More Interesting Than the Oscars 4: The Year of Taking What You Can Get

By around late December, a sense of panic had started to creep in.  I'd been haunting the movies all 2014, and for the first time in a long time, I hadn't found anything that I was comfortable proclaiming as my favorite film of the year.  I don't wish to say that this was an off year for movies; there were more than enough worthwhile events.  But rather, all pleasures seemed to come in a somewhat compromised form.  By the end, the quest was complete and I filled up 24 spots—even if I had to cheat a bit to get there.

At the multiplexes, the surprise hit of the summer was Guardians of the Galaxy, which took one of Marvel's most esoteric properties, gave it legs, and turned TV co-star Chris Pratt into a desired leading man (Spielberg is reportedly eying him for an Indiana Jones reboot, so brace yourself).  The movie itself was less witty and creative than the average episode of Firefly, but it's a sign of how multiplex audiences yearn for personality and eccentricity that the mere act of aspiring to Firefly was a genuine tonic.  Then there's Interstellar, which was supposed to ride in as the great white hope of intelligent blockbuster cinema.  The result is something of a mess, overwrought in some places and underdeveloped in others, landing neither the critical clout or the box office that a Nolan film portends.  But then again, its practical FX, musical score, and hard sci-fi ambitions are something to cling to in this day and age: this is the closest Hollywood came all year to the thoughtful fantasy spectacle of an Alien or an E.T.

Then there's the Oscar bait.  The Imitation Game shows how polish and star-power matter more at awards season than inspiration.  The cast is good and the product is slick, but just about everything the filmmakers changed or added made the real-life story less interesting, not more.  Selma was a better film, with a few remarkable sequences to call its own and real fire in its belly.  But the snubs aren't worth the controversy they caused, in part because the movie isn't that exceptional, and mostly because even if the voting went a different way and gave the film a few more token nominations, it still wouldn't change Hollywood's systemic issues with race.

Which brings us to the major contenders, in a year praised for auteurism charging the Oscar stage.  Birdman is a magnificent achievement that can't help but feel a little fraudulent, a kind of have-its-cake/eat-it-too movie where everyone involved, from the actors to the DP to the drummer, is top notch, only it's all in service of a statement that doesn't add up to nearly as much as it would like.  Whiplash is a movie that isn't only about showing off, but embodies it.  Boyhood is the best American film of the year practically by default, showing an ambition, sincerity, dedication, and purity that nothing else matched, and that can successfully overshadow how parts of the film are downright embarrassing (I'm thinking of the Hispanic day laborer who Patricia Arquette apparently saves with an off-hand comment).  The Grand Budapest Hotel is some of the most fun to be had all year, but Anderson's usual undercurrent of melancholy is thinner than before; it's the only of his films that seems less substantial with each viewing.  American Sniper stands out as deserving perhaps the most ink spilled on it, especially in the light of the controversy it's caused through face-value readings of its take on the Iraq War, but that piece will have to wait for another time.

Then there was the festival circuit.  This year's Palme d'Or winner at Cannes, Winter Sleep, must have had the most muted reaction in years.  Amour, Blue is the Warmest Color, and Tree of Life got people arguing.  Winter Sleep is an excellent film that doesn't seem to have surprised or galvanized many people at all; if anything, it was like a given for a director who's been in and out of the spotlight for over a decade.  Far more of a lightning rod was Jean-Luc Godard's Goodbye to Language, which contains two of the most mind-blowing shots of the year, but compared to his best work (including his underrated films from the 90s) is more like an exercise than a feature.  Inherent Vice showed P.T. Anderson going further off the deep end.

And yet, now that I officially sound like a bitter curmudgeon, let it be known that I found something (sometimes many things) valuable in every film I've just named.  Surprises around every corner, too.  Much to the dismay of my friends in high school, I could never get into anime, yet anime takes two spots near the top of my list for the year.  As for the Oscars, there's plenty of good you can see in it, and not just because Neil Patrick Harris is hosting.  Three godheads of 90s independent cinema—Richard Linklater, Julianne Moore, and Wes Anderson—are serious contenders to finally get their Oscars this year, and even if it's not for their best work, it's a good thing.

Speaking of good things, on to my list of favorites.  As always, here's a top 10, wide 2 wild card picks, and another 12 runners-up.

12. Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA)

Perhaps the most valuable contribution Inherent Vice made, aside from getting Chuck Jackson stuck in our heads, is jump-starting a conversation about the importance of plot vs. story.  P.T. Anderson's film takes an intentional glee in all its loose ends.  Its narrative is like a river emptying into a sea.  But the sense of loss and paranoia that pervades it, how the twilight of an era is sliding away and leaving its heroes in an uncertain future, makes it a unique film to treasure.  A pulp noir fantasy, a twist on movie cliches, and a paranoid trip through America's most schizoid chaos.

11. Foxcatcher (Bennett Miller, USA)

Moneyball was good, but Bennett Miller didn't seem to know what to do with an Aaron Sorkin script. He thrives on a slow tempo and an icy palette, which is why Foxcatcher is a more natural fit.  Steve Carrell gave the type of performance that gets awards, prosthetics and all.  But don't discount Channing Tatum's best performance to date, as something of a brute with dreams of American exceptionalism, even if all the evidence he can see—including in himself—points to something darker.

10. Gone Girl (David Fincher, USA)

Fincher's latest is one of the slipperiest films of the year, looking initially like an episode of CSI but turning into a sly, subversive satire of forensic drama, marital strife, happy ending, media circuses, Ben Affleck's blankness, and the post-modern career of Neil Patrick Harris.  Film history may yet recognize it as a comedy.

9. Winter Sleep (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey)

A rich, sprawling drama, a long series of conversations full of richness about the gaps between rich and poor, men and women, young and old, working its spell upon you gradually.

8. The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, USA)

Anderson's most fleet-footed caper to date, full of visual and verbal wit.  Forget the ending about the collapse of Old Europe in the face of World War II—those movies have already been made.  The real potency here is the melancholy feeling that Anderson was born too late to be Ernst Lubitsch.

7. Black Coal, Thin Ice (Diao Yi'Nan, China)

This year's Golden Bear winner (still unreleased in the States, for reasons unknown) is a tricky film to get a grip on, especially if you expect a film noir and find out that so much of the movie leans towards the absurd.  This is a police procedural where the police are practically clowns, not solving so much as stumbling upon a solution—and even then, they don't grasp the significance. A dig at both Western cliches and Chinese authorities. Which, come to think of it, is the opposite of Transformers 4.

6. Under the Skin (Jonathon Glazer, UK)

A cold, spare science fiction tale, one that would be a little too basic if it were told in straightforward Screenwriting 101. But since it's told almost exclusively in (stunning) imagery, it becomes a mesmerizing nightmare, where Earth feels like the surface of the moon and being a woman among men is like being an alien presence. Watching it is definitely taking a plunge.

5. The Tale of Princess Kaguya (Isao Takahata, Japan)

Now that Hollywood animation is almost exclusively ironic pastiches with celebrity voices, I'm glad someone is holding up the old school: animation that looks like the drawings of a children's book, perfect for fairy tales.  A truly beautiful film about the expectations placed on women, far more mature and troubling than Brave.  The scene of Kaguya bolting off belongs in any highlight reel of 2014.

4. Boyhood (Richard Linklater, USA)

Linklater's masterpiece?  I'm not so sure.  But he follows his method of finding beauty, heart, and transcendence in life's little moments to their fullest possible conclusion: a twelve year epic where we dip in and out of characters' lives, seemingly at random.  I'm not sure how Boyhood will fare in years to come, whether it will be viewed as a filmmaking triumph or a gimmick.  But lovely moments abound, and it's inspiring to see audiences rally around such a film.  It shows that we do like movies and life to be connected after all.

3. Like Father, Like Son (Hirokazu Kore-Eda, Japan)

It's Capraesque in its simplicity, but fuck it, we could use some Capra. Six years into a deep economic slump, a time when you'll regularly see asshole pundits on TV slagging the poor, Kore-Eda's film makes the beautifully simple argument (in tribute to Ozu) that everyone could be everyone else's family. It gets by on the sort of sentimentality that would seem schmaltzy if it weren't so delicate. But delicate it is.

2. Leviathan (Andrei Zvagintsev, Russia)

Russia has gone from the Tsars to authoritarian communism to whatever the hell Putin is, and Zvyagintsev, with this sense of history, confirms his rep as a master of the slow-burn allegory. A brilliantly written drama, surreptitiously laying out important details as it draws a chilling (yet often comical) look at how corrupt systems can't be challenged because the challengers are only human.

1. The Wind Rises (Hayao Miyazaki, Japan)

Deeply humane and strikingly classical, Miyazaki's farewell film is a departure for him, but is like the sort of movies Kurosawa and John Ford used to make.  And if it's a "kids' movie", it's the most morally complicated ever made. Miyazaki's animation is rich, taking history partway (but not too far) into fantasy.  Its view of an attempt to live life outside of history is a provocative work of true heartache.  It played in 2013 for one week in L.A., to qualify for last year's Academy Awards, and then slipped quietly into theaters in 2014 for the rest of us.  Putting it here may be cheating, but either way, it's perhaps the masterpiece to find playing in American theaters this year: the one that shows that what we admired about the old masters is still here.

*****

The Honor Roll: 12 more films that made following movies worthwhile this year...

American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, USA)

Birdman (Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu, USA)

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves, USA)

Force Majeure (Ruben Östlund, Sweden)

Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, France/Switzerland)

Jauja (Lisandro Alonso, Argentina/Netherlands)

The LEGO Movie (Phil Lord, Christopher Miller & Chris McKay, USA)

Maps to the Stars (David Cronenberg, Canada)

Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, USA)

Two Days, One Night (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Belgium)

Venus in Fur (Roman Polanski, France)

We are the Best! (Lukas Moodyson, Sweden)

Lives of Observation: "Boyhood" and the Cinema of Richard Linklater

What difference does a title make?  Richard Linklater's Boyhood, which has become the most celebrated American film of the year, was originally going to be called "12 Years".  But just as Linklater wrapped production, 12 Years a Slave hit it big, so Boyhood it became.  The word "boyhood" implies something archetypal.  It has a tinge of the definitive, and the film has been criticized these lines, both accused of holding up a flattering mirror to its audience and questioned for not living up to a universality that it never really claims.  More on that in a moment, but for now, I wonder if, had the film had kept its original title, it would be clearer that it's first and foremost about the passing of time in one small corner of the world.  Title aside, the boy in Boyhood is one of the least active players.  It's at least as much about his parents.  It's even more about what, in almost any other film, would be the backdrop or the incidental details, from video game technology to political campaigns.  To watch the movie is to watch an endlessly shifting time-capsule.

A friend once told me that the worth of any movie is how well it stands when you remove its central novelty.  Thus the true measure of, say, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind isn't the wild visual tricks or the mobius-strip structure, but whether or not the romance at the core holds any weight.  It's a metric that hung in my mind as I watched Boyhood.  The production of the film is itself an awe-inspiring model of dedication: a narrative film shot and written in pieces over 12 years using the same actors.  The filmmakers let a decade-long plot play out and then condensed it into a feature.  It's difficult to be critical in the face of such a noble, ambitious passion project, which is surely a factor in the film's nearly dissent-free 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

So what would Boyhood be if you removed its novelty?  What if it were shot in the conventional way, over weeks or months, with different actors playing the boy at different ages, using makeup to age Patricia Arquette instead of letting time do it for you?  Stripped to its dramatic essentials, the film is uneven.  It may be ungrateful, or at least redundant, to accuse a 12 year production of patchiness, but the feeling is often inescapable.  You can put it simply: some scenes work, some don't.  Some are beautiful, heartbreaking, and funny, and several made me cringe.  Some actors inhabit their roles seamlessly, others are forced.  And, in a film that's nearly three hours long, hardly anything interesting is ever done with the camera.

And yet this description doesn't do justice to the appeal of Boyhood at all.  There is something mesmerizing about watching the characters age, and you the viewer feel more like Linklater's collaborator than his audience.  You're part of the experience, particularly if you see it with a crowd, and when a scene doesn't work, you simply brush it off and wait for the next one.  Perhaps novelties and gimmicks aren't merely accessories to a movie at all.  Perhaps they are, or can be, the core.

The acclaim has already invited backlash.  Rebecca Mead wrote a piece for the New Yorker called "The Scourge of 'Relatability'", with Boyhood used as a prime example of culture that panders to its audience.  Is the film good simply because we relate to it?  Watch it in a packed house on a Saturday night, and you can feel the audience murmur with recognition.

I must admit that I'm not sure how the film will play in years to come.  When it's viewed by a generation too young to have played Nintendo Wii or watched the shittiness of the Bush years turn into the shittiness of the Obama years, I suspect it'll seem like an artifact instead of a masterpiece.  But these are criticisms more of the movie's praise than of the movie itself.  For such an ambitious production, the film that resulted is actually very unassuming, or as unassuming as a movie about Life with a capital L could possibly be.  It covers an emotional spectrum with no pretense towards any insight that anyone over the age of 20 hasn't already figured out on their own.  And it's getting burdened right out the gate with a masterpiece status that its humble, shaggy, grinning shoulders can hardly withstand.

As for Richard Linklater, he remains the most unassuming of current American cinema's major directors.  In fact, it feels strange to even use the term "director" when his latest films seem so pointedly undirected; unlike any of his contemporaries (the Coens, Wes Anderson, P.T. Anderson, post-digital Soderbergh), there's nothing in Boyhood or Bernie or Before Midnight to peg a shot as a "Linklater shot" instead of a shot by anyone else.  Linklater's trademarks are more literary: the way people talk, and what they talk about.  So you might say he's a storyteller, except that what he tells aren't stories.  Lit-class terms like "conflict" and "resolution" apply to Boyhood precisely as much as they don't apply at all; what the film chooses to show and not show in its characters' lives can feel almost random.  A Linklater film is more like a series of anecdotes, some funny and some sad, placed side by side until their accumulation achieves a kind of sweep.  It's not a Tolstoy novel; it's staying up all night in a dorm room sharing your life stories.

Slacker, Linklater's first official release, remains one of his best films even if Dazed and Confused will always be more famous.  Slacker is pure observation.  It's also a film without any main character; the camera simply follows one young, aimless twenty-something for about five minutes, then gets passed like a baton to the next character to pass by.  It's the precise midpoint between narrative and avant-garde film, and it works beautifully.  The film has its precedents.  Max Ophüls' La Ronde (1950) and Luis Buñuel's The Phantom of Liberty (1974) both experimented with this structure.  But that's the key: those predecessors come from abroad.  A film like Slacker draws from this international arthouse tradition and applies it to a movie as American as John Wayne.  Boyhood is something like a time-lapsed version of Francois Truffaut's Antoine Doinel series, and it's hitting home for audiences even if they aren't the least bit familiar with the French New Wave.

For this, and other reasons, the next Linklater film is always something to look forward to.  Boyhood is the movie of the moment, and as Linklater's hero would be the first to admit, life is just one moment following another.  Which means another one can't be far behind.

********************** 

Boyhood is now playing to packed arthouses.  You should show up early to get a good seat.

250 Words or Less: Noah (2014)

Darren Aronofsky enters a studio exec's office.

STUDIO: "Black Swan was a big hit!  Oscars, box office...What would you like to do next?"
DARREN: "I'd like to do a Biblical epic, but a different kind of Biblical epic.  One that meditates on the Old Testament god of wrath, on ancient faith versus modern faith, on notions of sin and purity and the struggle to discern what god wants from us."
STUDIO: "Sounds risky."
DARREN: "It is, but even if it's bad, it'll be interesting enough to be worth seeing."
STUDIO: "Would you be willing to make it, like...90% Avatar, maybe with some Y.A. fantasy romance thrown in?"
DARREN: "How about 50%?"
STUDIO: "80% and you've got a deal."
DARREN: "Done."
STUDIO: "Great.  Here's $125,000,000."

2 out of 5 stars.

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Noah is now available on home video for the confusion of family movie nights everywhere. It's interesting enough to be worth seeing.

REVIEW: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

It's not easy being a science fiction allegory.  The fundamental challenge is to take a completely preposterous premise and get it taken seriously.  It's a thin line to walk, and there are a few ways to do it.  One is to make it incredibly austere and heavy, like 2001 or Stalker.  Another is to double down on everything preposterous, but be smart enough to make it satire.  Paul Verhoeven was an expert at the latter: the scenes in RoboCop and Total Recall that are funny, campy, and over-the-top are the same scenes that are paranoid, subversive, and terrifying.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes tries both, tilting towards heavy but occasionally darting towards light.  It's a post-9/11 (and post-Christopher Nolan) shot at turning the franchise gritty, playing out as an us-vs.-them metaphor for geopolitical tension, starring genetically modified super-apes, where war is both unnecessary and inevitable.  Directed by Matt Reeves (Let Me In, Cloverfield), the world of the film is dark and dour.  Everything is caked in dirt or fog, with much of the frame blacked out in many scenes.  The decision to go without spoken dialogue for the first 10 minutes is downright ballsy.  And mixed in are a few stabs at blockbuster humor, with ape slapstick and a few nudges from humans who aren't puny so much as goofy.

The contrast can be jarring, and for the first half, I wondered if post-Nolan Hollywood had met its match: after Batman, Superman, James Bond, etc., it had finally found a franchise too inherently ridiculous to be turned into anything gritty.  But as it accumulates and climaxes, it reaches a rewarding kind of pop grandeur, in part because of Reeves' way with atmosphere, and mostly because the film takes its time to set the stage before exploding, which used to be standard but in 2014 feels more and more like a lost art.  The path towards conflict is sketched out with a tremendous amount of schematic detail.  And when the action does explode, with an ape riding a horse firing an assault rifle, it doesn't feel preposterous.  It feels apocalyptic.

As a series, Planet of the Apes is a strange beast.  The 1968 original is a standalone of-its-time masterpiece. But the franchise had pretty much lost its reputability by the mid-70s, and after Tim Burton's widely mocked reboot, there seemed to be no reason to bring it back except that remakes are the order of the day.  And yet Dawn shows what can happen when a property lands in caring hands, with a level of visual creativity and thoughtful attention above and beyond most of what's playing now.  Dawn should proceed directly to the rare list of sequels that truly expand on their predecessor—the franchise is more reputable now than it's been since 1968.  The human characters are boring, I suppose, but their era is ending, and the film features some of the most emotionally complex CGI characters that Hollywood has done yet.  Reeves finishes the film on an extreme close-up of a motion-capture ape where the tighter he pulls in, the more the eyes look human, and I'm still not sure if those eyes belong to Andy Serkis or an FX team.  With apes on one end and computers on the other, we may need to prepare for the New Order.  For now, there's a beautiful truce.

4 out of 5 stars.

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Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is in theaters now.  It's the sequel to Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which means that the Planet of the Apes rose before it dawned.  Which is crazy.

More Interesting Than the Oscars 3: "Great Year For Cinema" Edition

As 2013 came to a close, a story started circulating that we had just witnessed one of the great years in film history.  Praise for the year as a whole was declared from the Telegraph to NPR to MTV.com, and Vanity Fair even compared 2013 to 1939 (the de facto choice for Greatest Year in Cinema), running a photo of Blue Jasmine alongside Gone With The Wind.

Well, let's not get too far ahead of ourselves.  And besides, while Gone With The Wind is a masterpiece of production values, if it's the foundation on which 1939 rests, we may be viewing that legendary year with rose- (or Technicolor-)tinted glasses.  But all the hosannas for 2013 as a new high point get at one of the central concerns of being a cinephile today: that is, the nagging worry that movies simply stopped mattering as much as they used to.  After browsing through film history, you want to see a new release that "lives with you" the same way as the classics of the past, and you get disheartened when you don't find it.  As the main character of Peter Bogdanovich's Targets despondently put it, "All the best movies have already been made."

But this is, of course, largely an illusion, or a natural consequence of judging the past vs. judging the present.  When you look at the past, you hit the highlights; here and now, you have to wade through the filler.  I don't think we just lived through a miniature cinematic golden age; this year's Oscar nominees have about as many problems as usual, and I'm hesitant to apply the word "masterpiece" to the year's usual suspect.  But I must admit, as I browsed the festival circuit and even the multiplexes, I was captivated at the wealth of material this year.  Even up to last week, I was still catching up on new films I wanted to see, and there are many more, including James Gray's not-yet-released The Immigrant and Miyazaki's scarcely released The Wind Rises, that I haven't gotten the chance to.  So take heart that the sense of discovery is still alive and well.  After all, some of the best films of 1939 didn't get their dues until years later.

What defined 2013?  It was a year for satires of conspicuous consumption and the American dream (The Wolf of Wall Street, Pain & Gain, Spring Breakers, The Bling Ring, and even Behind the Candelabra).  It was also the year of running the gauntlet, of narratives that shoot a path straight through the storm with a hero who, by necessity, wants nothing except to come out of the other end alive (Gravity, All is Lost, 12 Years a Slave).  But looking at a list of my own personal favorites, I saw that another theme quite unintentionally rose to the surface: undecided fates, and stories that stop just shy of a definitive ending.  Make no mistake, something has changed since the beginning—progress has been made, and we've taken our first steps towards the realization of something important.  But by the time the end credits roll, characters or institutions or even entire countries remain suspended.  Maybe it's just me, or maybe it's the state of cinema, or maybe it's 2013.  But for a moment, we reach a point where everything is motionless.  And then the lights come up.

On to the films.  What follows is my Top 12 of the year.  Or really, a Top 10, plus two bonus candidates.  Because I cheat.

12. The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, USA)

"Subtle" is generally not a word I'd use for a three-hour string of (ironic?) orgies, drug freakouts, and on-the-nose speeches about stealing America's lunch money, but first impressions can be wrong.  I initially emerged from The Wolf of Wall Street exhausted, bleary-eyed, and browbeaten by the loud, repetitive surface, and the lack of focus on plot and psychology.  And yet something kept drawing me back to it, getting me high not on the excess, but the little details and smaller gestures.  So after lots of agonizing, it makes the cut, slipping in at the end.  The moral point of view (or lack thereof) is brilliant provocation, and even the title is misdirection—it's important to remember that we're not even on the actual Wall Street, but amidst a group of assholes on Long Island who fancy that they can create their own.  Of all the American dream satires that have dotted this year, Wolf is the best, and it's the most morally provocative because its sense of morality is handled with such ambiguous, disgusting, gaudy finesse.  And Kyle Chandler riding the subway home, an agent of Truth and Justice whose life apparently isn't interesting enough to make him the hero of his own movie, is the saddest happy ending of the year.

11. Nobody's Daughter Haewon (Hong Sang-Soo, South Korea)

A young woman keeps falling asleep in public places, as her life and choices (most of them not good) play out around her.  This miniature from Hong Sang-Soo made the festival rounds but is currently unreleased here in America, where it will eventually play at a few theaters in New York, unceremoniously appear buried on Netflix a few months later, and generally be seen as something of an acquired taste.  Indeed, its sensibility takes some getting used to.  It's not immediately apparent because Hong's style is so subdued, serene, and "realistic", but this dramatic/romantic/coming-of-age comedy is actually as much a mindfuck movie as Mulholland Drive or Primer: a character sketch drawn in the gentlest kind of surrealism, where shuffled layers of dreams and reality complete one another, and build to a message as important as any 2013 has offered.

10. Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, USA)

The ascendancy of Greta Gerwig climaxed with this wonderful comedy, in which the co-writer/star/muse helps director Noah Baumbach get out of his own head and hand in an eerily familiar film about being in your mid-20s in the 2010s.  "I don't know if I believe everything I'm saying" is definitely a line of dialogue for our time, and it helps that it's delivered without a taint of self-consciousness.  Baumbach provides the little moments, the gentle arcs, and the New Wave vibe, and Gerwig provides the film's reason for existing.  Another step forward for tales of aimless young people: the lack of emphasis on romance.

9. Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, Canada)

How do you organize every event you've experienced into a coherent narrative?  In our own memories, we do it without thinking; for documentary filmmakers, it's much trickier.  "Truth" (or whatever) is notoriously difficult to nail on film, so it's an elegant solution that Sarah Polley's beautiful chronicle of her thorny family history becomes a celebration of subjectivity.  It's a work both brainy and heartfelt, toying with verifiable fact and unreliable memory, and sifting through the emotions thereof.  And at the close, it offers this much as wisdom: if, in your life or your work, you're dealing with material of great sadness and confusion, you can't do better than ending on a joke.

8. Much Ado About Nothing (Joss Whedon, USA)

Joss Whedon's Shakespeare adaptation was one of the most unexpected, enjoyable comedies of the year (really), and its pleasures are many.  There's the way it feels like a home movie starring underrated professionals; everyone shines in beautiful camaraderie, and if an A-lister ever stepped on screen, the atmosphere would dissipate.  Then there's the way Whedon has made a "hip", modern version of Shakespeare without altering the essence or poetry of the original text, for which high school English teachers everywhere owe him a debt of thanks.  But most of all, the cinematic achievement of Much Ado is the way Whedon takes the most rudimentary elements of filmmaking—a set (his house) and actors (his friends)—and finds ways to stage comedy that are worthy of Lubitsch.  Comparing this to, say, Kenneth Branagh's version is instructive, and not at all flattering to Branagh.  Branagh is striving for the highest artistic aspiration he can imagine, and Joss is out to give you a good time.  Much Ado reminds you that the two were never that far apart at all.

7. A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhangke, China)

Jia Zhangke is considered among many critics today to be not only a leading voice of Chinese cinema, but a leading voice of cinema, period—and here, we have something of a radical departure.  Jia's earlier works are subdued, elliptical stories of the working class in modern China: in a usual Jia film, the camera sits back, and there are few if any cinematic flourishes.  But then comes A Touch of Sin: an arthouse revenge flick, absolutely stuffed with cinematic flourishes, as Jia's ordinary people get fed up with a corrupt system and reach for weapons like avenging angels in a kung-fu movie.  (Reportedly, the Chinese government is none too happy with the film, and has banned local media from talking about it).  Coming from one of the 21st century's leading social realists, this approach catches you off-guard, and since the film played at Cannes it has divided or even baffled many of his supporters.  Personally, the shock won me over; I think Jia made the avant-garde statement of the year simply by becoming more "conventional".  But make no mistake, it's still very much the work of a great and unconventional artist, a yowl of anger with a head on its shoulders, condensing different strands of cinema and culture into one of the most electrifying, melancholy, urgent, and challenging films of the year.

6. At Berkeley (Frederick Wiseman, USA)

If Stories We Tell was a tribute to subjectivity, this is the opposite—or at least, as close as a film can ever come.  This type of documentary is what they call Direct Cinema: no interviews, no voice-over, no music, no Errol Morris style or post-Michael Moore stunts—just extended, organized raw footage.  Never doubt that you're under the control of a director, but the goal of the film, much like the best college classes, is to invite reactions without prescribing any.  The film follows various strata of UC Berkeley life as one of the nation's top public universities is hit with the economic crunch, and what emerges is a vital portrait of patchwork unity, of a singular body made up of different and often confrontational identities.  And it's so full of ironies, tragedies, wonders, and contradictions that it's truly awe-inspiring.  Some may chafe at the idea of a four hour documentary with no central character.  But keep your eyes and ears open, and you get what feels like years' worth of experience and insights in less time than it takes to drive up the Pacific Coast Highway.

5. Before Midnight (Richard Linklater, USA)

At one point in the finale(?) of Richard Linklater's exquisite trilogy, Julie Delpy mentions that she once saw an old black and white movie where an unhappily married couple visits Pompeii.  Unless I'm not mistaken, she's talking about Rossellini's Voyage to Italy, and it's a knowing reference on the film's part.  Voyage is about an upper-class, middle-age man and wife traveling through Europe, growing tired and distant, sniping at one another, falling out (sound familiar?), and eventually reconciling in a sudden happy ending that still makes movie buffs complain.  This reference is both a skeleton key and a crowning touch for Before Midnight.  A valedictory for the Gen-X indies of the 90s (whose practitioners are getting old, and not always gracefully), it's also a revision of the alienated relationship dramas of the 60s, which Voyage kicked off.  If Rossellini's happy ending has been received as a spiritual statement, Midnight has a happy ending because working your ass off towards one is the best anybody can do.  This means a lot, especially from one of the few directors today who knows that a conversation between two people is worthy of an entire film.  A warm testament to talk, to late summer, to outdoor cafes, and to collaborative filmmaking.

4. Computer Chess (Andrew Bujalski, USA)

Few film this year lifted my spirits as much as Andrew Bujalski's delightfully bizarre shaggy dog comedy.  Sundance titles post-Garden State too often feel like studio movies where the characters are wearing hoodies, but this one was both a return to the lo-fi spirit of 80s/90s touchstones like Stranger Than Paradise plus its own kind of step forward into the zeitgeist.  If you're looking for a movie about how we arrived in our new techno-driven millennium, you can keep Mark Zuckerberg endlessly clicking Refresh at the end of The Social Network—just let me keep the story of a hacker convention and a weird New Age sex therapy group trying to share space in the same hotel.  Entrancing, inventive, and surreal.

3. Stranger By the Lake (Alain Guiraudie, France)

Like Antonioni's Blow-Up plus gay cruising (but much funnier than Antonioni ever was), this is a peculiar kind of murder mystery.  It's not that the murderer's identity is ever in doubt—we see it happen.  But the mystery, scarcely resolved, is why the crime took place, and why a young witness finds himself so fatally attracted to the perp.  Time and again, "Queer cinema" faces an uphill battle.  On the one hand, its distinct identity is essential to its existence; on the other hand, it risks ghettoization, of being something that straight audiences assume doesn't apply to them.  Stranger By the Lake walks this line to perfection, turning its deliciously minimal mircocosm—a rocky shore where everything except sexual appeal/desire/identity has been removed—into something specific yet intensely universal, and always compellingly mysterious.

2. No (Pablo Larrain, Chile)

Shot on beautifully cruddy 80s videotape, Pablo Larrain's media satire is a deeply ironic crowd-pleaser, and the fact that it can be both those things at once says a lot about how film and television work.  Its view of how social change can best be accomplished (if at all) through vague promises of happiness make it one of the most clever, provocative comedies of the year, and the archival footage it unearths, seamlessly blended into the fiction, is almost too hilariously strange to be believed.  (Overthrow a dictator!  Richard Dreyfuss and Christopher Reeve want you to!).  Of course the good guys will win, but the film's hero and its ending make for a magnificent question mark.

1. Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel & Ethan Coen, USA)

The Coen brothers enter their fourth decade as feature filmmakers this year, and though their reputation is crystallized as "the makers of Fargo and The Big Lebowski", the duo are still evolving.  With this and A Serious Man, they deviate into trickier structures and ambiguous endings, spinning modern folk stories and character stuides, shouldered by certifiable non-celebrities and liable to bounce off in a new direction at any time.  Llweyn is a film that slowly sneaked up on me.  Coen movies have always had wit, character, atmosphere, pop-surrealism, and a morbid sense of humor, but this may be the first one to really have soul.  In part because of the music, in part because of Oscar Isaac's performance, and in part because the Coens themselves seem to be reaching for new levels of emotional depth, the film manages to do justice to the sense of despondency that so often exists on the fringe of their comedy.  It's a quintessentially American film, a mythic tall tale of success and failure where a road trip to Chicago can be a journey to the underworld.  Of all the films of 2013, this is the one that's come to live with me as much as any of the old classics.  I suspect Inside Llewyn Davis will have to sneak up on the movie-going world in general, but if someone wanted to say that this is the best the Coens have ever done, I wouldn't complain.

*****

The Honor Roll: 12 more films that made following movies worthwhile this year...

Bastards (Claire Denis, France)

Behind the Candelabra (Steven Soderbergh, USA)

Beyond the Hills (Cristian Mungiu, Romania)

The Bling Ring (Sofia Coppola, USA)

The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino, Italy)

The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, Denmark)

Faust (Aleksandr Sokurov, Russia)

The Last of the Unjust (Claude Lanzmann, France)

Leviathan (Verena Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor, USA/UK/France) 

Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami, Japan/France)

12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, USA)

The World's End (Edgar Wright, UK)

*****
On to 2014...