But as always, the real gems are found in the cracks. You just have to look for them. Some were surprising major releases and others were obscure titles found through intelligent curation among shared cinephilia. And, broadly, the best movies weren't just great stories, but they were in some way aesthetically and formally bold. Whether they were in MTV-inspired hypercolor or black and white (there are five of those in here); whether they were documentaries that challenged the form itself or space adventures that redefined the idea of the frame; whether they were quickly edited action comedies or a meditative series of conversations between two familiar lovers, many of the movies below reminded me why the cinema is alive and well, and still a fertile ground as long as there are people around with enough chutzpah to simply plant a seed.
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| Terrence Malick's TO THE WONDER |
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Instead of a random list of runners-up preceding my top 10 list this year, I've merely expanded this post to a list of 25. Each of 11-25 will contain a brief snippet of (and link to) another critic's thoughts on that particular title, followed by my own brief thoughts on each of the final ten movies.
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25. Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland)
Bilge Ebiri, Vulture:Director Peter Strickland is more interested in using sound to establish Gilderoy’s general sense of unease and displacement, and then turning that into its own kind of slowly gathering terror.24. The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer)
Dana Stevens, Slate:
With its relentless focus on the pathologies, both personal and sociopolitical, that enable ordinary human beings to commit mass murder, The Act of Killing is resolutely uncathartic.23. To the Wonder (Terrence Malick)
Peter Labuza, LabuzaMovies.com:
This is not a director finding “Wonder” in the images of contemporary society, the “To” suggests that this wonder is beyond us, a force outside of his images. And To The Wonder thus becomes the director’s most self-conscious question of his own persona, his own imagination. This is a film of self-doubt, of a search for faith in a world that no longer supports the articulations of the past.22. Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami)
A.O. Scott, New York Times:
The gap between appearance and reality is Mr. Kiarostami’s native territory. He is fascinated by the ease with which people can pretend to be, and thus become, different versions of themselves, and sensitive to the ways that cinema can collude in such impostures.
21. Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach)
Stephanie Zacharek, The Village Voice:
At what age does one become a real person? There isn't really an answer, but Frances Ha captures the spirit of those times in life when you don't know what the hell you're doing, when even the simplest things—an OK place to live, a job that pays a living wage, a companion who gets what you're going through—seem desperately out of reach20. Museum Hours (Jem Cohen)
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune:
The film is composed as a supple flow of scenes from ordinary modern Viennese life. Not much happens in terms of drama, but it's more than enough, because "Museum Hours" is about a place and two people and how our surroundings fill our senses with stimulation.19. Blancanieves (Pablo Berger)
Noel Murray, A.V. Club:
Though shot in black and white and set in the ’20s—and though Berger relies on some montage and superimposition techniques that Sergei Eisenstein and F.W. Murnau would readily recognize—Blancanieves still feels modern, with a style of visual storytelling that owes a lot to music videos and the European New Wave cinema of the ’50s and ’60s.
18. Computer Chess (Andrew Bujalski)
Vadim Rizov, Filmmaker:
Computer Chess is bounded only by the ambitious weirdness of its creator’s willingness to baffle, discombobulate, introduce unexpected new elements. Like Alain Guiraudie’s No Rest For The Brave or Alain Resnais’ Wild Grass, it generates suspense partially by making you wonder what Bujalski will do next.17. Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen)
David Ehrlich, Letterboxd:
What sounds like a premise ripe for a network sitcom soon reveals itself to be another one of Allen’s didactic origami chatterboxes, the story unfolding away from the broadly bitter comedy of Jasmine’s new life as a fish out of water in order to reveal who she was before the collapse. Rather than revel in the schadenfreude of its heroine’s riches to rags downfall, Allen cuts between the past and the present in order to unravel Jasmine’s history like a contrapuntal canon, skittering back and forth from Jasmine’s new life in San Francisco to her old life atop Manhattan’s society scene and squeezing the years between like a untuned accordion.16. Side Effects (Steven Soderberg)
Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times:
...this clever bag of tricks is made with so much cinematic skill it makes implausibility irrelevant. What happens on screen is unapologetically far-fetched, but it unfolds with enough panache to make turning away out of the question.15. Nebraska (Alexander Payne)
Elbert Ventura, Reverse Shot:
What transpires on this canvas amounts to a state of the union. Regret and loss hang heavy over the landscape. The premise—a delusional man on a quest to claim a non-existent prize—may seem flimsy-cute, but it deepens into something genuinely moving.
14. The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese)
Richard Brody, The New Yorker:
Anyone who needs “The Wolf of Wall Street” to explain that the stock-market fraud and personal irresponsibility it depicts are morally wrong is dead from the neck up; but anyone who can’t take vast pleasure in its depiction of delinquent behavior is dead from the neck down.13. The Bling Ring (Sofia Coppola)
Eric Kohn, Indiewire:
By observing their attraction to a bottomless scheme and then watching as various repercussions play out, Coppola presents a smart cross-examination of the impact of media exposure on fickle young minds. While the ambitions of its young thieves often blur together and lack precise definition, "The Bling Ring" is the director's breeziest work, allowing the story to glide along with the ease of a heist movie.12. Stoker (Park Chan-wook)
Scott Tobias, NPR:
[Park's] images are arresting and often graphic, but they're cut together with a metronomic precision that has the effect of softening the shock while suggesting some hidden meaning. For a director whose most YouTubed sequence involves a man thwacking a gantlet of attackers with a hammer, his style is the furthest thing from blunt.
Sean Gilman, The End of Cinema:
The film has a pulsating rhythm, slowly building tension through dialogue scenes, involving one character attempting to convince another that he is being genuine. This is the film's Tarantinian inheritance: like Inglourious Basterds, Reservoir Dogs, or Django Unchained it is structured as a series of conversations wherein one person attempts to convince another that he is who he says he is (even though we know he's not). That tension builds to the point of eruption...
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I'm not entirely sure if I think this is the tenth best movie of the year, but I really wanted to squeeze this in just because it's so damn delightful. Shakespeare adaptations are a dime a dozen and this one might not be particularly new or fresh, despite it's updated setting. But what it is is good and what it is is funny. Whedon and Co. smartly update only the locale and time period to modern day, but outside of the peripheral signifiers (cars, cell phones, etc.), this version is entirely devoted to the true spirit of the bard, his dialogue performed with wit and aplomb by actors (whom he's worked with countless times) that have an enormously deft facility with language both old and modern. It exists as a nice antidote to the obnoxious bombast of Whedon's The Avengers. Also kudos to this movie for making me remember that the 24-year-old version of me wanted to marry Amy Acker in the worst way and that, apparently, I still do.9. The World's End (Edgar Wright)
The final entry in Wright's loosely-tethered Cornetto trilogy is also the richest, plumbing depths only hinted at previously in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. The darker undertones of the Pegg/Frost friendship are explored--the former's smug apathy, the latter's sad ineffectualness--and taken to their logical extreme: the dissolution of that friendship. Wright is also one of the few directors working primarily in a comic vein to have a strong visual sense, rather than simply relying on the gag or dialogue to carry the humor.8. The Grandmaster (Wong Kar-wai)
Often, even in good movies, national history or political climate merely serve as backdrop for a more specific narrative (think Gone with the Wind or Cold Mountain). But a personal story as allegory for a period in a national history (Hiroshima Mon Amour, 25th Hour) is a rarer beast and Wong Kar-wai's return to China (after his English-language debut with My Blueberry Nights) beautifully intertwines the two. So the story of the struggles between Ip Man and Gong Er for kung fu supremacy can be more broadly regarded in the context of the Sino-Japanese War. The fight scenes are impeccably framed and staged and the swell of emotion and regret that rise during the final moments are as moving a final act as there has been in the past year.(Please note: this is the Chinese cut of the movie, not the edited and restructured one for American audiences. The sadly now former editor of Film.com, David Ehrlich, has an exhaustive rundown of the differences between the two versions.)
7. Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine)
From The Wolf of Wall Street to The Great Gatsby, from The Bling Ring to Pain & Gain, much has been made about the year's cinema with regard to materialism and excess. My favorite though was Spring Breakers, Harmony Korine's depiction of crime, sex, and all around debauchery in St. Petersburg. The movie cleverly never really shows its cards. Is it an indictment of this lifestyle or a celebration of it? Perhaps it's neither, perhaps both. But with its oversaturated, dayglo aesthetic, it's absolutely brilliant supporting performance from James Franco as--yes--Alien, and it's ability to bring agency to female characters who are normally nothing but sex objects in movies of this sort make Spring Breakers one of the more exciting and unique visions of 2013.6. Blue is the Warmest Color (Abdellatif Kechiche)
The original title translates from the French as The Life of Adèle – Chapters 1 & 2, and though the long and graphic sex scenes have gotten a lot of the attention (and notoriety), this is really an epic coming-of-age story, with the remarkable Adèle Exarchopoulos in the lead. With Kechiche's notable and constant close-ups of Adèle and others eating, of her crying without reservation, and of all the bodily fluids that come along with that crying, some would suggest that his camera is trying its best to capture some sort of hard reality. But Kechiche is interested less in veracity than he is in voracity and the movie is all about appetites and desires, fulfilled and unfilled.5. 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen)
4. Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón)
3. Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley)
For a young director, with only three movies under her belt, Polley's work is uniquely measured and mature. And while this latest is a documentary as opposed to fiction, the DNA of Polley's vision is still apparent. The movie--on the surface about the fact that the man who raised her is not her own biological father--echoes the themes from her other two films, infidelity in particular and the dissolution of marriage more broadly. But they're all also about (explicitly in Stories We Tell) how we construct are own narratives, that the people who surround us are supporting actors in the movie of our lives, and how those supporting actors are the leads in their own--sometimes slightly, sometimes drastically--different tales.2. Before Midnight (Richard Linklater)
It's hard to believe that a small romance set in Vienna made 20 years ago would evolve into arguably the greatest of cinematic trilogies. But as the perfection of Before Sunrise begat the even more perfect Before Sunset, Jesse and Celine gave us one last (maybe) love letter. But this is a love letter perhaps laced with poison as it's also the toughest of the series, with the youthful hope of the first descending into the bitter realities of middle age. Yet in doing so, Midnight enriches the previous films, making all those small moments and long conversations even more precious and urgent as the cracks in the relationship becomes ever more apparent.1. Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel & Ethan Coen)
The title character from The Coen Brothers' latest is a man rife with hypocrisies. In one moment, he says music is merely something he does as a profession, yet he castigates another artist as careerist. He asks a favor from a friend whom he secretly betrayed. He helps a fallen man that he'll later leave out in the cold. But the Coens don't, I think, treat him with their (what some would say) characteristic bleakness and distance. In fact, despite the cold and wintry world they've created--assisted by the wonderfully icy cinematography from Bruno Delbonnel--there is a palpable warmth through which they view their protagonist. And despite evidence that both the world and Llewyn himself conspire to sabotage any semblance of success or happiness he may encounter, we root for him to breakthrough.
The downside (if there is one) to watching a lot of movies and having access to so many movies is that the films themselves tend to take on an ephemeral quality. Stories and images blend into one another and moments and performances float away into the ether. Like stuffing your face with food when you're too hungry, you forget to actually savor what you're watching. More than any movie in recent years, this one really sticks to my ribs and it still hasn't left me. I haven't stopped thinking about it since I first saw it. I won't stop thinking about it anytime soon. It's my favorite of the Coens in a striking career. It's my favorite of 2013.
And finally to the year in movies, I say fare thee well:
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