#20 - #11

I could bask for hours in the mellow, slightly psychedelic aura of this inviting slice of life, set in that forgotten era between the cultural revolution and the information age, induced by Mills' careful curation of personal memories, iconic images, poetry, literature, and punk music.

What little plot there is centres on the world of a retro modern family: At its core is single mom Dorothea (Annette Bening, giving an earthy career-best performance), a daughter of the depression trying to raise her teenage son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) in an era of sex, drugs, and rock n' roll. It takes a village though, including Dorothea’s tenants Abbie (Greta Gerwig) and William (Billy Crudup), and Jamie’s aloof would-be-sweetheart Julie (Elle Fanning). All five principals are doing complex, specific character work here that truly meshes, exploring new dynamics in every scene, flavoured with naturalistic humour throughout. Their omission from the SAG Ensemble ballot in 2017 was criminal.

Like in Mills' previous semi-autobiographical 2011 charmer Beginners (#72 on this countdown), nothing much goes on in terms of narrative, but he warmly welcomes us to get to know, if not fully understand his characters. The struggle to understand people – recognizing there are sides of them we’ll never see, just as there are sides of them for our eyes only – is the ephemeral truism at the root of this lovely film.

Coolest award or nomination:

Golden Globe [nomination] – Best Actress, Comedy/Musical (Annette Bening)

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Jim Jarmusch’s poetic Paterson (2016) – starring Adam Driver as a bus driver bemused by his daily routine and the tiny variations therein – may not dive as deep into character, but it pairs nicely with Mills’ lo-fi vibe. Both filmmakers share an eye for finding the beauty in small, inconsequential details.

I'll always denote the 2010’s as the decade when I finally acquired my taste for Wes Anderson; When his unmistakable directorial stamp went from insufferable to essential; When his blend of twee artifice and beats of dark humour went from something I eyed with puzzled interest to something I recognized as honest and true. It’s all exemplified by this adorable love-on-the-run comedy in which tween sweethearts Sam and Suzy elope, evading a frenzied search party across their cozily contained New England island community, while both literal and metaphorical storm clouds loom.

What's intriguing for an auteur whose aesthetic is so specific is the range in how his work could be read. Romantics may equate Sam and Suzy's chaste love affair to pseudo-matrimony, a motif taken to delightfully literal extent in the third act. They're too young to understand it, but they can tell that they're soul mates. Equally valid would be a cynic's point of view that this symbolic wedding is the death knell for their summer of love, foretold by the loveless marriage of Suzy's legalese-spewing parents; A fate the pre-pubescent lovebirds can run from, but not escape.

Coolest award or nomination:

Academy Award [nomination] – Best Original Screenplay (Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola)

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(see Before Midnight below)

In its exploration of the sometimes tedious, sometimes unpleasant, but always necessary give-and-take of meaningful relationships, Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy & Ethan Hawke's precisely written bottle drama is a movie about what it takes for “real love” to endure in an increasingly pragmatic and disenchanted society.

Not all agree on which of the Before trilogy is best in show. For some, the unfettered falling-in-love of Before Sunrise out-charms its sequels. For others, it's the fervent will-they-won't-they anticipation of Before Sunset that excites! For me, it's this instalment’s messy complications of “happily ever after (?)” that fascinate and ache. Is the frisky passion that dawned when they first met still there, beating beneath the weight of wedlock and kids? Or has the sun already gone down on their affair to remember? Hey, if it’s lasted 18 years (and couting), I’m willing to give Jesse and Celine the benefit of the doubt.

As a standalone film, Before Midnight is already excellent. Taken as a whole with the two films that preceded it, it's among the most endearing and singular achievements of modern cinema.

Coolest award or nomination:

Academy Award [nomination] – Best “Adapted” Screenplay (Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke)

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Both Sunset and Moonrise (what perfectly unintended tandem titles!) take us on a walk down to sea level, and evince – whether through retrospect or implicit foreshadowing – the erosion that long-term companionship must withstand well after their meet cutes are washed away by the obdurate waves of time. At least they offer enough whimsy and warmth to help that tonic go down. A chillier thesis on atrophied love can be found in Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years (2015), which employs a drip feed of exposition and performance to shade in the blanks of unspoken bruises and unresolved conflict. Charlotte Rampling delivers a masterclass of jealous frailty and brittle fortitude slowly dissolving from within.

Though a far cry from the undue provocation of Dogtooth or the abstract comedy of The Lobster, The Favourite sees Lanthimos wield his absurdist edge and penchant for bold left-field flourishes with far more control. His vulgar vision of the court of Queen Anne II is so distorted (as seen through Robbie Ryan’s many fisheye lenses) and so anachronistic in its behaviours and fashions (Sandy Powell’s black-and-white patterning is strikingly not of the era), that no viewer could possibly mistake it for anything resembling historical record. It serves to instantly shatter the stigma of the stodgy European royalty period piece, and announces The Favourite from the outset as a decidedly modern commentary on social climbing and emotional manipulation.

His contemporized tone also proves the ideal vessel for the biting tragicomedy of Deborah Davis & Tony McNamara’s sly screenplay, every quip carefully laced with poisonous double entendre. The three pillars of Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz, and Emma Stone are always on-point, often hilarious, and ultimately quite sad as their characters’ vainglorious pride and jealousy spin them toward mutually assured destruction.

Coolest award or nomination:

Costume Designers Guild – Excellence in Period Film (Sandy Powell)

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Lanthimos first gained international notoriety for his polarizing and bizarre black comedy Dogtooth (2010). I personally count myself among those perplexed critics on the outside of this movie’s gated compound, but the decisive splitting of opinions into ‘love it’ or ‘hate it’ camps is cause enough for engagement.

His first English language feature The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2015) came and went without much fanfare, but his dry dystopian satire The Lobster (2016) won near unanimous acclaim, and rightly so. Your mileage may vary on how “ha-ha” funny you think its snide send-up of single-shaming and social shackles really is, but it gets big points for originality. Ditto Colin Farrell’s masterclass in deadpan; From his non-inflected line readings to his sad puppy dog eyebrows to his gait, all hilariously meek and suggesting hidden layers of depression beneath the humour.

It’s hard not to swoon for this exquisite romantic drama, flung out of space, elegantly adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novel The Price of Salt by Phyllis Nagy. There's nary a false adjective in her descriptive prose. Her words inform the tone of the piece in rich detail, and every line of dialogue means more than just one thing.

Haynes – master sensualist that he is – uses image, music, and sound to stimulate all our senses (not just the aural/visual ones). Edward Lachman's compositions are gorgeously muted and narratively astute, while Carter Burwell's score does much of the talking for characters whose true thoughts and feelings are rarely spoken.

Indeed, the emotion of the piece is powerful but never overstated, often manifested as furtive glances and gentle touches, thanks largely to a quartet of superb performances. Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara stir a quiet, tactile passion that makes them a screen couple for the ages. In peripheral but impactful roles, Sarah Paulson and Kyle Chandler bring thoughtful, empathetic perspectives to two very different types of jilted lovers.

Coolest award or nomination:

Cannes Film Festival – Queer Palm (Todd Haynes)

Also worth checking out:

Céline Sciamma’s reserved 18^th century lesbian romance Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) works in similar moods and performance style (inasmuch that the emotion lies deep beneath the canvas), but is more stately in its tone and form. Like a good oil painting, it invites you in with its stillness. If you allow yourself to become absorbed by its tableaux, the more moved you will be by its quietly devastating love story. Claire Mathon's flattened shot compositions may not indulge in flourish, but they match the subject matter brilliantly. Paired with her moody work on Atlantics, 2019 marked her as a rising cinematographer to watch.

Seldom is the chaos of combat, or the mundane details of survival, evoked with such precision and formal exactitude as in this visceral, artfully disorienting account of WWII’s greatest “miracle”. Nolan weaves three asynchronous narrative threads together – complete with fleeting visual totems of events we've already witnessed and ones yet to come – until they intersect thrillingly in the film's tour-de-force climax. It’s an elaborate construct that allows him and film editor Lee Smith (nabbing a justly deserved Oscar for his efforts) to protract the release of adrenaline for the entire film. The tension scarcely ebbs, propelled by the clenched ticking of Hans Zimmer's clock-inspired motifs.

Whether history designates Dunkirk a great war film or a great anti-war film (or merely a great action movie set against a harrowing historical backdrop) remains to be seen. But if this notoriously coy filmmaker is making any sort of statement, it's not by shouting, “War is hell!” above the relentless din of gunfire and explosions. That's too simple for Nolan. His message about the insensible contradictions of war and its human impact is encoded in the film's antithetical closing montage, contrasting triumphant tone and sobering context. The valorous images he leaves us with are falsehoods. Even this “miracle of deliverance” is a grand illusion, veiling inexplicable trauma, and foreboding untold horrors to come.

Coolest award or nomination:

Academy Award – Best Film Editing (Lee Smith)

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By sheer coincidental alignment of their subject matter, a natural companion piece to Dunkirk arrived later that year in Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour (2017), recounting the germination of Operation Dynamo from within the smoke-filled war bunkers and parliamentary chambers of London. It too concludes with Churchill’s “we will fight them on the beaches” speech, albeit with heavy-handed triumphalism. The screenplay’s stodgy sanitization of history and Gary Oldman’s jowly histrionics notwithstanding, Wright knows how to mount a handsome production, and he often plays with framing choices that (while hardly revelatory) are not uninteresting.

But the only films you can truly compare to Nolan’s are his own. All the hallmarks of his resumé – his fascination with the malleability of time, his dogmatic insistence on tangible spectacle, his frustrating farsightedness with female characters – are epitomized in his pop cultural milestone Inception (2010). Though encumbered with a premise that's at once intricate yet undercooked, his practical realization of this dream-set extravaganza is enthralling, pushing the envelope on the ‘race against time’ trope by staging races against time within races against time within races against time! How many filmmakers will go to such lengths to achieve such tactile thrills? Precious few. He’s one of the few true ‘event status’ filmmakers we have left. I only pray that his incomprehensible Tenet (2020) wasn’t our last hope at saving the theatrical experience from extinction.

Based on the harrowing memoir of Solomon Northrup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) – a man wrenched from his comfortable life in Saratoga and dragged through all nine circles of Hell in shackles – 12 Years a Slave makes a case for itself as the definitive American horror story, re-enacting an era wherein the wickedness of slavery was so deeply calcified it had become commonplace on both sides of the racial divide. Care is taken to humanize both the oppressed (immortalized in Lupita N’yongo’s shattering performance as Patsy) and the oppressors (Michael Fassbender’s menacing master Epps is heavily foregrounded, but he’s certainly not the only one). They are all forged by a system which is the stealthier, eviler foe.

Though viewers are sometimes quick to project their own perceived zeitgeist onto any project of serious subject matter, McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley’s mindfulness of the here-and-now is unmistakable. It is plain in Ejiofor’s climactic, wordless closeup, when he gazes unblinking through the fourth wall at a stunned 21st century audience, and we understand that this dark chapter of history is not yet closed.

Coolest award or nomination:

Toronto International Film Festival – People’s Choice Award

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The moral onus of whether, or how, to depict something as dehumanizing as slavery in any film is an artistic minefield, risking exploitation and distaste at every turn. Purely for comparison’s sake, productions such as Kasi Lemmons’ well-intentioned Harriet (2019), Nate Parker’s problematic Birth of a Nation (2016), and Quentin Tarantino’s outrageous Django Unchained (2012) all find moments of éclat but also stumble upon pitfalls of this loaded topic. All are worthy of engagement and debate.

A plot as sophisticated as that of this exceptional domestic/legal drama defies easy synopsis. So ambiguous are the ‘facts’ of its central conflict, further contorted by the shaky relationships between those asserting them. So numerous are the perspectives on who is right, who is wrong, or if either right or wrong exists. So unsettled are the characters in their moral standing and judgment: The abandoned father teetertottering on victimization and guilt, the devout housekeeper subjugated by more than one man, the teenage daughter truly seeing her parents for the first time as fragile, damaged human beings.

Farhadi’s multitasking script delves deep into the conscience of these and other characters to expose the inconsistencies between personal & moral codes, faith & secular ethics, justice & legality, and he navigates their interconnectivity with astounding vision. His aestheticism is economical but polished, Hayedeh Safiyari’s careful film editing capturing the very best of each performance (and there isn’t a single mediocre one in the bunch).

Coolest award or nomination:

Berlin International Film Festival – Golden Bear (Asghar Farhadi)

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Farhadi’s immediate follow-up The Past (2013) was divisive misfire, but The Salesman (2016) – a drama less tangled in its plotting than A Separation, but just as exacting in its slow-cooker escalation – brought him a return to near-unanimous acclaim, and to the Oscars (though he elected not to attend in protest of Trump’s executive travel ban against seven nations including Iran).

Even for those allergic to horror (or horror-adjacent) movies, this was one of the undeniable must-sees from the 2010’s; A darkly comic allegory on ingrained racism (both persecutorial and fetishistic) and the African-American experience… at least, I think that’s the metaphor? A big reason for its long half-life is in how openly it invites multiple readings.

Another big reason is the way Peele walks multiple tightropes at once, pirouetting nimbly between social satire, mystery thriller, gross-out horror, and laugh-out-loud comedy. Employing stealthy film editing and pointed musical choices, he builds a unique headspace for his movie that's at once unbearably tense but also conducive to laughter, nervous laughter though it may be – Not unlike Daniel Kaluuya’s flawlessly calibrated chuckling as he’s hypnotized by that rhythmic scraping of spoon on China. Peele commands a smart ensemble who are all on the same page with his sneaky tone, wringing every drop from their subtext-soaked dialogue for maximum creepiness.

The original ending written in Peele’s screenplay is less crowd-pleasing, but arguably more fitting than what made the final cut… But then again, no. Ooh, oh no. Nooo, no, no, no no no nonononononono. The Get Out we got is the Get Out we get.

Coolest award or nomination:

Academy Award – Best Original Screenplay (Jordan Peele)

Also worth checking out:

Though slightly more oblique and certainly more bizarre than Get Out, Us (2019) saw Peele emerge as an even more confident and audacious purveyor of darkly comic, socially tinged horror. Is it another slavery allegory? A metaphor for the sudden rise of the alt-right (violent doppelgangers clad in red who stand hand-in-hand across the nation seems a bit on-the-nose)? Perhaps a more generalized commentary on societal divisions? Or is it simply a Rorschach whose opacity is the point, disguised as nightmarishly fun entertainment that earns its right to indulge in a few preposterous twists? Whatever it is, it sticks with you. Lupita Nyong'o's chilling dual performance is one for the ages, and equally memorable is Michael Abels' spine-tingling score.

For yet an even more bonkers, metaphorical comedy on the African-American experience, Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018) will turn you utterly inside out!

The sweat rippling off cymbals in hypnotic slo-mo; The camera panning back and forth so furiously it threatens to give you actual whiplash; The acoustic subtlety of every instrument so perfectly articulated; Each cut keeping time with the scintillating tempo of “Caravan”… Few directors can make instrumental music explode on screen like wunderkind Damien Chazelle.

His adrenaline-charged craftsmanship is so stimulating, it nearly deafens us to the fact that Whiplash is among the most unsettling, violent films of its decade. Not so much physically – though there is some blood to go with the tears – but it’s the venomous tormentor-victim rapport (played to the hilt by J.K. Simmons and Miles Teller) and emotional violence that cuts deepest. When the hopped-up jazz rhythms finally do fade, what Chazelle leaves us with is an uneasy question about the price of true greatness, and whether or not true greatness is worth such a cost.

We do not need to agree with Fletcher’s assertion that there are no two words more harmful than “good job”, but most can agree that “good job” doesn’t come close to describing this lightning bolt of a movie: It is great.

Coolest award or nomination:

Academy Award – Best Sound Mixing (Craig Mann, Ben Wilkins, Thomas Curley)

Also worth checking out:

For a sportier but similarly pulse-raising flick about competitive spirit that fuels the quest for greatness, Ron Howard's Rush (2013) takes us inside the world of 1970’s Formula One racing for a look at a legendary rivalry between champion motorists James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Nikki Lauda (Daniel Brühl). The film is less interested in impressing us with their achievements than it is in discovering what drives the drivers, usually a combination of their healthy (or unhealthy) egos, their thirst for glory, and the mutual respect / resentment they harbour for each other. Critics have often been divided as to whether Howard's anonymous filmmaking style is an asset or a deficiency, but here it proves appropriate for chauffeuring Peter Morgan's script through the familiar rhythms of a sports movie. Besides, Rush already has an auteur stylist behind the camera in Anthony Dod Mantle, who invigorates the racing sequences with inventive flare by placing his camera not only inside the cockpits, but inside the engine, under the wheels, in front of the spoilers, and even in the drivers' helmets.