2011: Must-See Films

Mike Cahill’s directorial debut, Another Earth, is essentially this year’s Moon: a chilly, atmospheric, strikingly assured debut that’s nominally science fiction, but has as much to do with personal portraiture and emotional exploration as plot gimmicks. That said, where Moon focused on a handful of twists, Another Earth is more about raw emotion than story reveals. When promising astrophysics student Brit Marling (who co-scripted with Cahill) causes a car crash while drinking, her life dissolves into a morass of guilt and self-abasing attempts to relieve it. The appearance of a second, mirror Earth in the sky causes a great deal of soul-searching, for her and for others, as they wonder whether the people on the other Earth made the same mistakes they did, and what their lives might be like as a result. Cahill and Marling use that setup as a springboard for a moody, grimly thoughtful piece about regret, grief, and forgiveness. It’s a delicate film, necessarily limited in budget and consciously limited in scope, but effective and affecting, and completely in control of its messages.

Yasmina Reza’s play, God Of Carnage, is pretty thin gruel, but Roman Polanski turns it into a feast. When a playground altercation prompts a meeting between two bourgeois couples, the veneer of polite interaction is quickly stripped away, and liberal platitudes give way to verbal bloodsport. Polanski wisely retains the play’s real-time action, using the limitations of time and space as the impetus for a master class in cinematic technique. The quartet of perfectly tuned performances features Jodie Foster’s best work in decades as the film narrows to a cage match between her left-wing campaigner and Christoph Waltz’s glib social Darwinist. The unchecked slide toward savagery feels a bit rote, but Polanski attacks the material with poisonous glee.

Bertrand Bonello’s sad yet intoxicating look at life in a French country brothel at the turn of the 20th century is like the European analog to Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers Of Shanghai: Both are about hothouse flowers suffocating out of the light. Though the film is rich in period detail, Bonello reveals how the world’s oldest profession never changes in any era, no matter the luxurious surroundings: Prostitutes work off debts that only accumulate over time, wait for clients to rescue them with proposals that never come, and remain vulnerable to disease or abuse from men who believe that money entitles them to do anything. But harrowing as it is at times, House Of Pleasures isn’t a wallow in misery, it’s a sympathetic portrait of women who have entered into servitude, yet still share a deep, complex bond. And Bonello makes some thrillingly bold choices, including a brilliant sequence set to a pop song that wasn’t recorded until 70 years later.

Director Azazel Jacobs and screenwriter Patrick deWitt fashioned something special with Terri, a movie about high-school misfits that acknowledges the neuroses, the petty jealousies and—yes—the sense of wonder that accompany adolescence. Jacob Wysocki plays an overweight teenager who lives with his mentally ill uncle and suffers through his classmates’ teasing. But Wysocki doesn’t make it easy on himself; he’s a sweet, smart kid, but he’s also sullen, which annoys his teachers. (The one person who tries to help is his principal, John C. Reilly, who had a rough boyhood himself.) Jacobs has a terrific eye—Terri has a luminescent look, like a late-’60s coming-of-age drama—and deWitt’s script builds to a powerful scene in which Wysocki, scrawny psychopath Bridger Zadina, and damaged cute girl Olivia Crocicchia get hammered in a tool shed and confront the underlying tensions in nearly every male-female teen relationship. The sequence is well-written and staged, and provides a graceful climax to a movie that’s full of keen detail about kids who feel like “monsters.”

Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 children’s novel—adapted into a popular play in 2007—follows a boy and his horse from England to the battlefields of World War I. It’s a self-consciously old-fashioned piece of storytelling that draws on past masters—particularly John Ford—to reaffirm film’s ability to express humanistic values, even when the din of war threatens to drown those values out. It’s idealistic but unflinching, growing grimmer and bloodier as it goes along, while letting the horse at the center reflect humanity’s best and worst impulses. Spielberg directs with the control of a master craftsman, which should go without saying, but few directors this deep into their careers are still as committed to finding new ways to startle and move moviegoers.

Like George Clooney in The Descendants, Paul Giamatti in Win Win plays a fundamentally decent person mired in a situation that grows more impossible with each passing moment. Giamatti plays a struggling lawyer and wrestling coach who agrees to be the guardian for a dementia-stricken senior (Burt Young) for mercenary reasons, then confronts the unexpected consequences of his actions, good and bad, when the man’s teenage nephew (Alex Shaffer) comes looking for him and turns out to be a championship wrestler. Complicated as it gets, Win Win, like Thomas McCarthy’s other intricately drawn character studies (The Station Agent, The Visitor), is less about plot than about exquisitely realized moments of connection and resignation. Shaffer lends his wrestler an animal sweetness and vulnerability, but Win Win rests securely on the slumped shoulders of Giamatti, who makes his character’s commitment to simply schlepping his way from one day to another with some modicum of dignity and self-respect seem borderline-heroic.