#80 - #71

Blockbuster thrills enmeshed with smart dramaturgy, plus a topical – albeit thinly veiled – commentary on gun control. Not that anyone should (or would) mistake this for a preachy anti-war parable. Rather, it's more a study in how quickly peace falls apart, especially when people allow fear to govern their beliefs. That's just one of the observations about human nature drawn from these anthropomorphized chimps.

Indeed, it's hard to overstate just how 'human' the apes in this movie really are. Due credit to the performers who bring their pixelated makeup to life (most notably Andy Serkis, a figurehead for performance-capture acting), but none of it would translate without the workhorses at Weta Digital. Perhaps the greatest compliment that can be paid to Joe Letteri & Co. is that after a while, one stops gaping at how photo-realistic the CGI is and simply buys the illusion as “real”.

Coolest award or nomination:

Annie Award – Outstanding Achievement in Character Animation (Daniel Barrett, Paul Story, Eteuati Tema, Alessandro Bonora, Dejan Momcilovic)

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Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) is arguably the weakest link of the franchise due to its flat human characters, but it still surpassed everyone’s expectations. And even if War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) can't quite match the Shakespearean scope of Dawn, it still delivers a fittingly epic conclusion. Taken as a whole, these deftly controlled precursors to a verbose 60’s sci-fi represent the best of what the modern studio culture can accomplish; A high-minded dramatic saga driven by story over spectacle, and serviced (rather than shadowed) by technical innovation. Apes together, strong.

Wistful without being mawkish, muted in tone but very much alive; Although Beginners is unequivocally a movie about sadness, it does not feel like a downer. The minimalist plot centres on lonely Oliver, quietly absorbing the passing of his father while courting a new love interest. These three principal roles are each written and performed with maturity, love, and care: Ewan McGregor thoughtfully downcast, but not despondent, as a son in mourning; Christopher Plummer wise and fragile as a newly out gay man with terminal illness; Mélanie Laurent softly radiant as the woman who sees past Oliver’s blue demeanor, but harbours her own unique blues.

Mills also exercises his interest in the intersection of personal and generational heritage. He often has Oliver narrate over mini-montages of time capsule curios that reflect the histories of his father, his mother, and his girlfriend – like captioned inset images in another person’s biography, which he isn’t entirely sure how write. It’s an aesthetic and thematic trait he would reprise with even greater curiosity in 20th Century Women (2016).

Coolest award or nomination:

San Diego Film Critics Society – Best Editing (Olivier Bugge Coutté)

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John Cameron Mitchell's Rabbit Hole (2010) is perhaps more attuned to pain than to sadness, but it too achieves a unique emotional flavour to which a simplistic adjective like “bittersweet” would do a disservice. The screenplay by David Lindsay-Abaire, based on his play, mixes the unspoken sorrow of a couple grieving the death of their young son with a wry but tactful sense of humour that manages to compliment, rather than undercut, the anguish in Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart’s superb performances.

Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling both deliver career-best performances in Cianfrance's impressive debut, in which he dissects a dead marriage with parallel past/present timelines as his scalpels, juxtaposing the cruel contradictions and peculiar analogs of falling in and out of love.

Gosling would get much more praise six years later for his dashing turn in La La Land, but look closely and you'll see how that performance is shaded with mannerisms of this grittier, more immersed work. Williams often gets more notice by going big, whether through celebrity imitation (My Week with Marilyn, Fosse/Verdon) or tear-soaked gravitas (Brokeback Mountain, Manchester by the Sea), so what a miracle it was that this grounded work in an under-seen indie garnered her most deserved Oscar nomination to date.

Coolest award or nomination:

Academy Award [nomination] – Best Actress (Michelle Williams)

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Chronological jumps between happy and sad times is not a new trick, put it can be worked on breakup movies that have a connotation that's more plaintive than flat-out devastating. The Last Five Years (2015) – practically a filmed version of Jason Robert Brown’s Off-Broadway micro-musical – performs a similar relationship autopsy using His/Hers timelines, with the added twist that hers unspools in reverse order. To be clear: It's not really a good movie. Although expressively sung by supremely talented stars Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan, the direction is hackneyed and largely unimaginative. Better to listen to than to watch. I’ve only seen the movie once, but I must’ve played that album more times than any other movie soundtrack in the last five… er, the last half decade.

The death of a parent has been a pathos-laden plot device in children’s movies ever since uncle Walt let us hear the gunshots ring out from the meadow in Bambi, but seldom is it treated with the same directness and sensitivity as in this spellbinding, astonishing, jewel-cut fable. What Moore (earning apt comparisons as the Irish Miyazaki) and his screenwriter Will Collins managed to fashion out of ancient Celtic myth is in fact quite remarkable, though deceptive in its simplicity.

Song of the Sea never takes its very young audience by the hand to spell out the nuance of its characters or its message. Instead, it trusts kids to be perceptive enough to glean the meaning from its central metaphor; That if we don't allow ourselves to experience mourning, with all the sad (and some oddly happy) feelings that go with it, we’ll ossify and turn to stone.

Coolest award or nomination:

Academy Award [nomination] – Best Animated Feature (Tomm Moore, Paul Young)

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If taking your tots to see warbling princesses or jibberjabbering minions has been your only exposure to animation on the big screen this decade, do yourself a favour and skim all the Oscar nominees for Best Animated Feature. Yes, it’s mostly American cheese-flavored product, but there are also several international titles worth making time for. Highlights include: The charged enviro-political parable doodled with vibrant Crayola colours in Alê Abreu’s Boy and the World (2015); The spirit of Jacques Tati exhumed and breathed into every resplendent frame of Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist (2010); The gorgeously rendered blend of magic realism and pantomime of Michael Dudok de Wit’s The Red Turtle (2016); The soft-edged storybook whimsy of Benjamin Renner’s Ernest & Celestine (2013); The handcrafted odyssey (see what I did there) of Jérèmy Clapin’s I Lost My Body (2019); And a pair of late-career treasures from Studio Ghibli co-founders, Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises (2013) and Isao Takahata’s The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2014).

The day starts with a banal commute to the airport – The calm before the storm. Freight liner captain Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks) pontificates on the challenges of the future workforce: “It's tough out there these days,” he ruefully infers, “... 50 guys competing for the same job...” On the other side of the globe, 50 Somali fishermen are competing to be on a hijacking crew, just to stay fed and pay off their warlord oppressors for another week.

This disparity between worlds – one of affluence and one with no opportunity at all – is made sharply visible when these men clash in international waters off the horn of Africa. It’d be easy to dismiss as a lot of shouting and gun-waving and sea-sickening shaky cam, if not for the meticulous grunt work Greengrass does in defining the physical spaces and the increasingly desperate motivations of his characters. He maintains a taught grip and legible spatial awareness throughout, most pressingly in the film’s claustrophobic latter half, when this nautical poker match folds into a stifling standoff.

Coolest award or nomination:

BAFTA Film Award – Best Supporting Actor (Barkhad Abdi)

Also worth checking out:

Tobias Lindholm’s A Hijacking (2012) – released in Denmark just a year prior to Captain Phillips – has obvious narrative parallels, and some consider it superior.

But what comes most to mind for me is Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012), itself a corking procedural on a well publicized U.S. military strike that’s sort of typical of the genre in its journalistic outlining of events, but uncommon for taking even greater interest in a central figure. Both films are notable for reframing the idea of “American heroism”; Not as steely-eyed and idealistic, but as pragmatic, compromising, quivering, and forever scarred by trauma.

Mike Leigh's fascination with salt-of-the-earth middle class people and their foibles is a hallmark of most of his films, and it has seldom cut more slowly and crushingly than in this thoughtfully acted study on the many faces of depression, all coming to call on one saintly couple throughout the four seasons. His good humour feels unaffected and genuine, his tragedy equally so. The trajectories of his characters’ lives are subtle extensions of their backstories, that sneak up on the audience before its final cadences.

Lesley Manville stands out of course for playing the basket of jangled nerves among more demure and cordial company, but every one of Leigh's troupe makes a quietly durable impression, from bit players Imelda Staunton, David Bradley, and Peter Wight (among many others), to stalwarts Ruth Sheen and Jim Broadbent.

Coolest award or nomination:

Academy Award [nomination] – Original Screenplay (Mike Leigh)

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Although I found Leigh’s more lauded, grandly scaled Mr. Turner (2014) to be almost impregnably staunch, it’s still a major oeuvre in his filmography. His observant tableau-like staging gives us ample time to appreciate the painterly cinematography of long-time collaborator Dick Pope, who blesses the film throughout with landscapes and sunsets that could have been put to canvas by Turner himself (played with growling dedication by Timothy Spall). It’s an ultrafine marriage of subject and style.

This kinky Korean melodrama – or 'erotic thriller', or 'black comedy', or 'period grift game', or 'Asian lesbian romance', or whatever other genre you honestly think you can pigeonhole it into – is nothing if not absorbing. The sumptuous production design and costumes attract our gaze, but Park's shifting narrative perspectives and sneaky sense of humour holds it.

What I find most memorable are his tactile flourishes, when he deploys shallow focus, extreme closeup, and sound to elicit whole sensations that are lewd and seductive and repulsive and alluring. We’re not just talking about the sexy stuff. It’s in a grain of rice being placed on the tongue, the metallic jangle of a heavy bell, the squelch of nectar from a bitten peach, an octopus’ slimy stranglehold. His moments are textured and flavourful and aromatic, all sensory misdirection from the long con he’s really building to: That being comeuppance lying in store for male chauvinists who err to treat women as puppets.

Coolest award or nomination:

BAFTA Film Award – Best Film not in the English Language (Park Chan-wook, Lim Syd)

Also worth checking out:

Let’s talk about sex. Or at least, sex positivity. Awakening to one’s own otherness through a “taboo” love affair is hardly new as a narrative premise, but mainstream outings (including genre mash-ups like The Handmaiden) have grown less bashful in presenting the physical and emotional as being holistically intertwined. Look no further than Guillermo del Toro’s ravishing, saturated girl-meets-fish romance The Shape of Water (2017), surely the weirdest movie to ever swim away with the Academy Award for Best Picture. See also Ali Abassi’s folklore-inspired oddity Border (2018), in which sexual release gives rise to higher planes of self-discovery and newfound identity.

As for Park, his resumé has been more inflated by shorts and TV projects than features this decade, but his sexually charged psychological thriller Stoker (2013) remains an underrated, albeit perverse, bloodlusting treat.

No ‘best of the decade’ list would be truly complete without at least one allowance for the MCU, handily the savviest and most profitable mainstream franchise of the young century. Everybody's personal ranking of the 20+ films Marvel Studios cranked out in just eleven years will surely differ, perhaps because many of them feel somewhat interchangeable, but rank them we must!

For me, the spiffiest product off the Marvel assembly line is this pastiche of 1940’s idealism meets 1970’s conspiracy theory meets 2014 pseudo-futurism. The plot is no less convoluted nor farfetched than its MCU stablemates – “you are standing in my brain” gets a hearty guffaw from me every time – but the Russos' expert action staging, the script’s flirtation with sticky themes of surveillance and militarization, and the cast's lived-in rapport (namely between Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, and Samuel L. Jackson) raises this to the most satisfying entry in the Infinity Saga.

Coolest award or nomination:

Washington D.C. Area Film Critics Association – Best Portrayal of Washington D.C.

Also worth checking out:

Other episodes that made strong cases for being the sole MCU representative on this countdown included (*deep breath*): Joe Johnston’s endearingly old-fashioned origin story for the star-spangled man with a plan, Captain America (2011); Joss Whedon’s full-bodied ensemble actioner, and a make-or-break cornerstone for the entire brand, The Avengers (2012); James Gunn’s smart-ass island of misfit toys, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1 (2014) & Vol. 2 (2017); and Taika Waititi’s campily off-kilter Thor: Ragnarok (2017), perhaps the closest thing Gen Z will ever get to its own Flash Gordon.

The camera is a still observer (a “bee on the wall”, if you will) to the daily life of Hatidze Muratova, who practices sustainable beekeeping in her remote Macedonian mountain village. She rarely speaks or exudes much charisma, but her stoic determination to protect her bees and her near-extinct traditions from an insatiable, ever-encroaching consumerist society – given form in a nomadic family of interlopers – makes her one of the 2010's greatest screen heroes. And not a fictional one!

Cinematography tandem Fejmi Daut and Samir Ljuma manage to capture some jaw-dropping frames with their objective, though scrupulously coordinated photography. It’s all enough to make one question the veracity of the particular narrative developments and exchanges between “characters”, but the non-fiction spirit of the piece is never in doubt.

Coolest award or nomination:

Academy Award [nominations] – Best Documentary, Feature AND Best International Feature (Ljubomir Stefanov, Tamara Kotevska, Atanas Georiev)

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One of the more challenging tenets of Honeyland is how cultural histories can be at once shared and yet irreconcilably split, and how human conflict both shapes and scars the natural world. By similar extension, Orlando von Einsiedel’s Virunga (2014) takes us to the Congolese rainforests to prise open the entangled challenges facing conservationists fighting to protect the last mountain gorillas on earth. Despite its spectacular photography, this is no Disney Nature doc! With a riveting sense of dramatic build, it pieces together a complex and tragic picture of how all things on this planet – the environmental, the political, the economical, the anthropological, the geographical – are inextricably connected.

An inexorable, protracted chamber piece – and what sleekly synthetic, minimalist chambers they are too – that takes a contained approach to subject matter that would tempt most filmmakers to go macro. Its lofty yet dulcet speculations on consciousness and artificial intelligence are fascinating enough on their own, if a tad pretentious, but what truly brings these themes to beguiling life is the collective trigonal performance of Oscar Isaac, Domnhall Gleeson, and 2015’s biggest breakout star Alicia Vikander; All of them holding their cards close to the chest (or to the chassis, as it were) in a deadly hand of poker.

Garland’s blocking of these actors and his framing of the spaces they inhabit invites you to truly “read” each scene, without providing any definitive interpretation. It’s a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a platinum honeycomb-mesh bodice, the cogs and wiring of its narrative machinery clearly visible, but the cryptic programming of its characters maddeningly oblique.

Coolest award or nomination:

Academy Award – Best Visual Effects (Andrew Whitehurst, Paul Norris, Mark Williams Ardington, Sara Bennett)

Also worth checking out:

As a screenwriter and now director, Garland has specialized in science-fiction premises that give a sense of earth-shattering implications, but are always inspected through the prism of only a small group of characters, often physically isolated from the rest of the world. His compassionate adaptation of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me (2010), like Ex Machina, centres on a shifting love-hate triangle between characters whose existential nature is not readily apparent. He would dive down darker holes in his bleak, beautiful, and terrifying Annihilation (2018).

Also demanding a spot in the arthouse sci-fi canon is Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2014), an alien odyssey as eerie and entrancing as any you’ll ever see.