2011: AV Club Top 15 Films

Director Terrence Malick makes pretension look good with his deeply felt examination of godhood, humanity, and the break between them. Nominally a portrait of a boy caught between his mother’s gentle, spiritual side and his father’s urge to fight and win, The Tree Of Life explores the boy’s inner life, then expands to cover natural phenomena—from microscopic life forms to churning galaxies, and from the Jurassic age to the future, all in order to put his turmoil into perspective and focus. It’s an achingly personal film for Malick, one caught up in his own childhood traumas and his own struggles with the nature of God and the meaning of life. But while it rests in the details of one family’s life in Texas, it doesn’t get caught up in specificity: It tackles big questions while acknowledging that they have no firm factual answers, just emotional ones, which Malick brings across with gorgeous images and a soaring, expansive, poetic tone.

Director Abbas Kiarostami (Taste Of Cherry) once said “the best form of cinema is one which poses questions for the audience,” and Certified Copy, his beguiling twist on the talky European relationship movie, leaves quite a puzzle to be solved. What begins as a tour through Tuscany with a visiting author (William Shimell) and an antique-store owner (Juliette Binoche, by turns feisty and heartrending) deepens into something more mysterious as their relationship is revealed to have a longer history than first appearances imply. (Or does it?) By refusing to concretely define the nature of Shimell and Binoche’s relationship, Kiarostami leaves viewers unmoored, yet the memories and emotions at play are no less resonant than they would be otherwise. The question of whether the real thing holds more intrinsic value than a copy hovers over the proceedings, but the miracle of Certified Copy is that it works as more than mere gamesmanship. There’s something for the mind and the heart.

Rendering a domestic dispute with the car-crash intensity of a Breaking Bad episode, Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation considers what happens when a middle-class Iranian man and his wife petition for a divorce. She wants to move away from Tehran; he can’t leave his ailing, elderly father. Their intractability seems to infect everyone around them, from their moody teenage daughter to the devoutly religious woman they hire to be the old man’s caretaker. When something terrible happens to the family, the fragility of their respective positions is revealed by their journey through the court system, where every gesture demands justification, and every memory needs to be backed by evidence. What emerges from A Separation is a vivid depiction of marriage, parenthood, class, and religion, all filtered through the ever-fluctuating notion of what constitutes justice. The movie couldn’t be much more universal in its themes, or more riveting in the way it plays out.

Kevin Smith made a lot of noise and an exuberant spectacle of himself when he auctioned Red State—a grindhouse thriller about a cult led by a Fred Phelps-like figure who takes a proactive stance toward dishing out vengeance to evildoers—to himself at Sundance, but a strangely named, much-less-hyped film about a cult leader and a sensitive young woman who works up the courage to escape his grasp ended up making a deeper impression at Sundance and in the real world. Martha Marcy May Marlene is an utterly haunting psychological thriller about a strong-willed but impressionable young woman (Elizabeth Olsen, in a star-making performance) who falls in with a rural cult led by John Hawkes and later escapes to the emotionally remote confines of the home of her older sister, Sarah Paulson. In a performance of intense physicality, Olsen lets her big, expressive eyes convey the lingering damage of having witnessed things too horrifying to put into words, let alone understand. Martha Marcy May Marlene drains the cult drama of hysteria and overwrought melodrama, leaving behind a heartbreakingly human story of how the search for connection and meaning can go awry and leave behind scars that only deepen with time.

Kelly Reichardt’s stark Western, inspired by a real historical incident along the Oregon Trail, portrays rising tensions among a party of settlers traveling the Oregon High Desert. As supplies run low and their destination seems to recede into the distance, the party members turn on one another, project their fears on a Native American captive, and question their leader (Bruce Greenwood), who doesn’t seem to have any more answers than they do. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, but it never gets in the way of Reichardt’s gripping, you-are-there storytelling or another fine performance from Michelle Williams, as a woman who realizes she has to take matters into her own hands.

Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive follows reverently in the footsteps of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï, Walter Hill’s The Driver, and especially William Friedkin’s To Live And Die In L.A. in stripping away the frills and clichés of the action drama until all that’s left is its diamond-hard core. Ryan Gosling cements his iconic status as an ace stuntman who doubles as a getaway driver for some extremely unsavory folks. Gosling is an existential nowhere man with no past and no real attachments until he becomes infatuated with Carey Mulligan and develops paternal feelings toward her young son. A mood piece peppered by moments of intense, shocking violence, Drive captures the profound, bone-deep loneliness of living life outside the law. It’s an action film of powerful quiet. That extends to Albert Brooks’ revelatory supporting turn as an alternately pragmatic and sociopathic crime kingpin who doesn’t need to raise his voice to strike terror in underlings’ hearts. Like no other film this year, Drive hurtles itself irrevocably into the annals of cool.

Combining overworked tropes with the magic-realist quirk that drives her detractors nuts, Miranda July’s second feature has all the elements of a potential train wreck, plus intervals narrated by a cat. But July’s story about a pair of thirtysomething slackers struggling with the most meager forms of adult responsibility is grounded in painful truth and a firm grasp of consequence. Sure, Hamish Linklater’s mumbling man-child can stop time, but only for himself; the world outside keeps turning, and chances slip away as the film’s feline narrator waits to be rescued from an animal shelter. July uses naïveté as a weapon, daring her audience to drop its collective guard rather than simply offering a retreat into childish simplicity. It’s a high-wire act, a delicate balance of tones that could easily have ended in a shattered heap. July’s ability to pull it off at all, let alone with such honesty and grace, is movie magic of the most satisfying kind.

Pedro Almodóvar has gotten so good at crafting exquisite melodramas and finding emotional riches in lurid subject matter that it’s almost become possible to take him for granted. With The Skin I Live In, he has even more lurid material than usual—to say more than it involves the extremes of plastic surgery would give too much away—but beneath the shocks, there’s a haunting, masterfully made movie about identity, guilt, responsibility, and redemption.

Once upon a time there was a lonely kid who discovered a sense of purpose and a makeshift family when he began to study the history and craft of cinema. That describes the hero of Hugo—an orphan who lives in a Paris train station in the ’30s—and it describes the film’s director, Martin Scorsese, who spent much of his youth in movie theaters or watching films on TV because he was too sickly to play outside. Hugo is a fairly faithful adaptation of Brian Selznick’s innovative children’s book, to the extent that its plot and themes have struck some as too simplistic for a Scorsese picture. But there’s nothing unsophisticated about Hugo’s visual design, which is very much in keeping with Michael Powell’s concept of the “composed film,” where the editing, sound, and camera moves work in conjunction to create a feeling like listening to a great piece of music. And there’s certainly nothing impersonal about the way Scorsese illuminates the aspects of Selznick’s novel that mean the most to him: the notion of people dedicated to using mechanical contraptions to record our thoughts and our histories in ways that bring us all closer together.

New York teenager Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin) may be the most vibrantly realized movie character of the year, a precocious, entitled, well-meaning, infuriating 17-year-old who witnesses (and partially causes) a terrible bus accident that leaves a woman dying in her arms. Her quest to right her perceived wrong gets twisted beyond the hope of any satisfaction, she picks fights with her divorced mother, flirts with her math teacher, and loses her virginity to a classmate in a brilliantly awkward scene, and the film spirals out to turn its infinitely empathetic gaze on other characters in her world, from the boy who harbors a crush on her to her remarried dad in California to her mom’s suave new boyfriend. Margaret is messy, but marvelously so—it’s a film about the trauma of realizing that life will go on without you when you’re gone, but even more than that, it’s a testament to how rich, complex and ripe with possibility life is.

Two men hook up at a bar in Nottingham, England, and their drunken one-night stand leads to something more substantial in Andrew Haigh’s beautiful writing and directing debut feature, which might crudely be called a gay Before Sunrise. Tom Cullen plays the more reserved of the two, insecure in his sexuality and unable to come out to his family, yet open to a long-term commitment; Chris New is his opposite, brash and promiscuous and suspicious of convention, especially as it applies to romance. What’s thrilling about Weekend is how much their relationship takes on a life of its own, something neither of them could have planned or controlled. Cullen and New start as types, but they grow into more specific characters as the film goes along and their conversation deepens. Weekend is full of wit and intelligence, and tells the story of this relationship with admirable explicitness, whether its characters are in the bedroom or baring their souls.

In a year filled with outstanding narrative documentaries, the old master Errol Morris kept pace with Tabloid, a film about the chatty, personable Joyce McKinney, best-known (for those who know her at all) for her involvement with a 1977 kidnapping/rape case that the British press dubbed “The Manacled Mormon.” Morris allows people with different angles on McKinney’s story to tell their piece of it—including reporters from competing British tabs, one of whom championed McKinney and one of whom trashed her—but he makes no real effort to investigate the truth of what happened, because that isn’t really Tabloid’s point. The film is more about how easy it is to skew a story for entertainment purposes, and thereby make celebrities of people who haven’t really done anything except be nutty. Case in point: Tabloid itself, which is crazily entertaining and unpredictable.

Clio Barnard’s documentary about the short, fierce life of Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar and the three children she left behind makes use of a simple, ingenious device. The film is comprised of interviews with Dunbar’s family and others who knew her or her work, but we don’t see them on camera. Instead, actors, a little more polished, a little more photogenic, lip-sync their recorded words to the camera in what aren’t quite re-enactments—they’re more restagings. The theatricality matches Dunbar’s medium, and means that the factual scenes don’t look so different from the performances of snippets from her plays peppered throughout the film, simultaneously removed and painfully immediate. As the awful cycles of poverty, neglect, and substance abuse unfold, The Arbor provides a piercing reminder of the humanity behind these accounts.

For his latest documentary, Steve James (Hoop Dreams, Stevie, Reel Paradise) has trouble bringing an entire area and social issue into focus: His attempt at an overview of troubled Chicago neighborhoods during a period of extraordinary violence focuses on three of the people trying to improve the situation, in the process following so many players and focusing on so many intense, immediate, ephemeral situations, it’s hard to keep track. But as the film blurs into a morass of angry, frustrated people, The Interrupters gets at all the common ground between them and their situations—particularly how their environment trains them to fight, escalate, and never back down, while their own instincts often make them conciliatory at the first sign of reasonableness and a socially acceptable escape from a hairy situation. And moments stand out, as the three “violence interrupters,” working with a group called CeaseFire, intervene to set up conversations between combatants, and memorably, between a robber and his past victims. James’ documentary is a heartbreaking look at some of the causes of systemic inner-city violence, and some of the people working toward a solution: On the micro level, it’s unsettlingly intimate, as when one troubled girl confronts how she keeps letting herself and her sponsor down. And on the macro level, it’s food for uncomfortable thought, as James lets the participants’ words and actions speak for themselves, asking whether it is actually possible to end the violence on a larger scale, instead of just one moment and one fight at a time.

Some wrote off the directorial debut of The IT Crowd’s Richard Ayoade as Wes Anderson lite, but his singular coming-of-age story owes more to The 400 Blows than to Rushmore. The young hero (Craig Roberts) plots his life like a military offensive, calculating the right mixture of cruelty and cool to gain his first sexual partner, but life moves faster than his ability to respond, and his shallow mastery of teenage mores is challenged by traumas that can’t be assuaged by the right choice of mix-tape. Although Ayoade is known as a comedian, his approach is more wistful than laugh-out-loud: Submarine is saturated in dark, almost brooding colors and scored with plangent songs by Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner. It’s a film out of time rather than one attuned to the current trends, destined to be a cult object no matter when it was released, but grateful teenagers will still be stumbling across it years from now.