Review

In 2002, New York City lay beaten and bruised, injured and left for dead but not without some bite left in her. Certainly the city was ready and willing to dole out punishment to anyone who intended harm again. It’s a lot like the dog Doyle at the opening of Spike Lee’s 25^th Hour. Someone has abused him, but he lashes out at Monty Brogan (Edward Norton), who only wants to help. Monty takes Doyle in and when the story picks up a year later, the dog is reasonably normal while the city is still reeling from catastrophe.

From My Collection: A Simple Plan Movie Review

My history with A Simple Plan is very special. In 1998 I had seen lots of excellent movies that I really admired, but had yet to find a perfect 10. On New Year’s Eve I saw three movies. One of them was Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan, a movie I didn’t have any significant expectations for outside of being interested in Billy Bob Thornton and the premise of the film: three ordinary men find a bag full of money. What should they do with it? It was probably about halfway to two thirds of the way through when I had a realization that the film was on its way to my standard of perfection if only it could avoid any third act missteps. And then it made it. It arrived to the end and Scott B. Smith, who adapted the screenplay from his own novel, had made all the right choices and I stood in awe of this minor little film that was simply astounding.

Wag the Dog Movie Review

In 1997 there was no YouTube, no Facebook, no Twitter. There were message boards, email, websites, maybe some very early blogs, but the dissemination of information and access to reports, accounts, and testimonials, for all that we thought at the time was lightning fast, was nothing compared to today. This thought occurred to me while revisiting Wag the Dog, Barry Levinson’s seventeen-year old film about an invented war fed to the media to distract the public from a Presidential sex scandal two weeks before he hopes to be reelected. In it, Robert De Niro plays Conrad Brean, a kind of independently contracted fixer brought into the White House by Winifred Ames (Anne Heche) to help clean up the mess and potential fallout once the story breaks. So Conrad enlists the help of Stanly Motss (Dustin Hoffman), a big Hollywood producer, to put the pieces in place to sell not just a war, but a whole package and all the emotions and patriotic fervor that come with it, to the public.

From My Collection: A Beautiful Mind Movie Review

The Academy has a great history of awarding the Best Picture Oscar to a generally lifeless, inoffensive work of mediocrity. I can hardly say that A Beautiful Mind is not a good movie (I regrettably put it on my top ten list for 2001), but it certainly isn’t great. It’s not even particularly memorable except in its simplistic depiction of mental illness.

I can’t say with any certainty to what degree John Nash suffered with schizophrenia or how it manifested itself, but I do know that the way Akiva Goldsman incorporates it into his screenplay, based on the biography by Sylvia Nasar, seems almost preposterous, designed specifically to aid the unsubtle viewer in understanding what Nash was going through. I guess I shouldn’t fault the movie for trying to reach a broader audience, but nor should we assume that it has anything new or interesting to say on the subject.

From My Collection: Good Will Hunting Movie Review

Good Will Hunting was the first in a series of roles Robin Williams took that became increasingly dark, subversive, and at times questioning the very nature of our existence. It’s easy to see patterns in retrospect and ascribe meaning to them, but I remember it being clear at the time that Williams seemed intent on making a serious mark as a dramatic actor in a range of parts in (often) independent films. The years following Good Will Hunting saw him chase his suicidal wife into limbo as his character negotiated his own afterlife in What Dreams May Come. Later he was the villain in both One Hour Photo and Insomnia. But a lot of that seems to point right back to Gus Van Sant’s 1997 film penned by the wunderkinds Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. Of course the Oscar Williams finally won likely helped earn him more interesting offers and afforded him greater freedom to take risks. But without Sean Maguire, the widowed psychiatrist who helps the title character find himself, he might have continued making more of Hook and Mrs. Doubtfire.

Black Hawk Down Movie Review

As I rewatched Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down for the first time I more than a decade, two other war Berchtesgaden more than a year later. The similarities are numerous. Both are based on books that attempted to recount, in as much factual detail as possible, the events surrounding are large contingent of American soldiers in conflict. Both were released toward the end of 2001, coinciding with post-9/11 American jingoism. Both focus heavily on the responsibility soldiers in combat feel toward each other more than to the ideology or politics behind the war. And both unflinchingly portray some of the horrors and carnage of war. The other is the more recent Lone Survivor, whose primary focus is on the fact of soldiers in harm’s way pulling for each other. The latter film has faced criticism for being a form of war porn, which you could also say to some extent about Scott’s film. But I think the positives to take away from all three far outweigh any negative observations regarding the depiction of blood and guts in battle scenarios.

From My Collection: Brokeback Mountain Movie Review

I read “The New Yorker” magazine with some regularity. Each issue has a short story included that I usually start, but don’t finish. They rarely grab hold of me. But I went back and took a look at E. Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” which first appeared in October 1997. It is an absolutely brilliant example of economy of story and character development. She squeezes more information into a single line of dialogue than other writers can get onto a page and fifty times the words. She won an O. Henry award for the story.

Senna Movie Review

If you go into the documentary Senna, about the late Formula One champion Ayrton Senna, directed by Asif Kapadia and written by Manish Pandey, with a blank slate as I did, you are likely to come away knowing more about this energetic and emotional young man than you could ever have learned from a book or series of articles about him.

The only thing I knew about Senna before was that he was from Brazil and that he died in the race car. I had no idea how old he was, how long he’d been racing before the accident, how many championships he’d won, or who his rivals were. Kapadia apparently did mountains of work combing through news and stock footage to be able to complete a total portrait of Senna’s Formula One career. He fills an hour and forty-five minutes of screen time without ever cutting away to a talking head. Every interviewed friend, family member, or colleague is presented in voiceover while we are treated to racing or practice footage, or those telltale ‘behind-the-scenes’ moments that reveal Senna’s emotions pre- or  post-race.

From My Collection: Bright Star Movie Review

Depicting an artist at work in a film is a tricky thing. The possibilities are greater when dealing with the visual arts because the process of creation is dynamic. But when it comes to filming the story of a writer, what can the filmmaker do to depict process? After all, what is a writer’s process in the majority of cases if not to sit at a desk and think…and write…and drink coffee…and think…and wait for ideas or inspiration? This does not make for very interesting cinema. So the most interesting films centered on writers tend to focus on something that is only tangentially connected to the writing or the finished product. Jane Campion’s Bright Star was a mesmerizing love story to me when I first saw it nearly four years ago and it remained so when I watched it again recently. The movie circumvents the problems of filming a writer’s life and work by making the story about the poet John Keats’ three year unconsummated love affair with Fanny Brawne.