I missed a lot of big movies this year, including the entire lineup of superhero pictures, and was less than enamored by arthouse faves like Tree of Life, Meek’s Cutoff and Melancholia. So this is one man’s idiosyncratic favorites based on an incomplete viewing season.
DriveDrive
Nicholas Winding Refn’s breakthrough film is—as everyone says—an ingenious marriage of arthouse and action flick sensibilities. It’s debt to 80s thrillers is a given, but it also recalls, down to that ubiquitous font, Alan Rudolph’s 1984 romance Choose Me, in which mysterious, goofy characters teeter at the intersection of violence and neon. Make your own double bill. (Ian Buckwalter’s review)
The Skin I Live In
Pedro Alomdóvar mostly dispenses with his camp roots for a different kind of outrageousness, sexy and provocative in ways you don’t expect from the master. If the premise strains belief, it’s still thoroughly entertaining. I can’t say more without spoiling it, but this thriller uses the entire body as a canvas, and as a metaphor for the creative process—what we put into it, what we give up for it. If only I had seen it before Jack and Jill. (Buckwalter’s review)
Bill CunninghamBill Cunningham: New York
Perhaps the best film ever made about a photographer—and since that photographer documents a quickly vanishing New York, one of the great films about New York. A study of great personalities in front of and behind the camera. (My review for Blogcritics)
Hell and Back Again
When I sat down to watch this I thought, “Oh great, another war documentary.” But Hell and Back Again is compelling from start to finish, a powerful human drama and a remarkable technical achievement. Director Danfung Dennis focuses on Sgt. Nathan Harris, cutting between the trials of the unit he led in Afghanistan and his trials at home in North Carolina, trying to make it as an injured veteran. The film was made on a Canon DSLR. Every time I see a digitally shot film I feel a little piece of my Circle Theatre celluloid upbringing dies. But the modest-sized digital rig that produced this big-hearted film offers up a powerful cinematic intimacy. (My review)
Tabloid
One great storyteller meets another in director Errol Morris’ portrait of beauty queen-cum-sex kidnapper Joyce McKinney. As I called it back in July: Rashomon for the supermarket aisle. (My review)
Midnight in Paris
Whenever I see that title I think of folk singer Michael Hurley’s song, and though it isn’t in the movie it conveys something of the goofy romance of Woody Allen’s best film since anybody can remember.
Thunder Soul
The funkiest documentary of the year, made about a legendary 1970s funk band out of Houston that happened to be comprised of high school students. (My review)
Machete Maidens UnleashedFrom the makers of the frenetic Ozploitation doc Not Quite Hollywood, which tanked in its brief D.C. run, this brief history of exploitation filmmaking in the Philippines didn’t even make it to Washington screens. But it’s an even wilder ride, and not without substance. It’s entertaining in all the ways you’d expect, but also provocative in its casual discussion of cheap labor in dangerous and sometimes fatal working conditions. John Landis, who was at the helm of a film-set tragedy himself, is among the featured talking heads, and his glee at the lawlessness of a Filipino movie set is chilling.
Higher Ground
Vera Farmiga directed and starred in this study of faith and doubt. Gorgeously photographed in muted tones that suggest both the diminished hues of uncertainty and soft tones of grace—and with a gorgeous soundtrack of country gospel that will raise you up even if it doesn’t convert you.
Drive Angry 3D
Wilma Swartz and Tigerman in Dumbstruck.After Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, I thought I never wanted to see a Nicholas Cage movie ever again, but this trashy thriller dares to temper t-and-a with literary conceits (Seriously? Characters named Milton and Webster?) and strange theological ideas. If you think about it, it’s Orpheus in reverse, but the ride is so much fun (until it’s muddled Wicker Man-like final act) you won’t have time to think about it. As for the 3D, I enjoyed it a helluva lot more than Avatar.
Honorable mentions go to the well-paced reboot Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Michael Shannon’s Oscar-worthy visions in Take Shelter, the gospel documentary Rejoice and Shout and Dumbstruck, by far the most depressing documentary about ventriloquism ever made. Larry Crowne was not unwatchable, but keep an eye out for Tom Hanks’ lipstick.
