Toronto Film Festival XXL

Sep 10: I'll update this post with my tweeted responses to these films, hopefully once a day.

Sep 8: Completed my final ticket selections this morning during my assigned window for the Back Half Pass (which gives you a slightly discounted rate for movies playing in the last five days of the festival). That's 45 features, two programs of 15 shorts, and 14 tickets I got for other people, and I got my first choices across the board. Clearly the other shoe will drop somehow, but for now I'm all blissed out.  I'll try to post some updates here during the fest, but my Twitter account will be the place to catch more immediate responses.  Please follow!  And track these other friends who always provide great TIFF impressions, too: Alex, Amir, Angelo, Bill, Calvin & Yonah, Catherine, Joe (also @decider), Katey, Lev, Nathaniel, Tim, and Yaseen.  If you see a movie you like, I'd love to hear about.  As, I'm sure, would any filmmakers on Twitter, especially those who aren't in the Gala divisions.  I've had great experiences cold-tweeting (?) directors whose work I just saw, and I heartily recommend it.  And if there's no way you can be at TIFF but spot a film you desperately wish you could access, tweet a filmmaker about that, too.  See if there's a college, cinema, library, or other institution near you that might be willing to host a screening, with or without the director's involvement.  Tschüss!

Sep 6: Could things be better? I logged on precisely at 8am Chicago time to buy single tickets this morning and was #143 in line. Others who did the same were 600 spots behind me; by the time I completed checkout at 8:30, there were more than 2600 people waiting. I got into all 13 showings I was hoping to add, too. With the total currently standing at 41 films and from 30 different countries, I have another half-dozen titles to add on Tuesday, when my Back Half pass goes into effect.  And then, just four days from now, the games begin!  Amy and Bradley are still dancing, girl. Channing, keep spinning, keep burning it up. Did he who made the lamb make thee?

Sep 1: I'm updating my listings below to reflect some of the Middle Eastern and African programming that I will be catching in Toronto, in cahoots with my favorite TIFF programmer, Rasha Salti. I didn't know Rasha at all or much about her cinematic beat until 2013, when Ladder to Damascus, Rags and Tatters, and Noye's Fludde (Unogumbe) all ranked among my favorites of the whole festival.  Last year, Silvered Water, Syria Self Portrait and Iraqi Odyssey were my absolute peaks of TIFF, with Timbuktu not far behind, and Rasha and I got to talking.  This year, I'm collaborating with her to see and promote her programming, all grouped here, because it's so dependably excellent, yet few of the films ever achieve a DVD release, much less a commercial distribution. So let's get behind these phenomenal movie-makers and under-heralded cinematic traditions.

Sep 1: Toronto International Film Festival season has begun, baby, and we at Nick's Flick Picks (read: I) could not be happier.  I'll be there longer than I ever have before, and seeing an even greater number of movies.  Logged in this morning at my TIFF-appointed time to make my first 30 ticket selections, 20 of which were for me, 10 for friends who wanted to see movies we worried would sell out.  I'll keep updating this entry over the next week or so as my itinerary expands, when individual tickets go on sale, and when my Back Half discount kicks in.  So, keep checking this page, and click the links if you want to learn more about the movies.  I don't, really: I'm picking based on affinity for the filmmakers, general buzz, and the dimmest notion of premise (and in some cases, I don't even know that).  I like going in as cold as possible, so I'm going to keep it that way.

The list is bound to get more esoteric, since I prioritized films that seemed likely to draw big crowds and/or I hoped to see in the first few days.  And if you're like, "These already look pretty esoteric," then that's Nick's Flick Picks for you.

MY TIFF ITINERARY (Updated 9/20)

3000 Nights (Palestine, dir. Mai Masri)
B+  Stirring drama inside Israeli women's prison, with mostly Palestinian inmates. Gutsy takes on solidarity, maternalism.

Anomalisa (USA, dirs. Duke Johnson and Charlie Kaufman)
C+  Could summon no enthusiasm. The self-pity of Kaufman's men is usually ballasted by much more creative detail or insight.

Arabian Nights, Vol. 1: The Restless One (Portugal, dir. Miguel Gomes)
A  A+? So many good films here but this inhabits a whole other level as piebald art and political intervention.

Arabian Nights, Vol. 2: The Desolate One (Portugal, dir. Miguel Gomes)
A–  Less obviously intricate than Vol 1, and more frontal in stating themes—I thought. Then I grew less sure.

Arabian Nights, Vol. 3: The Enchanted One (Portugal, dir. Miguel Gomes)
A  What Obama said about guns and religion, but about chaffinches. Heavy histories shrink to bearable fetishes.

As I Open My Eyes (Tunisia/France, dir. Leyla Bouzid)
B+  Sonorous, trenchant portrait of an artist as a young woman, riding sharp lines between petulance and dissidence.

The Assassin (Taiwan, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien)
B+  A royal marriage of many lines, sumptuous, as much Unforgiven as Scarlet Empress. Hou's hand still unsteady on story.

Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story) (France, dir. Eva Husson)
B+  Remarkably assured, richly executed debut. Not all story beats fresh but layered, meticulous study.

Beasts of No Nation (USA, dir. Cary Joji Fukunaga)
B–  Value, impact hard to deny but formal and narrative storytelling are a little crude. Young Attah is a find.

Blood of My Blood (Italy, dir. Marco Bellocchio)
C+  My astigmatism around high-theatrical Italian melodrama persists. Less crude than Vincere but ideas seem simple?

Cemetery of Splendour (Thailand, dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
B  Reader, I must confess I'm starting to find Weerasethakul tedious, as much as I admire his directorial craft.

Chevalier (Greece, dir. Athina Rachel Tsangari)
B  Greek surrealist, quasi-Apatovian remake of American Psycho business-card scene. Finds its berth fast, hangs out a while.

Dégradé (Palestine, dirs. Arab Nasser and Tarzan Nasser)
B–  Entrapment, suffocation are topics, occasionally effects of one-set suspenser in Gaza salon. Bold vision. Hang in there.

Dheepan (France, dir. Jacques Audiard)
A–  Sleek, observant, steadily winching synthesis of prior Audiard themes. Psychology deftly externalized. Actors keep it hot.

The Endless River (South Africa, dir. Oliver Hermanus)
B  Strikingly shot. Taps a rich seam of region-specific tensions and story traditions. Maybe exploits them a bit.

Eva Doesn't Sleep (Argentina, dir. Pablo Agüero)
B  Eva Perón as Addie Bundren. Caryl Churchill-esque. Brute embodiments and symbolic afterlives in unwinnable duels.

Evolution (France, dir. Lucile Hadžihalilovic)
B  What if Matthew Barney and Jacques Cousteau co-directed a YA dystopia? I couldn't imagine, but Lucile Hadžihalilović did.

Fire Song (Canada, dir. Adam Garnet Jones)
C–  Noble intents, rare focus, and solid production values lose out to stiff writing and editing, erratic hold on character.

Francofonia (France/Germany/Netherlands, dir. Aleksandr Sokurov)
A  Louvre, the End of History. Witty, moving essay on doomed objects surviving, enemies collaborating, time as tight knot.

Frenzy (Turkey, dir. Emin Alper)
B+  Formally stunning mitosis of one suspense thriller into two, enigmatically related. Two parts Audiard, one Don't Look Now.

Girls Lost (Sweden, dir. Alexandra-Therese Keining)
C+  A century after Florida Enchantment, we're still using magic-beans device for transgender tale. Shaky on its own themes.

Green Room (USA, dir. Jeremy Saulnier)

F  Blue Ruin had assets in all areas; this has zero in any. What happened? Quoth its own eviduh, "This is taking too long."

High-Rise (UK, dir. Ben Wheatley)
TIFF canceled my screening.

The Idol (UK/Palestine, dir. Hany Abu-Assad)
Couldn't access the screening.

In Jackson Heights (USA, dir. Frederick Wiseman)
A–  Most democratic US community abounds with sidewalk pedagogy and filibusters. Everyone tries to save everyone.

In the Shadow of Women (France, dir. Philippe Garrel)
B+  Tiny ficelle of a film takes witty stock of knotted infidelities. Neither one-sided nor free of judgment.

Ixcanul (Guatemala/France, dir. Jayro Bustamante)
A  Guatemalan drama quietly, sturdily makes expert choices scene after scene, culminating in my biggest jaw-drop of the fest.

Let Them Come (Algeria/France, dir. Salem Brahimi)
Couldn't access the screening.

Minotaur (Mexico/Canada, dir. Nicolas Peréda)
A–  Totally bewitching miniature about profound indolence. Possibly class critique of a new, Lynch-meets-Pina Bausch type.

Mountains May Depart (China/France/Japan, dir. Jia Zhangke)
B–  Hi, I'd like a Hong Sang-soo, a Stella Dallas, a Notes on a Scandal (iced), and a small side of Drrrainage?!

Much Loved (France/Morocco, dir. Nabil Ayouch)
A–  Bracing, gutsy, humane drama of Moroccan prostitutes. Moving and nuanced images, sounds, and characters. Pass it on!

No Men Beyond This Point (Canada, dir. Mark Sawers)
Wound up skipping for Ixcanul

The Other Side (France/Italy, dir. Roberto Minervini)
B+  Beasts of one nation, arguably under God, arguably indivisible. An upsetting revelation no matter how "true" it is.

The Pearl Button (Chile/France/Spain, dir. Patricio Guzmán)
B+  Empathic, poetic speculation from a filmmaker whose equanimity is a miracle. Not quite Nostalgia but much-needed.

Price of Love (Ethiopia, dir. Harmon Hailay)
B  Some story beats are sadly familiar, but this streetside Ethiopian drama conveys them with nuance and piquant detail.

The Promised Land (China, dir. He Ping)
D  Way too airy-fairy Chinese romance between ballerina and hockey coach. Barely a premise, endlessly pre-rehearsed.

Return of the Atom (Finland, dirs. Mika Taanila & Jussi Eerola)
B–  Vividly mounted and persuasive on its basic grounds, but several editing and sound choices baldly manipulate.

Right Now, Wrong Then (South Korea, dir. Hong Sang-soo)
A–  Lovely. Iridesces with sadness. Hong's Purple Rose of Cairo? Well, that's not exactly true. Nothing ever is.

Schneider vs. Bax (The Netherlands, dir. Alex van Warmerdam)
B  Another 18th-century comedy about 21st-century mercenaries. Merrily morbid, somewhat for its own sake. Thin look.

Short Cuts Program #5 (Canada/France/Germany/Iraq/Spain/UK, dir. Misc.)
B–  No clinkers, few coups. My faves were the angry Society and the compactly suggestive New Eyes and El Adíos.

The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (UK, dir. Ben Rivers)
B  As elaborate and idiosyncratic as it is, the postcolonial metaphors become a bit flat and static.

Son of Saul (Hungary, dir. László Nemes)
A  So formally brilliant you can't help noticing, even as you expend all emotional and moral energy. The sound! The story.

Starve Your Dog (Morocco, dir. Hisham Lasri)
B  Boldest shredding I've seen here of cinematic form, story flow. Death and the Maiden as punk Moroccan cherry bomb.

Story of Judas (France, dir. Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche)
B+  Daring rewrite of 2000-year-old treachery, passing for a long time as classical, almost POV-less account. Gorgeous.

Sunset Song (UK/Luxembourg, dir. Terence Davies)
C–  First hour a stilted slog. Middle fights its way to poignancy but last act falters. Barely ten oxygen molecules in it.

Taxi (Iran, dir. Jafar Panahi)
B  Feels less ambitious than Panahi's two previous house-arrest movies but it's funny and wise and has good tricks up its sleeve.

Te prometo anarquía (Mexico, dir. Julio Hernández Cordón)
B+  Rare bird. Rewards patience and trust as it builds from vaguely illicit skater/dealer pic to humbling tragedy.

The Treasure (Romania, dir. Corneliu Porumboiu)
A–  Comic gold, with an impressively ferrous structure of ironies and nuances that hold it together and expand its scope.

Victoria (Germany, dir. Sebastian Schipper)
A–  Morvern Callar rebuilt as pulse-pounding thriller, astonishingly executed in a continuous, 132-minute take. Overwhelming.

Wavelengths #4: Psychic Driving (Austria/Brazil/Canada/France/Spain/USA, dir. Misc)
A–  Links radical activism to African diaspora, occult folklore to synaesthetic abstraction. Dazzling.

The White Knights (Belgium/France, dir Joachim Lafosse)
Wound up skipping for Beasts of No Nation

The Witch (Canada/USA, dir. Robert Eggers)
C  Antichrist meets The Village. Spooky surface meets crossover dreams. Old tropes about faith meet some about the colonies.

Top 10 U.S. Releases of 2014

Click here for some context on this list, or here for its companion list.

Stay tuned for #1-#7!  In the meantime...

8. The Missing Picture Especially compared to the two films further down this list, Rithy Panh's The Missing Picture inspired no controversy at all—except, perhaps, on the question of when exactly it opened. A tiny commercial bow was planned late last year for LA, though evidence suggests no ticket-buyer saw it until last March. Such are the vortices of minutiae into which a Top 10 list gets pulled, when the point is to showcase artistry as keen, inventive, and affecting as Panh's, narrating his country's and his family's experience of the Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia in the 1970s. Forsaking a talking-head approach to history, Panh assembles an eclectic archive of stock footage, movie clips, superimpositions, and abstract sound elements that testify to the unstable, prismatic qualities of public and personal history, even as his soft-spoken account of genocide and systemic oppression evokes the stubborn, harrowing factuality of the past. Famously anchoring the film's mix of styles and source materials are Panh's handmade dioramas of Cambodians usurped, imprisoned, indentured, and buried. Watching the film again for the first time since TIFF 2013, I realize how many times I've misremembered these wood-carved villagers as clay sculptures: they're as poignantly expressive as stop-motion figures, as palpably stamped with their creator's doting attention, to such an extent I conflated the two. Whittling and painting them by the dozens—suggesting a mass-production of bodies, but evading tyrannical-conformist connotations by subtly humanizing each doll—Panh tells a gruesome history in terms that he and his audience can bear. Still, The Missing Picture remains, of course, a deeply sobering experience. You could see it as a document of traumatic repetition: not just of immersion in an intolerable history but of daily, painstaking labor that simultaneously puts the past to sleep and wakes it back up. The viewer gets enfolded in a similar ambivalence: you'd love for the man and the country to be able to forget, but you also recognize the necessity of never forgetting how a nation of people were stripped of every individual possession but their spoons; how 250 grams of rice somehow fed 25 people per day; how a nine-year-old boy reported his starving mother for stealing a mango in a field; how the regime's oddly poetic prohibition on poetry ("the spade is your only pen, the rice field your only paper!") unwittingly inspires painful, poetic reflection among those few who survive. Through the titular, oft-repeated conceit of the "missing picture," Panh asserts that despite his film's expressive diversity, notwithstanding every photo and figurine and audio collage, this period in Cambodia's past is defined by what nobody can show. The kernel of history remains out of reach and surpasseth understanding. The Missing Picture may in that sense be a film structured around an omission, but look how beautifully and bravely it struggles to fill that gap.

9. American Sniper You know what Clint Eastwood's movie about the "most lethal sniper in American history" lacks even one of? A single scene where Chris Kyle embraces that tag. Every time someone tries to print the legend to his face, he opts for non sequiturs, quick subject-changes, or J.M.W. Turner-esque grunts.  Clearly, the film has roundly reimagined Kyle from his real-life namesake, who seemed only too proud to trumpet and embellish that mythological reputation, for reasons that invite a separate inquiry. Just as clearly, the film's Chris Kyle—an utterly coherent characterization of its own, more challenging to hawks or doves than the real Kyle was—is caught within a vertiginous experience that his own legend does nothing to ease or elucidate. Nationalistic, mission-oriented, smart, dim, haunted, gruff, focused, arrogant, repeatedly humbled, empowered and chilled by a red-meat upbringing, prone to racist word and deed, prone to selfless thought and act, capable of moral reflection but seemingly uneasy with it, capable of giving and receiving and reneging on love, Chris emits a plethora of contradictory attitudes and positions. Sniper never reduces these, even as its hurtling momentum, its inductive approach to character, and the exigencies of battle preclude it from flaunting its own complexity or apologizing for its compromises. "It's a hell of a thing, killin' a man," William Munny apostrophized in Eastwood's grim and heavily lacquered Unforgiven, an accomplished film that foregrounded its own rhetoric; it anticipated and even wooed an audience of artistically inclined revisionists, assuring us that it grasped its moral paradox, that it felt the clamp of guilt. American Sniper, faster, brighter, bloodier, and lodged inside contemporary quagmires, radiates a similar but less articulated moral despair.  Its agonies are expressed everywhere from the arrogant, overwhelming roars of American warcraft to the utterly un-rousing score to the sickening, raspberry blasts of blood that accompany every kill. It neither characterizes a single Iraqi in depth nor presses very far into most of its American characters nor shows almost any Iraqi (with one Guignol, discordant exception) doing anything I wouldn't imagine an American doing in the reverse position... if we can even imagine ourselves in the reversed position. Sniper's reception suggests that many pro- and anti-war audiences and critics expect films on this subject to come right out and flatter them in undiluted terms. This film doesn't do that.  Exceptionally well-made, well-shot, well-mixed, and with a tension in the cutting that few Eastwood movies and few modern war films have achieved, American Sniper is as cinematically deft as it is culturally divisive.  Op/eds and awards pundits keep trying to spin it as the anti-Selma.  I look at the pair of them, one an exhortation for justice and the other a hydrochloric assault on ethical conviction—one a study of a group challenging The System, the other a study of a man who, for better and worse, subsumed himself to a system—and I think these two Best Picture nominees are the two bravest, and the two most worth saving.  In serious terms, with both feet planted in the real world, they showcase complex men and communities that too few movies ask us to consider, much less to assess in such rounded, inspiring, but discomfiting ways.  Which, speaking of...

10. Selma A great tweeter called @DanBlackroyd came up with these apt words, angry but beautiful and totally on-point, following that notoriously low tally of Oscar nods: "Selma will be written about for years to come. Its legacy is intact. The Academy needed Selma way more than the other way around. Trust." He's so right. But if you wanted to parse the thought differently, part of why the Academy needs this movie, and why this movie merits more awards, is that it's the rare film that unabashedly needs us—that reaches for us and involves us. It's not the kind of historical drama that unfolds behind plate glass.  Beyond its epic yet intimate staging of events in the mid 1960s (superlative), beyond its close but woeful presaging of events in the mid 2010s (urgent and humbling), observe the consummate engineering of the film. Its broadest arc moves from an opening, monolithic close-up on one man to a closing, diamantine montage of thousands. It pivots on sequences like the second attempted march toward Montgomery, which King unexpectedly halts.  Minutes go by before the film spells out his thought process, enlisting us in the meantime to do the necessary work, to practice thinking like an activist, to deduce why this counter-intuitive move could possibly make sense in the moment... which does not, by the way, mean forbidding us or the other characters from questioning King's wisdom.  Selma inspires us to feel and to cogitate, and to act in our communities.  To act as communities!  The film percolates with expansive ideas and also with subtle filigrees of framing, figuration, and form.  Not just in content but in its texture and its frequently self-effacing technique, Selma honors the candid but deceptively complicated man at its center, and it honors even more that ethos of coalition, resilience, and solidarity for which both Kings and Lewis and Abernathy and Nash and Rustin Cooper and Boynton and Young and Williams and their many colleagues all stood (and sometimes knelt, and occasionally fell).  Selma sparks our memories, solicits our horror, and mobilizes our sense of what's right—not for each of us individually, but for all of us together.

Best of 2014: In Salute of Collaboration, Pt. 4

Ukrainians gathered on Independence Square in Maidan

(Catch up on Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, and afterward, keep reading through the big finish.)

31. Claude Lanzmann and Benjamin Murmelstein, The Last of the Unjust - Critics largely treated Unjust as though it were extra recommended reading attached to the prodigious syllabus that is Lanzmann's Shoah. But the projects are very different, and this is a prodigious event in itself. Murmelstein, once the Chief Rabbi of Vienna and later the appointed supervisor of the Jewish ghetto and concentration camp at Theresienstadt, remains for many people an emblematic face of Nazi collaboration, and he knows it.  So not only is he rare for being the unambiguous center of an epic-length Lanzmann documentary but he arrives to his interviews as Lanzmann's subjects seldom do: fully aware of the frameworks and biases that many, many people will apply to his testimonies, if they even listen at all.  He seems to have decided that all he can tell is the truth, his truth, and hope for some benefit of the doubt. The documentarian seizes on Murmelstein's candor and his amazing recall of salient details, including the horrible fates of prior Theresienstadt supervisors.  The narrative appeals to the part of Lanzmann that likes to complicate received narratives, even if Murmelstein isn't always prepared (who is?) for such astringent, indefatigable probing.  He tows a line of asking for understanding without begging for sympathy, with Lanzmann both helping him draw that line and repeatedly shoving him off it. As heavy as the film is, it's remarkable how invigorating it is to see a weighty conversation about an absolutely intractable circumstance get the screen-time and thorough contextualization it deserves, sustained by a vigorous inquirer and an impressively reflective subject.

32. Roger Ebert and Steve James, Life Itself - A lighter documentary, but far from insubstantial, particularly since neither Ebert nor James is interested in doting hagiography. Affection for Ebert flows across Life Itself and from multiple sources; anyone eager to honor his memory or his durable, capacious careers as journalist, critic, and media personality would do well to rent the film. But the scenes that stick are those where James wants to shoot something Ebert doesn't want filmed (like the excruciating suction of his esophagus), or where Roger and his wife Chaz are of different minds about how much to broadcast of his ongoing medical challenges or of bad news arriving in real time. Occasional conflicts like these help make Life Itself a Steve James film, not just a loose facsimile of Ebert's memoir or a straightforward extension of his self-perceptions. The same could be said of the fair hearing Gene Siskel gets in Life Itself, neither sidebarred nor sentimentalized nor set up as the obvious lesser of two equals.  Just as Jamesian is the prismatic view of complex professional pressures, the tough ligatures linking work to family or individual to community. It says plenty about Ebert that he wanted an actual filmmaker to document his life, not just a trusted friend, and that he'd want the movie to be good, not just fond.

33. Cheng Pei-Pei and Ben Whishaw, Lilting - It's difficult to play two characters who, beyond misunderstanding each other, have absolutely no context for grasping or reading each other.  It's even harder to do that without the actors suggesting that they themselves are out of sync, or without resorting to the kind of broad, superficial semaphores of impatience that suggest a clean, improbable rapprochement is just around the corner. Cheng Pei-Pei and Ben Whishaw clear all these obstacles in Hong Khaou's delicate film. They offer Lilting such a strong center that it survives the vaguer storytelling and characterizations all over its margins. Cheng is an elderly, unassimilated Chinese immigrant to the UK who has recently lost the son who placed her in an assisted living center. She does not realize he did so only temporarily, until he could screw up the courage to come out to her as gay and convince her to live with him and his boyfriend, whom Cheng's character already doesn't like. The son died before he could clarify anything, so now the mother and the boyfriend glare at each other across linguistic, cultural, and generational barriers, and across chasms of secrecy and grief, while also contending with other, private matters that add to their sorrow and anger. Much of this is communicated via silent expressions; even when they speak through a translator, all we need to know is written on the features of Cheng's and Whishaw's faces. The film is a tiny labor of love, kept aloft by the year's unlikeliest star pairing, and one of its most moving.

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Best of 2014: In Salute of Collaboration, Pt. 3

Anna Kendrick, Melanie Lynskey, and Lena Dunham in Happy Christmas

(Catch up on what I'm doing here and here. And yes, I recognize that these are getting longer.)

21. Karidja Touré, Assa Sylla, Lindsay Karamoh, and Marietou Touré, Girlhood - The complaint writes itself and is practically rhetorical: "Why'd Boyhood get so much attention and Girlhood so little?" To be fair, Céline Sciamma's study of four Afro-French teenagers, and of one in particular, won't open in the U.S. until hopefully next year. At that point, many of my readers will have their best shot at nullifying this objection by buying lots of tickets and endlessly chatting up the movie.  Once that comes to pass, we can all admire first-timer Karidja Touré's artful projection of vibrancy and heartache in the lead role but also the sinuous rapport of all four actresses at the center of the film, playing characters who are often but not always lifelines for each other. The relations synthesize most gorgeously during their exuberant, full-length, indigo-lit sing-along to Rihanna's "Diamonds" but their spirit, as bruised and boisterous as the song, courses through the whole film. Sciamma taps into it deftly and created the context in which it could thrive, but she couldn't access it and we couldn't savor it if her actresses hadn't conjured it.

22. Everybody in Goodbye to All That - Maybe they really do make this kind of movie all the time in France, but it's nonetheless remarkable when an American filmmaker understands character this way: not just as a carefully sculpted centerpiece, dominating a table to which spectators and fellow actors dutifully pull up a seat, but as a porous environment, a weather system, a loosely bonded atomic cloud through which motives, desires, personalities, ideas, and situations pass and accumulate. That's how writer-director Angus MacLachlan approached Otto and how Paul Schneider plays him, with a relaxation and a sense of ongoing discovery rarely connoted by adjectives like "impeccable," which Schneider nonetheless deserves. So do the other members of the cast, most of whom are women. Melanie Lynskey's brave and angry wife, Ashley Hinshaw's friend with benefits, Anna Camp's hot-and-cold churchgirl, Heather Graham's simmering old flame, Audrey Scott's believably all-seeing daughter, and especially Heather Lawless's resilient free spirit: these are not just refractions of Otto, but permeable, evolving creations of their own, as Otto is, and at no cost to their dramatic coherence. Smaller parts rendered by Michael Chernus, Amy Sedaris, and national treasure Celia Weston are just as indelible. They don't just honor the personalities implied by the script.  They contribute to an idea about life that the script hopes to promulgate: that we're all making it up, co-creating, but hopefully not lying.  Men and women alike, they are all midwives to this insight, expert and utterly un-arrogant.

23. Anna Kendrick, Melanie Lynskey, and Lena Dunham, Happy Christmas - "He's only saying it because they're friends," some readers will grouse. "He's only saying it because we're friends," one particular person might be saying, with typical, self-effacing modesty. "Oh my god, for real," say actual spectators of Happy Christmas and Goodbye to All That, who know the truth. Lynskey is the only well-known actor I can also call a friend; the filming of Happy Christmas, not far from my home, was the occasion for finally spending real time with her.  But private sympathies aside, her project choices consistently incline toward ensemble pieces, and when we're all lucky, not just her, these are the effects. Happy Christmas gifts all its actors with roles that draw off past personas (Kendrick's chipper edge, Lynskey's dejection and carefully tended hope, Dunham's jovial listening and self-ironization) while nudging most of them into new territory (Kendrick's a mess, Lynskey's a mom, and I did say most of them).  For a certain kind of indie audience, this is an irresistible cast. The comfy scenes, including a hilarious post-credits stinger, where these three bat around ideas for the Lynskey character's next book have the punchy whiff of the actresses simultaneously creating and goofing off. But they aren't playing themselves, and this isn't all a joke: witness one of the film's best moments, where Kendrick's and Dunham's characters pose genuine queries to Lynskey's about motherhood; she is gratified but also made nervous by their too-quick glorification of her role and her choices.  Name the last movie where this many women asked this many rarely-broached questions and evoked such multi-dimensional investments and responses on all sides, spoken and not.

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Best of 2014: In Salute of Collaboration, Pt. 2

Jafar Panahi, or is that Kambuzia Partovi, in Closed Curtain

(For context on this series, visit Part 1. For continuations, see Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.)

11. Cast and Crew, Boyhood - One of my favorite morsels in this year's Hollywood Reporter Actress Roundtable came when Patricia Arquette described the experience of having to be these characters on- and off-camera during short spurts over a 12-year period.  Playing a mom to two young kids who had to buy her as their mom, or at least as a second mom, involved the usual interruptions of motherhood. Thus, when one of them needed a sandwich, there was no more line-running or ruminating on the character, just a trip to the micro-budgeted craft-services table to see who wanted what.  In her way, it feels like Arquette is speaking for lots of folks involved in Boyhood, from Ellar Coltrane to the perfectly-cast grandparents to the people who paid for the shoot, edited the footage, and stocked the lunch table with sandwich stuff. They all kept it real. So, fine, I'm in the camp that admired Boyhood without quite absorbing it as a religious experience.  On the sheer scale of artistic accomplishment, I see a prodigious if uneven experiment, a great performance by Ethan Hawke, and an above-average family chronicle with angles and textures a more conventionally produced movie couldn't have, for better or worse.  But as a collective enterprise of trust and long-term devotion, among collaborators who showed us a family and were a family, this was awfully special.

12. Kristen Stewart and Peyman Moaadi, Camp X-Ray - I have, thank goodness, never been to Guantánamo or to any facility resembling it, so I can't fairly assess this film's encapsulation of that environment or of the experiences people have there, on either side of the jail bars. But Stewart and Moaadi certainly convinced me I was privy to a nascent, plausible, and variously friction-filled relationship, hard to put into words, between a mysterious captive and an erstwhile captor, herself a vulnerable underling by virtue of her age, her inexperience, and her gender. Their performances really land.  And as an Army brat, I particularly admire Stewart's strong, persuasive hold on what many young soldiers are like. Movies often seek to show that, but few past the smell test.  In a year where Stewart also showed agility and sensitivity in scenes with Julianne Moore and Juliette Binoche, she was best with Moaadi.  He continues Stewart's laudable run with world-class duet partners.

13. Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, and Glenn Greenwald, Citizenfour - Doesn't it seem silly to group what this trio pulled off, and the context in which they did so, alongside the collaborative work of even the best actors and storytellers?  Yes and no.  One thing this team understood was that the filming of Snowden's disclosures wasn't finally separable from the disclosures themselves; image and representation are seminal, as boon and as danger. With that knowledge in mind, they construct a scene of History in Action that we can trust, even as they acknowledge the labor that goes into even the most "unvarnished" depiction—and even as they hope out loud that information might just this once travel at a speed of light before cults of personality and image-making inevitably overtake it.  What a heroic and endlessly debatable enterprise. What a rare look at such a pivotal circumstance, reflecting so much thought about what these people were doing, at concentric levels of critical remove from their own minute-by-minute and all-but-unprecedented experience.

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Best of 2014: In Salute of Collaboration, Pt. 1

Kevin Allesee, Julian Walker, Nikki Jane, Gary LeRoi Gray, Wanita Woodgett, and Torrey Laamar in Blackbird.

"The thing that counts the most with me is the friendships, and the love, and the sheer joy we have shared making movies together. My friends."

If you don't know who said that and when, it is conceivable that you are reading the wrong blog, but that's okay.  It just means our lives are very different, which is fine.  The first reason these words linger in my mind today, even more than it does every day (no, seriously), is that during a month when everybody's making lists of the best single films and most outstanding individual accomplishments of the year in film, I realize how little we salute collaborations.  Outside of acceptance speeches or unbreakable ties on Ten Best lists, it's hard to pay tribute to the aspect of movielove that isn't about beholding solo artists' achievements but about relishing teamwork among filmmakers, or bonds between characters, or resonances across films.

The other reason is that New Year's Eve and New Year's Day are always occasions when I dwell on my own gratitude for the relationships that sustain my life and enable my good fortune.  This blog isn't the place to repay more private debts, but much of the thankfulness I feel is toward movie artists, for how they inspire, educate, and move me—often via their own visible camaraderie.  I genuinely feel happier in my life and better able to communicate, empathize, rebound from hardships, and admit my limitations because of the impressions of life, however reassuring or confronting, that I glean in the cinema.  So here are 52 occasions, one per week of the year, when the currents running between characters or the collaboration nourished among creative artists filled me with joy, admiration, humility, or insight.  I've limited myself to movies either released in 2014 or bowing at festivals in the last year, hopefully to arrive on screens near you in 2015.  I didn't love every movie, but that's the whole point: all of these relationships were gems to me, even the ones that were nestled in the rough.

1. Regina Hall and Kevin Hart, About Last Night - In their support of Michael Ealy and Joy Bryant and in their frisky, cantankerous rapport with each other, Hall and Hart generated the closest thing I saw in any 2014 romantic comedy to the vivid, spiky ensemble work that sustained the genre in the classic decades.  They don't play down to the genre, or defer to their co-stars.  Contemporary and frequently raunchy as they are, they act like they're in Libeled Lady, or a sexed-up, 21st-century Palm Beach Story.  As tasty as the whole film was, I wanted to keep watching their characters, even though you wouldn't necessarily want to be them or count on them in real life.  And with so many filmmakers giving Hart a long leash to improvise or ceding him his own unchallenged spotlight, which he's often very good at filling, it was great to see an actress go so fully toe-to-toe with him (among other bodily contacts).

2. Catherine Breillat and Isabelle Huppert, Abuse of Weakness - With typical flintiness, Breillat answered my question to her at TIFF '13 by saying that Huppert was the only professional actress she had any interest in working with.  As a piece of acting, Huppert's rendering of a palsied, embittered, undisguised surrogate for Breillat is often impressive but somewhat uneven, though less so than the film, which starts out strong, stagnates for a while, but sticks its pointed landing.  Setting all that somewhat aside, as an instance of making oneself a conduit for a forceful, sui generis filmmaker with something angry, complex, and somewhat inchoate to say about an extremely difficult time in her life, Huppert's work is exceedingly generous without being at all soft.

3. Alex and Ali, Alex & Ali - I hope more people get to see this documentary about a man from the U.S. South and a man from Iran who were friends and lovers a half-century ago, when the latter's family hosted the former as an exchange student, and who are now attempting to reconnect at a very different time, personally and politically.  The story is as harrowing as it is happy, and I won't reveal how they resolve their very difficult circumstances, but their willingness to be filmed at all was inspiring enough.  Their candor about thorny matters of head and heart, unfolding unpredictably in real time, is all the more so.  Sobering and valuable storytelling, straight from life.

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Happy 50th, Chicago Film Festival!

I've known since I moved here that I shared a spiritual link with the Chicago International Film Festival, and this year the case only gets stronger. On October 9, the festival will turn 50 on the same day I turn 37, and as happens every year, the programmers will whup even my relatives and loved ones in the competition for Best Gift.  Tickets go on sale to the public today, though one of the perks of joining Cinema/Chicago and supporting the organization is getting a two-day head start on those purchases.  I suspect I won't be the only patron who feels I am being showered with presents.

For their golden anniversary, the leadership has curated a selection that, according to Programming Director Mimi Plauché,"ties back to the history of the festival and also looks forward in so many ways." That commitment to its own heritage begins with the Opening Night selection of Liv Ullmann's Miss Julie, extending CIFF's streak of programming all of Ullmann's directorial efforts since her first in 1992 (including a new personal favorite of mine, Private Confessions, which won Pernilla August a richly deserved Best Actress award here in 1996).  Ullmann will be back to introduce the film and take questions, as will Hollywood directors and CIFF loyalists Oliver Stone and Taylor Hackford, who will screen some favorites among their own work: Natural Born Killers and the extended cut of Alexander in Stone's case, The Idolmaker and White Nights in Hackford's.  CIFF will also host the North American premiere of the newly restored Why Be Good?, released simultaneously as a silent and a talkie in 1929 and previously thought lost.  The star, Colleen Moore, plays a character named "Pert," which is all I need to know. She will be familiar to CIFF audiences as the inspiration for the Franju-esque graphic that CIFF has used as its logo since its inception, since she helped to found the whole institution.  Archival pleasures extend as well to a four-film cycle of Isabelle Huppert's greatest post-2000 hits, selected by the actress herself and screening all in 35mm at the Music Box: The Piano Teacher (blistering), Comedy of Power (diabolical), Copacabana (atypically comic), and White Material (unmissable).  Whether Huppert herself will alight for the occasion was not clear, but a girl can dream.

Miss Julie, despite being an Irish-set and substantially Irish-funded production, also commences in its way CIFF 2014's spotlight on Scandinavian cinema, which encompasses among many other films Ruben Östlund's festival smash Force Majeure, which I couldn't get into in Toronto; Norway's 1001 Grams, already submitted for Oscar consideration; Sweden's The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, which at least gave Roy Andersson some competition in the race for memorable film titling; encore screenings of Breaking the Waves and Fanny and Alexander; a portmanteau of recent Nordic short films; and Iceland's Of Horses and Men, already a cult favorite, with an indelible poster and this IMDb logline: A country romance about the human streak in the horse and the horse in the human. Love and death become interlaced and with immense consequences. The fortunes of the people in the country through the horses' perception. You can bet I'm skipping the one-night-only screening of Birdman to be there.

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Oscar 2013: Predictions, Preferences

All feature-film categories now complete!

Look how distressed Sandra Bullock is, trying to glance into her crystal ball, straining to quantify how many Oscars her movie Gravity will win tomorrow.  I'm sporting the same look on my face as I publicly prognosticate winners for the first time since Jennifer Lawrence was in the Brownies.  But why not take a stab at it?  I've been spouting off on every other angle of the Academy Awards this year: diagnosing the narrowing field of "top" competitors for The Advocate; debunking popular myths about the Oscars and their biases in The Washington Post; and discussing some favorites among this year's nominees and some formative Oscar moments with Der Spiegel, though if Sie kein Deutsche sprechen, you won't be able to read it.  What I have not done anywhere, in any language, is forecast who is winning or fess up to my own choices.  So many of my favorite people are sticking their necks out.  So, as Charles Busch belts out in Die, Mommie, Die! - widely regarded as a near-miss for a Best Picture nod in 2003 - "Why not me?"

Best Visual Effects
Gravity will stomp all over its competitors, making it the sixth Best Picture nominee in a row to cop the prize (after Benjamin Button, Avatar, Inception, Hugo, and Life of Pi, just so you don't have to look it up).  You may take this streak as proof of the Academy's growth over the years—since even within my lifetime as an Oscar queen "effects movies" were often persona non grata in Best Picture—or all you may see is an industry increasingly compelled toward digital extravaganzas. Either way, Gravity would probably mop the floor even with the five past winners I just named, much less with the competitors it has to vanquish here... which in a way is too bad, because there's a lot to say for the invigorating spectacles and sleek execution of several sequences in Star Trek and Iron Man 3.  I was less taken with the effects work in The Lone Ranger (yes, even as regards that train crash), and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug was one of a handful of Oscar nominees I missed in theaters. Will: Gravity  Should: Gravity  Hey, Where's The Great Gatsby, which owes the bulk of its locations, color schemes, camera movements, and memorably debauched extras to digital intervention

Best Makeup and Hairstyling
From an impressively strong field we slide over to an annoyingly weak one. Dallas Buyers Club will probably win on default, since voters tend to gravitate to Best Picture nominees unless there's a stirring reason not to.  Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa is many things, but not that.  (Actually, Bad Grandpa on its best day is only a couple of things, which disappointed me, since I thought the first Jackass movie was a hoot.  Especially seeing it in a Detroit shopping mall, with people flashing laser sights on the screen midfilm.)  The Lone Ranger has the more-is-more thing nailed down, and a lot of graphically arresting cosmetics have been lovingly applied to actors like Barry Pepper and Helena Bonham Carter.  Still, AMPAS has recently rejected some ostentatious contenders who would have been shoo-ins in the Rick Baker era (The Time Machine, Norbit, Hellboy II) when a more broadly admired film presents itself as an option (Frida, La Vie en rose, and Benjamin Button in those cases).  I think it might have been nice if more of the Buyers Club's subscribers had looked visibly ill.  I would love to see a bruising throwdown between those who insist that Johnny Depp's bird-stapled-to-his-head "Native American" is the year's most horrifying faux-archetype and those who proffer Jared Leto's eyebrowless transwoman for the same distinction.  But failing that battle, and following the canny publicizing of Dallas's breathtakingly low budget, Adruitha Lee and Robin Mathews ought to get own their chance to say "All right, all right, all right!" or possibly even speak about Neptune. Will: Dallas Buyers Club  Should: Lone Ranger  Hey, Where's American Hustle, obviously, but also the lightly greyed hair of Llewyn Davis and the wax-museum quality of so many of his acquaintances.  Also, Cate Blanchett's Park Avenue blonde tresses in Blue Jasmine, which are turning into dark roots before her eyes, or ours at least.

Best Supporting Actor
On the subject of Dallas Buyers Club, I thought the movie was fantastic and Jared Leto pretty good the first time I saw them.  Upon revisiting a week or so ago, Dallas betrayed more stress marks, and Leto—by now vaulted from Casting Stunt That Paid Off to Prohibitive Favorite for the Oscar—still seems ...pretty good, without quite explaining what Rayon's doing in this script.  There are some pearl-clutching gestures and other frou-fra in the performance that make it seem stale, conceived more for an audience than from a character who's been built feet up, as they say in American Hustle.  And speaking of Hustle, Bradley Cooper has a large enough part in that movie that he's drawn fire for being a lead falsely slumming in this category.  Yet there are lots of ways to confront the question of who's really "supporting" in a film.  Leto's scenes are more limited, but every single one is handed to the character to be charismatic, or tragic, or funny, or all three, just like Angelina Jolie's and Jennifer Hudson's scenes were in their Oscar-winning vehicles. The movie arguably supports him more than the reverse. Cooper is on screen bunches but, like most of his Hustle castmates, acts an over-the-top character in a strong way and still doesn't seem like he's showboating, or depriving his co-stars of the cues they need to enrich their work.  He and Abdi are the Bests in Show in their movies without ever looking like they realize it.  Fassbender, like Leto, is cleverly playing a thesis that's been posited in the script in place of a real character: in one case, the AIDS patient with a wavering commitment to living, in the other, a slave-owner as one-man multiplex of grimy perversions.  Hill is ...uh, very good in 21 Jump Street and Moneyball.  I have no idea who he's playing in Wolf of Wall Street, no matter how hard he's working to keep the badminton birdie from landing. Will: Leto  Should: Cooper  Hey, Where's James Gandolfini, who didn't need an iota of gratuitous sentiment to merit a nod for his middle-aged romantic, so tentative yet brave, so relaxed yet staunchly principled.  Plus the usual surfeit of guys who got no promotion (Ben Mendelsohn in Place Beyond the Pines, David Oyelowo in The Butler) or who indulged in the sin of acting in non-American films (Yiftach Klein in Fill the Void, Peter Kazungu in Paradise: Love).

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Top 100 Films, or Reasons To Be Thankful

I've been adding to my revised Top 100 Films list again, offering 100 words apiece about each of the entries. To give the list some added value, each entry also contains some suggestions about where interested readers might find a scholarly or film-critical response that's well worth your time.

The first ten listings in the new format have promised a place to leave comments, and though some early conversation began in this ribbon-cutting entry, you're welcome to revive the conversation here. If you've got feelings to share about Annie Hall, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Joyless Street, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Flesh, When Harry Met Sally..., In the Year of the Pig, Nostalghia, 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Riddles of the Sphinx, have at it!

Help Hold On To History

Thanks to everyone who's been so patient with the Great Blogging Drought of 2011. It's a huge year for me in terms of writing deadlines and professional obligations, which is the only reason I've been so scarce. Believe me, if I had time to write about the rapturous Tree of Life, I would! Even I don't think a tweet is remotely sufficient. Bear with me a little longer!

Still, some causes are too urgent to postpone, so I want to share some news from Anne Aghion, a filmmaker whose revelatory documentary My Neighbor, My Killer, about the Gacaca Trials and other local aftermaths of the 1994 Rwandan genocides, I saw at the 2009 Chicago Film Festival. I wrote a glowing review of the film, which later showed here in Chicago at Facets' Human Rights Film Festival, though it didn't get nearly the exposure it deserved. That said, two people have told me that the tip-off I provided to this extraordinary piece of work was the most valuable thing they've ever taken from my site; if you'd seen the film, you would easily recognize why they think that.

I was chuffed to get an e-mail today from Aghion, whom I do not know, informing me about a historical and cultural center that she and a colleague are trying to open in Rwanda. Many of us who hear the name of that country still think immediately of genocide, although I'm happy to say that I now have a friend living in Kigali whose reports are giving such a different, richer sense of the nation. Still, even Rwandans have painfully limited access to their own audiovisual history, so Anne Aghion and Assumpta Mugiraneza are working hard to open a Media Archive called the Iriba Center that will offer Rwandans free access to footage, photographs, and documents that preserve and illuminate their cultural legacy—to include, of course, the genocide, but also reaching back through an entire century of other records.

Aghion and Mugiraneza have already raised some key donations toward the amount they will need to open the center, but of course they need more—especially since some of the promised funding is conditional upon the two women independently raising $40,000 themselves, in two months' time. Please read about this impressive project and if you can give anything—literally, the minimum donation is $1—I hope you'll consider donating. I get paid Thursday, so I am broke as a joke right now; believe me, I understand. But one latte for me is $4 that this project could really use, and if 1,000 people felt the same, that'd be 10% of the fundraising bar right there.

And now that I've hit you up for money (though not for me! though I have thought about it!), I promise to do my best not to recede backward into eerie silence. In fact, I already have a comeback project planned, so stay tuned. Think: sunshine... glamor... "the universal language of film"... and microfiche.

CIFF Reviews: Sex Magic: Manifesting Maya; also, Sasha

Jonathan Schell and Eric Liebman's frisky, earnest, hilarious, eye-rolling, and eye-opening documentary Sex Magic: Manifesting Maya only plays the 46th Chicago International Film Festival tonight and tomorrow, and I think it deserves a strong audience, though no one under 18 will be admitted. Given my imagined readership for this blog, I doubt this poses a problem to any of you. My full review is here. I was less taken with the German-Montenegrin coming-out drama Sasha, but as I say in my review of that one, the clearly extant audience for pathos-inflected, light-comic gay movies will very likely enjoy it. I wanted more formal and storytelling ambition and fewer narrative strands tied up so neatly, but many moviegoers have exactly the opposite tastes. Chacun à son CIFF. Sasha's two play dates are Saturday and Sunday.

Meanwhile, if you aren't following my Twitter page, I just want to underscore how much I loved the French, girl-centered, coming-of-age drama Love Like Poison, which made use of that haunting Belgian-choir cover of "Creep" before the Social Network trailer did, and which also got a strong, early notice from Bill Stamets in the Chicago Sun-Times. Tickets to that one should be no problem to buy, unlike the situation with the delectable Certified Copy and the mystifying but must-see Uncle Boonmee, which are already sold out on all dates. Among the less high-profile movies, it's definitely my pick of the festival so far.

Monday Reviews, Part 2: Mugabe and the White African

I normally wouldn't double up on posts during the same day, especially when I've already linked to five new reviews below. However, Lucy Bailey and Andrew Thompson's Mugabe and the White African, long-listed for last year's Documentary Feature Oscar and a favorite of several film writers I adore, offers an unusual combination of a film that seems like essential viewing while also deeply rankling me, in political as well as aesthetic terms. I think everyone should see it and then argue about it, providing they can resist the otherwise brave filmmakers' implied preference that we respond emotively but not historically or intellectually to the tale they are presenting.

Mugabe is only playing at Facets Cinemathèque in Chicago until Thursday (thanks for this one, Facets!), so in the interest that a hometown audience might turn out for this urgent and somewhat inflammatory piece, I'm publishing my full review pronto.

The Fifties for 2010: Best Picture

Yeah, I know you were expecting Best Actress next, but I also know the kinds of folks who frequent this site, and I elected to make you wait another day. Plus, this list was easier to settle on.



Dogtooth, for the courage of its convictions, evoking cruelty without just being cruel, and culminating so precisely, with shivers of jet-black wit;

Everyone Else, for inhabiting a three-act structure without laundering a speck of life's messiness; I could have watched another hour, at the outset or end;

Mother, because it's The Host all over again but potently elevated in stylishness and feeling, with mother and son swapping the role of the beast;

Prodigal Sons, speaking of life's messiness, for making the filmmaker's present as fascinating as her past, her family's story as gripping to us as to her; and

Toy Story 3, for being an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Playroom, an honest-to-god fable of purgatory and collective purpose, with sniffles and laughs.

Extremely honorable mentions to Fish Tank, Greenberg, and Lourdes, all of which have maintained formidable staying power in my mind and could conceivably move up this list upon a second viewing. A Prophet emanates lots of craft and an unpretentious self-assurance, but for whatever reason it's just never arrived to me as the full-on corker that it was for a lot of other people. Maybe I need to give that one another whirl, too. A glance over my Movies of 2010, using the grade-sort option, ought to let you know what other titles I considered for this category.

And tomorrow, the female leads.

The Fifties for 2010: Sound and Editing

See what I did there? I threw in two categories that you weren't expecting. And right away, a worthy nominee gets to qualify, after starting a commercial mini-run in New York last week. Hear the call of the high-school zombie!

Best Sound (Mixing and Editing)


Sam Petty and Richard Pain for Animal Kingdom, for working creatively across music, ambient details, and abstract sound, as in that unsettling electric hum underneath... Air Supply?;

Francesco Liotard, Paolo Amici, David Quadroli, and Fabrizio Quadroli for I Am Love, for sounds of eating and food prep to give the gastroporn images some grounding, and for pushing so boldly with those John Adams elements;

Richard King, Gary Rizzo, Ed Novick, Paul Berolzheimer, Michael W. Mitchell, and Bryan O. Watkins for Inception, because even when I start getting leery of the Christopher Nolan Wall of Sound, it turns out to have meaningful layers and emotional potency;

Tye Bellar, Aaron Irons, Eric Lehning, and David Rowland for Make-Out with Violence, for accomplishing something glossy, exuberant, and disturbing on a tight budget, and figuring out how to make a wall-to-wall song score work; and

Paul Hsu, Warren Shaw, Philip Stockton, William Sarokin, Jeffrey J. Haboush, Scott Millan, Greg P. Russell, Peter Staubli, Jacob Ribicoff, Jon Title, and Allan Zaleski (!!) for Salt, a great argument for having many cooks in the kitchen, giving the stunts and scuffles sonic impact and maintaining the key of deadpan camp.

Honorable mentions to two films that hopefully didn't get pipped for the mere fact that I saw them a while ago: Green Zone, with a team headed by Oliver Tarney, Simon Hayes, Mike Prestwood-Smith, Simon Trundle, and James Boyle, might have qualified for the usual Loud Noises slot, but like the best Loud Noises movies, the work here is detailed, varying in density and modulation, and specific to its environment; and Fish Tank, with its smaller crew headed by Joakim Sundström, Per Boström, Rashad Omar, and Christer Melén, which doesn't carry its sound design to the unnerving heights of Red Road but weaves deftly back and forth between realism and a heightened sensory awareness.


Best Film Editing


Yorgos Mavropsaridis for Dogtooth, because despite all the lengthy shots, the timing of the jokes, the shocks, the pauses, and the close-ups has to be ace for the film to work;

Marion Monnier for The Father of My Children, for nailing the desultory rhythms of daily life, in times of peace and stress, as well as the dark, quiet character and story arcs beneath;

Hervé de Luze for The Ghost Writer, because from the first ferry-ride and the publishing-house meeting, we know we've a taut, witty suspenser in store, even when the script sags;

Maryann Brandon and Darren T. Holmes for How to Train Your Dragon, which could easily have jerked between set-pieces and draggy interludes of hiding and waiting, but the whole thing pops, soars, and delights; and

Shannon Kennedy and Kimberly Reed for Prodigal Sons, for shifting smoothly from a specific occasion to unpredictable events, and using the cuts to signal the echoes between two main storylines.

(I am aware, by the way, of the arguments against animated features being considered for editing awards, given that the storyboarding is so intensive and the amount of footage produced is generally more commensurate with what ultimately goes into the film. Even if this amounts to a conceptual form of "in-camera editing" where shot relations, alternations in perspective, and montage largely need to be worked out in advance—which still leaves open the matters of precise timing, cross-cutting, etc.—I still prefer to recognize successes in a different kind of process that winds up constituting its own form of "editing.")

Extremely honorable mentions, so much so that I'd probably swap them in for some of the above on a different day: Sarah Anderson for Accomplices, the best film I keep mentioning that nobody saw, and a miraculous proof that you can tell a bifurcated past-tense and present-tense movie and make both tracks exciting and detailed; Luke Doolan for Animal Kingdom, who repeatedly helps to endow genre-bound scenes with engaging off-rhythms and palpable tension; Teresa Hannigan for Cairo Time, who makes brave choices for unfilled silences and static longueurs, capturing how the leads are comfortable as well as uncomfortable with each other, all the time; Moon Sae-kyoung for Mother, who takes a risk on a heavily story-boarded feel but works adroitly with character details and with abstract crystallizations of mood and feeling; Tom Fulford and Chris King, who make Exit Through the Gift Shop such swinging fun even in its thinner passages; Heike Parplies for the consummate handling of psychology and pacing in Everyone Else; and Christopher Rouse, whose intercutting of multiple colliding courses of action at the end of Green Zone was the pulse-pounding action climax of the year so far, a whole worth more than the sum of its exciting parts.

Honorable mentions, too, to Nicolas Chaudeurge for Fish Tank, Tim Streeto for Greenberg, Nicolas Chaudeurge for Fish Tank, the ever-dependable Juliette Welfling for A Prophet, Karina Ressler for Lourdes, Ken Schretzmann for Toy Story 3, and Walter Fasano for I Am Love.

The Fifties for 2010: Best Director

So, re-entering the now: seasoned readers will know that every year, once I've crossed the threshold of seeing 50 commercial releases, I pause for a midterm progress report of bests in several categories, which doubles as a kind of For Your Consideration ad for achievements that I'm hoping other people will recall at year's end (or else hunt down, if they didn't see them the first time). I'm going to move in reverse order of the categories I just rehearsed from last year's Honorees. And so, without further ado...



(...although, if I can just add a little ado, can I say how exciting it is to see this list filled with five filmmakers ranging from their early 30s to their early 40s, none of whom has more than three features under her or his belt, two of whom got their first solo directing credits for these films, and three of whom are women? And I promise, I arrived at this list before considering any of that. It's a new day!)

Maren Ade for Everyone Else, since she proves the term "actor's director" needn't imply inattention to visuals and structure—but still, get a load of those performances;

Jessica Hausner for Lourdes, because she hovers between spoofing her subject and seeming spooked and humbled by it, while maintaining pristine, enigmatic formal control;

Giorgos Lanthimos for Dogtooth, for evoking more about petty tyranny and ignorant complicity by refusing to be literal, allowing himself humor, and trusting his originality;

Kimberly Reed for Prodigal Sons, for an 80-minute master class in imposing clear, forceful, and moving arcs onto complex and wholly intimate material, without losing nuances; and

Lee Unkrich for Toy Story 3, a playroom Preston Sturges who spins a rich central story about love and betrayal, couched amid sublime comic supports, pristinely concluded.

Extremely honorable mentions to Jacques Audiard for bringing his trademark blend of gritty realism and lightning verve to the prison tale A Prophet; to Bong Joon-ho for justifying Mother's wilder excesses by crystallizing his tones and intents so purely when it counts most; and to Andrea Arnold for sustaining the promise of Red Road in Fish Tank, which mirrors the Audiard in its blend of scrappy entrapment and fablic embellishments, and draws an ensemble of performances to die for. Those three runners-up would be full-time ballot contenders in a whole lotta years. I guess this year is shaping up okay? The only catch: Toy Story 3 is the only legitimately new film of 2010 anywhere among these eight.

Further honorable mentions to Roman Polanski for The Ghost Writer, Noah Baumbach for Greenberg, Mia Hansen-Løve for The Father of My Children, David Michôd for Animal Kingdom, and Frédéric Mermoud for Accomplices. The first, second, and fourth actually did bow on the world stage this year—albeit very early, at Sundance and Berlin!—so that's something.

Monday Reviews: Borom sarret and Only When I Dance

I was disappointed not to be more impressed with Only When I Dance, a recent documentary about Brazilian teenagers aspiring for a spot in an elite ballet corps or an international academy. I have at least one friend who is partial enough to the film that I feel like a buzzkill. And contrary to what some readers might think, it's no fun to ruin a film's perfect Rotten Tomatoes record, even if, as a culture, we seriously need to get over our over-investment in that heuristic.

In any event, here's my full review of Only When I Dance, but I'm thrilled that I am able to chase it instantaneously with something else I wrote in the wee hours this weekend, in response to a real breath-catcher. If you don't know Ousmane Sembene's films, or you're feeling self-conscious at having never seen one and not knowing where to start, you could do a lot worse than his gorgeously controlled, wise, and economical short film Borom sarret. At 20 minutes, it's also perfectly sized for a break from heavy-duty manuscript work, which was also a plum recommendation for the 78-minute Only When I Dance. Both of them inspired a rush of words, but in Borom sarret's case, they're nothing but ecstatic praise. And in this case, I'm blazing a trail for a previously empty Rotten Tomatoes dossier. So, see the film, write it up, and give the Tomato-surfers more to chew on! Seriously, you have 20 minutes, and from where I'm sitting, you're unlikely to be sorry.

So I Reviewed an Axe Murderer

It's been months since I wrote a full-length review of a first-run film, and I was worried about getting kicked off the blogosphere. So, eenie-meenie, meinie-mo, the most recent release I screened as this impulse hit was Cropsey, a documentary that screened as part of last fall's Chicago International Film Festival and begins its Windy City theatrical run on Monday at the Music Box.

I wound up having a lot of objections to the way Cropsey handles a fascinating set of delicate and disturbing questions, some of which revolve around the possibility that a devil-worshiping, hook-handed axe-murderer still haunts the grounds of a notorious, now-defunct asylum in New York City's outermost least beloved borough: Shutter Island on Staten Island. Notwithstanding my caveats, I'd still urge you to go see Cropsey. I'm basically a fan of seeing almost anything at the Music Box, since it remains such a stalwart exhibition venue for international, underfunded, repertory, and nonfiction programming in the city and therefore deserves our fealty. But Cropsey is also a film worth arguing about, and not just because you can't tell who's head you're inside now, or whether or not that top is about to fall. I wish this project had been executed a bit differently, but I vote Yes to almost any movie that so easily guarantees a full dinner hour or two of follow-up conversation. My review is here.

R.I.P. Marc McKerrow

The most searching and inspiring conversations I have ever enjoyed with a filmmaker I had with Kimberly Reed, the director of the extraordinary, autobiographical documentary Prodigal Sons. I still think that film is the best commercial release of 2010 so far, but coextensive with its narrative and aesthetic virtues is an extraordinary act of tricky, lucid, personal compassion from a sister to a brother. Marc McKerrow, Kimberly Reed's brother, never had an easy life. It only got harder, partly for reasons he might have tried harder to control, but largely for reasons exceeding his control, and which surely caused him more grief than they did anyone else.

Prodigal Sons was a watershed experience for me at last year's Nashville Film Festival and has moved audiences and impressed critics in Canada, Greece, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, and so many other places, as well as the U.S. Long before I spent a weekend hosting Kim at Northwestern, I was already bewildered by the smattering of reviews that worried whether Prodigal Sons is over-crowded with subject matter, or whether it's ultimately exploitative in depicting Marc's struggles with mental illness, his consequent swings of temper, his longing for his birth parents whom he was never to meet, and his acute case of sibling rivalry. From where I was sitting, the beautifully judged density of the narrative is one of the movie's cardinal virtues, since too many films, fiction and nonfiction, seem so cowed into dulling the edges of difficult stories, or taking infinite snapshots of one side of a character while never taking the initiative to walk around for different angles, or to think, hard, about to whom and to what that character relates. And the danger of exploitation strikes me as precisely what Prodigal Sons avoids through such a rounded, principled, but compassionate vantage on Marc—a vantage, moreover, that puts the filmmaker up for review as fully as it does her struggling brother.

When Kim visited Northwestern last winter, she said that no one was a bigger fan of Prodigal Sons than Marc. For anyone to whom this reads like a typical sound-bite of promotional cant, I watched her fulfilling Marc's standing request that she call him before or after and sometimes during every single festival screening of Prodigal Sons she attended—and she attended a lot. Marc's former wife, whom you meet in the film, attended a recent screening at the Spokane International Film Festival, near the home she shared with Marc: as apt a tribute as I can imagine to the fullness and fairness of the characterization, short of her own continued, private support of Marc through his ordeals. If you have seen the film, which has begun airing on the Sundance Channel and will appear on DVD this month, or if you saw Kim's hour-long interview with Oprah Winfrey in February, you know that behind this meditative, deft, free-thinking, and full-hearted movie is a family of unusual resilience and attachment, even or especially in the face of unusual tests.

Motivating all of these words is the news that Marc passed away unexpectedly on Friday. Only three days later, Prodigal Sons screened for the first time on Sundance, thereby reaching what is certain to be its largest, least predictable audience. The film is suddenly his legacy in a poignantly literal way, which I expect will only make it a more wrenching but also a more stirring and memorable viewing experience. Tributes to Marc and condolences to the family have already begun proliferating on the film's Facebook page; a new foundation in his name, to raise awareness and funding related to brain injury and mental illness, will soon go online here and here. I encourage you to donate what you can, even if it's just a few moments of your time to read and learn, or a private thought for the McKerrows and for other people who negotiate these sorts of challenges.

I have found it difficult to pay tribute to Marc without sounding like I'm shilling for the movie. I don't know how to avoid that danger when I not only feel so strongly about Prodigal Sons, but after all, it's the aperture through which my life came to be changed by my exposure to Marc and to his whole family's story. From any proximity, intimate or distant, blood-tied or wholly anonymous, he comes across as not an easy person to get next to. At the same time, Prodigal Sons makes clear that Marc had an ability to be very open and kind, very big of heart, and that he believed in family in ways not everyone allows themselves to do anymore. In conversation, Kim amplified what is already evident in the movie: Prodigal Sons was her way of reaching out to a sibling who had always posed problems for her. Well before the seeds of the film were even planted, Marc had surprised Kim with a request that she help him write his autobiography. In many ways the film was his pet and his idea, despite a few viewers' misapprehensions that he is somehow secondary or precariously positioned with respect to Kim's own narrative. Though Marc's life only got tougher from where the movie leaves off, brother and sister only became more and more bonded.

Now, in the wake of his death, I am only more moved to see Prodigal Sons as a beautiful, sobering testimony—provoking of thought as well as feeling—that there are so many ways to reach out and mend fences where they are broken, or even to reiterate your love for people who are well aware of it. During what is surely a terrible time for the McKerrow family, I hope they find some solace in the fact that they collectively—Marc included—reached out to each other before it could easily have been too late. Clearly the story is more complicated than that, and it's important to recognize, even having spent time with Kim, that I have only an extremely mediated awareness of who the McKerrows are and what all they have been through together. But I'm keeping them even closer in my thoughts than I already have in the year and a half since I first saw Prodigal Sons, and I hope some of you might do the same.

Four days after Marc passed, and the morning after the movie's premiere to a nationwide audience on cable TV, this rare double rainbow appeared in the sky over the McKerrows' hometown of Helena, Montana. Interpret as you will. Poetic license can be a great ally in moments of introspection.