#60 - #51

Don’t let that motel’s pink paint job and kid’s-eye POV fool you: This is a deceptively forlorn mosaic of poverty's viscous cycle, albeit tiled with candy-coloured shards of childlike whimsy, and peopled with unpretentious performances from a mostly nonprofessional cast (Willem Dafoe’s excellent, haggard hotel manager notwithstanding).

Though our hearts may yearn for Hollywood catharsis and resolution, Baker steadfastly commits to a jagged vignette structure that draws focus to the societal drain little Moonee (a transcendent Brooklynn Prince) is circling. His pastel-palette images are easy on the eyes, but the big picture is hard to look at. Setting his slice-of-life on the outskirts of Orlando – in the long shadow of the “Happiest Place on Earth”, always in view but far beyond reach – was a masterstroke.

Coolest award or nomination:

N.Y. Film Critics Circle – Best Director (Sean Baker)

Also worth checking out:

Baker’s scrappy DIY feature Tangerine (2015) – a day in the life of two trans women, shot entirely on iPhone – garnered much notice for its low-tech ingenuity and for its bracing comedic spunk. Neither of those qualities cross over to The Florida Project, but his humanizing fascination with disregarded people (and the spaces they inhabit) does.

Other empathetic depictions of a youngster’s perspective of life on the margins can be found in Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace (2018) and Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum (2018).

It's iterated often in Skyfall that the old-fashioned ways are sometimes the best. It's a persistent theme that permeates both the literal narrative and the conceptual approach to the 23rd film of the interminable James Bond franchise. While the story debates the virtue of antiquity in a modern world, the film adheres to the sturdy Bond tradition as seen through a filter of contemporary dramatic structure. The Bond formula is old-school, rustically so at times, but its treatment here is as invigorating as any entry in the Bond canon, atop which Skyfall sits comfortably. While the entire cast and an A-list crew all do top notch work, credit must go to consummate craftsman Sam Mendes for knowing how to wring the most out of them.

Coolest award or nomination:

American Society of Cinematographers – Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography, Feature Film (Roger Deakins)

Also worth checking out:

Mendes had a hard time matching his short-lived early career acclaim post-American-Beauty (1999), a Best Picture winner that – for reasons hardly his fault and beyond his control – has not aged all that well. But his recent brush with Oscar, the trick-shot WWI yarn 1917 (2019) (which we imagine ran a very close 2nd to Bong Joon-Ho's Parasite), has reminded audiences of his sharply honed ability to imbue theatrical sensibilities in a wholly cinematic experience. Of course, those paying attention to Skyfall eight years ago already knew that his skills had never waned. That said, feel free to skip Spectre (2015).

This bittersweet divorce saga seamlessly pairs two warring tones – comedy and tragedy – without ever making them feel like they don't belong in the same movie with each other. It finds the humour in the pain and vice-a-versa. Baumbach manages to evoke the joy of the marriage that once was by setting the story during its sourest chapter, finding opportunities for graceful exposition that never leans on flashback.

While quibblers are correct in pointing out that his script could benefit from a more even-handed perspective, Baumbach's direction is intelligently staged and extracts sublime, emotionally naked performances from Adam Driver and Scarlet Johansson. Supporting players Laura Dern, Alan Alda, and Ray Liotta contribute comic relief to what could have been dry litanies of legalese.

Coolest award or nomination:

American Cinema Editors [nomination] – Best Edited Feature Film, Dramatic (Jennifer Lame)

Also worth checking out:

Baumbach had a busy decade, directing six features (plus a documentary) and lending his writing services to other projects. While Greenburg (2010), Mistress America (2015), and The Meyerowitz Stories (2017) all have their champions, it’s Frances Ha (2013) that takes the cake. Baumbach and his partner/muse Greta Gerwig cultivate an incisive character study about a young woman trapped in her own self-imposed purgatory of prolonged adolescence, shot by Sam Levy in Manhattan-esque black and white. Gerwig's sweet-and-sour performance is just cute enough to charm us, but prickly enough to keep the film from tipping over into the realm of insufferable hipsterism.

While he makes far more clunkers than he does hits these days  – and even this pastry lite romcom would be considered trite by his most jaded detractors – the longevity of Woody Allen's career is nothing to sneeze at. That he has produced significant and memorable works in each of the last five decades (stop and think about that for a second) is testament to his talent. His finest from the most recent ten years is undoubtedly this fresh and imaginative treatise on nostalgia and the root of our innate dissatisfaction with the painful present, draped in golden-hued Parisian ambiance and populated to the point of bursting with droll bit players. It borrows liberally from The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), but who can blame a guy for cribbing his own best work?

Among the especially tickling cameos are Michael Sheen as the know-it-all pompous ass, Adrian Brody’s daffy rhino-obsessed Salvador Dali, and Corey Stoll’s hyper-virile Hemmingway.

Coolest award or nomination:

Academy Award [nomination] – Best Art Direction (Anne Seibel, Hélène Dubreuil)

Also worth checking out:

As already implied, when you’re so prolific that you keep cranking out a film per year well into your eighties, inevitably your shooting percentage is going to decline. As such, most of Allen’s output from the 2010’s are disposable, but his sardonic Streetcar Named Desire revival Blue Jasmine (2013) deserves your time purely for Cate Blanchett’s acidic career-topping performance. Or if all you want from Woody is a who’s-who of movie stars firing zingers while traipsing about an iconic (fetchingly shot) European city, then To Rome with Love (2012) delivers what it promises, more or less... mostly less.

Miller has this uncanny ability to make movies that get slowly better with every repeat viewing. Folks could be forgiven for yawning at the film's surface subject – how advanced analytics came to sire the current management model in most pro sports – but it's the human aspect of this true underdog story that keeps me coming back for more. It gives a sense of (but never gets bogged down by) the minutiae of sabermetrics, fixating instead on the courage and uncertainty that go hand-in-hand with revolutionizing old systems, and the chess match between easily bruised egos.

The stakes are built patiently, but the script pops in just the right moments. Brad Pitt finds the most perfect balance of movie star charisma and internalized character work we've seen in his career, even better than his recent Oscar-nabbing turn in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

Coolest award or nomination:

Academy Award [nomination] – Best Sound Mixing (Deb Adair, Ron Bochar, David Giammarco, Ed Novick)

Also worth checking out:

James Mangold’s auto racing biopic Ford v. Ferrari (2019), James Franco’s cringe comedy The Disaster Artist (2017), and James Gray’s The Lost City of Z (2017) (a ‘James’ triple feature!) examine men of vision risking it all – ruffling plenty of feathers and alienating family along the way – to build something of value that proves the naysayers wrong. They may lose the battles, but unexpectedly win the war… sort of? Yes, it’s a hoary cliché to slot them into, and none tread as deftly as Moneyball does around toxic masculinity, but all four of them are muscular entertainment in very different ways.

“How are you with harmonies?” asks one pragmatic music executive who doesn't see a lot of money in Llewyn Davis' act. But Llewyn (Oscar Isaac at his aloof best) does not harmonize with people. His life is a solo act of jaded self-obsession, existing in an infinite loop of couch-crashing vagrancy as he cycles through the flats of his hipster friends in 1961 Greenwich Village.

The Coen's screenplay (inspired as many of their other works are by the likes of Homer and Joyce) adopts an elliptical structure dictated by this existential dilemma. True, a rolling stone gathers no moss, but Llewyn is a stone that's rolling in a circle, set to the acoustic strums of a folk record – curated and re-purposed by the gifted ear of T-Bone Burnett – that spins around and around and around before being flipped and played all over again.

Coolest award or nomination:

L.A. Film Critics Association – Best Music (T-Bone Burnett)

Also worth checking out:

None of the Coens’ other features from this decade can quite match this high bar: Their faithful ushering of Charles Porter’s text to the big screen in True Grit (2010) is a hearty diversion, but bears little of their DNA; Hail, Caesar! (2016) is ripe with theological ideas, but lacks clarity in execution; Their hexagonal short film anthology The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) comes closest to epitomizing their comic nihilism in its six intractable treks towards death, but forbids them from delving into character as thoroughly. That’s not to suggest any of them aren’t worth your time. As arguably the greatest American filmmakers working today, even mid-tier Coens is fertile ground for discussion and enjoyment.

A terrific remake of an old showbiz staple, the limitations of its hand-me-down material mitigated by stellar execution. It spends less time than you’d think idling in the intricacies of its own romance (which makes it just a tad uneven), but every scene is lean, truthful, and serves purpose.

Many will remember this as the moment Lady Gaga went from fabulous pop star to supernova, filling the shoes already stretched out by the (figuratively) giant feet of Janet Gaynor and Judy Garland and Barbara Streisand. But the real revelation is Cooper, who writes, produces, and directs himself to a career-best performance. His and Gaga’s chemistry is gorgeously served by Matthew Libatique's closeup photography, and a hella tight playlist that they helped compose themselves. Their Billboard-topping, Oscar-winning “Shallow” isn’t even the best track, although it yield the single best Oscar night musical performance of the decade.

Coolest award or nomination:

Grammy – Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media (Lady Gaga, Bradley Cooper, et.al.)

Also worth checking out:

If you had told me in 2009 that the hot guy from The Hangover would etch his name as one of the most charismatic, committed, and flexible multi-hyphenates of the coming decade, I’d have scoffed and retorted, “Yeah, and raccoons can talk!” Flash forward through Silver Linings Playbook (2012), American Hustle (2013), The Place Beyond the Pines (2013), and American Sniper (2014), among others, and I’m eating a lot of crow. Whether Gaga can sustain her newly minted movie stardom remains to be seen, but Cooper is clearly here to stay.

This fragmented, modernist take on Louisa May Alcott's beloved novel articulates fresh contexts to the episodes of the March sisters through the push and pull betwixt rose-tinted memory (even the wintry scenes are colourfully warm) and the present (filtered through cool blues and whites).

Gerwig's chronologically jumpy palimpsest – qualified through the meta-commentary of Alcott herself – needed strong performances to actually work, since the actors do not appear to age as much as their characters. Picking out a favourite from this fantastic ensemble is a highly personal fool's errand, though I reserve a special fondness for Saoirse Ronan and Florence Pugh's ability to evoke the shifting fault lines in Jo and Amy's sisterhood with such hard-won feeling.

Coolest award or nomination:

National Society of Film Critics – Best Director (Greta Gerwig)

Also worth checking out:

The more classic the literature, the trickier it can be to make one’s own, but Whit Stillman did a fine job of it with Love & Friendship (2016), his hilarious parlour farce of buttoned-down niceties and social machinations. His translation of Jane Austen’s epistolary novel Lady Susan is a crafty piece of adaptive writing, every bit the equal of Gerwig’s Little Women, similarly dressed to the nines and relished by a sharp-tongued cast. Would that all dry humour was this flavourful.

From what could have been a painfully academic exercise, DuVernay sculpts a vital essay on the prison industrial complex that's both engaging and enraging. Though it boils down to a scholars’ panel of talking heads, their insights into systemic racism and its Constitutional inheritances are punctuated by graphical and musical choices that are deliberate and artful: Note the insistent emphasis on the power of the word “criminal”, which pops up in bold capitalized text upon each utterance; How every interviewee is framed by bricks and bars, a reminder that even the most woke individuals, Black or White, are living within a construct that was here long before we were.

Sadly, its closing passages on the Black Lives Matter movement is even more salient in 2020 than it already was four years ago. It is essential viewing.

Coolest award or nomination:

BAFTA Film Award – Best Documentary (Ava DuVernay, Spencer Averick, Howard Barish)

Also worth checking out:

Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro (2016), more a record of social reflection than activism, extrapolates from the unfinished manuscript of James Baldwin, granting posthumous voice to his point of view on race relations. With punctiliously curated film clips and archival footage, presented in a manner as carefully articulated as Baldwin was himself, it challenges viewers to confront their own ignorance and reconsider their understanding of what it means to be Black or White in America and the world beyond.

Anderson orchestrates this stolen art caper with comic hijinks that run the gamut from the wittily madcap to the wickedly macabre; From prison-break tools smuggled in gourmet desserts, to morbid assassinations that leave one unfortunate victim with digits numbering six – In either case, fingers get “licked”.

But as with most of the auteur's peculiar comedies, there's something more substantially emotional loitering beneath its scrumptiously designed surface. Anderson simply replaces tears with laughter here as a way of mourning the death of a lavish time and place that was too glorious to last and has since dissipated into lore.

Ralph Fiennes delivers a comedic career highlight as the fey and fastidious M. Gustave. Production designer Adam Stockhausen’s vision of the Grand Budapest – like a seven-layer cake glazed with pink frosting – is one for the ages.

Coolest award or nomination:

Golden Globe – Best Motion Picture, Comedy/Musical

Also worth checking out:

Nine years after Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), Anderson returned to the realm of stop-motion animation with Isle of Dogs (2018). It really does seem like the perfect medium for his diagramed visuals and affinity for miniaturized detail. And while it may be folly to recommend a title that hasn’t been released yet, were it not for COVID-19 we should already have set eyes on his latest The French Dispatch (2021?), which promises more quaint pre-war European stylings and deadpan line readings from his usual repertory company.