I’d like to apologize for not writing any reviews this week. I haven’t given up on this blog again, but I am currently working at the Los Angeles Film Festival. And aside from taking up much of my time, it would be at least somewhat unethical of me to post reviews of anything I see there while the festival is ongoing. So instead, since we are right around the 1/3 mark of this decade, I thought I’d take the lazy blogger’s route and look back and make a list of the best of the 2010’s so far. I don’t think there’s any real point in judging a whole decade based on just 40 months of films, but it seemed like a good occasion to see where we’re at so far.
Joe Swanberg’s best film to date shows a slightly more refined style than his past work and is centered around a truly amazing performance from the always wonderful Jane Adams.
The best of Soderbergh’s five legitimately great films from this decade, Magic Mike finds the prolific master turning his eye toward a unique version of the American dream.
At a press screening, I heard another critic describe this film as being “as dull as Antonioni.” Not only did this teach me to drop whatever respect I still had for my peers, but it actually makes a fair comparison. Antonioni would undoubtedly be proud of this contemplative and beautiful western.
I called Michael Shannon my favorite working actor in my last post, so I’m sure you can imagine my appreciation for this, one of his best roles as a traditionalist father coming to terms with shifting family structures in post-recession America.
This documentary, made by Panahi and his friend Mojtaba Mirtahmasb while Panahi was under house arrest, explores one day in his life, as the great director struggles with boredom, fear and the summary execution of his artistic voice. While discussion of the situation and the horrific problems of the Iranian government are included, the simple fact that the film exists is its most important political statement. True radicalism in cinema cannot simply come from the statement of an issue, it must come from the specific way the filmmaker chooses to fight that issue. This Is Not A Film is one of the strongest statements against oppression and censorship in the entire history of cinema, if not art itself.
-From my original review for Realtimepodcast.org
One of the most emotionally harrowing films you will find, McQueen and his brilliant star Michael Fassbender layer this film with a perfectly overwhelming sense of dread.
I’ll admit that I more or less hated all of Korine’s films before this one, but Spring Breakers is by far the best film I’ve seen on the (often overstated) narcissism of the Millennial generation. Few films can claim to pulse with as much energy as Korine’s masterpiece, a garish, dubstepped-out horror story for my generation.
Akerman adapts Joseph Conrad’s first novel into a scathing look at the legacy of colonialism. Armed with her standard gorgeous framing and deliberate aesthetic, this late-career masterpiece proudly stands alongside Jeanne Dielman and Les Rendez-Vous d’Anna.
Another look at the effects of European colonialism, Gomes’ film takes the novel approach of looking at its subject through the lens of cinema, offering a wholly unique vision of the west’s imperialist past.
Leos Carax’s welcome return to feature-length filmmaking represents a fully fledged vision of the power of cinema. Each piece is a totally unique celebration of acting and filmmaking, unlike anything we’ve seen before.
If there is one way not to react to this film, it is to focus on the supposed mystery at the center. Almost all of the dialogue in the film, particularly when it involves her son, could be interpreted to support either answer, and I do not think Kiarostami really wants us to know if they are married or not. Of course, the answer could be both: we could be seeing both of these moments in their relationship, just with the same actors and the exact same setting. This was my first reaction, but now I realize that it just does not matter. This major thematic concern of the film is a question of the value of reproduction. The writer’s book states that a reproduction of a work of art still has value because it was created by someone, and that a copy can have greater cultural significance than an original. In an interview in the most recent issue of Cineaste, Kiarostami said: “The value of copies is that they can direct us toward the original.” He uses the Mona Lisa as an example. The original is a beautiful painting, but people would not be as aware of it without the endless copies. Does either of their relationships—as two single people with similar interests and as two married people trying to figure out where it went wrong—lose value because it may not be an original? No, of course not. For them, whichever one is just a copy will undoubtedly lead in the right direction, and for us both relationships are emotionally engaging, beautifully filmed and brilliantly acted. Neither affects the audience any more or less than the other, even though logic states that one has to be “false” in some way.
-From my original review for Light & Shadow
After a relatively uninspiring group of winners last decade, the Palme d’Or is off to a good start for the 2010’s. Two of the three winners (I’m not even counting Blue Is The Warmest Color since nobody outside of Cannes has seen it yet) made my top ten, starting with Weerasethakul’s brilliant fever dream. I don’t know if it’s his best (I’d vote Blissfully Yours), but I do know that there’s never been anything quite like this film.
2013’s best film to date represents a bold new step for Terrence Malick, cutting down his already minimal narratives to nearly nothing in favor of purely poetic take on cinema. Occasionally laughable acting prevents it from reaching the same highs as his very best work, but there is something to be said for this distilled version of his style, which I hope to see explored further in his next two films.
Alexander Sokurov’s is one of the most distinct voices in all of cinema, so you just knew his version of the classic tale would continue cinema’s long line of great Fausts. Re-imagining the aesthetic of his early movies like Mother And Son on a much grander scale, this take on the story gets by on an enthralling dream-logic.
Outside of a few Bela Tarr films (more on that later), I can’t think of another film that had as much of an immediate emotional impact on me as Melancholia. I still vividly remember stumbling out of the Parisian movie theater, so drained that I couldn’t walk the mile back to my hostile and had to stop at a cafe and gorge on coffee and wine just to regain my strength. And yet I was drawn to see it again the very next day, to a very similar result.
Emotionally, what makes this, Anderson’s best film, seem so different from his other work is the frank and sincere portrait of young love. Of course we still get the strange and awkward moments that are the heart of Anderson’s work to date, but there is far less distance between the characters and the audience. I think this largely comes from the fact that the protagonists are actually children and not just extremely childish. Anderson realizes this and changes his visual style to match, adding more movement and a greater sense of urgency to his usual tableaux.
-Taken (and slightly edited) from my original review for Real Time Podcast.
I’m not even sure what to say about Reygadas’s wonderful head trip. I’ve only seen it once, and it was such an overwhelming experience that parts of it certainly flew over my head. All I can say for sure is that I genuinely loved it, and even now, eight months later, I still routinely think of images from this film that will never leave my mind. Reygadas is already responsible for one film in my all-time top ten (Japon), and this, the best film of 2012, so his continuing career is one of the things I am most excited about in cinema.
True story, I saw this film five times in theaters (in four different countries). I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything else more than twice. Need I say more?
I don’t know if it’s really possible to pick the single best aspect of Ceylan’s epic masterpiece, but now, a year after I first saw it, the thing that I remember most is the sound. So much of this film’s greatness is about atmosphere, and the carefully constructed sounds of people walking on dirt and digging, and especially of the autopsy at the end are the aspects of that atmosphere that have stuck with me every time.
I have no means of doing a short write-up on this film, so I will instead re-post a slightly edited version of my original review, written as part of a series on Tarr for Real Time Podcast coinciding with the Harvard Film Archive’s Bela Tarr series last spring.
If you have to go out, you may as well go out on top, right? I doubt that idea played any part of Bela Tarr’s thinking when he shocked the film world by announcing that 2011’s The Turin Horse would be his final film, but at least it does hold true. This was the first time the announcement of anyone’s retirement has ever brought me to tears, but at the very least, our greatest director left us by more or less guaranteeing that he would finish in the top spot of my eventual “best of the decade” list for the third straight time. And if you think that it is a bit too early to make that claim, you clearly do not yet understand how I feel about this man’s art. As his goodbye, he has given us his most tragic, most minimal and most apocalyptic work, a movie that slaps traditional narrative cinema in the face while clearly mourning the death of film itself.
As the story goes, in 1899 Friedrich Nietzsche was walking the streets of Turin when he saw a cabdriver whipping a horse that had stopped moving. The hysterical philosopher threw his arms around the neck of the horse and begged the man to stop. After this, Nietzsche never spoke again for the remaining decade of his life. The Turin Horse may or may not be the story of that horse. I say may or may not because many people seem ready and willing to automatically label them as the same, but, given the fact that the film is very much set in Hungary and, as in all of Tarr’s later films, the time in which the events shown take place is never actually clear. Rather, I think Tarr sees this film (and its horse) as his own Turin Horse, and after he is done with it he will never speak (artistically) again. In the film itself, an old farmer and his daughter attempt to eke out a meager existence on their small plot of land in Hungary, but this cannot last forever. Their horse has stopped moving, and can no longer carry them anywhere. The constant overwhelming wind storm has rendered the outside world inhospitable so, like Akerman’s great Jeanne Dielman, we follow a few days in their lives, with specific events playing out in real time as they eat, get water and work around their home. At one point a friend comes over for a quick drink and later some gypsies try to take some of their water. Of course, this doesn’t really matter. It is what Tarr is able to do with this sort of hyper minimalism that enthralls us.
As always, we must begin our discussion of the film’s aesthetic with Tarr’s use of the long take. While the setting and lack of supporting or background characters renders the shots generally less complex than in Werckmeister Harmonies, there are also fewer of them. While Werckmeister had thirty-nine shots in its 140-minute runtime, The Turin Horse only has thirty in the same amount of time. As Werckmeister and Satantango, this makes it very clear that Tarr, more than anyone else is interested in cinema as a spatial and temporal art, and unlike Haneke, Tarkovsky or Sokurov, great filmmakers who are known to use the technique frequently, Tarr has made it the very basis of his aesthetic. The emotional weight of these films comes from the duration of the shots, and this is never as clear as it is in Turin Horse. The way the local retrospective of Tarr’s films was set up allowed me to see this the day after Damnation, and this timing made it very clear how much Tarr’s style changed over time. The shots are obviously longer, but the camera also moves much more and the lighting is much more subtle and interesting.
The film’s much-discussed opening shot shows the farmer riding the horse back to the farm at a high speed with the camera rushing to stay in front and Mihaly Vig’s brilliantly simple score blaring in the background. This is the single most energetic and surprising shot in all of Tarr, and by holding it for as long as he does, we soon begin to project any emotions we have onto the massive, struggling horse. The most memorable animals and objects in cinema are not cloying tools used to make the audience smile (as in the dog from The Artist), but rather creatures that, through great direction, are presented in a way that they reflect the emotional weight of the story. Think Bresson’s Balthazar or even the titular toy in The Red Balloon. That is how Tarr presents the horse in this film. This horse is giant and fairly intimidating, but because of how it is presented, I can only see it as something utterly tragic. It is no surprise that the most emotional moment of the film comes when the daughter makes one last attempt at trying to get the horse to drink. There are no histrionics and the horse doesn’t even move, but this moment has moved me to tears on three separate occasions and I can’t see that changing with future viewings. Tarr makes it very clear that there are comparisons to be drawn between the father and the horse, and seeing their respective struggles play out in parallel makes the film only that much more tragic. The rest of the shots after the opening are more like the Tarr we know, providing us a privileged viewpoint to see the emotional struggles of this father and daughter. The film is so much more than a normal aesthetic masterpiece though, and its merits cannot just be discussed in regard to the long take.
The Turin Horse is one of the most emotionally engaging filmic experiences I have ever had, and aesthetics only play one part in this. For one, the performances from János Derzsi (as the father) Erika Bók (as the daughter) are among the greatest in any of Tarr’s work and the film could not succeed without them. As in the previous films, the characters here are not motivated by the usual psychological explanations found in Hollywood films, but rather by the existential search for some kind of dignity and meaning in their lives. When the farmer’s friend comes over for a drink, he gives a speech about how the world has become “debased” and how, once the good and intelligent realized that good and evil do not actually exist (furthering the Nietzsche connection), they disappeared and life became meaningless. The farmer dismisses that as “rubbish.” He is an old man with nothing but one working arm, a loving daughter who can barely read and will struggle mightily if ever left to her own and a dying horse, but he cannot accept the inherent meaninglessness of the universe. Eventually, they try to leave the farm behind, but they do not have the strength to go on. To see them give up and accept that they will die on this already dead farm with no more water and no horse is one of cinema’s greatest tragedies. Even at the very end, when the wind that has made up the entire soundtrack of the film stops blowing and they are able to sit in quiet, they, like their horse, can no longer even bear the thought of eating. Throughout the film, I was also aware of Tarr’s mourning of the loss of film as a technology. As the director who I would vote least likely to make the transition to digital, this does make sense. Eadweard J. Muybridge’s early photographs of horses in motion were one of the single most important influences on early cinema, and so, for Tarr, it ends with a horse unable to move.
An Excess Of Cinema 