Potent themes of personal security, fear of the future and impending doom ran through this year’s most powerful, accomplished movies.
Michael Shannon continues to perfect the art of bringing frightening depth to the mentally unhinged in “Take Shelter,” an impeccably crafted, pseudo-apocalyptic psychodrama from writer/director Jeff Nichols, who casts Shannon as a blue-collar worker plagued by visions of impending doom. In its effortless allegorical brilliance, the film leaves wide open the possible connections between the visions and our own world’s ills, letting the resonant paranoia of Shannon’s on-the-fringes, self-dismantling outcast speak for itself.
Working from one of the year’s best scripts (which he co-wrote with Nat Faxton and Jim Rash), “Sideways” director Alexander Payne makes a triumphant return after a seven-year hiatus with “The Descendants,” a beautifully humanistic portrait of family and the real ways, both private and public, that people grieve. With a fantastic cast led by George Clooney, the Hawaii-set film makes the grand most of its rare milieu, links its themes with unassuming cleverness, and offers humor and stirring pathos without an ounce of gooey sentiment.
Kelly Reichardt’s elliptical western “Meek’s Cutoff,” which whittles the tale of a parade of Oregon Trail deviators down to three families and one ignorant guide, is a film whose experience truly begins after the credits roll. A slow and sparse blank canvas of a thing, the film, whose stars include Michelle Williams and Bruce Greenwood, is as much defined by what you project onto it as what you take away from it. Its largely wordless narrative plants juicy seeds pertaining to gender, race, politics, colonialism, and perhaps the whole of American history, then leaves you to harvest them in your mind. A stunner.
Celebrated South Korean actress Yun Jeong-hie gives one of the year’s best female performances in “Poetry,” writer-director Lee Chang-dong’s deeply moving, bittersweet film about an Alzheimer’s-afflicted woman (Jeong-hie) who allows art to help her take control of her own destiny amid devastating family turmoil. The rare, soulful depiction of a well-defined woman of late age, “Poetry” lets its developments unfold with the smooth grace of the verse that first eludes Jeong-hie’s heroine, then finally sets her free.
A small masterpiece of style and craft, Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive” is alarmingly well-constructed, with the director in staggering control of every last detail of the tacky-classy-cool production, from bone-rattling sound design to retro hotel wallpaper. As a part-time getaway driver whose vehicle becomes an extension of his slick figure as he steers it through the neon streets of Hollywood, Ryan Gosling is a perfect contemporary protagonist, an unlikely hero buried beneath an acquired shroud of apathy.
Miranda July, the reigning queen of quirk, delivers a brazenly original and puzzlingly heartfelt meditation on the march to middle age with “The Future,” her smart, layered, and highly personal follow-up to “Me and You and Everyone We Know.” A sort of “Big Chill” for the museum-frequenting culturati, her latest wows in its specificity of relationships and fears of turning the page, and it is, incredibly, a modern movie jammed with idiosyncrasies yet devoid of pretense.
There is a near-constant, non-diegetic rumbling in “Take Shelter,” writer/director Jeff Nichols’ brilliant, impeccably well-made allegorical psychodrama about a blue-collar construction worker whose hallucinations might signify more than mere mental illness.
A marvel of keen emotional intuition and non-judgmental human portraiture, Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants” has a big and wonderful understanding of the many things that surround a person’s life, and subsequently, a person’s death.
One of the lasting images of the cinematic year will be Ryan Gosling’s eyes reflected in a rearview mirror, the lights of a nocturnal Hollywood dancing across his million-dollar face. In “Drive,” the latest from Cannes Best Director winner Nicolas Winding Refn (“Bronson”), Gosling plays a stuntman/getaway-driver-for-hire who can maneuver a vehicle like he’s merely an extension of its engine. And what lies behind those steely blue peepers? An antihero for the times: A disconnected, unconsciously apathetic societal outcast whose strong, silent disposition is veiled over a deeper, propulsive need for love and purpose.
There’s a lot of talk of “inside” versus “outside” in Miranda July’s “The Future,” with the outside generally representing savagery and loneliness, and the inside supposedly denoting comfort and peace.
There are virtually no limits to the appeal and accessibility of “The Artist,” the French-made, silent, black-and-white Hollywood homage that debuted at the Cannes Film Festival and is now gobbling up critics’ awards left and right. Naysayers accuse the film of being out of touch with its era (the transition from silents to talkies circa 1930), but “The Artist,” in all its relentless, romanticized charm, has little interest in being a historical record. Timelessness is its goal — the enduring ability of fundamentally, modestly dazzling images to captivate, and the undying, universal power of visual narrative.
At last, deadpan queen Kristen Wiig gets the spotlight she deserves in “Bridesmaids,” an indecently funny and surprisingly big-hearted comedythat’s worthy of far more than its reductive tag as “‘The Hangover’ for Girls.” There is an impending wedding, and Vegas and drugs do play pivotal roles in the comic high point (puns!), but it’s more character study than ensemble bash, more zeroed-in narrative than shock-laden farce. And, yet, those latter descriptors shouldn’t be counted out, either. There’s hysterical, airy fun to be had in “Bridesmaids,” with firm ground to plant your feet on. Wiig (who co-wrote the script with Annie Mumolo) plays Annie, a 30-ish, out-of-work baker who proves there’s no set age for a coming-of-age crisis. Burned by the economy, men and her own self-limiting isms, she finally cracks when she’s appointed maid of honor by her newly engaged best friend, Lillian (a perfect Maya Rudolph). Things get ugly — and smelly, and sloppy and violent — with the intro of Lillian’s other maids: Prudish Becca (Ellie Kemper), boorish Megan (Melissa McCarthy), brash Rita (Wendy McLendon-Covey) and sickeningly perfect Helen (Rose Byrne), who’s out to unseat Annie as Lillian’s BFF. On its own, the goldmine of comediennes makes “Bridesmaids” a must-see (every...
Can Martin Scorsese inspire a new generation of classic-film buffs, who marvel at the crank of an antique camera, the magic cascade of light through celluloid, and the fanciful, dawn-of-the-medium creations of filmmaker Georges Méliès?
There’s a certain sense of incompletion to the latest incarnation of “Jane Eyre” – a palpable breezing-through of pivotal plot developments and time jumps that keeps the film from achieving a sweeping, satisfying totality. But director Cary Fukunaga (“Sin Nombre”) has greater and more interesting ambitions than to simply deliver one more sweeping costume drama.
Set in a Tex-Mex tumbleweed town in urgent need of a hero to solve its dwindling-resource crisis, the golden CGI nugget “Rango” handily nails western-movie nostalgia and modern-day resonance in one swell swoop.
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