Hundreds of movies later, our intrepid film critic Ian Buckwalter bids farewell.

You might think, before watching Bullhead, the Oscar-nominated debut from Belgian writer/director Michaël R. Roskam, that a film about black market trade in illegal bovine growth hormones in the rural cattle-raising borderlands between the French and Dutch sections of Belgium might not not the most interesting prospect. You’ll probably leave thinking much the same thing, but there are multiple stories — probably too many — at work in this film, with that one just being the clumsiest.

There’s an textual epilogue at the end of Agnieszka Holland’s new Oscar-nominated World War II drama that confirms something that I suspected throughout the film: the director was angry. Like most movies that involve the Holocaust, this is a story of struggle against adversity and the triumph of the human spirit in the face of unspeakable actions. But most of those films look at the atrocities with a sad resignation — what’s done is done, so better to mourn than to rage — that balances whatever triumphal notes there are in the story.

“The people are the city!” That line appears just once in Shakespeare’s play detailing the rise and fall of fifth-century B.C. Roman war hero and politician Caius Martius Coriolanus (Ralph Fiennes), just as public opinion is turning ugly towards him and his anti-populist attitudes. Ralph Fiennes makes his debut as a director in an adaptation of that play, and in his and screenwriter John Logan’s version, set in modern times, that line becomes a rallying cry for the people who oppose Coriolanus in his bid to follow military success with a run at becoming a Roman consul.

Everyone has made difficult choices and faced the consequences. But those choices and their consequences can be different in a place like Iran, a theme that carries Asghar Farhadi’s insightful new movie, A Separation.

If you head over to the IMDb, look up Roger Corman, and start scrolling through his filmography, make sure your scrolling finger is limbered up. The list of producing credits alone stretches, as of this writing, to 398. And Corman, well into his 80s now, is still consistently averaging two to three movies a year. Many of those aren’t just putting-up-the-money executive producer credits, either. Corman, as Alex Stapleton’s documentary Corman’s World demonstrates in its opening minutes, is a hands-on producer, offering directorial input onset (keep scrolling down the page and you’ll find over 50 directorial credits from 1955-1990), and sitting with the editor and guiding the cutting process.

Many of the scenes in Pariah, Dee Rees’ debut narrative feature, are shot in shallow focus closeups, actors’ faces filling much of the screen as the background is lost in a soft blur. It’s an unforgiving shot for an actor, every subtlety — and, potentially, deficiency — of their performance magnified by the proximity of the viewer. But what it demonstrates is an overriding confidence in the abilities of her performers on the part of Rees. That confidence isn’t misplaced: The intensity of these performances, and their gorgeous rendering on film by cinematographer Bradford Young, carry a film that could easily have sunk into Sundance-indie inspirational cliché.

Never mind the naysayers who complain there are never any good movies, Ian Buckwalter says. This was an extraordinary year for film. And here are Buckwalter’s favorites of 2011.
But for some reason that complaint particularly irks me this year because it’s not just a case of it being a pretty much normal year and that some people will never be happy. It’s that this was an extraordinary year for film, and I just can’t fathom anyone who cares about movies looking at this year’s roster — admittedly, making sure to look past many of the wide releases — and not being ecstatic at what they see.

The Hollywood adaptation of the Stieg Larsson bestseller might not have been needed considering a Swedish-language film in 2009, but David Fincher’s efficient direction is more than welcome.

You could spend an entire essay talking about the visual detail of Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy. This is a film that never needs a word to express that it’s not just about the Cold War, but about cold men, cold interactions, a cold decade. There’s the grey, muted color scheme that creates an eternal autumn out of the entirety of the 70s. The pale, doughy faces of men who look as if they’ve never seen the sun, faces sitting under bad haircuts and worse combovers, sequestered in smoky, soundproof underground rooms discussing the activities of their intelligence counterparts in other countries, who are likely also overwhelmingly pale, male, and grimly disaffected. The wallpaper is textured, the filing cabinets metallic and industrial, and the secretarial pool seems designed to take leering gazes just as much as they take dictation.