2010: Must-See Films

With its focus on the fascinating minutiae of carrying out an assassination, The American partly resembles the fine 1973 thriller The Day Of The Jackal, about an attempt on Charles de Gaulle’s life, though it’s much sparer, and completely apolitical. Corbijn and Joffe aren’t interested in the real-world ramifications of Clooney’s work so much as the erosion of his soul, and Clooney plays the role with typical understatement. The strengths and weaknesses of The American are similar to those of Corbijn’s Joy Division biopic Control. He’s a patient, fastidious filmmaker with a great eye—ideal for his subject here—but his austerity doesn’t entirely erase the suspicion that he doesn’t have much on his mind. His film is a triumph, but it may be a triumph of style over substance.

The specter of death looms heavy over And Everything Is Going Fine and lends an almost unbearable air of bleak irony to sequences like the one where he asks an older woman whether she’d ever pondered suicide. Soderbergh loving, shattering valentine to his late friend and collaborator has an inherently tragic arc, but it’s ultimately a celebration of Gray’s irrepressible lust for life and bottomless curiosity about the strange and beautiful world around him. It does justice to a subject who made his life and death works of art.

Thank goodness Animal Kingdom is so stylish and sharply plotted. Plus, Michôd counters Frecheville with two strong characters: Weaver, a sweet-faced lady with a well-honed sense of self-preservation, and Mendelsohn, who tests the mettle of everyone in his circle by talking slow and staring dead-on, leaving them wondering whether he’s totally off the beam, or more aware than anyone realizes. Weaver and Mendelsohn easily manipulate the needy Frecheville, who’s just looking for a home. As the villains turn Frecheville’s suburban oasis into a prison, Animal Kingdom joins in the tradition of brutally unsentimental Australian crime dramas like The Boys, in which the stakes are low, except to the people staring down the barrel of a gun.

Director Mike Leigh is famous for his collaborative writing process, in which he requires his actors to create detailed personal histories for their characters. The payoffs are clearer than ever in Another Year, a rich ensemble piece about people who have known each other for decades and are dealing with the pains and pleasures of growing older, if not necessarily wiser. Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen are both wonderful as a picture of marital bliss, but their stability stands in sharp contrast to the unsettled friends in their orbit, especially Lesley Manville, excellent as a middle-aged lonely-heart who dresses (and drinks) like a woman half her age. The message seems to be “Don’t grow old alone,” but the film isn’t quite so reductive, and its lived-in quality gives it warmth and good humor even when things are at their bleakest.

Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams seem to choose roles solely on the basis of how much suffering their characters will endure. Blue Valentine stands out as especially brutal even by the high standards of these two masochistic actors. The film offers a harsh, unblinking autopsy of the doomed relationship between a sweet, idealistic dreamer without much in the way of ambition (Gosling) and the practical woman (Williams) he wins, then can’t hold onto. It’s an intense drama of raw nerves and agonizing moments that grows more and more despairing until a shattering conclusion. Blue Valentine made headlines when it was slapped with an NC-17 despite its lack of particularly explicit sexual content—a judgment that was since withdrawn. Still, the rating at least made a little sense: The NC-17 was created for adult films, and Blue Valentine is adult in the best, least smutty possible sense.

Director Rodrigo Cortés makes good use of the limited space, although at times, it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on in the dim light. Chris Sparling’s script is cleverly constructed too, filling in the details of Reynolds’ situation (and his life back home) in the midst of the action. He’s torn between whether he should do what his captors ask, go behind their backs, or just make his final amends with his loved ones. There should be a little more to the backstory than there is—and more to the movie than a familiar critique of the management of the Iraq War—but Reynolds is terrific, and Cortés and Sparling overlay a preposterous premise with familiar modern complaints. Buried is as much about dropped calls, getting sent to voicemail, and being openly lied to by our institutions as it about being buried alive by terrorists.

Gibney combines agitprop with a quasi-journalistic approach that fuses original interviews and reporting with a more basic summary of what’s already known. His films are rarely revelatory in and of themselves, but they’re invaluable for making sense of stories too complex for cable or even print outlets to encapsulate. Casino Jack wends through a dense thicket of information— not always gracefully—and convincingly pegs Abramoff as part of a larger lobbying scandal, one that’s still (and for the foreseeable future) ongoing.

Catfish is absolutely riveting, and even nerve-wracking as Joost and the Schulmans get progressively closer to learning more about their “friends.” What they find is partly what viewers will expect, but partly not, and it’s to the movie’s credit that its protagonists don’t just debunk and run; they stick around long enough to learn more about what’s really going on, and why. What emerges is a tense, more-than-a-little-disturbing study of the relationship between artists and their fans (and between virtual friendships and real relationships), not-so-neatly summed up by the anecdote that provides the movie’s title. When we hear about how catfish are employed to help keep cod fresh, the story initially sounds self-serving: a metaphor for how artists need to be nipped. Then again, in the dynamic between artist and fan, who’s really the catfish?

There’s some terrific character-defining detail in Cyrus, as when Reilly tries to choose between a big or small box of condoms before his big date with Tomei. And there’s something to be said for the idea of a naturalistic comedy about what happens when people prop up their weak friends and relatives for far too long. (Tomei and Hill’s relationship mirrors the one between Reilly and his ex-wife Catherine Keener, which raises the question of whether Tomei only falls for Reilly because he’s just like her son.) But once again with the Duplasses, there just isn’t enough of anything: not enough funny lines, not enough variation of mood, not enough plot. If these guys were students, Cyrus might merit a “promising.” But this is their third movie. It’s time for them to stop turning in first drafts.

The quintessential break-up movie, Maren Ade’s Everyone Else follows a young couple—she (Birgit Minichmayr) a free-spirited, sometimes childish sprite, he (Lars Eidinger) a would-be architect who’s arrogant and coolly distant from others—as they go on vacation in Sardinia and come to see their incompatibilities. But much like The Forest For The Trees, Ade’s brilliant debut feature about a provincial teacher who struggles socially in a new city, Everyone Else is about the difficulties of fitting in. Setting the story against a lovely backdrop, Ade deals truthfully with the external factors that drive a wedge between the couple, and isn’t afraid to reveal the pettiness and back-biting that happens when a relationship dissolves, even if it makes her characters looks bad. It ain’t pretty, but it’s real.

Sometimes, when you don't expect something to be truly great, it goes and surprises the hell out of you and turns out to be just that. Director David O. Russell's THE FIGHTER is engrossing entertainment and a triumphant underdog story that is certainly one of the greatest sports movies in my lifetime. For hours after seeing the film, my brain was battling itself trying to figure out which performance I loved the most or what my favorite moments were. I eventually gave in and realized that I loved every second of and every performance, from Wahlberg, Bale, and Leo to the wonderfully scary ladies with the out-of-control hair who played the Ward sisters. The film is as inspirational as it is heartbreaking, as tough to watch at times as it is one of the most watchable films I've seen all year. Prepare to have the earth move under your feet. This is the film that had grown men weeping at Butt Numb-a-Thon, people.

Four Lions is less Abbott & Costello Meet Osama Bin Laden than Abbott & Costello Are Osama Bin Laden: The bad guys, anti-heroes, and comical bunglers are all one and the same. There’s something strangely humanizing and even faintly humanistic about the film’s depiction of would-be holy warriors who wrestle with the same anxieties, fears, and hopes as the rest of us. The jihadists here register as all too recognizable; it’s easy to both laugh at them and identify with their neuroses. Morris has a lot of fun spoofing his subjects’ vanity; even terrorists threatening to deliver a deathblow to the godless secular world want to look good on camera. Four Lions maintains such a ramshackle, loosey-goosey, larkish vibe, it can be easy to forget its grim subject matter, but there are moments throughout when the wackiness dissipates and the high stakes involved become bracingly apparent. Four Lions is audacious and uncompromising, a fearless comedy that isn’t afraid to use exploding bodies as punchlines, especially during a rousing climax that will forever change the way audiences see comical animal costumes. Like few satires, domestic or otherwise, Four Lions feels dangerous; it’s an edgy provocation that alchemizes tragedy into literally explosive comedy.

Get Low is meant to be funny, heartwarming, and wise, and it is, for the most part—but in an overly familiar way. The movie has the look and tone of a Hallmark Original, but quieter, and the story develops fitfully, largely because Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell’s screenplay has to hold back Duvall’s big secret reason for throwing his “funeral party” until the end. When the big moment arrives, though, it’s appropriately riveting. Get Low is also helped along by two strong supporting performances: one by Lucas Black, who brings his usual twangy authenticity to the role of a young family man encountering the reality behind a local legend, and the other by Bill Murray as a mortician who sees this free-spending backwoodsman as the golden ticket he’s long been waiting for. Duvall’s performance sticks to his usual assortment of guttural grunts and wistful, wrinkled stares, but Murray is a wild card. When his faux-sincere huckster vibe rubs up against Black’s idealism and Duvall's plainspokenness, Get Low gets better.

The connections to Tony Blair and his insidious dealings with America and the CIA in the lead-up to the Iraq War are unmistakable and damning; if Polanski set out to catch the conscience of the king, he’s made the perfect play to do it. And in the role of the suffering wife, Olivia Williams creates a wonderfully modern femme fatale, a quietly powerful woman whose shame has curdled into duplicity. With much of the action confined to the dark spaces of Brosnan’s island compound, The Ghost Writer has the suffocating scale of a chamber piece, one Polanski could pull off in his sleep. Yet in its entertaining mix of the topical and the personal, the film is a vital record of the times, both for its maker and the world from his window.

It’s a great-looking film—and an impressive use of 3D—but ultimately, the story makes it memorable. Dragon drops viewers in the middle of an impossible situation grounded in a fundamental misunderstanding, then saddles an unprepared, easily wounded kid and his scaly, big-eyed sidekick with the task of fixing it. There’s a lot at stake here, and the film never loses sight of that amid all the dragonfire and whooshing flight sequences.

Sylvain Chomet’s animated adaptation of Jacques Tati’s unproduced screenplay The Illusionist follows the travails of a Tati-like magician in the UK in the early ’60s, as his kind of entertainment starts to lose steam with the public. As an evocation of Tati’s minimalist whimsy, The Illusionist falls short, but the movie as a whole still succeeds splendidly, paying direct and indirect homage to multiple ’50s and ’60s cinematic showmen and honoring how the simplest tricks can still charm and deceive us. Then it all ends on a melancholy, ambiguous note, with disenchantment and new hope all jumbled together.

The overwhelmingly white, rich, and old talking heads of Inside Job are partially there to provide context and commentary and partially on hand to provide a gallery of eminently hissable villains. Though Ferguson is never actually seen, he makes his presence felt to an almost distracting degree by asking uptight financial ne’er-do-wells damning questions, then cutting away from them either before they can defend themselves or mid-sentence. From an emotional standpoint, it’s enormously satisfying, even cathartic to watch Ferguson “nail” some of the rogues behind the economic crisis with the unseemly zeal of Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report, but journalistically and cinematically, it feels like a self-congratulatory flurry of cheap shots, albeit at richly deserving targets. Yet ultimately, Inside Job is as much crisp, professional journalism as ballsy takedown, and the film’s two sides complement rather than detract from each other.

At the core of Rivers’ kibbitzy style of unvarnished truth-telling lies a deep reservoir of sadness, rooted in the suicide of her longtime manager, producer, and husband Edgar Rosenberg and the emotional scars incurred when Rivers’ mentor and early champion Johnny Carson had her blacklisted from NBC after she hosted a competing, ill-fated talk show on Fox. Much of A Piece of Work inhabits the tricky intersection of comedy and tragedy: the specter of mortality looms large for Rivers, as does the even more terrifying possibility of professional irrelevance. A Piece Of Work is funny, heartbreaking, and casually profound about the insatiable need for validation and approval that fuels so much stand-up comedy.

Few of the Taxi Driver-like undertones of Millar’s comic book remain in place, but the film keeps some of his dark wit, and fans of Nicolas Cage scenery-chewing will appreciate his turn as Big Daddy, a masked avenger who’s Adam West with a mean streak when wearing his costume, and Ward Cleaver with a subscription to Soldier Of Fortune when out of it. Chloe Moretz is similarly memorable, and disturbingly entertaining, as Hit-Girl, Cage’s foulmouthed, sweet-faced, bloodthirsty daughter and sidekick. Kick-Ass comes closest to inspired, unsettling lunacy when it lets Moretz loose on a bunch of bad guys who aren’t expecting death to arrive wearing pigtails. But elsewhere, Vaughn struggles to put his own stamp on some familiar action beats, unless spotlighting a billboard featuring his wife, Claudia Schiffer, counts as a personal touch. A film about wannabes who use attitude and bluster to emulate their inspirations, this ersatz blockbuster ends up seeming a little too much like its heroes.

Director Tom Hooper (The Damned United) peppers his feature with manipulations, from swelling music to painfully intimate close-ups to heartstring-jerking shots of Firth’s sad-eyed subjects humbly hanging on his every word. And a late-film disruption between Firth and Rush comes at the most narratively overwrought moment imaginable, straining credulity in the name of conventionality. But Firth is unmissable as he paints his character in layers upon layers, with his helplessness, pride, misery, and wrath apparent in every hitching syllable and self-hating joke. The King’s Speech is admirably free of easy answers and simple, happy endings; it’s a skewed, awards-ready version of history, but one polished to a fine, satisfying shine.

Aided by strong performances from Bell and Fabian, Stamm deftly plays with the boundary of fact and fiction, though his game might have worked better with a little more grounding in verisimilitude. Fabian’s brand of fundamentalism feels cobbled together from an outsider’s perspective of how evangelicals think, the editing cheats the one-shaky-camera-tells-the-story approach a bit too often, and the finale abandons the carefully constructed ambiguity. That said, it’s scary as hell and funny too, letting viewers relax into Fabian’s confessional task early on, then ratcheting up the tension one unbearable moment at a time until the pressure threatens to crush the camera that’s trying to capture what it can’t understand.

Let Me In replicates the Swedish film’s spare, haunted, wintry palette, and gets the rest of it more or less right, but mostly less: One fairly silly segment involving cats has been smartly excised, but the two key scenes—the climax and the scene that gives the film its title—are significantly less effective. Though it’s a better facsimile than, say, The Vanishing or Nightwatch, Let Me In doesn’t have the thematic justification of other shot-for-shot(ish) American remakes like Funny Games or even Gus Van Sant’s Psycho, which at least counts as some screwy postmodern experiment. Let Me In is a beautiful redundancy.

But those moments are all too rare in Monsters, overwhelmed by a conventional “mismatched would-be lovers on the run” plot that Edwards and his cast treat with way too much reverence. The dialogue is bland and familiar, and the approach so down-to-Earth/slice-of-life that Monsters is frequently tedious. Edwards takes some big chances in setting out to make a movie in which the genre elements are deep in the background rather than front-and-center. He’s said that his intent was to begin where most monster movies end. So why does Monsters feel like it never gets started?

I can't think of a recent science fiction film that felt less like sci fi and more like a quaint love story set largely in the British countryside. But music video director extraordinaire Mark (ONE HOUR PHOTO) Romanek's latest work, based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, shifts effortlessly from haunting to tragic to mysterious with such precision that the film is constantly making you question everything you see and hear. The simple fact is that the most shocking things contained in NEVER LET ME GO are presented with little fanfare, and the consequences of bigger questions about what defines humanity and the soul are given much more weight than you might expect or be used to. In the world established in this film, we are not looking at events as they took place. Instead, we are presented with events as they might have taken place if one very crucial medical discovery had been made in the 1950s: a cure for most known diseases--a shift that resulted in the average human life expectancy somewhere around 100 years old. But NEVER LET ME GO isn't overtly about what defines life or humanity, and by keeping events and emotions at such an even keel, Romanek is, of course, demanding that we pay that much more attention to both. Carry Mulligan is our guide and narrator through this story, and even her Kathy seems to understand perfectly what her lot in life is, and it's this accepting that makes us weep for her. NEVER LET ME GO is powerful, crushing material, and you should give it your total and immediate attention.

Hedwig And The Angry Inch and Shortbus director John Cameron Mitchell dials back—well, mostly eliminates—the stylistic flair in Rabbit Hole, but that ends up working in favor of this adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire’s play about loss, grieving, and what comes after. Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart star as parents who discover, eight months after the death of their child in an automobile accident, that they have to redefine nearly every aspect of their marriage. It’s a beautifully acted film in which every word counts and every gesture has meaning.

Rare Exports takes a little too long to get cranked up—especially given that it’s less than 80 minutes long—and Helander doesn’t hit his horror, action, or comedy beats as hard as he could’ve. But he’s a fiendishly clever image-maker, and Rare Exports is full of wonderfully twisted visions, from the creepy life-sized dolls Santa’s helpers leave behind when they snatch a kid to the giant warehouse door that resembles an advent calendar, right down to the big “24.” And it’s hard not to like a movie in which a little kid who’s so skittish that he totes around a protective stuffed animal suddenly stares down the grown-ups, cocks a gun, and snarls, “It’s either me or Santa. I suggest Santa.” Rare Exports is slight but fun: a potential new holiday classic for moviegoers who always suspected that any old dude who sneaks into houses can’t really be as jolly as his reputation.

What Restrepo is not is an all-encompassing portrait of the ever-evolving situation in Afghanistan. The movie offers only a token consideration of the Afghani point of view, and though Junger and Hetherington show how the Americans are enraging the locals as much as they’re winning hearts and minds, the filmmakers also clearly sympathize with the frustration of soldiers who see their best friends ripped to pieces in front of them, and get little thanks in return. Restrepo can be tedious at times and nerve-racking at others, but why shouldn’t it be? That’s exactly what Junger and Hetherington saw on the front lines, so that’s what they show, with very little filter.

Writer-director Juan José Campanella (Son Of The Bride) has a lot of experience helming American TV procedurals like House and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and The Secret In Their Eyes wends smoothly through the complexities of the case and the political and romantic histories that inform it. Though unimpeachably intelligent and sophisticated, the film nonetheless has no grit under its fingernails: Here’s a story about a crime of passion, unrequited love, and political upheaval, yet Campanella keeps it all at arm’s length. Like his haunted lead character, he tries to tell a personal tale from a novelist’s distanced perspective, and in that, he’s successful to a fault.

Somewhere has strong echoes of Lost In Translation in particular, from the luxury hotels to an encounter with another country’s bizarre television, but the style—all understatement and studied long takes—breaks rewardingly with what she’s done before. It’s all so uneasily compelling and quietly moving, it might be too much to ask her to sustain it through the conclusion, which gives Dorff a Charlie-Sheen-breaking-down-in-Wall-Street moment before the symbolic Ferrari shows up again.

Shooting with a cool reserve and a steely-blue color palette, Natali keeps the film unsettling by using icky creature effects, but just as often by offering up grotesque caricatures of real-life parenting discomforts, from the exhaustion to the collapse of privacy to the difficulty of instilling a moral code in an offspring that often seems alien. The film keeps a sometimes too-clinical distance but pushes buttons from afar, including a final act that turns into a series of outrages bound to upset audiences who might have stumbled in expecting the usual monster-of-the-week horror movie instead of this thriving, disturbing, thoughtful mutant of a movie.

Pop star Mandy Moore voices Rapunzel, the long-haired girl trapped in the familiar tower. But in this retelling, her overprotective mother (magnificently voiced by Tony-winning Broadway star Donna Murphy) has a new set of motivations: Rapunzel’s hair has magical properties, which Murphy’s character jealously guards by manipulating Rapunzel into a state of confused, frightened dependence. Nonetheless, like so many Disney heroines past, Rapunzel wants to see the great outside world—really, to escape mom and come of age—so she sneaks off, enlisting the help of a smug, rakish thief (voiced by Chuck star Zachary Levi) to escort and protect her on her journey. The story should be a standard mismatched-couple-falls-in-love tale, but the script (by Bolt co-writer Dan Fogelman) and the sprightly directing (by Bolt’s co-director Byron Howard and its story head Nathan Greno) give the story plenty of snap and humor, and the animation is so luminously beautiful that even a falling-in-love sequence cribbed in part from The Little Mermaid is overwhelmingly magical.

In a desperate attempt to create heroes in early days of the Iraq War, the U.S. government and military concocted a story about the death of the most famous man to enlist in the Army and fight in that war. Patrick Tillman gave up a multi-million-dollar NFL contract to fight, and did everything in his power to keep his reasons for doing so a private matter between him and his tight-knit family. But when he was killed during a skirmish (according to the sanctioned story), the Army myth-making machine saw an opportunity to turn the body of this man into a recruitment poster. Knowing that her son would never have allowed such a thing, Tillman's mother, Dannie, tirelessly embarked on a campaign to find out exactly how her son died and how far the knowledge of the nature of his death went up the government food chain. This film is her story.