Light Sensitive

Age of innocence

I love the narrator’s direct, sensuous reaction to the first time he spies Swann’s daughter Gilberte in the first volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: “Suddenly I stood still, unable to move, as happens when we are faced with a vision that appeals not to our eyes only but requires a deeper kind of perception and takes possession of the whole of our being.”

That feeling of exultation and release was my dominant reaction the first time I saw Boyhood, at its Sundance premiere, on a Sunday night, at the Eccles Theater, this past January. From the opening strains of Coldplay’s “Yellow,” to the diaphanous shots of cloud formations to the subtle camera movement tracing the face of a young boy lying on his back and staring into the deep space, I was hooked.

The story is elemental and expansive and infused with a novelistic density. Boyhood is a work of cinema, but it is informed by other impulses and artistic forms, like music, literature, photography. The movie is a free and open work dedicated to the act of seeing and watching. It’s an immersive portrait of a boy we see develop—physically, emotionally, socially—over a twelve year time period. The impact and power is transcendent.

The protagonist, named Mason, is incarnated by a terrific and avid young actor named Ellar Coltrane. (He grew up in Austin, was primarily taught at home and has a pretty bohemian background.) In the movie, a child becomes a young man, defiant, evocative and idiosyncratic. Boyhood atomizes the process, and makes it vivid, tenuous, funny, sad, vulnerable and finally rather heartbreaking.

The movie’s organizing structure is governed around the family, and many of the individual scenes are shaped by the boy’s often complex interplay with his older sister, Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, the director’s daughter) and his mother (Patricia Arquette). On the margins, his estranged father (Ethan Hawke) is always seemingly hovering.

The movie meditates on time and duration in a way that is virtually unprecedented for a work of fiction. Rather than be obliterated by the form, the movie thrives on it as the anecdotal and observational storytelling achieves a very tangible and lucid shape. Time is both constant and elliptical. The first half is marked by disruption and dissonance.

The natural isolation of childhood gives way to a creeping sense of dread and pain, captured in the anger flashed between his parents or even more frightening, viewed in the violent collapse of his mother’s marriage to a college professor (Marco Perella) who is revealed to be a petty and abusive drunk. Life under the man’s martinet rule is suffocating all right, but it provides one of the movie’s loveliest moments. After the man orders Mason’s long and generous hair scalped to the nub, a self-conscious and humiliated Mason is buoyed when he turns up at school with this severe new style and the prettiest girl in his class sends him a furtive note saying how much she likes it.

In the first half, time is more imperceptible or offscreen, that is detectable by the movie’s subtle use of the diegetic sound, like televised news reports about the war in Iraq, a release midnight release party of the new print edition of the Harry Potter series, or the use of music or changing personal technology. In the second half (the movie runs two hours and forty-six minutes) time is more rapid and acute and self-aware, and the telling physical changes in Mason, the shape of his body, the deepening register of his voice, denote the passage.

Events whir by, and Mason is the fulcrum whose point of view filters the raw and unmediated, his father’s acceptance of social norms with a new wife and young child, his mother’s professional competence as a college professor of psychology marred by her continued pattern of hooking up and marrying the wrong man, and the growing independence and self-reliance of his sister.

Mason is not passive. He is inquisitive and alert. Boyhood crystallizes and makes visible the expressive capabilities of cinema, recording movement, behavior and feeling to render the sublime through the shock of recognition.  As his experiences become more diverse, his exposure to earthy, rural and fundamental culture of his father’s new in-laws or the ecstatic possibilities of his first serious girlfriend, the movie makes palpable what is often out of reach, the quotidian, or even ineffable, but it’s often muted, so it’s more realistic and telling.

Linklater’s vaunted humanism opens up rather than narrows the range of voices. The title notwithstanding, Boyhood allows many contrasting points of view to converge. If there’s an anger about the film, it is in realizing that in the twelve year production history, Arquette has been criminally underused in cinema, mostly having to make a living in television. Her big moment late in the film, about the burden and pain and anger of having to submit to assigned social roles is absolutely lacerating and brutally honest. Like her sister, she played the sexualized ingenue because she was beautiful and had a knock out body. She goes past the physical and gets at something direct and unvarnished, and the power and precision is something to see.

Hawke is a polarizing figure, but he does his best work with Linklater. They know each other so well that Linklater never lets the actor get away with one of his cons. The first big scene with his kids, after he has been away in Alaska, Hawke lets loose and he makes vivid the pain and horror of a man who knows he fucked up and wants a chance to make amends. Over time, as he drops his act and tries to play the role of a father, being demanding and instill discipline and responsibility, like giving his kids a talk about sex, Hawke finally underplays his natural cockiness and the result is pretty great.

In preparation for this piece, I went back and looked at the first interview I ever did with Linklater, almost twenty-four years ago, when we talked about his breakthrough second feature, Slacker. “Had I gone to film school, I never would have made a film like Slacker—there would have been too many people telling me why it wouldn’t work,” Linklater told me.

Boyhood is Linklater’s seventeenth narrative feature. Not every one of those works is perfect, but each brims with ideas, honesty, conviction and power. We are all grateful that Linklater took his own route.

Amazingly, in the movie’s twelve year production, Linklater shot the movie in thirty-nine days. The film has one-hundred and forty-three different scenes. He dedicated a significant part of his life to seeing the movie through. He colored the narrative with strands of his own autobiography. He cast his daughter in a lead role. Pretty much every single movement, idea and action rings true, especially emotionally.

The film’s extraordinary achievement is not his input alone; credit obviously is shared with the four superb actors, and the key artistic collaborators, his editor Sandra Adair, and the two cinematographers, Lee Daniel and Shane Kelly, production designer Rodney Becker and costume designer Kari Perkins.

The first time I saw the movie I thought the opening hour was uneven, largely because Linklater was working with raw, technically untrained actors; I felt the cumulative power was extraordinary in how the pieces fused together. A follow up viewing was less revelatory but even more convinced of its greatness. Boyhood is not perfect, but outside of a movie or two by Renoir or Ozu, I’m not sure what movie is. The quibbles and flaws are so minor and insignificant in the larger context they barely register. In its rigor, freshness and reach, nothing at the moment even comes close.

Images courtesy of IFC Films.

Sound and fury

Is Michael Bay the anti-Christ, a pop visionary, or a filmmaker for our devalued times. I am the first to admit his cinema is not mine. Personally, I find Armageddon, Pearl Harbor and Bad Boys II much more reprehensible in their swaggering and brutish monotony than the Transformers films.

I caught the the fourth installment, Age of Extinction, in Imax 3-D. (If you’re going to see it, that’s the way to go.) The movie cost a million per minute; the one-hundred and sixty-five million budget matches the running time of two hours and forty-five minutes. It’s not exactly boring, just spectacularly wrong-headed.

It is striking to consider the disruptions and incongruities. At his best Bay shows a preternatural ease with his velvety and sensual imagery, particularly when it comes to visualizing the shape-shifting of the robots. Some of those moments are, I think, intuitively exciting, sharp examples of what technology and money afford. The last two editions, both shot in the larger format, are much less spastic and self-annihilating.

Still, the dominant impression remains joyless and dispiriting. The inventive is cancelled out by the director’s impatience, indiscretion and shamelessness. Bay is enough of a tyrant that he pores over every detail, yet how can he not fathom how graceless it is to have an establishment credit that reads, “Texas, USA.” Or in a rare instance where Bay actually considers the emotional implications of death, a secondary figure is vaporized into a cinder of ash. Rather than ponder the loss, I felt a horror and revulsion at the calculated manner Bay appropriates the imagery of Hiroshima to elevate and justify his fantasia.

Bay is not really a director as much as an advertiser. The technical demands of computer generated imagery and special effects have stripped him of any individuality or personality. He is a ghost in his own machine. “We all work for somebody,” says one of the movie’s robots.  Bay is not a James Cameron-like kingmaker administering his technical prowess but a hired hand orchestrating an impersonal globalized product. He’s just selling it.

Looking back at his work, his one ambitious effort that actually strove to say something intelligent and discerning about identity, society and the larger culture, The Island, was his one unqualified financial bomb. The Transformers franchise quickly followed, his no doubt conscious and cynical rebuke to the same of professional failure.

He personifies how digital has corrupted the action form and obliterated mise-en-scène, cinematography, camera movement, space, color and movement. Movies still conjure a world, but they're backdrops, deprived of psychological acuity and denied any natural, intuitive or expressive rendering. Nothing’s real, so there’s no solidity or depth of feeling.

Ehren Kruger is the sole credited screenwriter. Structurally, the movie is an expositional nightmare, convoluted and inchoate. Like the other films, it’s Manichean, divided into unambiguous divisions of good (Autobots) and evil (Decepticons), with some minor variations.

The actors are capable though rarely fully engaged. Mark Wahlberg is the central figure, an inventor and engineer. Nicola Peltz plays his teenaged daughter, and Irish actor Jack Reynor is the aspirant boyfriend. Kelsey Grammer is a CIA directorate running a black op to wide out the Autobots who’s backed by an industrialist played by Stanley Tucci.

Characterization is fluid and unstable. Reynor is introduced as a man of action whose skill and bravery as a race-car driver extricate Wahlberg and Peltz from a dangerous situation. In a follow up crisis he’s cowardly and craven. Wahlberg is impoverished though lives on a spread, as a friend points out, that puts Tara to shame. Peltz is the new object of lust, the camera always starting at her ankle and angling up her uncovered thigh or pivoting in a reverse action.

Couched in the imagery of Disney and Spielberg, asserting the primacy of home, family and country (Bay never turns down an opportunity to wave the flag), Age of Extinction is objectionable in the usual fashion: its celebration of the infantile, the fetishization of the military, the dehumanization of women and the unrelenting, assaultive filmmaking that denies any real pleasure. The coercive stabs at humor only reveal the desperation.

It has about fifteen or twenty minutes of real grandeur and intensity, like a parkour style fight that unfolds down the vertical shaft of a Hong Kong apartment complex. The flourishes of wit and style in the production design prove insufficient. If Michael Bay were truly radical or innovative, he’d eliminate any pretense at plot and turn himself loose. The movie’s entire existence, its concessions to the Chinese marketplace and its egregious use of product placement, is built on compromise.

“It’s the film of a free man,” Roberto Rossellini famously said of Charlie Chaplin’s A King of New York. With every slog and desperate move, Michael Bay proves its opposite.

Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

The Rapture

The third feature by the London-born filmmaker Jonathan Glazer, Under the Skin is a work of exacting strangeness. Like Gravity, the movie testifies to the power and hypnotic wonder of image and sound. The movie has some truly knockout images, a motorcycle cutting like a blade through the nocturnal landscapes, waves lashing against the coastal cliffs of the Highlands or most frightening, the fate of avid men seduced by the mysterious central character.

The movie is adapted, very loosely, from the 2001 novel by the Dutch-born Michael Faber, by the director and his writing partner Walter Campbell. (Glazer admitted that Campbell never even read the book.) The novel, closer in form and tone to Anthony Burgess, is more satirical, about consumerism and also more explicit in pointing out the rationale motivating the alien’s behavior.

Under the Skin is a meditation on the form and erotic wonder of Scarlett Johansson. She plays the alien seductress who falls to Earth and takes the shape of a carnal loner who navigates the streets of Glasgow in a white van. Adopting the persona of a Londoner who’s lost, she gains their confidence and slyly seduces them. It is utterly nerve-wracking and transfixing to watch of the men led into an inky-black pool of slit that issues an eerie transmogrification.

Johansson, who's so astounding beautiful, has never really received her just due as an actress. She is electric, especially in the movie's brilliant centerpiece, an extended pas a deux between her character and a virginal, severely deformed middle-aged man she offers a kind of erotic sanctuary. The emotional exchange alters her being, deepening her own humanity and, conversely, exposing her to a wholly different form of vulnerability and weakness.

Johansson avails herself emotionally and sexually in a way she has never really been demanded of. Under the Skin is a great many things, often contradictory, the exasperating and annihilating alternating side-by-side. As storytelling, the movie seems an acute failure, deprived of clarity, emotional insight or psychological intricacy. The tradeoffs are ample, Johansson's performance, the score (Mica Levi) and the voluptuous, sinister visual rhyming.

Now the film is available as a digital download, VOD at Amazon, and a forthcoming high-definition Blu-ray. During an interview, Glazer talked about art and matter and how the long-gestating project came to being.

The idea of subterfuge is central not only to the film but its making. The pick-up scenes were shot clandestinely, with hidden cameras and the performers, many of them nonprofessionals, had no idea it was Scarlett Johansson.

Jonathan Glazer: That hidden camera idea came from over a period of thinking about the story. You’re just looking for it and you don’t know yet what it is until you find it. I didn’t feel sated yet. I knew there was a big method, a methodology we hadn’t yet discovered.They don’t just come out of nowhere. They come out of being immersed in the problems and the issues and you continue to turn them over until things coalesce and you just understood how to do it.

I shot something once in Toronto with a woman running down the street and I had 57 hidden cameras, because I wanted to keep the street completely open and have the woman run through, having people coming into and out of shops, going onto buses and seeing her negotiate her own life. I guess that was a sketch. Alongside that it came about with trying to find a way of being able to cast this film with a familiar actress.

I had a real disquiet of how to shoot this film with somebody who was really familiar to us. We needed somebody to be alien, and this was a way of achieving that. The idea of surveillance, the idea of shooting the world as it is, felt so critical because if the film is about her observing human beings and what we are and how we behave, in order for us to have some kind of value to her, than it has to be real.

The film is punctuated with mystery and dread, but you have said the key to the film is the scene on the beach, with the child and the interaction of the alien and the Czech man she meets there.

Glazer: The baby on the beach, what’s interesting about that, is than when [the alien] is in the traffic jam after that and hears the sound of the baby crying and she looks around, as if it’s in the glove box or something, it’s a baby in the backseat of a car. It’s the first time in the film she looks away from her target. It’s the first time in the film there’s almost a curiosity, some residue of memory. She just turns her head. The whole beach scene is really to achieve that, that tiny shift in focus; that’s the beginning. It’s not just who she meets, but what she smells and what she sees. For all of us, it’s the sum of all of those experiences.

The movie’s couched in the mood and style of science fiction. The deeper we get into the film, the more it becomes a kind of inquiry into what it means to be human.

Glazer: I hope so. Those are the things we were interested in. Also the fact that there’s no way into it, there’s no salvation or redemption, there’s no completion. It’s evolving as we are. People go into the cinema and they want to come out with answers. The more this film would have made sense, the less it would have. It needed to be in charge of its ambiguities.

I think Scarlett’s character is  fabulously complex and inscrutable. I find that all very human. Charting that drift from a very clear objective to this confusion and delusion that she has was a very difficult arc to create; it was constructed not just on the page, but in the editing and the music, and just finding the right curve. It was never about one event is going to be happen, and she’s going to turn left now or right. That was difficult to chart and calibrate.

This is probably the most extreme example of the dialectic in your films capturing a conflict between your need to innovate though also make something that conforms to the idea of commercial cinema.

Glazer: I think you’re right. I do find plot tyrannical. I want plot to be light-footed. I want it to follow emotional truths. What’s interesting is that sometimes when you shoot, what you write is emotional truth and what you shoot, what you think is the emotional truth, is not in the scene. You then look for the truth again when you look at the rushes.

When you look at the rushes, you’re looking at the things that feel most truthful and you begin to assemble that. You have to tell the plot in an unexpected way. You’re still aware that you have to tell the story, but you’re doing it less predictably. It’s about understanding the life and the footage you shot.

I’m still making my way through that. I feel like I’m moving further away from narrative. I appreciate a story, I love a great story, but I’m always looking for an idea that I could wrap around the back of a cigarette package and then investigate the form of that. I’m not the best person to go and shoot a story.

I don’t think it would challenge me in the way I want to challenge myself. I’m fascinated and preoccupied with the form. When you see those moments that transcend, they become something else, they take off and it’s very hard to go back from that, to identify that and not want more of it. Perhaps some of the music videos I’ve done has gotten me into that habit.

How did you shoot the film, and how, in a wider sense, has your work been impacted by the radical changes wrought by technology and digital.

Glazer: We invented cameras to shoot this film. Once we decided we’re going to shoot her in disguise and the world as it is, we started to ask how can we do that, or how can we achieve that. Testing the cameras that are out there didn’t give us the result that we needed. So we had to build on our own. We built these cameras because we needed a tool that wasn’t out there. We used a German camera that was used to shoot the inside of industrial machinery. 

I love the aesthetic of  [the camera]. It had the quality not of film, or even digital, the blacks bled and the colors rolled and it was beautiful. The aesthetic comes from the need of that tool. I think the idea of images and wanting your film to look a certain way, I’m less interested in that now. I think it’s about what suits the story you’re trying to tell.

You become more liberated in the process.

Glazer: Film’s gone now, but I think you have to look at that as an opportunity. I mourn the loss of film, but I’m not preoccupied by that. These aren’t the tools anymore. It’s not immersive. We invented a camera that ended up having an aesthetic that satisfied that. It was alchemy to the image somehow, which you never get from a digital camera. I like the way an iPhone camera image looks, but at the same time I can see an Eadweard Muybridge print of how San Francisco looks and be rocked backwards.

I think it’s important to look for the idea and what’s important for that.

Images courtesy of A24 Films.

 

Tender loyalties

 

Kelly Reichardt is one of my favorite American directors. She makes beautiful, intelligent and glancing movies that are almost impossible to predict. Those are, obviously admirable and viable qualities in an artist, but not necessarily welcome by an audience.

I have sharp and distressing memories of seeing her previous film, the extraordinary Meek's Cutoff, with both a festival audience and a commercial one, and both times the crowd was left mystified, even angry, with how that film ended.

Her movies typically invite you in but then hold you off. Her films meditate on friendship and desire and are built on familiar movements that continually find ways to surprise. Her movies are after something almost impossible to develop dramatically—the ineffable, the unspoken—so the rhythms are deliberately off-kilter, or denied a forward kick.

That desire to work through complicated themes, in a muted or downbeat style, walls off any easy or readily available emotional connection. So even having recognizable actors (like Michelle Williams, the star of her two previous features), Reichardt has never had a following to match her achievements.

Her new movie, Night Moves, is her fifth feature, and it is playing around the country after premiering last fall at Venice and Toronto. The movie is the closest since her first-rate debut, River of Grass, made twenty years ago, of a conventional story. All of her movies are tethered to genre—the Western, the road movie, the couple on the run—and then spiked, or subverted from within.

Like its subject, Night Moves is marked by its own subterfuge and furtive qualities. The title is a conscious doubling of the identically named 1975 Arthur Penn film with Gene Hackman and Jennifer Warren. Like the Penn movie, the new film is suffused with an annihilating sense of entrapment and quickly escalating paranoia. With its echoes of Ernest Hemingway’s great For Whom the Bell Tolls, the plot is slippery, morally and otherwise, rejecting psychological realism in conveying an upbraided idealism gone berserk.

Three very different operatives, radical in belief and practice, make their disillusionment explicit in the meticulous plot to blow up a hydroelectric dam in Oregon. The first part tracks the planning, and the second studies its aftermath. Reichardt wrote the script with her talented collaborator Jon Raymond. The filmmakers largely eschew motivation and intent, shaping the story, especially visually, around process, behavior and action.

Josh (Jesse Eisenberg), who works at a farm collective, is the operational and command leader. Dena (Dakota Fanning), a young woman of privilege, subsidizes the intricate action. Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard) is a former marine who is coveted for his expertise and facility with explosives.

In the opening movements, Reichardt deftly establishes a feeling of unease and disorientation, visually conveyed through weather and the rugged, pockmarked landscape, like a remarkable tracking shot following a young kid on a bicycle as the camera swings, floats and suddenly drops. Incrementally, the story, viewed through fragments and isolated actions, comes into sharper focus.

The planning is built around forms of acquisition as the three principal characters accumulate the necessary materials, such as a boat Josh and Dena buy off an unsuspecting private dealer. In the most riveting sequence, Dena is tasked with carrying out the negotiations to purchase a vast quantity of ammonium nitrate fertilizer from a skeptical factory salesman (the great James Le Gros). The scene is a marvel of body language, Fanning’s expert mix of authority and flirtation countering each of the man’s pointed inquiries until she finally wears him down.

These movements build to the eerie and remarkably sustained centerpiece that climaxes with the appalling act of ecological sabotage. Reichardt brilliantly shifts between the players and their environment, the velvety dark night interrupted by bursts of light, as she lightens the tension with stabs of humor, like a garrulous backpacker who wanders into their mix. The operation, no matter how well planned, is fraught with complication and nearly scuttled after the occupants of a nearby car stop to change a flat tire (“That’s not a good place to be,” Dena says).

The result, dramatically and emotionally, is indirect and quietly unsettling, the brutal and messy denouement heard more than seen. The action signifies not the end but a heightened phase of profound uncertainty as the three participants experience different levels of guilt, remorse and desperation to cover up their involvement.

Visually, Reichardt and her superb cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, map out an intricate visual pattern of surveillance: the three seated, plaintively, at a restaurant, dwarfed by a large wall painting; a reverse angle shot from the perspective of the interior of a motor home capturing their entrance to the campgrounds; the recurring use of cameras and mirrors.

As the movie subtly turns from a study of action to one of character and emotional confusion, the actors color and accentuate that deepening panic. Sarsgaard projects a wounded toughness and messy bravado and Fanning leaves teasingly open her own confusion and conflicted loyalties. (One of the best, most mysterious scenes shows how a surprise sexual encounter strains the emotional dynamics and upsets the group hierarchy.) Fanning is less vibrant and beautiful than in her other performances; she limns a vulnerability and shame reflecting the split between her ideals and their actual deliverance.

Again, the movie is weakest at articulating a convincing rationale for their behavior. Reichardt is more alive to behavior than morality or judgement. Eisenberg is the movie’s center. Not since David Fincher in The Social Network has a director so sharply and expressively utilized the actor’s idiosyncratic gestures, hesitations and pauses. No actor so skillfully navigates extremes of likeability and the self-serving. His intelligence is formidable and threatening. He’s perfect for Reichardt, given his essential instinct is one of implication.

The movie ends with two remarkable passages, a chilling confrontation inside a sauna that in its visual abstraction recalls the ending of Joseph H. Lewis’ noir classic The Big Combo and a disquieting and ambiguous coda that conjures another great Hackman film from the time of the Arthur Penn movie, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. It chillingly begets the emotional costs of surveillance and the violation of being watched.

Night Moves is all of a piece about a rot and malaise that no matter how far you flee is always there.

Images courtesy of Cinedigm.

 

Moving pictures

 

Most of my Cannes pieces this year originated at Doug Cummings’ superb Los Angeles-based site, www.filmjourney.org.

I have been extremely fortunate to attend every festival except one in the last nineteen years. One thing you learn, trying to summarize your feelings about a given year, is ultimately, you have to go your own way making artistic and aesthetic judgments.

The festival has many pieces and parts, not always smoothly arranged. I saw nearly forty films, and that still seems insufficient to adjudicate, critically, the programming—the competition, the official selection, the parallel programs in Un Certain Regard, Quinzaine and Critics' Week. For instance, I saw next to nothing in the Quinzaine, or Directors’ Fortnight.

We hand out instant grades, or analysis, of a given work though it is necessary to point out how some films actively resist this. More and more, I think, Cannes is like the professional drafts in football or basketball. It is impossible to weigh in the present.

The competition is what sets the discourse. This year’s, I thought, with a couple of exceptions, was distinctive and strong. For the second straight year, the professional jury made the right call on its Palme d’Or, as Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan won the top prize with his painterly, demanding, extraordinary Winter Sleep. The new Jean-Luc Godard feature, Adieu au language, seventy-minutes of awe and wonder in 3-D, transported the festival, as did first-rate new works by Olivier Assayas, Mike Leigh, Abderrahmane Sissako, Andrey Zvyagintsev and David Cronenberg.

From one to eighteen, this is how I’d rate the competition titles.

Winter Sleep (Nuri Bilge Ceylan) A+

Adieu au language (Jean-Luc Godard) A+

Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas) A

Leviathan (Andrey Zvyagintsev) A-

Mr. Turner (Mike Leigh) A-

Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako) A-

Maps to the Stars (David Cronenberg) A-

Two Days, One Night (The Dardenne brothers) B+

Foxcatcher (Bennett Miller) B

The Wonders (Alice Rohrwacher) B

Mommy (Xavier Dolan) B

Saint Laurent (Bertrand Bonello) B-

Wild Tales (Damián Szifron) B-

The Homesman (Tommy Lee Jones) C+

Jimmy's Hall (Ken Loach) C

The Captive (Atom Egoyan) C-

Still the Water (Naomi Kawase) C-

The Search (Michel Hazanavicius) D

Of course, many times your immediate impulse is dead on. No matter how much time passes or the context, Atom Egoyan's The Captive or Michel Hazanavicius’ ill-labored The Search, are going to be recognized as just being flat out bad movies. Every festival has those. The hope is that you limit them.

I have left out the older works I saw in the Cannes Classics and the tribute screening, in the Quinzaine, of Alain Resnais’ terrific Providence. These are the other titles I saw, in various programs, what I thought of them, at least on a single viewing. I am arranging them by the order I saw them.

The Lovely Girl (Keren Yedaya) C-

The Blue Room (Mathieu Amalric) B+

Red Army (Gabe Polsky) C+

White God (Kornél Mundruczó) B-

It Follows (David Robert Mitchell) B

Jauja (Lisandro Alonso) A

The Rover  (David Michôd) B

Queen and Country (John Boorman) B

Bird People (Pascale Ferran) A-

Lost River (Ryan Gosling) B-

Snow in Paradise (Andrew Hulme) C-

Charlie's Country (Rolf de Heer) B

The Tribe (Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy) A-

Party Girl (Marie Amachoukeli, Claire Burger, Samuel Theis) C+

Les combattants (Thomas Cailley) B+

Regrets are unavoidable. The top of my list are what I missed: Maidan, Sergei Loznitsa’s documentary Ukraine; Turist, or Force majeure, by Ruben Östlund; Jessica Hausner’s Amou fou; and Nadav Lapid’s The Kindergarten Teacher. I wished I’d seen those. Another time.

Even when Cannes is disappointing, the films cautious or familiar or just not terrible exciting, the experience is still exhilarating. Even if the films never match the expectations (or more significantly, fail to warrant the increasingly huge resources necessary to attend), Cannes remains essential.

Photo of Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner, with Timothy Spall, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics and Cannes Film festival.

Cries and whispers

The extraordinary Ida, mournful and devastating, is the new work and the first in Polish, by the filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski. He was born, in Warsaw, grew up in England, and has long been drawn to recurrent themes of exile and cultural estrangement.

His previous work (Last Resort, My Summer of Love, and The Woman of the Fifth) typically concerned protagonists caught in some form of transition, of people fleeing their past or identity in search of something new, better or satisfying.

Ida deepens those themes, and marries them to a central philosophical question of Poland’s cruel, necessary past and poses tough, essential questions of forgiveness, shame, heroism and honor. The movie is fundamentally about a search for truth, and the act of bearing witness to that truth, no matter the horror uncovered in the process.

The new film is set in the terrifying, dark moments of the early nineteen-sixties, a period marked of suspicion, political repression and severe social restriction. Pawlikowski conveys this from the start in the brooding, austere black and white photography. The visual texture achieves a deft, eerie likeness to newsreel, especially the cold, almost medieval architecture and the empty landscapes.

The sensation is further accented by his decision to shoot in the film in the Academy ratio, the square 1:37 ratio that conjuring a punishing immediacy to its physical environment.

Pawlikowski has two groups of very talented collaborators, the cinematographers Lukasz Zal and Ryszard Lenczewski and the production designers Katarzyna Sobanska and Marcel Slawinski. Visually, the movie’s white on white compositions, interrupted by stabs of charcoal grey, is often spellbinding.

The story is framed as a personal foundation myth. A serious, somewhat closed off young woman, Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) is an attractive, committed novitiate nun in her late teens who is preparing to accept her vows. Before doing so, she is ordered by her Mother Superior to meet with her only living relative, Wanda (Agata Kulesza), her aunt.

“I know who you are,” Wanda tells the young woman when she turns up at her apartment building. In the first of a series of startling revelations, Wanda informs her niece, who was raised in an orphanage, that she is Jewish, and her actual name is Ida Lebenstern. Startled though also intensely drawn to the particulars of her parents’ personal travails, the young woman accompanies her aunt as they travel to the countryside to the family’s estate, a rural farmhouse where they were hidden in the nearby forest from the Gestapo during World War II.

Pawlikowski wrote the film with Rebecca Lenkiewicz. The story sharply plays off incident, background, character and revelation to develop its ideas. Ida’s innocence and confusion is contrasted with Wanda’s bitter though often riotously bleak dark humor. "Do you you have sinful thoughts"? Wanda inquires of the young woman, following up before her response, "Of carnal love."

Wanda is a bit of a party apparatchik (a one-time feared prosecutor known as “Red Wanda,” for her work as a prosecutor during the show trials of a decade earlier), now filling out her bleak hours working as a judge, but mostly drinking and carousing and otherwise numbing herself. As the women undergo a tense quest to locate the dying patriarch of the gentile family who shielded Ida’s parents to better understand their fate, the film probes something else entirely, not just beliefs and prejudice but the guilt, shame and survival tactics that colored all manner of human behavior during the war.

The film is seemingly predicated on Ida’s act of witness and personal discovery, but the more dramatic and overwhelming material develops from Wanda’s painful admissions of profound loss and regret.

Ida is about two forms of horror collapsing against each other, the abuses perpetrated during the war framed against the privation of post-war Communism. It is also another work that directly addresses the question of nativist anti-Semitism, feeling of suspiciousness and alienation ever-present, from a bartender to more astoundingly, a priest, who asked about Ida’s parents, shrugs and says, Jews mostly clung to their own.

It is an annihilating vision, to be sure, but Pawlikowski and his performers find emotional outlets for their sorrow. Some of the richest filmmaking and acting occurs during the middle passages as the square, virginal Ida is pursued by a handsome saxophone jazz player (Dawid Ogrodnik). The astoundingly beautiful singer Joanna Kulig, in the same scenes, is like something from another time and place.

Agata Kulesza is one of the marvels of contemporary Polish film, and she brings the right combination of defeat, cynicism and bleak humor to a difficult part. By contrast, Agata Trzebuchowska is a novice, a nonprofessional who has subsequently given interviews saying she is not interested in acting ever again. She has a direct, plain style that works exceptionally well, where the absence of “professional technique,” liberates her and gives her a direct access, emotionally, to Ida’s pain and confusion. If it does turn out to be her only performance, it is an extraordinary one.

Ida is not a grand, sweeping work. It runs a fleet eighty minutes, but not a moment is wasted and everything, powerfully and devastatingly, connects.

Sundance: All in

The Berlinale is at the halfway mark, but I am still thinking about Sundance (illness and other personal factors prevented this piece from arriving earlier). This year's edition, my twenty-third foray there, had a free form and circular structure given the opening night film, Whiplash, swept the festival's most coveted prizes, the grand jury prize, awarded by a professional jury, and the audience award, selected by the public.

All festivals are intensely subjective and peculiarly idiosyncratic private experiences. You create your own rhythm. By the time my own festival ended, I saw thirty-three films across a range of programs. Yet, I wonder, how could I begin to accurately get inside a festival that resists easy assimilation.

No matter how hard I tried, I left with some deep regrets, like missing Ira Sachs' Love is Strange, or the grand jury prize-winning documentary Rich Hill, by the filmmakers Tracy Droz Tragos and Andrew Droz Palermo. I saw a lot, and yet I saw not nearly enough, considering I failed to see a single documentary in the main competition or the erudite and typically rich New Frontier section, by most learned accounts the defining work of which, The Better Angels, by A.J. Edwards, occasioned a British critic to ponder, after seeing it in Berlin, why it did not gather more critical excitement.

That is just one example of how dispersed the festival is. Perhaps another reason why is that unlike Cannes, Venice or Toronto, critics at Sundance are segmented and separated from each other in way not terribly open to framing the critical discourse (more and more the sole province of social media platforms).

The only true program I feel qualified to talk about is the (strangely) named US dramatic competition slot, where I saw fourteen of the sixteen titles. I saw six films in the Next program and five Premieres. This year’s festival echoed last year’s: a new film by Richard Linklater, the extraordinary Boyhood, proved without equal. (Boyhood has its international premiere later this week at the Berlinale, and I will be writing about it then.)

For the purposes of this piece, by "competition," I mean the main body competition. It had one great film, Whiplash, by the very gifted Franco-American independent filmmaker Damien Chazelle. I'm much more guarded about the rest of the competition. I liked enough films, but few had the range and ambition and insight that one hopes to find in a major competition, especially one predicated on discoveries.

I think the festival director, John Cooper, and his top lieutenant, Trevor Groth, have an extraordinarily difficult job parceling the thousands of submissions they receive in a very tight window in choosing the program. To their credit, they are much more open about acknowledging past mistakes than their predecessor.

For instance, I thought last year's program was solid, better at the top than the present, but then you find out about the glaring mistakes and omissions, like passing on Destin Cretton’s Short Term 12 (even though the director's previous feature was here and a short version also won a prize here). Too many films, you get the sense, get a free pass or at least at unfair advantage because the scripts or directors have a connection to the festival through the workshop or institute.

As much as Cooper and Groth have opened up the process, I still think it needs more transparency. Films that were workshopped in the labs get into the main competition and rather than assert the artistic achievement, it serves to legitimize the workshop. That strikes me as an holy union.

Sundance is getting a lot like Berlin, in that the best films turn up in the furtive corners, the equivalent of the Forum or Panorama, like Next or New Frontier or world cinema. I said it before, the festival made a major error in not slotting Alex Ross Perry's superb New York literary movie Listen Up Philip and Martha Stephens and Aaron Katz's terrific Land Ho! in the main competition.

Sometimes the glare of the spotlight is too much, unsupportive of the work at hand, but Damien Chazelle, I'm happy to report, is a legitimate artist. This new film and his low-budget debut, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, beautifully play off his complex cultural background. His twined French and American cultural identities overlap, conjuring a beauty and tender grace echoing the early, plaintive wonder of the nouvelle vague with a volatile energy and madcap tempo much more specific to an American vernacular.

Both films are musicals. Guy and Madeline was quiet, tender and handmade in the best sense; this work is more unruly, disruptive and volcanic. Chazelle deftly poaches American and French film history: the grammar and style suggest Martin Scorsese, with a direct allusion to Raging Bull, but the interior moods and themes strongly evoke Robert Bresson, with its study of a young ascetic attempting to achieve his own grace and salvation through his art, a mélange of Pickpocket and A Man Escaped.

As the first-year student at an elite Manhattan music school, Miles Teller is also stripped down: pure, direct and elemental, and the act of creating music and art is inseparable from self-annihilation. As the martinet instructor, J.K. Simmons is spectral and terrifying. From the opening shot, a marble slab of darkness in long shot that links the two warring antagonists, Whipsaw is both precise and thrillingly alive to possibility.

Nothing else is the competition really came close to the energy, vitality and startling conviction of Whiplash. Still, two I quite liked were: Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, by the Zellner Brothers, David and Nathan; and Low Down, a first feature by the exceptionally gifted cinematographer and experimental filmmaker Jeff Preiss (his best known credit was photographing Bruce Weber's lyrical Chet Baker documentary, Let's Get Lost).

Kumiko is another serious work of cinephilia, in that it directly addresses the works of the dominant figures of American independent filmmaking: the Coen Brothers and Jim Jarmusch, its two-part structure sharply moving East to West, from the urban to pastoral, touching on themes of madness and severe cultural dislocation, about the steadfast quest of a quietly resolute Japanese woman (the fantastic Rinko Kikuchi) to locate a buried treasure.

This is the first film of the Zellners I've seen, and they combine a keen eye for detail, landscapes and social observation with a marvelous off-balanced humor and subtlety of expression. The portraiture (Japanese cultural conformity, American parochialism) is hardly original, but the subdued rhythm and tone becomes fairly intoxicating. The humor is observant without being condescending and their imagery, like the lone, frightened figure walking through a snowbound landscape in an inventively improvised personal covering is a knockout.

Preiss is also a natural and intuitive imagist. His first film, like Let's Get Lost, is a potent, lyrical lament about art, creativity and breakdown, captured from the open, vivid perspective of a beautiful young girl (Elle Fanning) coming of age as her father, the great bebop pianist Joe Albany (John Hawkes, impressive as ever) struggles with his own private demons. The movie divided most people, between those who found the material unshaped and dramatically uninvolving to a more sympathetic coterie who were entranced by the mood and evocation of early seventies Hollywood skid row bohemia. Fanning is, of course, Amy-Jo Albany, upon whose memoir the film is adapted from.

It's an allusive, even subversive film much more concerned with an aching vulnerability and loneliness than a psychologically complex portrait of addiction. With the wonderful Fanning, it collapses the thin veneer marking young female consciousness and adult behavior. Her brief, startling emotional exchange with another adult inhabitant (played by Peter Dinklage) of the hotel is breathtaking. Shot in super-16mm (by the excellent cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt), the movie is colored and given expressive energy from its tentative, wounding tone braiding together memory, regret and wonder.

Carter Smith (The Ruins) is another director whose work is new to me. He has talent, especially visually. Jamie Marks is Dead has an eerie assurance that elevates the grungy, monotonous tone of the material, adapted from a novel, Christopher Barzak's One for Sorrow, a great many people were thrilled and excited by. The ghost of the eponymous dead child who was tormented and ignored by his peers haunts the tense, vulnerable girl (Morgan Saylor) who discovered his corpse and the guilt-ridden track star (Cameron Monaghan) who was indifferent or too weak to intercede on his behalf.

The movie never quite achieves its early promise (further marred by a subplot involving the protagonist's lower class, desultory home life), but it showcased a tonal and formal control worth getting exciting about.

I didn't believe a single moment in it, but for sheer pleasure and bravado, Jim Mickle's Cold in July held together with a sinister wit and some outrageously mannered but lively performances by the underrated Don Johnson and for once uninhibited and expressive Sam Shepard. As unfussy, clean and unpretentious genre filmmaking, the movie tore apart a lot of a the gentile preoccupations of the Sundance movie. At the same time, this movie belonged in Park City at Midnight, not the main competition.

Justin Simien’s Dear White People is more fascinating in its conception than its execution (I wanted to play faster, with a kinetic, screwball tone). Still, the dialogue is witty, the situations clever and the interpolated, flashback structure both unpredictable and clever. Like early Spike Lee, or even Robert Townsend, Simien has more ideas than possible to fully articulate into a single work. It has more wit than insouciance, which is not always such a bad thing.

This is how I’d rate the competition:

Whiplash (A)

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (A-)

Low Down (B+)

Dear White People (B)

Cold in July (B)

Jamie Marks is Dead (B)

Hellion (B)

Camp X-Ray (B-)

God's Pocket (B-)

Fishing without Nets (B-)

The Skeleton Twins (B-)

The Sleepwalker (C)

Song One (C)

Life After Beth (C-)

Images, from top, of Whiplash, Jamie Marks is Dead and Dear White People, courtesy of Sundance Film festival. All images copyrighted by owner.

Foreign country

With his first film in the West, the extremely gifted Asghar Farhadi draws on the very themes of the stranger, layering cultural dislocation and social estrangement in fashioning an alternately chilling and often-heart piercing beauty in the (primarily) French language film, The Past.

The director's first feature since his breakthrough A Separation won the Academy award for best foreign language feature, the new work conflates many of the ideas and preoccupations of that film and that of its immediate predecessor, About Elly.

Like A Separation the slow-burn narrative details the rupture of a relationship. Like About Elly which turned on the mysterious disappearance of a young woman, the rupture is a means to introduce the larger network of characters, using incident, social detail and color in developing the story.

What feels euphoric and liberating about the telling is how Farhadi elegantly shifts among his characters, as though each figure were passing a baton and telling a part of their story, revealing their condition, before passing on to the next person in the carefully construction formation.

In The Past Ahmad (Ali Mossafa, pictured at top) returns to France after being estranged for four-years to complete the divorce from his French wife, Marie (Bérénice Bejo, the silent film actress and love interest in The Artist). The taciturn, somewhat withdrawn Ahmad is installed, somewhat awkwardly, at the ramshackle suburban home of Marie, where she lives with her two daughters from a previous relationship.

The oldest daughter, Lucie (the ravishing young actress Pauline Burlet, pictured below right), is in a state of war with her mother over her intentions to marry Samir (the great young actor Tahar Rahim, of Jacques Audiard's A Prophet). Her disapproval takes on outright disobedience and elaborate acting out. Samir, who owns and operates a dry cleaning goods store, also has a young son, Fouad (Elyes Aguis), a friend of Marie's younger daughter, Lea (Jeanne Jestin). His own life and backstory is complicated by his comatose wife.

A Separation used an unraveled marriage to dissect the legal, social and sexual mores of a closed, even reactionary society, especially its harsh, almost retaliatory treatment of women. The Past is even more pointed politically, suggesting the moral and emotional costs of exile. Ahmad is trapped between East and West, openness and confinement.

Farhadi is very careful how he apportions information, gleaned from conversations, pauses and tightened faces. Farhadi works in a harsh, realistic vein separate from the neo-realist impulses of somebody like Abbas Kiarostami. Like Kiarostami, the moral rigor and intelligence is a constant.

From the very opening, inside an airport terminal, an invisible wall constricting the key players, the movie uses imagery to express its ideas, gracefully but also emphatically. Even the movie's inventive, quick title sequence (from the French, Le passé), is an act of inspiration, the white on black letters, mimicking the wiper blades on a car windshield, suggest an act of erasure, of coming clean.

The direct cinematography of Mahmoud Kalari is steady, observational and pellucid.

Just like his other work, Farhadi is exceptional with actors. He conducts extensive rehearsals before shooting. He creates a tension, of feeling and movement, in the bodies and faces of his actors. The young kids are funny, graceful and revealing without ever being sentimentalized, like a wonderful exchange between the young boy and his father about whether or not he owes Ahmad a personal apology over a minor transgression.

The tension and unresolved emotional interaction between Ahmad and Marie, for instance, colors and deepens the material. If the new work never quite gets at the level of A Separation, the new work is more plot and incident-intensive, and not always to its advantage. As a point of comparison it lacks the subtlety and range of the director's masterpiece.

Still, even when the storytelling veers out of rhythm, the actors find a way to smooth over and refine the rough edges.

Ahmad is a double exile, removed from his homeland and drawn back to his adopted place, but still frozen and on the outside, unable or unwilling to reveal his own feelings about Marie. Rahim (pictured below) is often exceptional at capturing the wounded grievances and buried resentments of the working class; here he exudes a ferocious and feline presence, able to shift in a moment's notice, from joy to anger.

Pauline Burlet, who has a remarkable and uncanny resemblance to Marion Cotillard (she played the younger version of Cotillard's Edith Piaf in La vie en rose) is a vivacious and beautiful woman, with deep, liquid eyes, but she smudges her beauty to convey the inner turmoil and even desperate emotional confusion of the young woman. Her work is exceptional and deep. Taking a part originally written for Cotillard, Bejo won the best actress prize at Cannes last May and she makes the part her own.

Marie is vulnerable, calculating, flawed and deeply human. She makes the whole work sing.

Images: Sony Pictures Classics

I'm Not There

 

The first time I saw the Coen Brothers' film Inside Llewyn Davis at Cannes, I was struck by the virtuosity of the imagery and the plaintive sadness of the story without being entirely convinced the pieces all held together.

This is their sixteenth feature since Blood Simple. The brothers have always been fabulists who are masters at the glancing or the oblong. Their refusal to tell stories straight has always been one of their idiosyncratic and admirable traits.

The new film is a deft picaresque, a fantasia in the vein of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, though darker and more threatening. It’s streaked in pain and humiliation and colored by the nasty moment to moment vicissitudes of fate and circumstance that situates it closer to Barton Fink and A Serious Man.  

At times it felt almost too jagged and loopy, the individual pieces lovely and haunting, but overall, somewhat amorphous and disconnected. Still, large parts of the movie lingered with me long after Cannes, especially the tour de force thirty minute road set piece that occurs halfway through the movie.

Having the chance to see it a couple more times the disparate parts and wild tonal contrasts seem more coherent and thematically bound. The inventive structural patterning of the script, not apparent until the end, gives a governing shape, and kick to the material.

The story concerns the absurd and comically despairing episodes in the life of the eponymous folk singer. The movie’s set over a couple of days in the winter of 1961 (significantly the year when Bob Dylan detonated the Greenwich Village folk scene). Beautifully played by Oscar Isaac, with just the right mixture of grievance, seriousness and comic exasperation, Llewyn Davis is introduced, in close up, performing at the Gaslight Cafe the wounding lament, "Hang Me, Oh Hang Me" ("Poor boy, I've been around this world").

Isaac has a nicely modulated voice and he does all of his own singing and plays his own guitar, a nice touch of verisimilitude that adds a more emotionally authentic and realistic vein than that of O, Brother. The somewhat jarring opening quickly establishes Llewyn’s abrasive, mocking nature. After the number, he says, "You've probably heard that one before, but what the hell. If it was never new, and it never gets old, then it's a folk song."

Summoned to a back alley by an alleged acquaintance, he is immediately pummeled by the mysterious and wrathful figure in black. The corners of the frame give way to a blinding whiteness, suggesting a peculiar dream state as Llewyn suddenly awakens, in a well-lit apartment. In fact, a number of scenes begin just this way, the comically undone protagonist being suddenly jolted into consciousness.

A man with no fixed address Llewyn is obstinate, abrupt and wholly untethered from responsibility, work or obligation. He roams from one apartment to the next, typically alternating between the well-heeled Upper West Side space of his music patrons, the Gorfeins, or the couch of the musical couple, Jim and Jean (played by Justin Timberlake and Carey Mulligan). The straight life terrifies him.

The story is largely about his professional quest to remake himself as a solo performer following a personal and professional tragedy. The Coens work in inference, the spiky exchanges between Llewyn and Jean all surly recrimination and nasty epithets. For all of his faults, contradictions and self-righteousness (he even has the gall to accuse Jean of being a "careerist"), Llewyn has enough talent and and persistence that he is accepted by his circle of associates and friends.

Despite the period and milieu, the film is politically fugitive. The protest song movement is addressed, and civil rights is acknowledged through an inventive use of the song, “500 Miles.” (The specter of Vietnam is invoked in the form of a white-bred singer named Troy Nelson who plays gigs during weekend furloughs from Fort Dix.)

The Coens are drawn to doubles and contrasts. Troy Nelson's smooth emotional engagement is a direct rebuke to Llewyn's surliness, or the assimilated Jew Arthur Milgrum (a play on the great and irascible Minneapolis art film personality Al Milgrom) who reconceives himself as the cowboy Al Cody.

By contrast, Llewyn Davis cannot escape or reinvent himself. Even after he undertakes a surreal quest to snare an audition and make a favorable impression with the influential Chicago club impresario Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham), Llewyn suffers a particularly cruel and soul-killing insult that illustrates his own marginalization.

The Coens are working for the first time with the superb French cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, and he sharply accentutes their deeply recognizable and exacting formal style, especially compositionally with their off-center framing. The dominant visual metaphor is confinement, emphatic in the recurrent scenes set inside apartments and clubs, recording studios, the impossibly tight landings of the Village walk ups, subway compartments and especially car interiors.

The thirty-minute Chicago sojourn contains some of the most enthralling images of any film I've seen in the last year. The cuts and transitions are much different than anywhere else in the film. The screen ink black, the light materializes and the perspective is the forward thrust of a car captured from rear. It’s evocative though tense and mysteriously alive.

Llewyn is a passenger helping out with costs to Chicago, where he is regaled by the fanciful stories of a blowhard jazz musician (John Goodman) and his "valet," the impossibly good-looking actor and somewhat criminally inclined (Garrett Hedlund).

As shot by Delbonnel and designed by Jess Gonchar, the American landscape has never felt so restrictive and marked by hallucinatory dread, expressed by the the perilously narrow backroads and garishly lit all-night diners conjuring all manner of creative exhaustion and artistic depletion. It plays like a charged and deranged version of the Hades episode of Leopold Bloom’s incident-fraught carriage ride to Dignam’s funeral in James Joyce’s Ulysses, ending like it began, with a man confronting his own oblivion, (Joyce is a recurring literary source whose connection is made explicit by the movie’s end.)

The music, produced and arranged by the Coens’ regular musical collaborator, T Bone Burnett, is majestic and sublime. (I particularly loved that David Mansfield, one of my favorite composers who did the extraordinary score of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, played guitar and fiddle on several of the tracks.)

The protagonist is not changed or awakened or certainly not softened. He is rather a man trapped by history and caught in a historical tumult he is almost certainly incapable of fully realizing. Not for nothing are the final words of this sharp-eyed and magnetic work out of time: “Au revoir.”

Images: Cannes Film festival and CBS Films.

The best of the year in cinema

On this, the final day of the year, I offer my personal top ten of the best in cinema.

1. Before Midnight (Richard Linklater, Sundance). Reviewed here.

2. Après mai (Olivier Assayas, Toronto 2012). Reviewed here.

3. Blue is the Warmest Color (Abdellatif Kechiche, Cannes)

4. The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, Chicago press screening)

5. Beyond the Hills (Cristian Mungiu, Cannes 2012). Reviewed here.

6. 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, Toronto) Reviewed here.

7. Bastards (Claire Denis, Cannes)

8. A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhang-ke, Cannes) Reviewed here.

9. Inside Llewyn Davis (Coen Brothers, Cannes)

10. American Hustle (David O. Russell, Chicago press screening)

It was, I think, a fairly exceptional year, so much so I never had such difficulty finalizing my preferences. I’ve listed, in the parenthetical, the director, and where I first saw the film.

The two other Linklater films that make up the trilogy, interestingly enough, both predate the existence of this blog, but not my putting together a personal top ten. Nine years ago Before Sunset was my number one film. I believe Linklater and Assayas are the other directors to top my list more than once.

The Assayas and Mungiu films were first screened, at festivals, in 2012; four of the titles premiered at Cannes, three in competition, one in the parallel official selection program, Un Certain Regard.

I’ve also included links to longer essays about the films in question. The ones that lack longer reviews I plan to publish over the next couple of days.

The following are those titles that I struggled with, for one reason or another, before putting them on my second ten. In most years, I’d have found a spot for them in my primary list.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

11. Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach)

12. Computer Chess (Andrew Bujalski)

13. I Used to Be Darker (Matt Porterfield)

14. Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine)/The Bling Ring (Sofia Coppola)

15. Her (Spike Jonze)

16. Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami). Essay.

17. You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet (Alain Resnais)

18. Fill the Void (Roma Burshtein)

19. Lenny Cooke (The Safdie Brothers)

20. Short Term 12 (Destin Daniel Cretton)

Finally, the following constitute films I thought quite accomplished and in many cases, lovely, just unfortunately, no room at the top.

Ain't Them Bodies Saints (David Lowery)

All is Lost (J.C. Chandor)

The Attack (Ziad Doueiri)

At Berkeley (Frederick Wiseman)

Blue Caprice (Alexandre Moors)

Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen)

Byzantium (Neil Jordan)

Dallas Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallée)

Drug War (Johnnie To)

Fast and Furious 6 (Justin Lin)

Fruitvale Station (Ryan Coogler)

The Go For Sisters (John Sayles)

The Grandmaster (Wong Kar-wai)

Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón)

The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino)

Hannah Arendt (Margarette von Trotta)

Kill Your Darlings (John Krokidas)

Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Verena Paravel)

Magic Magic (Sebastian Silva)

Mother of George (George Dosunmu)

Museum Hours (Jem Cohen)

Nebraska (Alexander Payne)

Night Across the Street (Raúl Ruiz)

No (Pablo Larraín)

Passion (Brian DePalma)

The Past (Asghar Farhadi)

Prisoners (Denis Villeneuve)

Side Effects (Steven Soderbergh)

The Spectacular Now (James Ponsoldt)

A Teacher (Hannah Fidell)

This is Martin Bonner (Chad Hartigan)

To the Wonder (Terrence Malick)

Upstream Color (Shane Carruth)

Blue is the Warmest Color (top), Frances Ha (middle) and Bastards. Images courtesy of IFC Films and Sundance Selects.