The Fifties for 2015

I'm back with one of my most popular features: The Fifties, honoring the year's best filmmaking achievements among the first 50 U.S. releases I saw in 2015.  I think this is the earliest I've ever hit this numerical milestone; it's nice to be drafting this post on July 2, at the exact midpoint of the year.  Many of the films I'm honoring are either still in theaters or newly available on DVD and streaming services, so I hope you'll investigate any titles you've missed.  And, as ever, please suggest your own favorites in the comments, especially if you suspect I've missed the film.

I've gobbled up so many movies post-graduation—ten features in five days, after seeing only three in theaters during the previous two months—that I hustled all the way to a tally of 56 before I could catch my breath. Amy, The Look of Silence, Phoenix, and Tom at the Farm have not technically opened yet, and I'll only believe the last one's planned release when I see it. I'll sideline these for now, which means Tom's Lise Roy, Amy's impressive sound mix, Phoenix's mishandled but interesting script, and just about every stunning aspect of The Look of Silence (easily one of the year's best films, towering over all of the other documentaries I've seen) won't get recognized below.

Otherwise, the eligible movies were '71, About Elly, Amour fou, Blackbird, Blackhat, Boy Meets Girl, Clouds of Sils Maria, Dope, The Duke of Burgundy, Eastern Boys, Eden, Ex Machina, Far from Men, Far from the Madding Crowd, Fifty Shades of Grey, Futuro Beach, Gerontophilia, Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, Girlhood, Heaven Knows What, The Hunting Ground, Inside Out, Insidious: Chapter 3, It Follows, It's All So Quiet, Jauja, Joy of Man's Desiring, Jurassic World, The Last Five Years, Li'l Quinquin, Love & Mercy, Mad Max: Fury Road, Madame Bovary, Magic Mike XXL, Maps to the Stars, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Of Horses and Men, The Overnight, Paddington, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, Play, The Princess of France, Serena, Spy, Testament of Youth, Timbuktu, The Tribe, When Evening Falls on Bucharest, While We're Young, White God, Wild Tales, and The Wolfpack.  And the nominees are...




BEST PICTURE
Girlhood (rent it!), tough-minded but affecting coming-of-age ensemble drama
It Follows (DVD in July), an ingenious and brilliantly executed horror yarn
Li'l Quinquin (rent it!), Bruno Dumont's amazingly effective foray into comedy
Mad Max: Fury Road (in theaters), tense, implacable, and baroquely conceived
Timbuktu (rent it!), a quietly confident and increasingly tense social document
The Tribe (in theaters), come for all-signing conceit, stay for potent storytelling

Also: I followed Oscar's lead and drew a contour line around the choices that most excite me, though the wonderful Eastern Boys, Pigeon Sat on a Branch..., Eden, Princess of France, and Jauja are all closely clustered just beneath this sextet, and The Look of Silence would unquestionably appear if it had opened yet.


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The Fifties for 2011: Cuts and Cues

Assuming that you know the drill by now...



Best Film Editing
Oliver Bugge Coutté for Beginners, because associative leaps help us feel the work of memory while edits lend the aging an unusual energy and early middle-age a worrisome inertia;

Paul Tothill for Hanna, because Wright and his team once again prove their mettle with set-pieces but also generate electricity and tension in choreographed cross-cuts;

Ivan Lebedev for How I Ended This Summer, because the chilly and bleary-eyed Arctic longueurs, the rhythm of daily tasks, and the escalation of tension all persist and enrich each other;

Benjamin Heisenberg and Andrea Wagner for The Robber, because without losing a hold on the protagonist's alienation, the film keeps coherent pace with his hammering heart, plotting action expertly; and

Hank Corwin, Jay Rabinowitz, Daniel Rezende, Billy Weber, and Mark Yoshikawa for The Tree of Life, because edits evince a symphonic feel for when to enter or leave a shot or a sequence, whether cutting mid-action or dilating out to abstraction.

Honorable mentions in alphabetical order by film title to Shûichi Kakesu for Caterpillar, Bahman Kiarostami for Certified Copy, Óscar Figueroa for Leap Year, Patricio Guzmá and Emmanuelle Joly for Nostalgia for the Light, Marc Vives for Putty Hill, Rui Mourão and João Pedro Rodrigues for To Die Like a Man, and Sean Albertson, Matt Chesse, John Gilroy, and Aaron Marshall for Warrior, which people should be buying tickets to see.




Best Sound (Mixing and Editing)
Ahmed Al-Ibrahim, Christopher Scarabosio, et al. for Hanna, for modulations and—where subtlety would hamper the fun—whomping extremities of silence and sound, including delicious flaunting of super score;

Vladimir Golovnitsky, et al. for How I Ended This Summer, for using natural and abstract sounds to establish rhythms, denote aberrations, get inside Pavel's head, and imbue a radioactive hum of tension;

Mandell Winter et al. for Meek's Cutoff, for helping to keep this unplotted exodus somewhere between a dirt-in-your-shoes reality and a folkloric parable of Americans seeking their way;

Craig Berkey, Erik Aadahi, et al. for The Tree of Life, for the gorgeous pastiche of classical quotations, and for boyhood pops and hushes, plus the soft and mighty sounds of worlds coming into being; and

Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr, Koichi Shimizu, Richard Hocks, et al. for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, because although Joe has recorded Thai jungles before, plus Thai offices, plazas, and housing modules, their buzzing soundscapes still entrance.

Honorable mentions to the teams headed by Sylvain Brassard for Heartbeats and Daniel Iribarren and Ansgar Frerich for Le Quattro volte.

The Fifties for 2011: Images and Words

Here I continue my yearly enterprise of isolating the achievements I admire most from amidst the first 50 films I viewed from this calendar year of U.S. releases.

Please be advised, by the way, that Tim Robey and Joe Reid have both gifted us their parallel lists, Joe conveniently at the 50-mark as well, and Tim so far past it I wonder if he can remember it. Also, several commenters have got enticing lists to share. Keep reading around!



Best Cinematography
Stéphanie Weber-Biron for Heartbeats, because even if Dolan borrows most of his ideas, his films move gorgeously between swoony, heightened sensuality and deftly deoxygenated dolors;

Pavel Kostomarov for How I Ended This Summer, because faces and framings evince mystery, tension, and texture, landscape evades cheap pathetic fallacies, and Arctic glow is soft but spooky;

Adriano Goldman for Jane Eyre, because all the bounced light sources serve key themes, and moody lensing has a metaphysical severity that echoes Jane's tough, devout outlook;

Chris Blauvelt for Meek's Cutoff, because the palette's dusty austerity and the inspired boxiness of the Academy framing make these dioramas both antique and transcendent of era; and

Emmanuel Lubezki for The Tree of Life, because as in operatic music, Malick's camera is characterization and worldview, a free-indirect means for exploring souls without being of them.

Honorable mentions in alphabetical order by film title to Peter Zeitlinger for Cave of Forgotten Dreams, an atypically uneven but still exciting Alwin Küchler for Hanna, Kim Hyun Seok for Poetry, Reinhold Vorschneider for The Robber, who would have shared the citation with his hard-working camera operators, and the team of Yukontorn Mingmongkon and Sayombhu Mukdeeprom for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Maybe Boonmee should be in for Heartbeats? I'll live with it.




Best Screenplay
Mike Mills for Beginners, because a long chain of short, taciturn, yet revealing scenes can be harder to write but richer to discover than three acts of heavy dialogue;

Abbas Kiarostami for Certified Copy, because Kiarostami has not previously disclosed a knack for probing reality and illusion with such finesse or such stirring emotional depths;

Moira Buffini for Jane Eyre, because not since the mid-90s glories of Hossein Amini has anyone stayed so true to a landmark novel while so aptly condensing and taking risks;

Lee Chang-dong for Poetry, because a few stock scenes and meandering passages are a worthy tariff for such probing and delicate characterization, such breadth of mystery; and

Alexandru Baciu, Răzvan Rădulescu, and Radu Muntean for Tuesday, After Christmas, because to hold shots so rewardingly and lift performances to such heights, you need to start from an acute anatomy of intimacy and its failures.

Honorable mentions to John Logan, Gore Verbinski, and James Ward Byrkit for Rango. The year's funniest movie so far, The Trip, is too heavily improvised to count here, and apparently too much so to even credit a screenplay.

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.