#100 - #91

What a courageous gamble for a Chilean auteur to play spiritual medium to America's most fashionable First Lady, and announce his seance from the outset as an anti-biopic. Less a matter of historical record than a self-professed dictation of one’s own myth, Jackie doesn’t care if you – or the cautiously objective journalist (Billy Crudup) who serves as our framing device, possibly even Larraín’s surrogate – find it hard to warm to her, because she’s already numbed you into rapt submission.

You could justly quibble about Larraín’s waffling between 2nd person verité and lucid dreamlike camerawork, or may feel that Mica Levi’s suite of funereal dirges are more anaesthetizing than hypnotic, or find Natalie Portman’s wrought iron performance to be somewhat stilted (by design). But their cumulative effect is an unforgettable, frosty tone poem on image and legacy. Let it never be forgot.

Coolest award or nomination:

Academy Award [nomination] – Best Original Score (Mica Levi)

Also worth checking out:

Larraín has had a direct hand in some of Chilé’s most significant artistic exports this past decade. He directed his country’s first ever Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, the political referendum drama No (2012). Ingeniously shot on VHS tape, it recounts the 1988 national plebiscite to end military dictator Augusto Pinochet’s regime from the perspective of the media consultant (Gael Garcia Bernal) who headed the TV campaign.

Larraín also produced Chilé’s first Oscar winner, Sebastian Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman (2017); A compassionate, melancholic meditation on identity, punctuated with flourishes of bold stylization. At its core is Daniela Vega's still, honest, captivating turn as a trans woman grappling with how society sees her, and fails to see her.

The scenery is blindingly white, the tragicomedy pitch black in this wintry satire on traditional gender roles and male ego. When a precariously disjointed family unit experiences an avalanche scare while on vacation, the father makes a panicked decision that lands with more impact than a speeding wall of snow ever could.

What would you have done? To reflect on that hypothetical is a very slippery ski slope indeed.

Östlund prods this big white elephant in the room with a chilly, challenging sense of humour, slaloming between cynicism and absurdism. He ultimately leaves it for us to decide if this family walks away from their trauma stronger or weaker than before, but his perspective on how strained social conventions are all that keep people together seems clear as day. One may disagree with that icy assertion, but to incite argument is the whole point.

Coolest award or nomination:

Cannes Film Festival – Un Certain Regard Jury Prize (Ruben Östlund)

Also worth checking out:

Nat Faxon & Jim Rash’s remake Downhill (2020) is droll enough on its own terms, but it’s no replacement for Östlund’s original. He continued to skewer masculinity with his divisive Palme d’Or winner The Square (2017), also taking aim at the pompous and privileged biome of modern art with its own audacious (you might argue ‘hollow’) provocations.

Screen chemistry between two actors is hard to define, but whatever it is, Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever have it. Within the first minutes they're pop-n’-locking to their own boisterous beat while ad-libbing hilarious compliments to each other, and that alone could have provided the basis for 100 minutes of endlessly watchable fun!

Nevertheless, comedienne Olivia Wilde – in her confident directorial debut – takes them on a raucous long night of the soul, filled with the sorts of over-the-top peripheral characters (special mentions to Billie Lourd and Noah Galvin's hysterical caricatures) and R-rated hijinks usually reserved for ‘boys behaving badly’ movies. To deliver such consistent belly laughs while scaffolding earnest emotional stakes... well it's like the saying goes: Getting into Yale is easy, comedy is hard.

Coolest award or nomination:

Independent Spirit Award – Best First Feature (Olivia Wilde)

Also worth checking out:

The box office legs of Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids (2011) helped clear a path for female-centric raunchiness, now enjoying its long overdue moment (see also Girls Trip (2017) and Trainwreck (2015)). On the “testos-terrific” side of things, no gut-buster had a higher laugh-to-joke ratio than Nicholas Stoller’s bro culture parody Neighbors (2014). In both Feig’s wedding disaster-piece and Stoller’s frat house lampoon, Australian comedienne Rose Byrne proves an invaluable secret weapon.

Jaws meets Gravity for post-millennials; An ideal August matinee that’s so simple it’s stupid, but executed so well it wins you over. The summer of 2016 was an otherwise arid three months at the multiplex, but this satisfying B-movie blend of tight thrills and unabashed ‘shark and awe’ stood out like a shimmering aquamarine (and blood red) oasis.

I’ll confess it’s a guilty pleasure, but I won’t suggest that it's a hack job in any way. Serra economically maps out the internal geography of this barebones survival tale, making shrewd use of inset screens to breeze through exposition, and an enveloping sound palette to keep us precariously unnerved both above and below the pounding waves. The often-misused Blake Lively (see The Town, Green Lantern) finally has a top billing she can proudly hang her surfer suit on, anchoring the suspense with an unpretentious straight face.

Coolest award or nomination:

Saturn Award [nomination] – Best Thriller Film

Also worth checking out:

If you’re in the mood for a more frigid man vs. beast drama about a grieving hero mustering the will to fight on against the dying of the light, Joe Carnahan’s The Grey (2012) pits a reliably grizzled Liam Neeson against a phantasmal pack of Alaskan timber wolves, employing a terrific sound mix to encircle us with sadistic winds and hellish howls. As with any animal adversary, these lupine predators are most threatening when they're off-screen.

The 'Afghanistan war documentary' became a grim but necessary subgenre in this young century, and this may be the finest among them. The time Danfung Dennis spent embedded with marines deep in insurgent territory yielded some gripping footage, but it's the time spent thereafter with Sgt. Nathan Harris – whose leg was crippled by a bullet nearing the end of his deployment – that elevates this evocative photograph of a soldier above the rest.

Now back on American soil and limping to readjust to civilian life while warring with post-traumatic stress, we see the exposed imbalance of a fragile mind who finds himself for the first time in a fragile body. Dennis toggles back and forth between the “Hell” of Afghanistan and the “Back Again” of America. By the end of the film it's suspected that home may have become Harris' true hell.

Coolest award or nomination:

Cinema Eye Honours – Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography (Danfung Dennis)

Also worth checking out:

‘War correspondent’ is one of the most dangerous jobs out there. Imagine carrying everything a soldier does plus your own AV gear, and when faced with horrific sights and sounds you would be duty-bound not to look away. The miraculous Restrepo (2010), by photojournalists Sebastian Junger and the late Tim Hetherington (killed one year later while documenting the conflict in Libya), is a visceral but apolitical artifact in honour of not only the soldiering life, but of their own perilous profession.

On the fictionalized side of the coin, Danish writer-director Tobias Lindholm’s A War (2015) is an intelligent study of modern warfare and its sticky morality. He smartly builds up its first half with parallel vignettes of rigorous on-the-ground combat and family battles waged back home, which eventually dovetail into a tense courtroom drama. It wracks more nerves with its legal missiles than with gunfire and artillery shells.

If thou wouldst favour jump scares and other unholy concessions of pop horror, then take your leave from this movie. But if thou wouldst like to live deliciously, to chilleth thy bones in the immaculate dread of Puritans cursed by unnatural providence, then prithee, remove thy shift and be seduced by its whispered devilry.

All pilgrim speech aside, this is an impressively contained mood piece. Eggers’ text – purportedly drawn from primary sources – exploits the inherent creepiness of 17th century Christian piety, that all of a sudden doesn’t sound so totally different from 21st century slut-shaming. While his bewitching finale left many audiences bothered and bewildered, you have to admire the gumption of a rookie helmer willing to confront us with a gruesome plot catalyst in the first ten minutes, and then hold the… um, climax until the final shot.

Coolest award or nomination:

Sundance Film Festival – Directing Award (Robert Eggers)

Also worth checking out:

Like The Witch, Egger’s sophomore feature The Lighthouse (2019) – an absurdist descent into stark raving madness – also isolated characters in a petri dish removed from civilization, and watched the paranoia grow like mold. But where the former crafted an oppressive atmosphere of forested silence and dreary greys, in the latter he opts to drown us in rhythmic maritime cacophony and high-contrast black & white. All the better to fill with sodden Promethean imagery, and a pair of increasingly unhinged performances from Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe.

Mustang tells the story of five Turkish sisters whose youthful exuberance and summer frolicking triggers their tyrannical uncle (who can’t stand the smell of teen spirit) to confine them to their home and start grooming them for a life sentence of subservient wifehood. While our Western eyes may be conditioned to widen with liberal outrage at the shackling of female adolescence in ultraconservative societies, Ergüven does not lock her movie into that one mood. She coaxes a quintet of deeply connected performances from her young leads, providing the full emotional spectrum needed to colour in the female+teenage experience. By hewing to their perspectives, she sidesteps empty victimization, showing remarkable maturity in her depiction of the girlish giddiness and sisterly warmth that keeps them glued together in their patriarchal prison.

Coolest award or nomination:

National Board of Review – Freedom of Expression Award

Also worth checking out:

Girl Power requires championing in every corner of the world, but especially in those where the oppression of young women is most overt. Haifaa Al-Mansour’s Wadjda (2013) – a disarming lite drama about an ambitious girl daring to find her own way in a society that constricts her willfulness – is not only an interesting commentary on religion and values in contemporary Saudi Arabia, but essentially just a wonderful story told with economy, care, humour, and honesty.

Meanwhile, Nora Twomey’s animated adaptation of Y.A. bestseller The Breadwinner (2017) casts a sensitive but sober gaze on heavier narrative stakes, striking a seemingly impossible balance between beauty and terror. The artwork is simple but remarkably emotive, weaving together jewel-coloured fantasy and hard-lined reality within an unflinching drama that offers the most precious of grace notes: Hope.

High-end biography or tabloid exploitation? Wherever you stand on the debatable ethics of Kapadia's archive of the meteoric rise and then tragic fall of Amy Winehouse, the collage it presents of the late songstress is enthralling in its melancholy, and biting in its indictment of the rabid celebrity culture that drove her to self-destruction.

And we must not neglect to applaud its mind-boggling assembly, for which herculean film editor Chris King deserves some kind of iron-man award. The ability to piece together such a complete story from whatever public (or private) footage could be dug up is a challenging feat, and one not without its protesters. But if Kapadia & Co. are grave robbers, then they're immensely talented grave robbers, and what they’ve fashioned here is a potent memorial picture board.

Coolest award or nomination:

Cinema Eye Honors – Outstanding Achievement in Editing (Chris King)

Also worth checking out:

Kapadia’s previous feature Senna (2011) is built the same way, and just as impressively, but it’s a tougher sell unless you have an inside track on the esoteric world of Formula One racing.

A doc that makes more creative use of found footage is Stevan Riley’s Listen to Me, Marlon (2015), itemizing hundreds of hours of audio so the renowned thespian can narrate his own biography from beyond the grave.

There’s also Brett Morgen’s Jane (2017), in which pioneering conservationist Jane Goodall (thankfully still with us) commentates her own life & times over previously unseen reels of her late husband Hugo Van Lawick’s breathtaking nature photography.

Following in the gory glory of The Evil Dead and Scream, here we have further proof that gross-out horror and post-modern comedy are in fact the ideal genre pairing. Its meta premise – technicians orchestrating elaborate slasher scenarios and looking on from their control room – allows it to self-efface all the silly contrivances and voyeuristic tropes of the genre without actually breaking the fourth wall. Instead it gleefully pulls back the curtain on the literal smoke and mirrors that go into constructing a quality fright, bouncing the audience between their own theatre seat and the director’s chair.

The whole cast is game for its winking tone, with special mentions to the perfectly baked Fran Kranz and the amusingly mundane comic banter twixt Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford. But who are we kidding? The real star is the screenplay, penned with fiendish wit by Goddard and Joss Whedon in just three days. The fruits of their labour: A new midnight movie classic.

Coolest award or nomination:

Fangoria Chainsaw Award – Best Screenplay (Joss Whedon, Drew Goddard)

Also worth checking out:

It’s not such a bad thing for ‘fun’ horror to rely on a gimmick… if that gimmick is well executed. The only one from the past decade that rivals Cabin in the Woods is Taika Waititi’s hilarious vampire mocumentary What We Do in the Shadows (2014), now successfully spun off into its own hit sitcom.

More recently, even though few people even heard of it (let alone saw it), Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett’s Ready or Not (2019) has all the makings of a cult classic: A cheeky, campy, bloody fun stew of escape-room / final-girl horror with the clownishness of squabbling in-laws!

The third in Carney's incorrigible 'stealth musical' trilogy may lose the ragged indie soul of Once (2007) and Begin Again (2014), but it does gain a more polished, humorous screenplay (his finest yet) and a healthy dose of hopeless romanticism, however sanitized. It's impossible not to adore this band of scrappy youths learning to drown out the noise of their shit lives with creativity, brotherhood, and rock n' roll.

The largely unknown Irish cast (Lucy Boynton became more recognizable after this breakthrough) works wonders at spinning the strain of socioeconomic malaise into comedy gold. Their happy-sad affectations manage to be more endearing than annoying (how novel), and the songs by Carney and Gary Clark are like manna from heaven for eighties nostalgists.

Coolest award or nomination:

Golden Globe [nomination] – Best Motion Picture, Comedy/Musical

Also worth checking out:

Some of the ploys of Begin Again (2014) are a bit hokey, to be sure, but it’s also so generous with its enchanting songs and swoon-worthy moments that it can afford to not care about its flaws. Carney has a knack for making these ‘musicians-just-trying-to-figure-life-out’ jam sessions look easy, and he finds a mesmeric lead in Keira Knightley, who’s never given as laid-back or openhearted a performance as this.