#70 - #61

I’ve seen The Martian more times than any other movie from the last decade. That’s simply a by-product of circumstance, having screened it for every grade 9 science class I’ve ever taught, and by now it has thoroughly imprinted. I can quote most of its jocular dialogue verbatim, describe every shot with my eyes closed, pinpoint all its scientific accuracies and embellishments, and lip-sync to every disco needle drop. Each time I watch it I can sense how Goddard’s fleet delineation of Andy Weir’s dense source novel is almost too perfectly engineered to be broadly appealing (without being overtly dumb), sold on the unflappable star magnetism of a game Matt Damon, who recognizes – as does his audience – that he’s NOT going to die on Mars.

And yet familiarity has bred the opposite of contempt. I adore The Martian, and Ridley Scott for taking a happily unexpected detour from his usual self-seriousness to give us such an exciting, flippant, and (I can testify to this) rewatchable space adventure that celebrates human ingenuity and cooperation.

Coolest award or nomination:

Golden Globe – Best Actor, Comedy/Musical (Matt Damon)

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This was the only one of Scott’s films from the 2010’s that was neither a grim nor grimy affair. At least Prometheus (2012) was not completely empty-headed, and manifested a tangibly icky Alien world, but struggled to organize its cosmic quandaries and buckled under an asinine third act.

In terms of science fiction actively striving for scientific credibility, the only other title that comes close is Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), which secured the expertise of Kip Thorne to help visualize its time-warping gravitational physics. And, like The Martian, it also centres on a team of astronauts going to absurd lengths to rescue… uh, what’s the statute of limitations on spoilers for Christopher Nolan films? Y’know what, forget it. Just see it yourself.

Nick Hornby wrangles a reflexive stream-of-consciousness about grief and closure from the memoir of Cheryl Strayed (a vulnerable and volatile Reese Witherspoon) as she embarks on an epic hiking expedition from Mexico to B.C., comically dwarfed by a monster backpack that only hints at the emotional baggage she's towing.

The film always plants one boot firmly on ground in the beautifully shot Pacific Crest Trail, the other one drifting through recollections of Cheryl’s past and her late mother (the vivacious Laura Dern), revealed through a meandering potpourri of image and sound. Vallée’s pointillism with memory and sensation comes to paint a disjointed but complete portrait of who Cheryl is, why her mother's death was so shattering, and how her solo journey becomes so much more cathartic than just a walk in the woods. I was moved.

Coolest award or nomination:

USC Scripter Award [nomination] (Nick Hornby, Cheryl Strayed)

Also worth checking out:

Some critics feel Vallée’s editing affectations are overplayed and that he should diversify his paybook, but if you really dig the way this guy puts his movies together (*raises hand*) then you’re bound to enjoy his preceding feature Dallas Buyers Club (2013), which employs similar assemblage to the story of unlikely AIDS activist Ron Woodroff (Matthew McConaughey at the apex of the ‘McConaissance’).

Not to be missed on the television side of things are his heralded series for HBO, Big Little Lies (2017) and Sharp Objects (2018), the latter being a personal favourite of mine that boasts Amy Adams’ most raw and difficult work on any sized screen to date.

Dear Friend, this will not be the highest entry in this countdown to centre on teen protagonists, but it may be the highest one that I’d definitively classify as a ‘high school movie’, and certainly the finest Y.A. adaptation on the list. Author-director Stephen Chbosky, treating his own novel for the screen, has an intuitive grasp of the camera-as-narrator concept. He sees things, and he understands. His graceful montage of a year-in-the-life crystallizes all the agony and ecstasy of youth with tenderness and zeal.

Cynics who only see a soap opera that's hormonally all over the map might be forgetting what those confused years actually felt like. With its formal finesse over heightened emotion – not to mention an affectionate just-shy-of-the-90’s mixtape for a soundtrack – this gem makes infinite for us a moment in which we ourselves were infinite. Crank up the tunnel song and drive!

Coolest award or nomination:

Writers Guild of America [nomination] – Best Adapted Screenplay (Stephen Chbosky)

Also worth checking out:

If Perks transports us back to adolescence with its mood-swinging episodes of drama and mirth, then James Ponsoldt’s The Spectacular Now (2013) achieves a more mature perspective on youthful romance and self-actualization through worldly retrospect. Its subdued build is delicately revealed in a rare, honest, unactorly chemistry between Shailene Woodley and Miles Teller.

If it's blow-for-blow predictable and a tad melodramatic, that's only because a good sports movie should be those things, and this one more than lands its punch. This is a robust crowd-pleaser – directed and performed with more intelligence than you’d think the seventh(!) Rocky movie deserves – and a new classic that doesn’t topple the monument of Stallone’s beloved Balboa, but rather erects a new one to stand alongside it; Fighting Stronger for the audience of a new day, but inseparably owed to the legends of yesteryear.

Coogler and DP Maryse Alberti bring a sense of clear visual rhythm to the ring, especially in one centerpiece bout that goes to show you don't need furious Raging Bull editing to construct a riveting boxing sequence. Ludwig Göransson pumps new blood into a soundtrack that echoes with Conti throughout.

Coolest award or nomination:

L.A. Film Critics Association – New Generation Award (Ryan Coogler)

Also worth checking out:

Michael B. Jordan aught to have been Oscar-nominated for Best Actor for this bona fide Movie Star performance that sings within the parameters of genre and universality, but is also transparently scaffolded by the African American experience. He and Coogler would explore similar dimension in an even more heightened genre with global pop phenomenon Black Panther (2018). It may not be Marvel’s ‘best’ movie, but credit a filmmaker who can imbue those formulaic story beats with such biting subtext about privilege and racial diaspora, that it transforms a tweetable tagline into a major cultural moment. #WakandaForver

Elsewhere in the realm of prize fighter movies, Gavin O’Connor’s Warrior (2011) makes the most of a haggard Nick Nolte and the brooding friction between Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton, building steadily to a brotherly bout that hits the cathartic sweet spot.

Ever the student of human behaviour and less of plot, Anderson bores into subtle, shifting power dynamics on several intersectional fronts: Artist/muse, man/woman, mainstay/interloper, critic/coach, lover/friend. Somewhere in the praxis of this rotating Venn diagram lies a perfect marriage, embroidered by the ingenious pairing of established thespian Daniel Day Lewis (priggishly funny as a prat of a couturier) and discovery Vicky Krieps (refusing to be modelled as a passive pawn).

Scrutinizing their relationship with a delicious side-eye is Lesley Manville, like a dry Stadler & Walldorf who quietly calculates the precise moment to put down her crumpet and run you through. Johnny Greenwood’s piano-on-strings jazz/classical blends go a long way in clouding the invisible tension between characters.

Coolest award or nomination:

Academy Award [nomination] – Best Supporting Actress (Lesley Manville)

Also worth checking out:

PTA’s previous enigmas still read to many as poppycock, which they may well be, but it doesn’t make the work any less provocative, spellbinding, bewildering, or hypnotic. In The Master (2012), a fraternal companion to Phantom Thread, the gravitation between yin and yang (the late great Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix) plays out with the intricacy of a chess match and the intensity of rams clashing horns. His hazy stoner ‘comedy’ Inherent Vice (2014) also has its defenders… Who knows what they’re smoking?

A hero’s journey brimming with magic and adventure, tempered with a strong undercurrent of melancholy, drawn from classical samurai morality tales à la Kurosawa. I’ll not make excuses for its somewhat garbled amalgam of cultural influences, nor for its problematic voice casting (both of them valid complaints), but Kubo demanded placement on this countdown for sheer technical invention.

The rapid succession of images to present the illusion of movement is the very essence of the magic trick that is cinema. Laika’s mixed media approach to stop-motion animation epitomizes and elevates this illusion into the realm of genuine wonderment. There’s something to be said for a movie of this rarefied ilk, in this day and age, that leaves your jaw on the floor in dumbfounded amazement, mumbling to yourself, “How the 𝒻μ©𝕶 did they do that?”

Coolest award or nomination:

Academy Award [nomination] – Best Visual Effects (Steve Emerson, Oliver Jones, Brian McLean, Brad Schiff)

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Over the course of its first ten years, Laika has defined itself as vital counter-programming in the flooded American animation market: Tonally shifty between 'just left of sentimental' to 'flat-out creepy'; Character designs that lean closer to the grotesque than any of their doe-eyed CG contemporaries would dare; And stories aimed at children but eager to wrestle with dark moods and themes. I’ll confess that most of them keep me at arms length, almost always hampered by patchy scripts or oddly shaped character arcs, but there’s value in the risks. ParaNorman (2012) is perhaps the purest encapsulation of the studio’s philosophy, strengths, and weaknesses: A kid-friendly horror about kid-pertinent issues (bullying and prejudice), saddled by comic bloat and muddled messaging, but propped up by distinctive visual personality.

I vacillated on which half of this documentary double bill should be resigned to “also worth checking out” status, before finally coming to my senses. Though they operate in very different tonal and formal milieus, these two brave interrogations of Indonesia’s 1965 political genocide cannot be divorced from one another.

The Act of Killing, the more ethically dangerous of the pair, feigns the making of a gonzo propaganda film in which former executioners of suspected communists re-enact their slaughters. The Look of Silence, the more lyrical companion piece, shifts focus to the families of victims, and the social wounds that continue to fester a full half century after their military government’s bloody baptism. Both are discomfiting and important records for any citizenry that grapples with denial of past sins.

Coolest award or nomination:

Berlin International Film Festival – Panorama Prize of the Ecumenical Jury (Joshua Oppenheimer)

Also worth checking out:

Rithy Panh processes malleable memories of his childhood, interred in a Khmer Rouge labour camp, by handcrafting clay figurines in The Missing Picture (2013). The dioramas are impressive in and of themselves, but by abstracting the human rights atrocities (of which much archival footage has been lost or destroyed) into this conceptual representation, Panh forces us to actively contemplate a nation’s collective grief, rather than simply observe actual images of it.

For their remarkable levels of access, and complex, cautionary theses on unchecked governance, both Petra Costa’s The Edge of Democracy (2019) and Laura Poitras’ CitizenFour (2014) are just as eye-opening.

Posing as a docudrama about humanity's crowning engineering achievement, Chazelle's under-appreciated moonshot drama actually delivers something far more modest and yet more grand; An elegant, emotionally clenched character study about a grieving everyman foisted upon a defining moment in history, rather than a rhapsody to the celestial wonders that transfixed him.

While certainly expressing a stoic appreciation for the nuts and bolts and elbow grease of NASA and its brilliant minds, the film draws a tighter bead on Armstrong (the stringently interior Ryan Gosling) both narratively and visually, especially when in his rattling flying machines. Ai-Ling Lee’s thrilling sound design and Justin Hurwitz’s lunar orchestrations (eclipsing even his most aeriform La La Land melodies) are major boons in these high-flying sequences.

Some myopic, nationalistic squabbling ensued in certain spheres over the lack of flag-planting. These harpers failed (or simply refused) to register the film’s construal of space as more a window for escape than as a frontier to be conquered.

Coolest award or nomination:

Golden Globe – Best Original Score (Justin Hurwitz)

Also worth checking out:

While the movies have been amazing audiences since the silent era with dramatized journeys to the Moon (both fictional and historical), nothing quite compares with the real thing. Todd Douglas Miller’s Apollo 11 (2019) is a pristine retelling – in gloriously restored archival footage – of an event we already know, but still commands our awe. Is it a great 'documentary', or simply a great clip reel of what others already documented 50 years ago? That's up for debate, but there can be no disagreement that it is great storytelling.

An exquisite diorama model city of a film, and a towering tribute to a woman the world will never really know. Sprung from the memories of the prodigious Renaissance man behind the camera (writer, producer, director, cinematographer, editor… hell, he probably stepped in for the gaffers and key grips), Roma is immaculate in its sensorial details of Mexico City circa 1971, a time and place seldom depicted in mainstream cinema.

That said, “mainstream” is probably a misnomer for a film that feels more at home in a neorealist arthouse than a platform like Netflix. It didn’t take the streaming masses long to realize that this meandering memoir would not be everybody's bag, but Cuarón did not make it for them. Not so much a movie that starts slow and "gets better", as a movie to which you simply acclimate. Yes, it begs the patience of its audience, most of whom cannot directly relate, and without the promise of any narrative payoff, but by the time it reaches its sublime conclusion I find myself ineffably wishing to know Cleo more.

Coolest award or nomination:

Academy Award [nomination] – Best Actress (Yalitza Aparicio)

Also worth checking out:

Okay, there are plenty of cinephiles out there, all smarter and more well-read than I, who would call it vulgar to liken a painstakingly personal mural such as Roma to nickelodeon comfort food such as The Help (2011). I’ll concede that argument, even if I don’t consider Tate Taylor’s sleeper hit about maids in Jim Crow Mississippi to be any more tone deaf in its identity politics than the bestseller it adapts. But even attempting to explore and celebrate the lives of domestic workers – in particular those who are more instrumental in raising the children of the White families they serve than the babes’ actual mothers – is risky artistic territory, accentuating racial and class divides while obscuring familial ones. Neither Roma nor The Help completely sidestepped controversy for sharing the stories of marginalized women through a lens of White privilege. Both of them invite (and merit) discourse.

Cops and cartels, midnight raids and public shootouts, blood vendettas and hidden agendas, and dead bodies walled up in a house of horrors. The boundary between good and evil in the war on drugs is blurred beyond recognition upon this new battlefield; One marked on the scorched earth of convulsing border towns, and in dark, snaking tunnels, where enemies hide in plain sight.

Villeneuve is our modern-day Hitchcock, insinuating and executing all these pulpy tropes with hitman-like precision. He winds the tension tighter than razor wire, holding our attention hostage for excruciating lengths of time. Emily Blunt (among our most versatile and unsung performers) is excellent as the strait-laced narc writhing in the coils of a crooked system. She plates her underwritten audience-surrogate role with a hardened post-Feminist edge – reminiscent of her "Full Metal Bitch" from Edge of Tomorrow (2014) – that is slowly corroded by disillusionment.

Coolest award or nomination:

Academy Award [nomination] – Best Original Score (Johann Johannsson)

Also worth checking out:

Along with his previous butt-clenching thrillers Prisoners (2013) and Enemy (2014), Sicario further cemented Villeneuve’s reputation as a filmmaker capable of elevating oily, perverse story material with his surgical attention to form and construct. Stefano Sollima’s attempt at a sequel, Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018), yielded diminishing returns.

A more topical double feature could instead be made with the non-fiction Cartel Land (2015), Matthew Heineman’s first-hand examination of vigilante groups on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, taking the fight against ruthless cartels into their own hands. The doc paints an unremittingly harsh landscape of a crime culture so institutionalized, so corrupt, and so cyclical, that civilians have no choice but to take up arms themselves… But to what end?