Casey's Top 40

(Not really Casey. It's me, Jason)

No preamble. Let's get down to business.

40. Star Wars: The Force Awakens (J.J. Abrams)

39. Spring (Aaron Moorhead & Justin Benson)

38. Black Coal, Thin Ice (Yi'nan Diao)

37. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem (Ronit Elkabetz & Shlomi Elkabetz)

36. What We Do in the Shadows (Jemaine Clement & Taika Waititi)

35. Man From Reno (Dave Boyle)
 
34. Blackhat (Michael Mann)

33. Slow West (John Maclean)

32. Shaun the Sheep Movie (Mark Burton & Richard Starzack) & 31. Paddington (Paul King)
Two family films that neither pander to the kids nor needlessly cater to adult sensibilities.

30. Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako)

29. Horse Money (Pedro Costa)

28. Brooklyn (John Crowley)

27. The Martian (Ridley Scott) & 26. Creed (Ryan Coogler)
Proof that the Hollywood formula can still work wonderfully in the right hands.

25. Pitch Perfect 2 (Elizabeth Banks)
Read more here.

24. The DUFF (Ari Sandel)
"Is that a wiener in your mouth or are you just happy to see me?"

23. 45 Years (Andrew Haigh)

22. Hard to Be a God (Aleksey German)
A 3-hour, black-and-white, Russian movie about poop. How are you not in?

21. Chi-Raq (Spike Lee)
Home-run hitters tend to strike out a lot. Lee's film is bursting at the seams with ideas. That is both to its detriment and benefit. But he's swinging for the fences here and, enough to compensate for the misses, often makes contact.

20. The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-hsien)

19. The Diary of a Teenage Girl (Marielle Heller)

18. White God (Kornél Mundruczó)
Puppies!

17. Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas)

16. The Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland)
Butterflies!

15. Mississippi Grind (Ryan Fleck & Anna Boden)

14. The Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino)
Is that a wiener in your mouth or are you just happy to see me?

13. Güeros (Alonso Ruiz Palacios)

12. Ex Machina (Alex Garland)
Hot robots!

11. The Look of Silence (Joshua Oppenheimer)

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Non-movie interlude.

Kendrick Lamar's "Alright" music video (Colin Tilley and The Little Homies)

Referencing everything from Busta Rhymes to The Pharcyde, the video for the fourth single from To Pimp a Butterfly ended up being an unofficial anthem for the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Lamar floats through the video, like a ghost, or the specter of every unfairly slain kid of color in this country. When the white cop at the end points his empty hand like a gun at Lamar, the metaphorical weapon turns into a literal one, perfectly encapsulating the idea that the threat of oppression doesn't always manifest itself through physical force.

Taylor Swift's 1989 World Tour (Live) (Jonas Åkerlund)
Experienced it myself in person. It was glorious. Got the free trial to Apple Music for no other reason than to watch this concert doc. Deal with it, haters.

Master of None - "Parents" (Aziz Ansari)
I've never seen an episode of television (or a movie even) that so perfectly understands the duality of being a first-born American child of two immigrants--the desire to respect and honor the sacrifice they made bringing you over here while simultaneously almost feeling the need to marginalize your own heritage to feel like you fit in with the new society to which you now belong. And how so much of our parents' lives before our birth would fascinate us if we simply bothered to ask.

Hamilton (Original Broadway Cast Recording)
I could only put the cast recording here because it's basically impossible to get a ticket to the actual show. I'm not usually one for hyperbolically praising things, even if I'm particularly high on it myself. But this is seriously one of the greatest things I've ever experienced--and a uniquely American one too, combining hip hop, R&B, pop, and traditional Broadway song craft to tell a story of the country's founding fathers through the lens of a mixed-race cast.

These people are so talented, this is what they do between shows:

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10. Phoenix (Christian Petzold)
On its beautiful surface, Phoenix is a sort of riff on Hitchcock's Vertigo--a melodrama of (un)mistaken identity, the power struggle between men and women. But more deeply, it's about complicity and forgiveness, both personal and national, and the psychic toll of betrayal. And my god, one killer of an ending.

9. The Mend (John Magary)
The most exciting American debut on this list belies any mundane description. Yes, I could say that The Mend is about two brothers and their love for each other, their women, and the rest of their absent family, but that doesn't get you very far. Magary shoots and edits and scores and sound designs his movie with such ferocity, creating an anarchic, palpable energy that doesn't exactly plow forward so much as it radiates from the gravitational pull caused by these bodies that are constantly orbiting each other.

8. Magic Mike XXL (Gregory Jacobs)
You can read more here. Needless to say, recent comparisons to Gene Kelly are a stretch (I mean, come on), but the video below, a pure distillation of the joy of dance, might as well be Channing Tatum's "Singin' in the Rain."

7. Results (Andrew Bujalski)
Probably the most accessible of Bujalski's features (particularly after his Computer Chess of a couple of years ago), Results still has echoes of his earlier works. Here the awkward interpersonal relationships between the young protagonists in Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation are instead happening between an older trio of characters. And the higher star wattage--this is the first time he's used name actors--doesn't lower the honesty of their interactions, those in which pride, ego, and insecurity wrestle with, in the parlance of one of the characters, self-actualization. Or better still, to quote someone who misreads a poster, "Fear Excuses Surrender."


6. Carol (Todd Haynes)
Cate Blanchett may play the movie's title character and she's wonderful (when is she not?). But for me, the film rests on Rooney Mara's shoulders. Or rather, her face. A whirlwind of emotions are written in the way she merely looks out a car window, or the way she regards Blanchett's loving glances, or the way these complicated situations are starting to overwhelm her. I also love how straightforwardly their romance is treated. Eisenhower-era America had yet to even come close to accepting this sort of relationship and, to be sure, there are mainly external factors that threaten it. But their attraction is pure and their coupling isn't a statement. Their love isn't a reaction to anything, it's just a fact of life. Gorgeously shot by Edward Lachman on 16 mm and probably the year's best score from Carter Burwell.

5. Tangerine (Sean Baker)
The dominant chatter, at least in terms of its technical aesthetic, was about how this movie was shot on a tricked out iPhone 5. Though that is certainly a notable piece of trivia, it has the potential of reducing the movie to nothing more than a gimmick. But Tangerine is so much more than that, with the camera's mobility allowing us to fly by the seat of our pants along with its two leads, transgender prostitutes during one particularly insane day in Los Angeles. It's one of the funniest movies of the year, uproarious and thrilling and, by the end, one of the most touching.

4. Mustang (Deniz Gamze Ergüven)

After some innocent frolicking with boys on the beach, five sisters from a small Turkish village return home to be punished one-by-one by their grandmother. The sisters have been raised by their grandmother and uncle since their parents died. Inspired in part by this pretty innocuous event and in part simply by the world they live in, all five are forced to quickly learn the domestic arts so they can be married off one after the other. In the meantime, their uncle slowly but steadily turns their house into a prison, adding bars to the windows and putting up higher and higher fences. Lale, the youngest of the group and movie's narrator watches this methodical disintegration of her family and ultimately her freedom. It's a sad situation to be sure, but Mustang, like its young protagonist, is full of life, verve, and determination. A lovely, lovely film.

3. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller)
No you don't need to have seen any of the previous Mad Max films. Because really this isn't even a Mad Max film. Sure, Tom Hardy takes over the nominal role, but he's swiftly and almost unceremoniously relegated to supporting player, as Charlize Theron's Imperator Furiosa ends up steering this big rig of a movie. A case study on how to make a modern action movie without an over-reliance on computer-generated effects.

2. Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (David Zellner)
The Zellner Brothers have been a staple around the festival circuit for years now. (All of their features and shorts I've seen have screened at the Florida Film Festival among many others.) But their latest, the story of a lonely Tokyo office assistant who believes the suitcase of money buried in the movie Fargo actually exists, is a major step forward for them. The movie's quiet realism throughout is bookended by surrealist fantasy, dramatically and stylistically different from the rest, giving it a fable-like quality. The absurdity of the situation could have easily allowed the Zellners to laugh at these characters. But they're smart enough and kind enough not to do so and that final, bittersweet ending (which I'll of course leave for you to discover) is like the hand of God reaching down through that snowy North Dakota sky, the hands of its filmmakers guiding us and Kumiko towards that "x" on the map.

1. Mistress America (Noah Baumbach)
When college freshman Tracy learns her mother is getting re-married, it is suggested to her that she contact her soon-to-be older stepsister Brooke. As played by Greta Gerwig, Brooke is not entirely dissimilar to the titular character she played in Frances Ha, the first writing collaboration between her and Baumbach: post-collegiate New Yorkers who haven't really decided how best to navigate adulthood. But where the earlier film had a loose, unkempt style and sense of humor, this one is tightly wound and when it finally snaps, unloads a final act of remarkably sustained screwball comedy. It's, line for line, the funniest and in many ways most incisive movie of the year.

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It's promising that 8 of the top 10 features female actors in the leading roles. It's significantly less promising that only one of those was actually directed by a woman. I'd like to say that has more to do with the state of the filmmaking industry than it does about my own taste. But I'm a bit loath to point fingers without acknowledging my own biases. Do with that what you will.