Paul Thomas Anderson is considered one of the greatest filmmakers of our time. By some, one of the greatest filmmakers of any time. Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood are held up, almost unanimously, as some of the finest films of the last quarter-century; some would add Magnolia and The Master to that list. (A few might even include Hard Eight and Punch-Drunk Love.)

Love him or hate him, Paul Thomas Anderson never wastes our time. He won’t toss one off for the mere sake of making something or collecting a paycheck. Every single moment in every single one of his movies is fully thought-through and executed exactly the way he intended it. Personally, I’m still not on board with the last few scenes of The Master, but I don’t doubt that Anderson presented them that way for a reason.

For what reason? I’ve no clue.

And I have no clue why he made many of the decisions he made in Inherent Vice, having seen it only once. (Most of Anderson’s oeuvre only gets better with subsequent viewings.) I read Thomas Pynchon’s novel, and I still don’t know exactly what I’m meant to take away from much of Inherent Vice. I can’t be certain that every character in the movie is meant to be a real person, or that every character who starts off as a real person is still real at the end of the movie, or if some might be figments of its protagonist’s imagination. I might have been frustrated had Inherent Vice come from a filmmaker I’m less familiar with. But in this case, I’m pretty sure my confusion is intended.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Doc Sportello, a private detective. This is a curious profession for a man who is so perpetually stoned, he tends to forget how he arrived at any given location, or who he came with. When an informant gives him a key clue about a Spanish phrase that might solve the mystery, he writes down in his notepad: “Something Spanish.” Oh well, it’s the 70s. The major joke of Inherent Vice, both book and movie, is that it follows a stoner’s logic. Plot elements are impossibly connected through a series of absurd and unlikely coincidences. There is a seemingly endless parade of characters, yet all are somehow involved in the same labyrinthine mystery, which feels like the kind of conspiracy a stoner would dream up, rather than a plausible string of crimes. Doc doesn’t really understand what’s going on, but he manages to connect some of the dots anyway, and even through that marijuana fog he understands what’s happening better than we do. (Or thinks he does, anyway.)

Trying to follow the plot of Inherent Vice is like trying to follow a conversation with the most strung-out individual you’ll ever meet: impossible. It makes no sense. Inherent Vice forces us to wonder if we, somehow, got high upon entering the theater. The script is way heavy on exposition; nearly every scene includes a detailed explanation of something we don’t fully understand. Certain characters seem to come out of nowhere and vanish just as quickly, and many who enter this movie for a brief moment never return. We might wonder for a moment: “Hey, where’d what’s-her-name go?” But then we’re distracted by something else… then something else… and hey, there’s that one thing again… but wait, what?

What were we so worried about a few minutes ago? What’s the point of all this, again?Inherent Vice begins as Doc’s ex-girlfriend Shasta (Katherine Waterson) reenters his life after a long absence. She’s cleaned up — no longer a hippie, she claims to now be the arm candy of real estate mogul Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts). That’s the jumping off point, but before it’s over Inherent Vice will introduce us to Nazis, lecherous dentists, naughty masseuses, corrupt cops, contract killers, pot-smoking maritime lawyers, assorted junkies, and a cult or two — and that’s just for starters. Inherent Vice is basically a grand tour through all of 1970, or at least all of 1970 in Southern California. Nixon is president, the establishment is paranoid about drugged-out hippies, and the drugged-out hippies are paranoid about the establishment. It’s far out, man.

The plot may be incomprehensible, and Doc is so drugged out most of the time that we’re never entirely sure he isn’t hallucinating some or maybe all of this. The film is narrated by Sortilege (Joanna Newsom), who reads some of Pynchon’s prose and occasionally interacts with Doc (but no one else). She moves in and out of the story fluidly, mostly likely a figment of Doc’s imagination. The rest of the story, mostly, I take at face value, even if a handful of moments have the queasy unease of a bad trip. Characters hang around Doc and occasionally help with no motivation, but that feels about right for a bunch of hippies in 1970 who are most likely all stoned beyond belief. An ill-advised road trip that is interrupted by the cops is particularly loopy and manic, and also reminiscent of the fast friendships that are formed when people are totally fucked up.On a macro level, Inherent Vice is about the clash of the straight world with the counter-culture. When we meet Shasta, she has attempted to trade up her lot in life, shedding her beachside waif look for a more sophisticated ensemble, shedding her dopey detective ex for a fat cat tycoon. But it doesn’t stick. Doc is currently dating Penny (Reese Witherspoon), a high-and-mighty deputy district attorney who only lets her hair down in the privacy of Doc’s home. There’s a major rift between the uptight straights and the dippy hippies, made most explicit in Doc’s interactions with his nemesis Bigfoot Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), who seems like a straight-laced lawman but drinks heavily, harbors a failed ambition of Hollywood stardom, and calls Doc up for frequent chats, seemingly out of boredom.

There is much to unpack in Inherent Vice — much more than can be done after a single viewing (even if you’ve read the book). Certain characters stick out — like the dope fiend dentist Dr. Blatnoyd, played by Martin Short, and Jade the helpful masseuse (Hong Chau), who kindly offers up the “pussy eater’s special” when she first meets Doc and then keeps pop upping conveniently any time he needs some info. Other characters fade from memory and seem less essential, but all represent a wacky piece of 1970 Americana. By this point, the children of the revolution were starting to lose their way, growing less sure of themselves and the groovy ideals they preached; the 1969 murders by Charles Manson’s followers had revealed the dark side of mind expansion, free love, and all that jazz. There was a time when many “square” Americans worried that the counter-culture was becoming the culture; Inherent Vice displays a weird push-pull between these factions, viewed on the periphery through the droopy eyes of Doc Sportello.Doc doesn’t realize it, but 1970 may have seemed like an apocalyptic time when viewed from a certain angle. For all we knew, the establishment might have been eradicated, replaced by an overabundance or drugs and sex and the collapse of life as we knew it. The threat of anarchy hangs over an otherwise sun-drenched Los Angeles in this movie, which is surreal either because it’s surreal or just because it’s 1970. Doc gets involved in a twisted plot involving Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson), a saxophonist, recovering junkie, and possible government operative who supposedly overdosed and died; he has left behind a young daughter and his wife Hope (Jena Malone), who has kicked her heroin habit and now sports some noticeably fake chompers. These two, I think, stand in for all of hippiedom, as (almost) everyone realized the visions of peace, love, and perpetual acid tripping that emerged in the latter 1960s were not a sturdy foundation to build a revolution on. The hippie life is only possible if the straight world is there to clean up the messes; by 1970, many of these crazy kids, like Hope and Coy, were heading back toward the family values and simple materialism that have kept America ticking all these years.

Inherent Vice is a vast spectrum of all the many ways these two societies intersect (or fail to). Some characters, like Penny and Doc’s lawyer buddy Sauncho Smilax (Benicio Del Toro), manage to live a straight life while occasionally dipping their toe into some pot-fueled fun; others, like Dr. Blatnoyd and his teen lover Japonica (Sasha Pieterse), maintain a (thin) facade of respectability when they’re really dope-fiend hedonists at heart. Some, like Mickey Wolfmann, long to be hippies but can never be because of the trappings of their success. Some manage to shed their vices and get back on the path toward the American dream, while others are lost forever to institutes and cults. Doc, Shasta, and Doc’s stoner buddy Denis (Jordan Christian Hearn) may be hippies for life, but by 1970, they’re an endangered species.There may not ultimately be that big a different between the straights and the rebels. Those with money and power are just as screwed up, equal slaves to temptation — or perhaps worse. At the center of the story, Doc is a simple-minded innocent who wants for nothing except a good buzz. He works mainly for free, driven only by a vague quest to do the right thing for people who seem to be worth it, even if he’s too high most of the time to realize that that is his motivation. He’s a good guy, but also a rare and dying breed in a culture that, in 1970, already seems to be on its way out, just a few short years after its inception. Inherent Vice maybe has a nostalgia for what could have been… what should have been?… for a time when a lot of people had the right ideas but a flawed execution of their convictions. Youth tried to bump up against the establishment, but ultimately they were too stoned and inexperienced to fight back properly, just as Doc is too out of his mind to do more than stumble through this mystery.

Doc’s way of life was, for America, a failed experiment, but for Doc personally, it seems to be working. That’s because Doc has no illusions of the American dream, no thirst for wealth or power or acclaim. He likes beer, he likes sex, he really likes marijuana, and he enjoys the company of just about anyone who will ride along and partake with him. Like many stoners, Inherent Vice has a lot on its mind — big ideas it can only begin to grasp at before they dissipate in the air like smoke from a bong.

(I still have only mentioned maybe half the characters in this movie, which also contains miniscule showings by the likes of Maya Rudolph, Timothy Simons, Jeannie Berlin, Martin Donovan, Jillian Bell, Serena Scott Thomas, and porn star Belladonna. Special shout out to director of photography Robert Elswit and composer Jonny Greenwood, doing typically stellar work in collaboration with Anderson. This looks and feels like it came directly from 1970.)Inherent Vice is tonally most consistent with Anderson’s oddball comedy Punch-Drunk Love, but set in the world of Boogie Nights. He can’t help but add a rather bonkers finale involving Brolin’s Detective Bigfoot, one that feels of a piece with the equally nutty climaxes of The Master and There Will Be Blood. As with both of these other films, there is a central conflict between two very different types of men. Doc, like Daniel Plainview and Freddie Quell, represent chaos and a bucking of the system, while Bigfoot, like Paul Sunday and Lancaster Dodd, represent order (and hypocrisy). Can these two very different types of men coexist, live and let live? Anderson sometimes ends such tales with a brutal murder by bowling pin, sometimes with a rendition of “Slow Boat To China,” and here falls somewhere in between. (I wager that the “Slow Boat To China” ending would make a lot more sense here than in The Master.)

As with most of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films, I feel I’ve only scratched the surface of Inherent Vice at this point, and only time can tell how I’ll ultimately feel. One thing is obvious: the master is at work. Inherent Vice is willfully incoherent and has almost nothing in common with your average movie mystery. You will grow more confused, not less, as it unravels, and that is as it is intended to be. You may not enjoy Inherent Vice if you are looking for either a thriller or a comedy, or a story to follow, or characters to invest in. Inherent Vice isn’t that kind of movie. It isn’t any kind of movie, except a Paul Thomas Anderson movie.

It’s about the American dream, about a very specific moment in time that says so much about everything that’s come after, about the highs and lows of habitual drug use… the old guard versus the new guard and the new guard becoming the old guard again… and also about a wacky detective who’s looking into a mysterious drug syndicate called the Golden Fang… and… a missing woman who’s not really missing, and a missing man who is easily found… and a murder, no, wait, not a murder… but there’s a different murder… but that’s not really relevant… and… wait, what was I talking about again?*

Into the woods

To sell a film

They don’t care how

The time is now.

Fairy tales are a universal language. Specific characters, like Cinderella and Red Riding Hood, appear in various versions of their tales in many languages, and even if they haven’t made it to every culture across the world, the tropes tend to be the same.

Little girls, watch out for big bad wolves. Wolves, watch out for big bad men. Damsels are distressed, princes are charming, and if a girl isn’t royalty when a story begins, she almost certainly will be by the ending. Women with power are old and ugly, and therefore must meet a gruesome demise. A few acts of bravado are all it takes for a suitor to win the heart of any young maiden, provided he is handsome enough.

These are the same tropes Stephen Sondheim played with in Into The Woods, his beloved musical, the very same tropes now explored in the movie adaptation by Disney. It’s a curious marriage. No company has as much stake in perpetuating these make-believe myths as Walt Disney, which has built an entire empire around weaning new generations on the same ol’ stories. One might argue that more recent efforts, like Frozen and Malificent, have taken a greater effort to add a postmodern feminist slant, but at the end of the day, they’re still about princesses. This is not a company that’s going to skewer fairy tales too vehemently any time soon.And that’s what we get in Disney’s Into The Woods, which may surprise moviegoers with adulterous heroes and vague implications of child molestation. I was glancingly familiar with Sondheim’s musical before seeing the film, which means I knew the broad beats of the story and some of the music, but had never seen or heard the show in full. I don’t know what specifically has been adapted or excised from the stage version, but my understanding is that this version is quite faithful (thanks largely to involvement by Sondheim and James Lapine). Nothing is egregiously missing from the original — no major character, essential musical number, or risqué bit of business that Disney deemed too naughty.

Nothing, except the maker’s intent.

Into The Woods gets off to a fabulous start, briskly introducing us to well-cast, familiar storybook-types like Cinderella (Anna Kendrick), Jack (Daniel Huttlestone), Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford), and Meryl Streep as Helena Bonham Carter as the Witch. As tends to happen in magical kingdoms like this, an old crone sends a Baker (James Corden) and his Wife (Emily Blunt) on a clear mission with specific (but illogical) rules: bring her the cape, the shoe, the cow, and the hair, and Mr. and Mrs. Baker will be with child. (If you’re questioning why these specific items are needed, what they have to do with the witch’s ultimate goal, or who mandated this spell in the first place, you’re watching the wrong movie.)Basically, a lot of fairy tale archetypes head “into the woods” on varying tasks, which is very much like a classic tale. They eventually become confused about what they want and why they want it, which is very unlike these classic tales. The “woods” are a symbol for the moral muck of adulthood. Gradually, storybook-simple characters grow a shade more complex, a shade more like you and me, people who sometimes debate whether or not that person who seems to love us really does, and really deserves to, or whether making a small (but morally questionable) sacrifice for the greater good is really the right thing to do. Many moral dilemmas are raised in Into The Woods, and the takeaway is this: being a grown-up is not as easy as being a kid. Fairy tales that make sense us to us when we’re little are actually quite problematic when seen from a modern-day adult point of view.

Think about it: Cinderella is a sweet rags-to-riches romance until you realize that the prince has “fallen in love” with his intended bride without even learning her name. What has captivated him so? Her crackerjack intelligence, her acerbic wit…? Or maybe just her sparkling eyes? Well, no, because he can’t even recognize her without first making sure that stupid shoe fits. What kind of a love story is this? A tale as old as time that reinforces the idea that the only way to catch a man is to gussy up, tell a pack of lies, play hard to get, and act the princess, and if you’re lucky you become so generic that he can’t even tell you apart from your ugly, big-footed stepsisters. This is the moral universe we want to raise little girls in?Sondheim has a sense of humor about such things, of course, allowing these characters to poke fun at their own antiquated values. That’s the whole point. In Into The Woods, Disney adopts that sense of humor as its own, yet we sense studio’s reluctance to lay the criticism on too thick, lest parents rethink how wise it is to show tots the animated Cinderella next time it’s broken out of the hallowed “vault.” (Or, worse yet, failing to show up for the upcoming live-action remake starring Cate Blanchett.) Sondheim’s musical has a light touch — it’s dark, but not too dark, and ends on a cheerful enough note. In so many ways, it’s tailor-made for Disney… and a little bit not. Sondheim didn’t have billions of dollars riding on the fairy tale business, which makes Disney somewhat suspect as the studio deigning to deliver us this particular melodic tale. What if, instead of HBO, the GOP had bankrolled Game Change? What if The Interview had been executive produced by Kim Jong Un?

On the whole, Into The Woods is fantastically entertaining. The opening “Prologue” is so fleet and entertaining that I wondered if I had underestimated one of the best movies of the year. A lot of credit is due to Sondheim’s zippy, playful lyrics and the clever story. The cast is almost uniformly great — Streep has plenty of fun as the witch, Blunt makes for a relatable heroine, lesser-known actors hold their own against high-wattage stars, and though it’s easy to imagine someone doing more with the Wolf role, limply crooned by Johnny Depp, his mediocre singing is nowhere near as damaging to this movie as Russell Crowe’s was to Les Miserables.

As told by Sondheim (as riffs on much older tales), the Rapunzel story becomes one about overprotective parents feeling reluctant about their children growing up (and losing their virginity); the adventures of Red Riding Hood have seriously creepy sexual predator vibes; Jack (of giant-killing/beanstalk-climbing fame) is ambivalent about growing up (which might have been more resonant if the part were cast with a slightly older boy). These things  come across without being so adult that the youngsters in the audience will be traumatized and shirk away from such tales. Sondheim certainly didn’t invent these metaphors, and Into The Woods is hardly the only riff on such themes. Disney’s version deserves credit for going as far as it does, but may still leave the adults in the audience hungry for the full-on  fang-baring that might have been.

The structure of the show doesn’t lend itself well to a film adaptation — you can’t really resolve every conflict in a movie in the middle and then expect the audience not to get restless once they realize this is nowhere near the end. (Stage performances are built around intermissions for a reason.) Rob Marshall’s direction is solid, but given that this is a fairy tale world, there is room to make it all a bit more stylized and abstract; the visuals don’t do much to represent the emotions its characters are singing about. (It almost made me long for a Tim Burton version, though not for the inevitable replacement of Helena Bonham Carter as the wicked stepmother or the witch.)

Curiously for a movie with this budget, with a fair amount of CGI artistry, Into The Woods feels quite stagey — which is, in a  sense charming and evocative of the original musical, and in another sense not nearly taking full advantage of the cinematic form. Much of the action takes place off-screen, which is a necessity on stage — but here, it just feels like we’re missing a lot of key stuff. It’s hard to understand why we don’t ever see, say, the giants in the sky during “Giants In The Sky,” or why we almost never see Cinderella and her Prince interact until their final moment together. These scenes would be superfluous or impossible in a musical, but feel absolutely essential in a movie. (The Rapunzel storyline is the biggest clunker, because the Rapunzel character is so thin and inconsequential.)

Disney’s Into The Woods quite nearly executes itself flawlessly, yet ultimately misses the mark by not aiming anywhere at all. It’s been marketed as a family-friendly holiday flick, and sure, there’s stuff kids might like, but the whole point of it will tower over their heads like a beanstalk. It’s hard to imagine that there will be a Baker’s Wife action figurine in Disneyland gift shops — but also a little hard to imagine that there won’t, given their reputation. Will “Hello, Little Girl” be added to a Disneyland parade? If this material isn’t really meant for families, then why pretend that it is? Why dress the wolf up in grandma’s clothing? Why not just let Into The Woods be a wolf, and allow us adults to enjoy it for what it is? Because of money, obviously.

The fine people at Disney did their calculations and realized that pulling in the tykes, the Disneyphiles, and the diehard Broadway fans was their best bet at a boffo profit, and they’re probably right. Into The Woods is good enough to snag some Oscar nominations, to not piss off parents who thought this was another tame princess tale, to amuse fans of the show and delight those who had never heard of the thing before it became a Johnny Depp movie. I can’t really begrudge them for it. Into The Woods is all about adult themes paying a visit to a children’s storybook world, but the film looks completely and totally like a kids’ movie. Had Disney not been so concerned with squeezing Sondheim’s vision in line with their global brand, it might have looked and felt a lot more daring. Instead, I saw a trailer for the bland-looking live action Cinderella just before Into The Woods, and they looked like the same movie. Sondheim’s lyrics contain a heaping helping of sly wit, but there’s no wit in these visuals. (Though the musical numbers are well staged in spite of this.)

There are fleeting moments in Into The Woods where what might have been and what is sync in perfect harmony, like the cheeky handsome princes’ duet “Agony” and almost any scene that prominently features Meryl Streep — plus a number of nods to modern common sense that pop into these characters’ heads and disappear just as quickly. (The tone is handled well.) Unlike less successful recent musical adaptation like Les Miserables, Rent, or Phantom Of The Opera, Into The Woods was made by a man who knows how to direct a movie musical, though the panache of Chicago is sorely lacking. (Thankfully, so is whatever made Nine such a dud.) It is one of the more successful stage-to-screen adaptations in recent years, with talented performers and skilled writing and an overall competence behind the camera. I can imagine a more potent Into The Woods with this cast brought to us by, say, Alfonso Cuaron, but there’s no way Disney would allow him to make that movie with their precious castle logo at stake. The version we get instead is a perfectly “nice” version.

But nice is different than good.

A toothier tale about the loss of childhood innocence is The Babadook, an Australian horror film written and directed by Jennifer Kent. Amelia (Essie Davis) a harried widow is terrorized first by her unmanageable six-year-old son Samuel (Noah Wiseman), who is so troubled and full of wild energy that he gets kicked out of school, then terrorized by something else entirely.

Like the assorted giants and wolves in Into The Woods, the Boogeyman is a familiar figure from childhood with a clear moral purpose — to scare the shit out of little children, with an intended end goal of good behavior. In this tale, the Boogeyman is the Babadook, a character in a sinister-looking pop-up book that appears mysteriously on a child’s bookshelf. (“Babadook” is an anagram for “a bad book.”)

As in most good horror movies, the big idea here is a representation of something else, though this one is a bit more obvious about it. The Babadook represents both Amelia’s haunted past and her ambivalence toward motherhood; Amelia is underslept and at the end of her rope, like many single mothers, so when she is terrorized by a murderous boogeyman, defeating the forces of evil becomes just one more annoying, fruitless task on her “to do” list.

The Babadook is a lot of fun. The illustrations in the storybook are truly frightening and implant visuals of a menacing, malevolent, and truly nightmare-worthy figure (that we see less of than I anticipated). The film contains a few fresh twists but ultimately explores some fairly well-trodden ground in the horror genre, which is a bit of a letdown after such a chillingly effective setup. (The last few minutes are rather deliciously original, though.)

The Babadook is a perfectly satisfying entry in the genre, though not one that transcends it in my eyes. Both Wiseman and Davis are wholly believable in these roles, going a long way to sell this material, and Kent’s direction is top notch. (The editing is also nifty, moving things along at an almost alarming pace.) I’d be happy to see a sequel to The Babadook, perhaps with a little more Babadook in it, or at least to check out Jennifer Kent’s next project.

Come to think of it, I wouldn’t mind seeing Jennifer Kent’s take on Into The Woods…

*

Art is subjective. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A picture is worth a thousand words. And everybody — I mean everybody — is a critic.

We critique based on the artist. A Picasso will be held up and judged against other Picassos, while a Tim Burton film will be scrutinized first and foremost as a Tim Burton film. “It’s better than Alice In Wonderland, but it’s no Ed Wood!” In recent films such as Ratatouille and Birdman, the figure of the critic is demonized, because these films were made by people who know what it feels like to have a good-hearted effort torn apart.

Bad criticism can hurt, but no criticism hurts even more, because then no one is paying attention. Being critiqued is an artist’s highest privilege, a sign that one’s endeavors matter enough to instill an opinion in those who glance upon it. Creative types may complain about the critics, just as the critics complain about artists, but what is art without opinion? If a work of art does not beg for analysis, then it is not worth being viewed at all.

Margaret Keane is an artist who was robbed of the opportunity to have her work criticized. Technically, it was criticized — heavily, mercilessly, savagely — but that had nothing to do with her, for Keane’s artistry was attributed to a man who stole credit for her paintings: her husband. The truth came out in 1970, but it didn’t really come out until 2014, when Tim Burton made a movie about it starring Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz. Because millions of people who never knew or had forgotten Margaret Keane will now remember her name, and her work.Big Eyes follows Keane’s story, and it’s a very nice movie to look at — nicer, even, than Keane’s best-selling artwork, which was dubbed obvious and sentimental by critics who favored more subtle or obfuscated works. The film takes its name from the gigantic peepers found in Keane’s subjects — lost-looking waifs with moist eyeballs that look like they’ll burst into tears at any moment, and some that already have. Margaret believes that eyes are windows to the soul, so she makes them very big windows. As this story grows sadder, Margaret’s connection to these pouty moppets grows more and more apparent. Art is personal, and Margaret’s gentle nature is very much on display for all the world to see — if only they knew it was hers.

It is the late 1950s, and Margaret leaves one lousy husband for another. At first, Walter Keane is utterly charming — he’s an artist himself, as well as an excellent salesman. Or at least, he seems to be. He’s not so good at selling his own artwork, some rather simplistic renditions of Paris streets, but he does interest the public in Margaret’s big-eyed tykes. The catch? He takes credit for the paintings, blaming a man’s world for the fact that womens’ art isn’t taken seriously. And he’s probably right — we get the sense that mild-mannered Maragret would never have gotten around to selling herself. In Walter’s hands, and under Walter’s name, her pictures sell like hotcakes and spawn endless cheap reproductions, posters and postcards with her paintings shrunk down to an easily-consumable form and size, perfect for taking home and pinning to the fridge with a magnet. Art critics scoff at both this and the art itself, but who cares about the critics when you’re making tons of money?That very question, in fact, may be what drew Tim Burton to this material. Burton has been knocking himself off for years — most of his recent films feel like pale imitations of old faves like Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice, but minus some of the magic that made them so delightful in the first place. Apart from a few stylistic flourishes, Big Eyes doesn’t feel like a Tim Burton remix — the colors pop, there are no pale freaks to be found, and Johnny Depp is entirely absent. (He must have been busy being all Tim Burton-y in Into The Woods.) This is a more grounded story in the vein of Ed Wood, but with the tone and look of Big Fish. It’s the sort of movie Burton needed to make if he wants to be taken seriously as an artist anymore, not just a Walter Keane-like salesman who is content making cheap imitations of his old hits. Burton can’t rightly be dubbed a fraud, but many have wondered if the onetime visionary still has a creative bone left in his body after debacles like Alice In Wonderland and Planet Of The Apes. His work of late has consisted of noble near-misses and a few utter misfires, but it’s been a long while since he had a real critical and commercial smash hit.

Alas, Big Eyes is not poised to be that movie. The film got a trio of Golden Globe nominations, for the two lead performances as well as Lana Del Rey’s theme song. But the Oscar race may be too tight this year to squeeze either Amy Adams or Christoph Waltz in, especially considering that both have been better elsewhere. Adams is good, but her character is a bit of a doormat, going along with Walter’s scheme without much reason to. She’s nearly as complicit in the deceit as he is, and for what? A little bit of money? In order for Big Eyes to work as it should, the romance between Margaret and Walter would need to be palpable. We’d need to believe that she really loved him, and that he was worth loving. (Spoiler alert: he is not.)

Red-blooded romance has never been Burton’s bag, especially when it’s not of the goopy, fairy-tale-esque Edward Scissorhands variety. And I would wager that Waltz is miscast, playing Walter as a manic huckster schmuck from the get-go, the kind of man we want Margaret to turn and run away from at first sight. Maybe we’ve seen Waltz play naughty in too many Tarantino movies in order to buy him as a romantic lead just yet, or maybe Burton never wanted to go that route in the first place. Regardless, there just isn’t much at stake in this movie — Margaret can get up and walk away at any time, and for a long while, she just doesn’t. She loses her only friend (Krysten Ritter), she loses her art, and she loses her self-respect. And what does she gain in the process? She trades her “big eyes” for a big house and a big jerk.

Big Eyes finishes strong, thanks to a cleverly comedic courtroom climax written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who also penned Ed Wood. It zips along easily enough, but never anchors us in the fear or uncertainty that Margaret claims she feels. There’s only one scene, late in the game, when Walter is truly frightening, allowing Waltz to unlock some of the sadistic magic he brought to Hans Landa and King Schultz, his two Oscar-winning roles from Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. Perhaps Waltz would feel more at home in one of Burton’s zanier films. (And, gasp, would Johnny Depp have been better in this one?) Big Eyes‘ obvious feminist message gets drowned somewhat when our heroine is so incapable of defending herself. We’re never allowed to be invested in their romance, or in Margaret as a character, since it’s impossible to be on board with her choices. The story doesn’t offer her enough incentive to make them.Adams is a great actress, but it’s hard to imagine that the Academy will want to recognize her for a role that is so much weaker than her dynamo turns in movies like The Master and American Hustle. (Though they do have a history of selecting an actor’s weaker roles for accolades. See recently: Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady.) Instead, Big Eyes seems to fall into place as one of the also-rans in an enormously crowded holiday season (it might have fared better in the spring). With a more nuanced actor playing Walter, it might have worked, but with every revelation that Margaret has about Walter’s dishonesty, we say, “Duh.” His Keane is so obviously full of shit that it’s hard to believe anyone would buy what he’s selling. Because we don’t.

On a more positive, the art direction is breathtaking — nearly every shot would be worthy of framing and hanging on the wall. Big Eyes is one of the prettiest pictures of 2014, and the direction shows promising restraint from Burton. There’s at least a touch of real artistry at work behind the scenes here, enough to generate a feeling of goodwill toward Burton that I’ve been lacking lately. Burton certainly knows how to make a gorgeous movie, and that goes a long way in a film about art.

Even more visually impressive — not to mention visually daring — is Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida, a likely nominee for Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards this year. (It also nabbed a Golden Globe nod, and I’d bet that it’s poised to win both prizes.) Ida follows a young nun named Anna who learns of an aunt who gave her up to the convent as an orphan. Anna is all set to take her vows and devote herself entirely to God, but first there’s a trip to meet Wanda, who is in most way’s Anna’s opposite. Anna is demure and virginal, while Wanda enjoys booze and sex. But Wanda is no mere floozy — she has a horrific past we learn about gradually, a tragedy that also enlightens Anna on how and why she was orphaned.

The cinematography in Ida is mesmerizing, shot in black-and-white and a 1.375:1 aspect ratio that looks more like an Instagram than a movie. (It’s shot much better than most selfies, though.) Movies became widescreen in the first place as a response to the squareness of television sets, and now that TVs are getting all cinematic on us, movies like Ida and Mommy are heading back to the classical era with their framing. It might seem like a frustrating gimmick if Ida weren’t so meticulously composed, leaving lots of head room above its characters so we don’t forget that Anna is always thinking of God. If I could open an art gallery filled with nothing but still frames of Ida, I would. (Maybe I’ll just settle for a new Instagram account with the same agenda.)

Ida is more than just a visual masterpiece — the dialogue is spare and the story is simple, but it says so much. Anna and Wanda take a road trip that gradually reveals how Anna’s parents died in the Holocaust, and the “how” isn’t exactly what you’re expecting. But Ida is just as much a tale of the bond between an aunt and an orphan who never knew each other, as well as a tale of a sheltered, sober young woman exploring the big, bad world for the first time. The brief third act is almost its own mini-movie, exploring how Anna’s views on her life’s devotion change once she knows of her past. But it wouldn’t be nearly so poignant without the setup that precedes it.

Most movies would make grand sweeping gestures out of such grand themes, but Ida skips nimbly through all three plot threads, covering ground that many filmmakers might take three hours to explore in a mere 87 minutes. Pawel Pawlikowski doesn’t waste a single millisecond of our time, managing to be meditative at a breakneck pace. A story about a young nun and her chain-smoking aunt dealing with the fallout of the Holocaust in 1960s Poland — in black-and-white, no less — sounds more like a chore than a pleasure, but Ida is a pure delight to behold, with performances and visuals working in perfect harmony. It’s the best-looking film I saw this year. (But nice try, Big Eyes!)*

You don’t make a movie about Wall Street in 2011 unless you’re saying something about what’s going down in America. J.C. Chandor did that with the gripping drama Margin Call, taking us inside the offices of a fictional investment bank on the literal eve of the financial collapse that (temporarily?) crippled the United States in this new millennium.

Chandor’s next film, Deepwater Horizon, due later this year, will explore the worst oil spill in U.S. history. It’s obvious that the man has a bone to pick with capitalism, a fact also apparent in his third and, to date, best film, A Most Violent Year.

A Most Violent Year is set in New York City in 1981, but its themes are hardly limited to that era. As most savvy period pieces tend to be, it’s as much a film about right now as it is about the 1980s, though the look and feel of it do inspire a nostalgia for a time (and cinematic era) long past. It brings to mind some of the most iconic and lauded movies of all time, The Godfather and GoodFellas and Scarface, and also The Sopranos, the television show widely regarded as the pinnacle of the medium. It’s a bit premature to hold A Most Violent Year up to those classics now, but at the very least it holds its own in the same conversation. The Godfather was not just a story about gangsters, nor was The Sopranos, nor is A Most Violent Year. These are stories that explore everyday Americana on a cutthroat edge. Maybe these characters are more violent than us — more likely to go to prison, more likely to die a gruesome, early death at the hands of some low-life scoundrel. Then again, maybe not. When you live in a violent place during a violent time, you never can tell.

A Most Violent Year does not actually take place over the course of a year. Its scope is instead set around a single winter month, as Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) makes a deal with some property owners for a piece of land that is crucial to the expansion of his heating oil business. It is, in fact, a bad time to be in Abel’s business, as someone has been hijacking his trucks and stealing the fuel, selling it to his competitors and crushing his bottom line. But Abel refuses to arm his truck drivers, knowing that this will only start a cycle of violence and get people killed on both sides of the fight. It would also seriously harm his reputation and threaten his own freedom and well-being, and that of his family. His employees are scared shitless, his home is invaded in the middle of the night — even his attorney wants him to take a stand against the crooks. Abel won’t have it. He makes tough choices that his associates, employees, and wife may not agree with, always in the interest of preventing violence and preserving the life he has so carefully built for himself.

But it’s a violent world, and it’s a violent year, and sometimes violence is unavoidable. The film’s title refers to the climbing crime rate in New York at this time — New York City was once an exceedingly dangerous place to be, with 1981 being one of its worst moments. Throughout the film, radio reports remind us of crimes occurring all around the city, acts of violence that have nothing to do with Abel Morales or his business but are targeted at innocent, faceless people nearby. Violence is everywhere and could happen to anyone — and chances are, sooner or later it’ll happen to you.

Several acts of aggression are carried out in A Most Violent Year, but they aren’t as frequent or extreme as the title might suggest. This is not GoodFellas or even The Godfather, and it sure as hell isn’t Scarface.(Though, like Tony Montana, Abel hails from a Spanish-speaking nation.) Those gangster movies cited above bathe in bloodshed in a way that A Most Violent Year does not; violence is threatened more often than it is carried out, though that doesn’t mean there isn’t doom in the air throughout. The first murder in A Most Violent Year is actually a mercy killing, directed at an unfortunate animal that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. A Most Violent Year has a lower body count than virtually any other crime thriller you’ve ever seen; Abel is more businessman than gangster, but that’s a line that is easily blurred. Abel Morales is trying to make it in America, and you can’t do that without becoming a target — and doesn’t everyone have a right to self-defense? Every success comes at someone’s expense — sometimes one’s own; more often somebody else’s.

The question in A Most Violent Year is this: who will pay for Abel Morales’ success?

A Most Violent Year is as much about doing business in America as it is about violence, but A Most Profitable Year just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Abel considers himself an honest businessman, but he does have something to hide, or else the D.A. (David Oyelowo) wouldn’t be making a case against him. His lawyer Andrew (Albert Brooks) has fewer scruples than Abel, and his wife and bookkeeper Anna (Jessica Chastain) also seems willing to cut corners. (She’s also daughter and sister to ruthless gangsters herself, spoken of often but never seen.) When a gun, dropped by a no-good prowler, is discovered by one of their daughters in the front yard, Anna pushes Abel to “do something.” She wants him to arm himself, just as his associates want him to give guns his drivers. Because in America, the safest you’ll ever feel is in the presence of a deadly weapon… right?

Like The Godfather, A Most Violent Year is about a man who spent his life striving not to become a gangster, only to find himself backed into a corner by circumstance. When his family is in jeopardy, can he still live up to this moral code? But A Most Violent Year is more like The Sopranos in the ways it gets into the nitty-gritty of Abel’s business dealings with various other head honchos and gangster-types, painting a vivid picture of who wants what and why. A Most Violent Year is populated by well-drawn, believable characters, each with their own agenda, each with their own interests at heart. Abel Morales is no Henry Hill, Tony Soprano, or Don Corleone, but he’s living in a Scarface world. He is an immigrant who made good for himself. He has a business he’s passionate about and a family he loves. He will not let his American dream die a quiet death.

A Most Violent Year is filled to the brim with interesting things to say about capitalism — about who must suffer so that the Abel Moraleses of the world can prosper. It uses violence to make a point, but that’s only an extreme angle on the world we’re all living in. Morals are difficult, perhaps impossible, to hold onto when you want to get ahead. And we all want to get ahead. This concept wasn’t born in the 80s, or even in America, but there may be no better backdrop for such a tale. The Twin Towers are seen from a distance in the background in a few key shots, not so much to remind us of the violence that occurred there in 2001, but as a reminder of what they represented, what that attack sought to affront. Money. Power. Security. Success. Manhattan is always seen from a distance in Chandor’s film, set primarily in Queens. Because Manhattan is something to aspire to, a better place on the horizon. It’s what Abel and Anna, along with everyone else, are chasing. Money. Power. Security. Success.

In the United States of America, every year is a most violent year for somebody. The methods may have changed, but the rules haven’t. We still do business in the exact same way, promising what we can when it benefits us and backing out when it stops. We borrow money we don’t possess, we call in favors wherever we’re able, we let go of anyone who threatens to drag us down. Abel hopes to avoid violence, but his success, in its own way, is an act of violence against those he needs to do the dirty work for him. To get to the top, one must leave the bottom-dwellers behind. In one killer scene, Abel shares his strategy for convincing customers that his business is top-of-the-line. Ask for tea, not coffee. Pie, not cake. Always go for the fancier option. It explains his fancy house, fancy clothes, and fancy wife, too.A Most Violent Year feels like an epic, perhaps because it reminds us of bigger, brassier stories set in this world, or maybe because Abel Morales is a stand-in for every American who ever strove to get ahead. (Basically, all of them.) It’s this year’s Wolf Of Wall Street, but Abel is neither sheep nor wolf — unless he’s forced to choose, and then he’ll pick the latter. Chandor’s direction is superb, emulating films from this era without totally aping them, and his writing manages to get his points across in the most obvious way without ever being obtuse. You’d need to be daft to not pick up on the themes of this movie, but the world he creates is tactile and real. He’s helped greatly by a towering lead performance by Oscar Isaac, who does more with a confident stare than most actors could do with a bombastic monologue, and the phenomenal-as-usual Jessica Chastain, who has a reasonably small but powerful part to play here. (Women are typically sidelined in such films, and while A Most Violent Year is primarily a male-dominated affair, at least Anna gets some juicy business of her own.) Alexander Ebert, who scored Chandor’s All Is Lost, returns here with equal triumph.

As much as it may remind of the great movies of yore, A Most Violent Year is no mere imitation of better films that came before — it’s enough of a novelty to see a crime story about a man who refuses to commit crimes, amongst other unique aspects that are all Chandor’s own. Abel is very, very careful to ensure that everything he does is on the up-and-up, legally speaking; moral crimes, on the other hand, one can’t really be held accountable for. He is a good man living in a shady world, convinced that he’s the exception to the rule; it’s the system that’s screwed, not him. (And who hasn’t told that convenient little lie to themselves?) He navigates through the moral murk and deceit, making compromises we’re all familiar with.

We’d all like to live in the idealized America — land of plenty, free of violence. Abel tries really hard to, but the people around him know that he isn’t, and Abel will learn that over the course of this story. His previous films were solid, but with A Most Violent Year, J.C. Chandor announces himself as a writer and filmmaker to be reckoned with. The man obviously knows his Coppola and Scorsese, but he also knows a little something about modern day America, too. A Most Violent Year has more to say in one scene than most films do in their entire running time. It’s a most excellent movie. *

Some films are great.

Some films are Important.

Some are both, some are neither. Many are one, attempting to be the other.

This time of year always unleashes at least one major release about a historical event we’re all familiar with, usually a true story, often centered around a major war or some other national or global watershed moment. Is it something about the onset of winter that makes us want to watch such stories?

No. It’s the Oscars.

These films are poised for Academy Award nominations, so they’re almost always released in the fall, often around Christmas Day. If they don’t win Best Picture, they’re at least trying to. They can be biopics or war films, literary adaptations or historical dramas. Maybe two or three or all of these. They smack of prestige. Often, they’re not quite as good as the marketing would have us believe. But sometimes they are.

As a war film/biopic/historical drama/bestselling literary adaptation, Unbroken was touted early on as the Film To Beat in the Oscar race of 2014, but that kind of early buzz can work against a prestige drama, as may be the case here. Based on a hit book that tells an incredible true story, co-written by the Coen brothers, and directed by Angelina Jolie, of all people, it is the tale of Louis Zamperini, an Olympic athlete who overcame some seriously harrowing obstacles during World War II. Louie is the child of Italian-American immigrants, a young troublemaker who is bullied for his outsider status and channels that angry energy into running track, which eventually takes him to the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin, where he is treated to an impassioned speech by Adolf Hitler. Louie doesn’t know it yet, but this man has set into motion events that will cause him serious harm and endanger his life numerous times, in numerous way, threatening to break him all the while.But — spoiler alert — they don’t.

Unbroken has the sheen of a typical awardsy prestige drama. Jolie’s direction is assured enough, in that this falls right in line with other handsomely produced wartime dramas that favor lush visuals over grit and bloodshed. Louie Zamperini faced unimaginable horrors, including 47 days with scarce food and water in a life raft with two fellow soldiers and a school of hungry sharks circling around them. And that might have been the most pleasant part of his story. He also had a stint in a POW camp where a particularly surly Japanese officer had it out for him. The actual experience of these events is obviously, inevitably more hellacious than any movie about them could depict, and Unbroken doesn’t even get close to putting us in that unspeakable situation. But did anyone expect an adaptation from the author of Seabiscuit directed by Malificent to “go there”? I didn’t.

So Unbroken is more War Horse than Saving Private Ryan, but that’s not inherently problematic. For what it is, Unbroken is an engaging drama, far from the best of the year but by no means the worst. It tells its story straightforwardly, without moral complications or a whole lot of character depth, but it is a hell of a story. We are meant to see Louie Zamperini as an American hero, a stalwart guy with a will made of iron. He never falters, and we never expect him to. Stories like this are comfort food — they go down easy and fill our bellies with warmth, like a big heaping helping of all-American apple pie. Jolie is no Kathryn Bigelow, but she knows how to make a movie.Unbroken is most notable for its lead performance by Jack O’Connell, a rising star if there ever was one. (In case you haven’t heard, he’s the new Tom Hardy.) Thanks to O’Connell, this Zamperini is exceedingly good-looking, but so is everyone else in the movie. As Unbroken tells it, World War II was fought and won exclusively by supermodels, and perhaps someone needed to tell its director: “Hey, Angie — hate to break it to you, but not everyone is beautiful.” The supporting cast features Jai Courtney, Garrett Hedlund, Finn Witrock, Domnhall Gleeson, and assorted other lesser-known gorgeous people, which occasionally make Unbroken feel more like Magic Mike Goes To The Pacific. Even the villain of the piece is played by Miyavi, an attractive Japanese musician making his English-language film debut.

Unbroken has its share of effective moments and a few that fall flat. The structure of the film starts us off in a tense action sequence during World War II and then winds back to depict some not-so-intriguing childhood flashbacks I suspect are there primarily because they’re in the book. (Some of the dialogue in this sequence is pretty painful.) The later obstacles are suitably grueling, if not exactly gritty, and maybe none of it would work if Jack O’Connell weren’t so engaging. He was scrappier in this year’s lesser-seen feisty indie Starred Up, but here he proves himself a worthy leading man in mainstream fare, too.

Unbroken may slip into the Oscar race as a crowd-pleaser, as these films often tend to, with a Best Picture nomination, though tepid critical reaction could just as easily hurt its chances. Jack O’Connell would have a fighting shot at a Best Actor nod in a year that wasn’t already so overstuffed with kudos-ready leading men, but he’ll have to wait his turn while Eddie Redmayne and Benedict Cumberbatch get their due. As for Jolie, the slot that once might have been hers now seems more likely to go to another director of a historical biopic, Ava DuVernay.It’s almost shocking that it took until 2014 for moviegoers to get a movie about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Though it also took us until 2012 to get one about Abraham Lincoln.) There are few American legends so towering, so influential, and so worthy of seeing of seeing on the big screen as King. (The man has his own holiday!) Selma is focused exclusively on 1965, the most tumultuous and significant year of the Civil Rights movement, when King was already a powerful and beloved minister and activist, at a point where he could choose to push forward, at the risk of getting his friends and other innocent people killed, or step back, letting the nation’s white leaders, primarily President Lyndon B. Johnson, deal with the Negro Problem when they got around to it.

For Dr. King, of course, that wasn’t much of a decision to make. While many white men in power fundamentally agreed with King’s principles, actually enforcing them was too politically dicey. Black men and women technically already had the right to vote in 1965, but white bureaucracy in the South often unjustly prevented them from doing so, leaving African-Americans without representation in the police force, juries, and government. Selma highlights all of these issues quickly and effectively, though it uses a little more talk than action in so doing.

King is played by David Oyelowo as effectively as you can imagine anybody doing so, and it’s just one turn in a wholly effective African-American ensemble that also features Oprah Winfrey, Common, Short Term 12‘s excellent Keith Stanfield, and Orange Is The New Black‘s villain Lorraine Toussaint. Selma was directed by a black woman, and comes most alive in scenes between its black actors. The issues at hand are not so simple as black and white — there are a wide array of opinions and ideas amidst King’s followers, and all are given a fair shake. Not everyone who wants to see African-Americans treated equally agrees with King’s methodology — some wish him to be more extreme, some less. Perhaps it shouldn’t feel so fresh and exciting for a major awards release to feature black characters talking to each other about political strategies, but it does, and that builds a lot of goodwill toward Selma.

Fittingly, most of Selma takes place in Selma. Where the film falters a bit is when it steps outside that city to take us into the White House, in King’s meetings with Johnson (played reasonably well by Tom Wilkinson), and into other rooms with other white men in power, like a judge played by Martin Sheen and Tim Roth’s Governor of Alabama, George Wallace. Particularly awkward is a hammy cameo by Dylan Baker as J. Edgar Hoover, who seems like he should be twirling a mustache. The dynamic between King and Johnson is intriguing enough for maybe one scene of this movie, but otherwise, we needn’t see a bunch of moments telling us what all these white guys are thinking and doing throughout all this, because we already know. None of these characters are particularly well fleshed-out; they are talking heads, and they undermine the down-to-earth authenticity Selma builds in Alabama. Most of what transpires in the city of Selma feels real; a lot of what happens outside it feels phony. What matters in Selma is what happens in Selma, but we spend a fairly large portion of the movie in Washington, D.C. and Montgomery, away from King and his followers.

With Oprah Winfrey as producer and Brad Pitt, winner of last year’s Best Picture Oscar for the dynamo 12 Years A Slave, (another significant film about African-American issues, naturally), executive producing, I’m not sure if the makers of Selma felt it was necessary to have a lot of white guys in the movie to lend some star power, or give Caucasian audiences a proxy, or if they really did think this was the best use of Selma‘s screen time. (At least there is no awkward Pitt cameo this time.) DuVernay’s direction is mostly effective and occasionally impressive, though a few of her choices feel too obvious. Virtually every scene that takes place in the White House unfolds in the Oval Office, which feels stagey and claustrophobic. I also had some trouble with the film’s final moments, featuring the marchers singing muted underneath an uplifting song by English singer Fink from 2011, which then leads into an on-the-nose (Golden Globe-winning) rap from Common and some rather self-congratulatory closing credits. It’s an aggressively bogus way to end an otherwise lovely film.

Selma may leave us on a false note, but I won’t do the same in my review, because there’s too much here worth celebrating. DuVernay lands the film’s most crucial moments, especially the shocking brutality King’s peaceful protestors faced at the hands of the Alabama police, who are mostly faceless in their attacks, rendering them as scary as any vampire or zombie. There are also several compelling dramatic scenes, including an interaction between Martin and wife Coretta (Carmen Ejogo) that addresses his infidelity, and the film’s best scene, in which an octogenarian grieves for the grandson (Stanfield) who was just senselessly shot by police. Henry G. Sanders has only a few scenes in this film, but this one is so immensely powerful — I wish there was Oscar talk for him, since it’s one of the year’s most effective supporting turns.

In these and a handful of other moments, DuVernay makes the struggles of the people of Selma immediate and heart-wrenching, forcing us to feel, as King and his followers did, that change needed come to imminently and at any price. I wish the wonky political scenes had as much grit and gravitas, and that DuVernay was able to sell the entire movie the way she so effectively lands the scenes of panic and violence. But I’d much rather see a version of Selma that gets the violence and bloodshed right and falters a bit in the talking head scenes than one that nails the white politicians and rings false note after false note in depicting the people of Selma.

There could have been even more Selma in Selma, and a lot less Oval Office — a fuller view of these people’s lives and the struggles they were up against. But I’m mostly content with the Selma we got. It is poised to snag a Best Picture nomination, is likely to earn a nod for Oyelowo, and may make history if DuVernay becomes the first black female to find herself in the Best Director race. It seems perfectly fitting that a film about a black man who made history could do so for a black woman as well.

*

Once again, it’s Oscar time.

This year’s race is gearing up to be one of the least predictable in recent memory. For every race that has an all-but-guaranteed winner (Julianne Moore, Best Actress; J.K. Simmons, Best Supporting Actor), there are as many that are truly up in the air — some with not only two possible winners, but several. Best Actor? It’s anybody’s guess whether it goes to Eddie Redmayne or Michael Keaton, and an upset by Bradley Cooper isn’t out of the question. Will the Academy reward Richard Linklater’s assured hand at shepherding Boyhood, a 12-year-in-the-making indie that’s full of genuine emotion and about as naturalistic as film can be, or Alejandro Inarritu’s brash, attention-grabbing stylings in the seemingly editless celebration of artistic ego Birdman? We’ll have to wait and see.

The big prize, Best Picture, is up for grabs, too, in a way it hasn’t been in ages. Boyhood was once the clear front-runner, then American Sniper made a killing at the box office and snatched up a surprising number of nominations. But not so fast! Birdman gobbled up awards from the DGA, the PGA, and SAG, making it the film to beat. And you should never underestimate Harvey Weinstein, who, as usual, is gunning desperately, cloyingly hard with his down-the-middle The Imitation Game, which boldly saves all the most fascinating details of Alan Turing’s life for the title cards at the end of the movie. Can we count out The Grand Budapest Hotel? Maybe not, given that ties only Birdman in nominations, and those who love Wes Anderson love him a lot. Even expected also-rans such as The Theory Of Everything, Whiplash, and Selma have at least some chance if the major contenders split the vote enough.

So there’s real suspense at the Oscars this year — for me included. The gold could either go to my very favorite film of the year, or this could be another massive disappointment, with a slicker, emptier production crowding out more deserving fare, like recent years that brought us such dubious Best Picture winners as The King’s Speech and Argo. Here we have clanging Hollywood ego (Birdman) battling conservative patriotism (American Sniper) up against sentimental indie humility (Boyhood) versus Harvey Weinstein (The Imitation Game). Which of these factions will emerge as most dominant in the Academy?

That’s a question for Sunday evening, but for now, it’s time to examine the true best of the year, across the board — those that were nominated, those that should have been nominated, and those who never had a chance.

Here are my Not-Oscars for the 2014 year in cinema!

(As usual, I pick a winner and then list my four other “nominees” in descending order based on how much I liked them. Check out last year’s Not-Oscars here.)

BEST ACTOR

Jake Gyllenhaal, Nightcrawler
Eddie Redmayne, The Theory Of Everything
Jack O’Connell, Starred Up
Oscar Isaac, A Most Violent Year
David Oyelowo, Selma

Honorable Mentions: Matthew McConaughey, Interstellar; Johannes Kuhnke, Force Majeur

My Best Actors for 2014 all feature men whose constrained exteriors contain (or strive to contain) something awesome or fearsome within. Jake Gyllenhaal’s Lou Bloom is the sinister, sicker cousin of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort from last year’s The Wolf Of Wall Street; both are origin stories about unrepentant American villains, but not the type you’ll find in a Marvel movie or a Jason Bourne film — the kind you might cross paths with on the streets of New York City or Los Angeles. Many called DiCaprio’s performance the best of his career, and he was rewarded with an Oscar nomination (but not a win). Sadly, Gyllenhaal can’t claim the same, though his work in Nightcrawler is undoubtedly a career highlight thus far. It’s not just a physical transformation, though how a normally very good-looking leading man inhabits this too-skinny, weasely-looking creature of the night is beyond me. Gyllenhaal allows Bloom to be a true sociopath, spouting off sound bites he’s memorized off the internet to pass as a real human being. He’s one of the best bad guys we’ve seen on screen this century, not because of the depths of his depravity or any one particularly heinous act, but because of how much he reminds us that in today’s America, those who reap the rewards are often those who play dirty.

Eddie Redmayne, who could very well take home the Oscar this year, is infinitely impressive in The Theory Of Everything, conveying so much while able to say and do so little as the ALS-afflicted Stephen Hawking. Jack O’Connell, very good in the Oscar-ignored Unbroken, gets so much more to do as the outraged teen criminal fighting to survive in a bad man’s world in Starred Up. Oscar Isaac is cool and calculating as a businessman who won’t give in to his base desires for vengeance and violence, despite enormous pressures from his wife, his employees, and an unknown enemy. And as Martin Luther King, Jr., a man we all know plenty about, David Oyelowo makes a real character out of an icon while still pulling off the reverence and dignity associated with one of the world’s greatest freedom fighters.
BEST ACTRESS

Julianne Moore, Still Alice
Anne Dorval, Mommy
Lisa Loven Kongsli, Force Majeur
Kristen Wiig, The Skeleton Twins
Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl

Honorable Mentions: Jessica Chastain, The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby; Agata Trzebuchowska, Ida

My 2014 roster of Best Actresses is a group of very unhappy wives and mothers. It’s a crime that Julianne Moore doesn’t have an Oscar already; fortunately, that almost certainly stands to be corrected this year for her fine work in Still Alice. While her role as an intellectual grappling with memory loss may not even be amongst her top five best performances, that’s more of a testament to her stellar work over the past few decades than any shortcomings of the film. (This isn’t just a Lifetime Achievement Award gussied up as an award for Still Alice, as sometimes happens, but it is another example of Oscar rewarding a terrific actor a little too late.)

Julianne Moore would face more competition from Anne Dorval’s fabulous and complex portrayal of a suffering single mother in Mommy if the film were a bona fide 2014 release, but instead it fell into the awards season nether-region. Lisa Loven Kongsli was adept in bringing both the comedy and the pathos putting up with a cowardly husband in Force Majeur. Kristen Wiig went darker than ever as one of two suicidal siblings in The Skeleton Twins, but still provided ample laughs in a sing-along with Bill Hader. And as the missing mastermind Amazing Amy, Rosamund Pike’s ice-cold turn in Gone Girl conjures up one of 2014’s most memorable screen characters, a figure who will prompt feminist discussion and debate for years to come.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Suzanne Clement, Mommy
Laura Dern, Wild
Rene Russo, Nightcrawler
Patricia Arquette, Boyhood
Carrie Coon, Gone Girl

Honorable Mentions: Jessica Chastain, A Most Violent Year; Tilda Swinton, Snowpiercer

My 2014 Best Supporting Actresses are women in (or soon approaching) middle age, grappling to accept what is versus what used to be. Mommy begins as a mother-son story, and at first, doesn’t seem to have much room for Suzanne Clement’s Kyla; it’s hard to grasp exactly how she’ll fit in to the story of conflicted mother-son Die and Steven, and for a while, she doesn’t. But Kyla turns out to be an instrumental observer in the events that unfold. Kyla stammers and stutters, failing to express herself in the manner she intends to, but Clement brings everything we need to know across — and more. Mommy is a love triangle of sorts about a mother, a son, and another woman, but Kyla is in many ways the heart of the story, even if technically she has the smallest arc.

It’s a testament to how good Laura Dern is, always, that her role as Reese Witherspoon’s mom in Wild feels like the essential soul of the movie; it’s a nice tribute to Cheryl Strayed’s real mom, who inspired the journey that inspired the book. Dern was happily, and somewhat surprisingly, nominated for her efforts — Rene Russo was not so lucky, but her comeback in Nightcrawler was a sight to behold; her news producer Nina displayed ball-busting bravura and feminine fragility in equal measure, and I can only hope it’s the first of several more late-period performances we’ll see. Patricia Arquette, the most likely Oscar winner this year, plays second-fiddle to her on-screen offspring, much like Laura Dern in Wild. By the end of Boyhood, young Mason’s story is just beginning, but it’s a troubling passing of the torch by his mother, who grapples with what her life has amounted to as her youngest heads off to college. And as Ben Affleck’s faithful twin in Gone Girl, Carrie Coon provides the moral center in an otherwise morally fucked tale of vengeance and marital artifice, and plenty of comic relief, too.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Antoine Olivier-Pilon, Mommy
Henry G. Sanders, Selma
Ethan Hawke, Boyhood
Mark Ruffalo, Foxcatcher
J.K. Simmons, Whiplash

Honorable Mentions: Edward Norton, Birdman; Martin Short, Inherent Vice

If there’s a common thread between my Best Supporting Actors this year, I don’t know what it is. They range from quite young to very old, from good-natured to truly terrifying. They are boys and men, fathers and bachelors, teenagers and senior citizens. My very favorite is Antoine Olivier-Pilon as Steven, a teen who is sweet-natured and sensitive one moment, bursting with rage and violence the next. Ultimately, Steven is confused, and we are allowed to shift our feelings about how Die should deal with him from one scene to the next. But Olivier-Pilon nails Steven’s child-like vulnerability and also his rambunctious joy, aided by the likes of Celine Dion and Oasis on the soundtrack.

Henry G. Sanders, an actor previously unknown to me, did so much with so little in Selma. He’s certainly not a name many would recognize, and has only one showcase scene — but I felt more for his grieving character than anyone else in Selma, and I wished more of the film focused on these individual civilian stories (and less on the Oval Office). Ethan Hawke reteamed with Richard Linklater for Boyhood in a role that, like the Before Sunrise series, is partially based on the direction his own life took over the course of twelve years, but also managed to show us a wiser paternal side of Hawke than we’ve seen before. Mark Ruffalo was solid in Foxcatcher, an enigmatic and elusive film in which the two main characters more often than not left us wondering what they were thinking; but with Rufalo’s Dave Schultz, we know exactly where this solid meat-and-potatoes dude is coming from, and the scene in which he’s coerced to lie in a documentary about his “mentor” shows us just what he’s made of. And what’s left to say about J.K. Simmons, undoubtedly an Oscar winner after this weekend, as the jazz teacher who’s as menacing as Freddy Krueger? Not much, but I can’t deny that he made the movie. A long-unheralded character actor gets his just desserts at last.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Gone Girl — Gillian Flynn
Enemy — Javier Gullon
Frank — Jon Ronson & Peter Straughan
The Double — Richard Ayoade & Avi Korine
The Theory Of Everything — Anthony McCarten

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Mommy — Xavier Dolan
The Skeleton Twins — Craig Johnson & Mark Heyman
A Most Violent Year — J.C. Chandor
Nightcrawler — Dan Gilroy
Whiplash — Damien Chazelle

(I don’t subscribe to the Academy’s ruling that Whiplash was an adapted screenplay. As usual, the distinctions between Adapted and Original are largely ridiculous.)

BEST SCORE

Enemy
Gone Girl
Under The Skin
Nightcrawler
Interstellar

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Ida
Under The Skin
Inherent Vice
Gone Girl
Nightcrawler

2014 Roster

    1.    Boyhood
    2.    Mommy
    3.    Gone Girl
    4.    A Most Violent Year
    5.    Nightcrawler
    6.    Enemy
    7.    The Skeleton Twins
    8.    Coherence
    9.    Frank
    10.    Maps To The Stars
    11.    Ida
    12.    The Double
    13.    Inherent Vice
    14.    The Theory Of Everything
    15.    Force Majeur
    16.    Whiplash
    17.    Edge Of Tomorrow
    18.    Starred Up
    19.    Pride
    20.    The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby: Her
    21.    Still Alice
    22.    Selma
    23.    Obvious Child
    24.    Wild
    25.    Under The Skin
    26.    The Babadook
    27.    Guardians Of The Galaxy
    28.    Foxcatcher
    29.    Snowpiercer
    30.    The Grand Budapest Hotel
    31.    The Lego Movie
    32.    Birdman
    33.    Blue Ruin
    34.    The One I Love
    35.    Dear White People
    36.    The Fault In Our Stars
    37.    Interstellar
    38.    Into The Woods
    39.    22 Jump Street
    40.    Only Lovers Left Alive
    41.    Unbroken
    42.    American Sniper
    43.    Life Itself
    44.    Godzilla
    45.    They Came Together
    46.    What If
    47.    Night Moves
    48.    Happy Christmas
    49.    Veronica Mars
    50.    Captain America: The Winter Soldier
    51.    Venus In Fur
    52.    Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes
    53.    A Most Wanted Man
    54.    Chef
    55.    Neighbors
    56.    Grand Piano
    57.    The Drop
    58.    The Rover
    59.    Noah
    60.    Listen Up Philip
    61.    X-Men: Days Of Future Past
    62.    We Are The Best!
    63.    Palo Alto
    64.    Bird People
    65.    Love Is Strange
    66.    The Imitation Game
    67.    The Purge: Anarchy
    68.    Locke
    69.    Non-Stop
    70.    Nymphomaniac
    71.    This Is Where I Leave You
    72.    Stranger By The Lake
    73.    Bad Johnson
    74.    Transcendence

*

My Top 10 for the year 2007 comes to you from the midst of the WGA Writer’s Strike of 2007-2008, when there was some doubt about whether or not a typical Oscar telecast would even be possible without those striking scribes.

That would have been quite a shame, since 2007 is one of the very best (if not the best) cinematic years of the new millennium thus far. In almost any other year that decade, my #3 choice would probably have been my #1 choice.

Of course, the Oscars did happen, with major wins for Marion Cotillard, Diablo Cody, and the Coen Brothers, amongst others. But it’s interesting, and a little depressing, to imagine an alternate reality where we never saw a bunch of very deserving actors and filmmakers take home the gold for a job well done.

(A briefer version of this Top Ten list was first published in my “Confessions of a Dangerous Film Student” column in INsite Boston in early 2008.)

“There Will Be Gold: In Support of Awards Season”

Let’s get this out of the way — naturally, I support the writers. Because… well, duh.
But I, like you, dear reader, also mourn the loss of things like scripted (read: watchable) television and those oh-so-glitzy Globes o’ Gold — almost as much as I miss the possibility that I might make money on a screenplay in the near future. What with my love of cinema (and the obsessive compulsion to express my love in list form), this time of year is basically my Christmas, and it is unfortunate indeed that a quibble has taken the focus off a slew of movies that are well deserving their aurous rewards.

So lest this strike never end, let’s celebrate 2007 as the year entertainment went
out with a bang — the best year for movies in quite some time — and, even if this year’s
Oscars are FedExed to recipients in lieu of a ceremony, I shall exercise my god-given
right to give kudos where kudos are due.

The year’s ten best films are as follows:10. ATONEMENT

There was never a chance in hell that a film could encapsulate the rich, stirring prose of Ian McEwan’s brilliant novel, but this lavish adaptation comes close enough for me. Beginning with a rousing day-in-the-life of a wealthy family (and their less well-to-do staff) in England prior to World War II, the film follows the fanciful Briony (Saorise Ronan) as she innocently invents one fiction (a play) and then a much more dangerous one that has devastating consequences for her sister Cecelia (Keira Knightley) and Robbie (James McAvoy), whose bright future is about to take a dark turn.

Despite an awkward execution of the book’s first tricky jump in time, place, and POV, McEwan’s haunting tale of lives undone by a child’s misunderstanding hits just as hard in the film’s crushing denouement. Joe Wright’s direction is assured and striking, particularly in the film’s more intimate first hour, before the tale takes on an epic scope (including an impressive but unnecessary long take of the beach at Dunkirk). It is only at the end, when Atonement unleashes a powerful revelation, that the full scope of the story becomes clear, and enhances so much of what we’ve seen. While the movie can’t quite match the impact of the book, it’s a mighty fine adaptation with a rare brand of emotional power that is not based so much on what happens to these characters, but what does not.

9. NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

Darkly funny and relentlessly tense, Joel and Ethan Coen have centered one of their best films on the most memorable screen psycho in recent memory (played to oddball perfection by Javier Bardem). Anton Chigurh is as unhinged and unpredictable as that pageboy haircut would suggest. As in all the best white-knuckle thrillers, here, at every moment, we expect something much worse to happen than what actually does. No Country For Old Men is certainly one of those. It has a pitch-black soul — so that even the characters it spares don’t really seem that far away from annihilation.

Perhaps the Coen brothers are the most perfect filmmakers in existence to execute the grim vision of Cormac McCarthy. The Coens love to tell stories about foolhardy heroes who end up being the punchlines of some grand cosmic joke, and McCarthy is more prone to bleak chaos. Somehow, they balance each other out. The story is entirely unconventional when it comes to who lives and who dies, and while that definitely challenged me upon my first viewing, I also had to admire the screenplay for its daring. I’m still a little sad about how things go down in this film, which I guess is the mark of a good movie. The gorgeous Texan landscapes are worth the price of admission alone. 8. PARIS, JE T’AIME

A collection of miniscule movies celebrating the famed French city, highlights include shorts by such notable filmmakers as Gus Van Sant, Tom Twyker, the Coen brothers, Alexander Payne, Walter Salles, Alfonso Cuaron, Sylvain Chomet, Wes Craven, and Richard LaGravanese, along with brief but full-bodied performances from the likes of Elijah Wood, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Steve Buscemi, Juliette Binoche, Margo Martindale, Gena Rowland, Bob Hoskins, Nick Nolte, Gaspard Ulliel, Catalina Sandino Moreno, and Natalie Portman.

As always in anthology films, some chapters are going to be more enjoyable than others. In the space of just a few minutes, several of these shorts manage to be touching and transporting; a few leave us wondering, “That’s it?” Cuaron’s single-take stroll at twilight is impressive technically, but not narratively; LaGravanese’s segment feels like an entire feature rolled into a short. Some are heavy dramas, others are light comedies, and a few contain a touch of magic. All in all, it’s a fitting tribute to the City of Light. If only every film had this breezy sense of creative freedom and joie de vivre!7. IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH

Americans are typically more concerned with domestic disasters than those on foreign turf, which explains why so many of 2007’s current events films flopped while everybody tuned in for updates on Lindsay, Paris, and Britney’s tiresome shenanigans.  Too bad, because this mournful look at the effects of the current war on soldiers features what might be the best performance of Tommy Lee Jones’ career as he portrays a father searching for his veteran son’s killers. The young man survived horrors overseas, but did not survive those that still lied in the hearts of the men who returned to American soil changed by the experience.

Charlize Theron, James Franco, and Susan Sarandon turn in solid performances in what turns out to be a not-so-terribly-cheerful movie. (Films about parents mourning their children are seldom laugh riots.) As it turns out, this little David of a movie was no match for the Hollywood Goliath, as it got all but lost this awards season. (Jones did get a deserved Best Actor nomination.) It’s one of the most egregiously underseen films about current events “Over There,” featuring brilliantly understated writing and direction from Paul Haggis that even Crash’s most vehement naysayers would be hard-pressed to rip apart.

6. MICHAEL CLAYTON

Michael Clayton is a curious movie; it’s not really about what it’s about. Michael Clayton is a law firm “fixer” — no law degree, but an ability to smooth talk the firm’s clients into doing what they otherwise might not. That doesn’t end up having much to do with the movie’s actual plot, which concerns an attorney who has gone off the deep end and now threatens to undermine their defense of a lawsuit against U-North, an evil conglomerate of the sort that’s easy to root against. And even that fairly typical plot isn’t really what the movie’s about. It’s a character piece — one in which the title character is not nearly the most interesting character.

George Clooney is just fine in his usual leading man mode, but Tom Wilkinson, as a guilt-ridden lawyer rapidly losing his mind, and Tilda Swinton, as the ruthless corporate villainess, give two of the year’s strongest supporting performances. The script is so good that this slick drama can just as easily pose as an enthralling thriller, even if the actual suspense is fairly minimal. Not bad for first-time director Tony Gilroy (the screenwriter of this year’s similarly breathtaking The Bourne Ultimatum).5. I’M NOT THERE

Todd Haynes’ unusual tribute to Bob Dylan is for the most daring of moviegoers — those looking to take a ride unlike any other. (And not necessarily only for Dylan acolytes, considering I’ve never had much interest in either the man or his music.) Not so much a movie as a tapestry in motion, it’s more mentally stimulating than emotionally involving — but well worth seeing for the performances of such esteemed thespians as Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, and especially the incomparable Cate Blanchett (all playing characters loosely based on Dylan).

This is essentially another anthology movie, though unlike Paris Je’Taime, these “short films” are all on the same subject and all by the same writer-director. Per usual for such films, some segments are much stronger than others. The most striking is Blanchett, playing a male in a stylish black-and-white segment, though Ledger leaves an impression opposite Charlotte Gainsbourgh in the most emotionally resonant piece. Is an artsy, elusive film featuring a number of actors playing Bob Dylan (but not named Bob Dylan) pretentious? Oh, sure. But in this case, it’s also mighty intriguing.

4. INTO THE WILD

Full disclosure: I saw this film at a screening attended by Walt and Billie McCandless, so I was extra-attuned to the film’s inherent tragedy. Though I doubt I’d be much less affected by my viewing no matter the circumstance. Based on the true story of Christopher McCandless, Sean Penn’s film entrances us with the reckless derring-do of a young man’s quest for emancipation — from his parents, from society, and from mankind at large. Along the way, he meets a series of vivid supporting characters played by Catherine Keener, Vince Vaughn, and Kristen Stewart, along with the very excellent Hal Holbrook. The film is episodic by nature, as many travelogues are, but still manages to build toward its inevitable conclusion all the while.

What makes it work is the tragic fact that McCandless was ultimately punished for his arrogance against the elements, and we are left to feel conflicted about his journey. We get swept up in the excitementof his travels even as the backs of our minds nag: “Hmm… this might be a really bad idea.” It’s easy to admire McCandless for his bold spirit, but Penn is a shrewd enough filmmaker not to leave it at that (as many directors might have). We see the hole McCandless’ absence left back home with his parents and sister (well-played by Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, and Jena Malone). It’s all anchored by a bold turn from Emile Hirsch in a film that reminds us that adventure is not a game, man is no longer wild, and absolute freedom is not something that can be seized without consequence.3. THERE WILL BE BLOOD

Heaven isn’t exactly the place Daniel Day Lewis and Paul Thomas Anderson were matched, but the combination of (arguably) cinema’s most captivating actor with (arguably) today’s most alluring auteur makes for a hellishly good time at the movies. The film’s title promises blood, and there is some — but not much until the end of the movie. Until then, there’s just a lot of oil, as the titanic antihero Daniel Plainview goes from poor prospector to the sort of wealthy tycoon who can afford his own bowling alley. (Wink wink, to anyone who has seen the climactic showdown.)

It’s a thoroughly American movie, one that tackles a lot of heady subjects — capitalism, materialism, greed, religion — and also explores the complex and ultimately heartbreaking bond between Daniel and his adopted son (a “bastard in a basket”), who is eventually blinded in a cruel twist of fate. The film’s titular payoff is one of the most riveting final scenes in motion picture history, in my not-so-humble opinion — guaranteed to leave just about any viewer speechless. What else to say on my summary of this excellent piece of cinema, except: “I’m finished!”2. THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY

It’s damn near impossible to make a beautiful film about blinking, but artist-director Julian Schnabel and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski have done it. It’s the kind of story that could never be dreamed up unless it happened to a real man — Jean-Dominique Bauby, who suffers a life-altering stroke that leaves him with only one very unconventional method of communication at his disposal. The camera shows us the world through our paralyzed protagonist’s one functional eye without feeling claustrophobic, alternating the hospital-bound scenes with flashbacks to Bauby’s pre-stroke life. Strangely enough, we come to realize that he may be better off now, despite his condition.

Mathieu Almaric has the challenge of projecting all the rage, confusion, frustration, and sadness Bauby experiences after the incident using just one eye, really. If there was an Oscar for Best Performance By A Single Body Part, he’d be a shoo-in. There are some nice supporting performances, but ultimately the film rests all on him and the movie’s visual stylings (which make very good use of some icebergs). It’s a spellbinding, deeply moving experience that affects us all the more because it’s incredibly true.     1. ZODIAC

This is one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen in my life, and it’s not even a horror movie. Only a handful of scenes are even attempting suspense. There are no jump scares. (Okay, there may be one.) There’s not an excess of blood or gore, and the killer is seen in, what? Less than 5% of the film? Even the DVD extras scared the shit out of me.

That’s because it’s a true story. These murders actually happened. The way it went down is fucked up and perplexing and contradictory the way only real life can be. At this point, maybe it’s unlikely that the Zodiac killer is still jaunting around the Bay Area, but he could be, because they never caught him definitively. In fact, we have no idea how many Zodiac killers there are. Maybe one. Maybe several. Hell, maybe I’m a Zodiac killer!

(Spoiler alert: I am not now, nor have I ever been, a Zodiac killer.)

Movies have taught us a great deal about serial killers. They have tidy motives sprung from traumatic childhoods; they are masterminds willing to spend years planning and executing flawless crimes; their diabolical patterns can be unlocked by collecting roughly three clues, all of which were right there all along. But Zodiac teaches us something else — that everything we’ve learned from movies is wrong.

No stranger to darkness and depravity, David Fincher delivers his most mature and accomplished film to date, a complex mystery that painstakingly examines the false leads, dead ends, and twists and turns of a real investigation. A journalist, a police detective, and (yes) a cartoonist team up, represented by the A-list acting dream team of Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo, and Jake Gyllenhaal (it’s a pretty easy-on-the-eyes lineup). The investigation unravels them all in different ways, and this emotional toll is as integral to the story as the cold-blooded killings themselves.

Which is not to say that the handful of scenes depicting the Zodiac’s shooting and stabbing are not effective. They make Fincher’s Se7en look like Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, and not because they’re more gruesome or numerous, but because they play out like real killings. No killer has actually executed people as artfully as the madman in Se7en. Real murder, I imagine, plays out much more as it does in Zodiac, with an unsettling randomness. A few of the victims don’t even die, which is almost more chilling. And since they never caught the guy (that we know of), there’s no Psycho-like final scene that explains why. These murders are administered by a villain who is all the more terrifying because of what we don’t learn about his psychopathic state of mind.

Oh, and P.S.: I wasn’t kidding about those DVD extras. If you think this movie is disturbing, wait until you watch the interviews with real-life people who encountered the Zodiac. These are currently the only bonus features I have forbidden myself from watching when home alone.

*

I’m tempted to post my review of Mad Max: Fury Road as a series of questions that popped into my head while watching it, but I won’t do that. It’s an early summer blockbuster that is being hailed by many critics as a masterpiece. Some have called it one of the most revolutionary action movies of recent years. There’s certainly something distinctive about it — that much is true. You can tell that just from looking at the pictures.

More than anything, Mad Max: Fury Road has reminded me that moviegoing is a subjective experience. One man’s Speed is another man’s Speed 2: Cruise Control. (I’m probably one of few people who actually likes Speed 2: Cruise Control, and prefers it to Mad Max: Fury Road, but let’s not go there.) Some people can sit through a film and find it wild and daring and completely innovative, while someone else — like, say, me — can sit there and be bored and frustrated all the while.

We all bring a little something different with us into a theater, and we all take a little something different home with us when we leave. Some leave with the treasure, some leave with the empty box that it came in. I was hoping to be exhilarated and dazzled by Mad Max: Fury Road, and from what I saw and heard of the film before its release, I had every reason to expect to be. So what happened?

Mad Max: Fury Road is a movie, I guess. At least, it contains some of the things that movies tend to have in them — driving, explosions, movie stars. It also lacks some critical aspects of most movies, such as a plot and characters. The end credits reveal a lot of cool character names, but I had no idea who any of them were, since few are mentioned by name and we rarely get a moment to bond with one of them. Even Mad Max himself pointedly doesn’t share his name until the very end — and that’s the one character I did know.

Quick question: I get the Max part, because that’s his name — but why is he Mad? He’s actually the most reasonable guy in the movie.

(I guess you can’t build an action franchise around a guy called Level-Headed Larry, though.)

The part of Max is performed by Tom Hardy — I won’t say played by, because there doesn’t seem to be a character to play. The Max character is basically a series of crazy stunts, with occasional breaks for squinting. Max is haunted by… something involving a little bugged-out CGI girl. Given that this is a dystopia, we can imagine that whatever it is wasn’t all sugar and spice and everything nice, but lacking any context, it’s mainly just there to trip us out. At first, Max only wants to escape enslavement by some other bugged-out-looking people, who feed off his blood for… well, there might be a reason. The main one we follow is played by Nicholas Hoult. Like Max, he changes his mind about wanting to help people at a certain point, without much exploration of how or why. There’s no time for that.Mad Max: Fury Road is basically a commute. Its characters all go driving in one direction for an hour, stop for a while, and then go driving back in the other direction. It has about as much story as your average traffic jam. The characters are all either hideously ugly or stunningly beautiful, which makes us wonder how much work it must be to keep up those supermodel good looks in a post-apocalyptic world. The characters are heading somewhere called “the Green Place,” but they should probably stay put wherever they are if they have the supplies to look like Victoria’s Secret angels.

I’m not here to nitpick George Miller’s apocalypse, though — mainly because, if I kept going, I’d never stop. You can ask a thousand questions about how this world does or doesn’t make sense — and I’d argue, it mostly doesn’t — but that’s not a fun way to watch a movie like this. I can forgive many leaps in logic as long as the movie gives me something to invest in, but in my eyes, Mad Max: Fury Road should instead be subtitled Mad Max And The Mystery Of The Missing First Act. As many movies do, Mad Max: Fury Road jumps right into the action, but unlike most movies, it never goes back to orient us in anything resembling a story. Despite the decidedly masculine title, Mad Max: Fury Road asks us to place most of our interest in the women on screen — first and foremost, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), whose parents must have really wanted her to be an action heroine with a name like that. (No ballet lessons for Imperator Furiosa!) Then, a quintet of hotties (the aforementioned Angels) who are only distinguishable by their hair color and very vaguely distinguished personalities, like Spice Girls. (Seriously, we’ve got Ginger Spice, Scared Spice, Having A Baby Spice, and… I honestly couldn’t tell you anything about the other two.) Finally, there’s a gang of badass grannies — cool in concept, but also pretty indistinguishable from each other, and mostly here to up the body count for the third act.

Imperator Furiosa and the Holograms are on the run from a bad guy named Immortan Joe, whose main villainous quality is that he’s very ugly. We never see him actually do anything to threaten or harm these characters, until they’re all on the run and everyone from Column A is trying to kill everyone from Column B anyway (and vice versa). Immortan Joe is apparently in charge of some kind of water supply he occasionally likes to spray at people, but how much water is there and where does it come from? Is he being stingy, or does it make sense to ration it in, you know, a bone dry apocalyptic desert? The heroes’ plan, in the end, is to just turn all the water on at full blast and let it spray everywhere and seep into the desert, which doesn’t seem like a very good idea. It made me wonder if, five minutes after the movie ends, they all run out of water and realize they probably should have used it more sparingly. (Immortan Joe was right all along!)In the end, overthrowing Immortan Joe’s evil power regime is astoundingly easy and probably required zero driving. (An old lady in the first few minutes of the movie could’ve done it if she was just a little less terrible at shooting.) A lot of water is wasted, which is celebrated as a good thing. We have no clue what will happen next, because the rules of this world have not been established. We know nothing about what Imperator Furiosa and Mad Max will do now, because we didn’t really know what they were doing in the first place. Imperator Furiosa claims she wants “redemption,” but aside from being kidnapped from the Green Place a while ago, it’s unclear what she’s been up to that she needs to be redeemed of. About Max, we know even less. Maybe he’ll go see what that googly-eyed girl is up to. (Except she seems kinda dead.)

There are several jarring CGI effects that feel at odds with the rest of the movie: a phony-looking sandstorm, the unconvincing nighttime effect that basically just dyes everything blue. It’s enough to make one wish Miller had stuck to his guns more in favoring practical effects — so much of the movie looks so good that when it looks bad, it looks terrible.

That’s true of the world-building as well — what’s good is so good that it only highlights the weaknesses all the more. As dazzling as the visuals are most of the time, so much of this world is underimagined, leaving an endless parade of basic questions unanswered. Such as: if resources are so limited, what do these people eat? (Max takes a bite out of a lizard at one point, but I have a hard time imagining that’s the most viable sustenance available.) If these people don’t get any water, how can they survive? This doesn’t feel like a world anyone could survive in for five minutes, let alone however long it’s been since the apocalypse. Gas is scarce, but apparently more abundant than everything else, given all the driving. How? (I will spare you any questions pertaining to the baddie playing an electric guitar suspended from a truck, though plenty arose.)It’s not that I need the answer to every question that popped into my head. A little mystery is great! Too much exposition can be even worse than not enough. But for all the sound and fury of Fury Road, there’s nothing to care about. No real characters, and no story. Grand scale epics work best when we can identify with some aspect of what the protagonists are going through, and there was none of that here, because I’ve never been in a car chase. That’s all this is. We never saw where these people came from, we have no idea what they really want out of life. We know nothing about them, except that they’re probably really thirsty. (For all the business about water, though, we don’t actually see any of them lusting for hydration.) The movie is incredibly spare with dialogue, particularly of the conversational kind, and that’s fine. Imperator Furiosa has an immediate goal that’s clear enough — to get these women to safety — but we still don’t know why she cares whether they live or die. Or why she picked today to try. Why now? Where did the sudden desire for redemption come from, all of a sudden? And, given how erratic her plan is, are we sure these ladies weren’t better off where they were before?

(Had this movie had a first act, it might have shown us that these women were, in fact, not better off in the clutches of Immortan Joe. As is, we have no idea.)

As for Max, well… I defy anyone to come up with a single adjective to describe his character.

(No, “mad” doesn’t count.)

A lot of action movies these days have similar problems — barely-there characterizations, plot holes, a serious favoring of style over substance. The trouble is, I didn’t expect Mad Max: Fury Road to be one of them. George Miller clearly knows how to stage an enthralling action scene, and in concert with the cinematography by John Seale, the visuals are mesmerizing. On a technical level, Mad Max: Fury Road is exquisitely crafted. The film has a visionary quality that lingers in the brain like a fever dream — but so what? I didn’t care. The characters are as deep in the movie as they are on the poster. The stakes? If these characters die, then… they’re not alive anymore. (And many of them do die, with no emotional consequence.) There’s a lot of driving, but they’re going nowhere; a lot of stuff that would be super cool, if only it made any sense.

For my money, I found Miller’s Babe: Pig In The City a more thrilling and visionary film. (And not an entirely dissimilar one.) It had sharply-defined characters and a real narrative to go along with arresting action and enticing visuals. (Yes, I’m being serious.) We knew where that pig came from, where he was, and where he wanted to be… and why.

Some will call Mad Max: Fury Road George Miller’s masterpiece, and I will say he peaked with Babe: Pig In The City.

Like I said, we all come in and come away with different things when we visit the movies. Keep your sound and fury, and I’ll keep my adorable piglet, and we’ll all be happy.

*

Continuing my retroactive Top 10 lists, this one takes us back to 2006, originally published in my “Confessions of a Dangerous Film Student” column in INsite Boston.

“Black Gold: Darkness Reigns During Awards Season”

I like fun. I promise.

But when it comes to selecting the year’s best movies, I’m not much for sunshine and puppy dogs — I’m all about drama. Whereas the Academy is more likely to recognize reasonably safe, audience-friendly films — you know, the ones that won’t send aging voters to the ER — the movies I reward tend to challenge and enlighten in ways Dreamgirls wouldn’t dream of.

So yes, this list is dark. It has a high body count. The films that aren’t death-centric revolve around drug addiction, pedophilia, or statutory rape instead. But considering how few of the silver screen’s pitch-black gems get the gold they deserve, it’s only fair that I recognize their murky genius here.

So without further ado… from out of the shadows rise my Top Ten Films Of The Year!!

10. NOTES ON A SCANDAL

Helen Mirren may be the critic’s darling for her cool portrayal of The Queen, but those who like their dames less regal should make note of Judi Dench’s icy turn in Notes On A Scandal. Dame Judi is positively nasty as Barbara Covett, a spinster school marm who takes a fancy to the hot new teacher on the scene, Sheba Hart. Covett both befriends and resents the younger teacher, especially as Sheba begins an affair with a studly student.

It’s wicked fun to hear the usually-mannered Dench rattle off nasty zingers from Patrick Marber’s script, contained in the diary that acts as Covett’s co-conspirator, as she convinces herself that she’s doing Sheba a favor when really, she’s lording power over her with the mistaken belief that this can somehow end in some happy romance. As usual, Blanchett makes for an alluring foil who imbues Sheba with layers of complexity. While it’s all fun enough to be one of the lighter entries on my list, we do have infidelity, blackmail, and age-inappropriate sex, which all results in a scandalously satisfying viewing experience.9. CASINO ROYALE

Sorry, Pierce Brosnan, but Daniel Craig makes your 007 look like 003 and a half, tops. The recasting of one of the world’s most iconic film roles is only the first aspect that makes Martin Campbell’s James Bond remake feel like a totally fresh franchise. For quite some time now, 007 films have been rather silly affairs, with the Bond girls and the dastardly plots only a few steps removed from their parodies in the Austin Powers movies. (That’s what you get when you cast Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist named Christmas Jones.)

Sure, Casino Royale is as slick and diverting as any prior Bond film, enough to satisfy purists. But it’s also smart enough to modernize Bond for a more progressive era with savvier-than-average Bond girls (welcome to the club, Eva Green) and a dapper but less smarmy Bond (notice that a buffed-up Craig is the one now climbing voluptuously out of the water). By getting gritty with the torture and making James a realistic, vulnerable human being, for once (gasp!), Casino Royale goes deeper and darker than any other Bond has previously dared, shaking our nerves while stirring our emotions. Let’s have another round! (As if there were any danger that they’d suddenly stop making Bond films after this.) It’s only fitting that the rare Bond film that would make my Top 10 list is also probably the darkest 007 to date…8. VOLVER

Being an Almodovar film, Volver isn’t exactly dark — it carries the director’s trademark quirkiness and colorful cinematography — but it also centers around a woman who returns from the dead shortly after her granddaughter kills her sexually abusive stepfather, so it ain’t Dora The Explorer either. Penelope Cruz is Raimunda, a woman who is busy dealing with her aunt’s death, her teen daughter, multiple jobs, and then her husband’s body after he’s been stabbed and left for dead on the kitchen floor. Raimunda treats this as just one more pesky task on her “To Do” list, and she doesn’t yet know that her mother has reappeared from beyond the grave and become her sister’s new roommate.

Even moreso than most of his films, Almodovar posits Volver as a love letter to strong and vibrant women — there are almost no male characters of any significance, especially after the pervy stepdad is out of the way. Cruz is so good in this Spanish-language delight, you’ll never want to hear her speak English again! (And I mean that in a nice way.)7. THE DEPARTED

Packed with the likes of DiCaprio, Damon, Nicholson, Wahlberg, (Martin) Sheen, and (Alec) Baldwin, it’s almost shocking to see so much A-list talent on screen in one place in The Departed… especially since, true to its title, nearly everyone bids us a bloody adieu. The Departed is a nasty piece of work, even by Scorsese standards, with a seriously grim outlook dressed up as a slick studio thriller. The premise couldn’t be any more high-concept, with DiCaprio’s Billy Costigan going undercover as an Irish gangster to try and bring down Nicholson’s crime lord Frank Costello, who has himself planted Damon’s Colin within the police force.

The Departed gives us the ultimate domino effect of double crosses and at least one seriously shocking death scene. But Scorsese is the master of violently dispatching great actors, so here, as always, we hate to see ‘em go, but we love to watch ‘em leave. If it doesn’t quite reach the annals of classic cinema the way Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and GoodFellas did, that’s only because Scorsese’s landmark in the past is so incomparable. It’s easily his best since GoodFellas, clear proof that Scorsese can still deliver the nasty goods when he wants to.6. THE FOUNTAIN

The Fountain is a lush, romantic story about eternal love, but don’t worry — it’s about death, too. (And thus, more than worthy of being on my downer Top 10 list.) Darren Aronofsky doubles down on the bombastic bleakness he wrought in Requiem For A Dream in this tale of a terminally ill woman (Rachel Weisz) and the husband (Hugh Jackman) who is desperately seeking a cure for her. Jackman also portrays a conquistador exploring new lands for Queen Isabella, as well as a lonely man traveling through space in the distant future, with only a tree as his companion.

Yes, The Fountain is ambitious enough to take place in the past, present, and future, and the budget is much lower than you might expect it to be in spite of its dazzling cinematography and special effects. With its sprawling timeline, fractured structure, and an overflow of Big Ideas, The Fountain is not for everyone, but Jackson and Weisz turn in astonishingly emotive performances and the film is equally unafraid of being overwrought. Rare is the love story that is really more enamored of our obsession with eternal life, but Aronofsky was obviously the right man for the job.5. PAN’S LABYRINTH

A young girl discovers she’s the lost princess of a magic land… sounds light, right?  Well, Pan’s Labyrinth is the only fairy tale in recent memory to also depict a man’s face being bashed in with a wine bottle, so don’t bring the kids.

It’s been a long time since we saw a cinematic fantasyland as richly imagined as this. And probably even longer since we saw one so devastating. Pan’s Labyrinth takes the “it was all a dream” trope of family-friendly flicks like The Wizard Of Oz a few steps further, presenting a real world we can really understand wanting to dream a life away from. Guillermo Del Toro creates a dazzling fantasy world to offset the cold, cruel real one — and when his young heroine retreats into her imagination, we’re as relieved as she is to get away from the brutality. As fantastic as his fictional monsters are, Pan’s Labyrinth reminds us that these created creatures are only born to help us deal with the real ones.4. LITTLE CHILDREN

Don’t let the innocuous title fool you — Little Children deals with some very grown-up subject matter, and though it’s less death-drenched than most of my list, it’s definitely not for children.

Two restless parents meet cute on a playground (Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson, both incredible) and begin a torrid bout of adultery. That’s pretty lurid on its own. But Little Children also centers on a child molester living with his doting mother (Jackie Earle Haley and Phyllis Somerville, equally incredible). These damaged characters give into their base desires just like — yep! — the titular lil’ kids. It’s a funny, moving, and somewhat disturbing portrait of the suburban underbelly from the man who gave us In The Bedroom. Even the steamy sex scenes between two incredibly attractive actors can’t distract us from the unsettling themes.3. HALF NELSON

Ryan Gosling gives it his all as Half Nelson’s charismatic inner-city teacher, striving to steer his students toward the straight and narrow. But this is not your average feel-good scholastic flick. The difference? Here, teach has a major heroin problem, thus his every encouraging word is laced with hypocrisy. Fun!

We’ve seen plenty of films about how inner city youth are in need of a little TLC, and there’s usually a benevolent educator there to shine a guiding light. Half Nelson gives us the flip side, presenting the teacher as the fuck-up who may never get things right, while allowing us to instill our hope in the next generation (which is the whole point of education). Shareeka Epps more than holds her own as the precocious student who knows teacher’s dirty little secret. The result is a heartbreaking look at how sometimes, the people we look to for guidance are the ones most in need of intervention.2. CHILDREN OF MEN

Much of the Earth’s population has fallen victim to war and famine. And if that’s not bad enough, all of humanity is about to go the way of the dodo. Yes, Children Of Men absolutely belongs on this downbeat list. Fans of Y Tu Mama Tambien already knew Alfonso Cuaron was a terrific filmmaker, but with Children Of Men, he confirmed more: he’s one of the best. Ever.

In a not-too-distant future, women have become infertile. There are no more children. Clive Owen is just one of many sad sacks waiting out human extinction. There is no hope… until radical ex-lover Julianne Moore pops back into his life, with some big news: one woman in all the world is pregnant.

Shocking in moments, painful in others, and tender just when we need a break from the tension, every note Cuaron strikes in Children Of Men is electrifying in ways that bear comparison to the best of Kubrick and Spielberg. Through long takes and otherwise expert filmmaking, he builds the suspense to an almost unbearable degree and delivers a truly surprising moment of violence that tells us all bets are off in this sci-fi dystopia. His apocalyptic tomorrowland feels all too real — it’s one glimpse into the future that actually feels like it could be coming. (But let’s hope not.)1. UNITED 93

No need to explain why this one’s a downer. With 9/11 still very present in the public consciousness, it’s questionable whether we needed a cinematic reminder. But thanks to Paul Greengrass’ riveting, documentary-like approach, United 93 does right what Oliver Stone’s sappy, malfocused World Trade Center did not  — it strips away the politics and aftermath of that fateful day and takes us back to that moment when our generation faced true global terror for the first time. A moment that changed so much forever.

The filmmaking is remarkably invisible, following men and women doing their jobs, going about their business, on a day that begins like any other ordinary day, with no one (but a handful of terrorists) aware that historic events have been set in motion. It’s as if a documentary crew just so happened to be in the right place to capture the action.

With subject matter as monumental as this, Greengrass had the right instinct — go small. Give us the details, and let us fill in what we already know about what’s happening. As the second plane hits, we read on the characters’ faces the devastating disbelief that this is actually happening; as we’re stranded aboard the titular flight in the film’s final act, we feel everything the passengers do. But in a way, we did already.

The brilliance of United 93 is that it approaches September 11 with attention to detail that, anywhere else, would be boring; it focuses on nondescript, everyday individuals to capture our collective horror. We’ve been on planes. We’ve been at work during a crisis. (Though certainly a lesser crisis.) And we were there on 9/11, seeing an unspeakable event unfold on our TV screens.

Many have shied away from this upsetting masterpiece, but it’s their loss — watching United 93 subjects us to terror and despair, sure, but it’s terror and despair we were already subjected to in real life. I can understand not wanting to relive it. But what United 93 does is allow us to process the fear and the grief — not alone, but together. We experience the strength and courage of the passengers in those final moments. Presenting these events to us with as little razzle-dazzle and embellishment as is possible in a narrative feature film, United 93 is a rare, powerful, and cathartic masterpiece in which we not only bear witness to a historic event, but are allowed to become a part of it. United, indeed.*

(A “Then & Now” perspective.)

This Top 10 is actually a 20, because sometimes ten just isn’t enough.

Actually, it’s because that’s how I wrote it back when it was originally published a decade ago, and if I’m bothering to re-post it I may as well re-post the whole thing, right?

This stop on my time-traveling Top Ten tour takes us back ten years to 2005, to what is probably my most controversial #1 pick ever. (And also one of the most controversial Best Picture winners of an Academy Award ever, too.) I won’t spoil it here, but if you’re familiar with the year (and my tastes), then you probably know it already.

And you know what? I still stand by that choice a decade later. Looking back on these lists sometimes make me want to rearrange things, and occasionally makes me want to omit a choice entirely in favor of something else. Something that seems great in the moment doesn’t always stand the test of time. There are movies on this list — and any list — that don’t end up provoking much thought down the line, that I never bothered to watch again, while others are still as viscerally amazing now as they ever were and have been rewatched several times since.

Of course, picking the best films of any given year is not an exact science, especially when you’re in the moment, rather than looking back on the year with some context at a future date. So, on that note, you’ll read what I had to say about each film then, and I’ve also decided to include notes at the bottom of each entry explaining what my relationship to the film is now, and how my opinion may have differed.

Got it? Okay. Let’s go back in time.

*

(I still think this is Apatow’s best work.)

9. MATCH POINT
There’s something very sexy about Nola (Scarlett Johansson). More than her husky voice, more than her smoldering looks, more than that predatory confidence she displays, there’s a vulnerability behind it all that makes her irresistible (though we all know it’d be much wiser to resist her). Chris (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) certainly sees it, and if he’s a little sketchy as a character it’s because we’re meant to identify with him as he marries into the lifestyle of the rich and fabulous. That lifestyle, of course, comes at a price — the price being that his wife is too perfect, and things are a bit tedious when he’s with her. He wants her upper crust life but can’t identify with it — instead, he identifies with the similarly-classed Nola, and fixates upon her.Match Point is a movie about wanting what we can’t have — or at least shouldn’t have, for then we must pay the price… and Allen is clever enough to know that even acceptance from the mighty isn’t quite enough to ever belong. That is the basis for the fatal attraction between Chris and Nola. The well-to-do are completely clueless about the ambitions and desires of the have-nots in this movie, and it’s just as well — they’d rather not know. Certainly one of Woody Allen’s darkest films, this one displays his long-dormant talent for compelling characters and sharp dialogue. Gone is the typical neurotic, rambling Woody character he often portrays himself, though Chris is not too far off — chasing an ideal. The difference is, Chris is ruthless enough to have it, whereas Woody never has been. ‘Til now.(I haven’t revisited this film in a long time, though it did mark an important turning point for Allen. He still misses as often as he hits, but he’s made a few very worthwhile films in the vein of this one, whereas his frothier comedies are not usually so compelling.) 

8. THE SQUID AND THE WHALE

This film is a good film, but the title is probably the only reason why it’s on my Top 10. It is the reason I went to see the movie. Don’t get me wrong — the film is good enough to belong on this list, and that is partly because its title so neatly defines what this movie is about — a clash of the titans. To outsiders, the spats between Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney would seem nothing more than lovers’ quarrels between two people who are no longer right for each other, but experienced through the eyes of their two sons, their battles are epic, larger than life.

The Squid And The Whale gives each member of the family equal consideration, and equal importance—somehow we see things through the naive eyes of its adolescent protagonists and also see the truth beyond what they can see in the thick of things. The parents are flawed people who make real mistakes, and this is the unusual film that does not ask us to like or dislike them as people. The same is true of the children. There are no conclusions to be drawn from this simple, honest, truthfully-acted film, and no lessons to be learned. It is merely a study of a family falling apart and coming together, again and again, the way real families do.

(Sorry to be redundant, but I haven’t seen this one again either. I’ve really enjoyed some of Baumbach’s subsequent work, though — Frances Ha in particular — so I’d love to go back and revisit this.)

7. GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK.

There’s quite a lot left out of Good Night, And Good Luck that most writers would have included — the film almost feels too slight for its own good. But George Clooney’s luminous drama about the McCarthy era depicts what is on screen just right — complete with fine acting and a convincing atmosphere, all in glorious black and white. David Strathairn’s performance is certainly Oscar caliber, and the shadowy cinematography sublimely reflects a society scared into silence.

Journalism is the central character in this film, with real news footage edited into the film’s depiction of behind-the-scenes politics at CBS, and at the end we feel grateful for bold journalists like Edward R. Murrow. Without their opposition the course of our nation might have been dramatically altered… and we’d never see a movie like this.

(This is still the peak of George Clooney’s career as a director, although he’s certainly made himself a staple at the Oscars one way or another ever since. That said, this film is not discussed often, and I’m guessing that the look and Straitharn’s performance remain its most notable attributes.)

 

6. A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

The film’s title could very well speak for the career of the film’s director, David Cronenberg, who also has a history of weirdness in his films… and this one is no exception. The world in A History of Violence is just this side of reality, though its dramatization of the innate violence inside us is utterly truthful. Viggo Mortensen portrays Tom Stall, a man who has successfully contained the aggression within — until a holdup at his diner compels him to kill again.

That one act of violence, though in self-defense, triggers a chain of further bloodshed… people act out in ways they didn’t expect of themselves, unleashing inner demons they didn’t know they had. Tom’s son gets into fights at school, Tom and his wife engage in some very aggressive love-making… it’s not just the heroes and villains who’ve got a history of violence here. For delving deeper and darker into these characters than most stories would, A History of Violence is one of the year’s most compelling films. Is it better to confront our true nature or deny it and live in a contained harmony?, the films asks, but never quite answers.

(I still haven’t caught up with most of Cronenberg’s early work, but I’ve seen every one of his films since this one, and I always appreciate the off-kilter weirdness he brings to stories that could be much more straightforward in other hands… he ended up on my 2014 Top Ten, too. This is still probably his best film of the bunch.)

5. BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN

It’s ironic that such a quiet, introspective film has received so much publicity for its unapologetic portrayal of a homosexual relationship. Ennis and Jack certainly wouldn’t want such a fuss. Brokeback Mountain, in fact, should be applauded for how revolutionary it isn’t — it makes no compromises for the fact that its romantic leads are men, nor does it add anything to the story that wouldn’t be necessary if it was a romance between Heath Ledger and Maggie Gyllenhaal. It is like any other story of doomed lovers, and the combination of the time, the place, and their gender just happens to be what keeps them apart.

As directed by jack of all genres Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain uses the ambling pace and wide-open, spartan iconography of typical Westerns to ground the story, leaving all traces of progressiveness to the media coverage. Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger are both convincing, thankfully without “playing gay.” Much is made of Brokeback Mountain being a love story, and it is… but I prefer to think of it as a buddy movie with benefits.

(Brokeback Mountain is still iconic, largely because Ledger passed away just a couple years later, and this was his defining performance up until The Dark Knight won him an Oscar posthumously. It’s both a romance and a tragedy, an important sign of its time, when homosexual pairings were still viewed much more suspiciously than they are now. It’s kind of amazing to view this movie as a response to that, and see how different things are just a decade later. That said, I never thought this movie should have won Best Picture, though it certainly would have been more symbolically significant.)

 

4. WALK THE LINE

Joaquin Phoneix’s performance may be less showy than Jamie Foxx’s Academy Award-winning turn in Ray last year, but that’s part of what makes Walk The Line such a great film. Phoenix embodies Johnny Cash so naturally, you forget you’re watching a biopic… you’re watching a fascinating character who just happens to come up with some of the greatest country songs ever recorded along the way. Sure, the typical musician biopic staples are in place — childhood trauma, disapproving parents, womanizing, drug abuse — but what helps Walk The Line rise above that is that, at heart, it’s a real love story between two dynamic people (and not just checking the “love story” box off the biopic checklist).

Reese Witherspoon shows off her acting chops as June Carter, an equally compelling character who is afraid to be with Johnny for the same reasons she loves him. The songs featured in the movie are not just placed there because Johnny Cash sang them, but are actually fueled by June and Johnny’s relationship; they help move the story along. It’s refreshing to see a movie about a musician that seems like it would exist even without the iconic artist in question. Walk The Line contains not only love for Johnny Cash the musician, but who Johnny Cash was a man — lonely, brooding, and one of a kind.

(This movie gets a bit of flack for being too biopic-y, but I still love it. I wouldn’t want to take Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Oscar away, given his untimely death, but I do prefer Phoenix’s performance as Johnny Cash.)

3. MUNICH

Munich is no Schindler’s List, and that’s one of the best things that can be said about it. Though the heavy subject matter isn’t far from his 1993 masterwork, Spielberg does not attempt to recreate or outdo his Oscar-sweeping triumph and instead delivers a taut thriller that resonates with moral ambiguity to prove that, even as the best-known filmmaker of the past several decades, he’s still maturing as a storyteller.

Munich takes place in 1972 but, even better, feels like it was made back then, when studios spent big money to let autuers tell large-scale, lengthy masterpieces (and people went to see them). We empathize with the assassins in Munich, though we do not necessarily believe what they are doing is right, or what anyone is doing is right. The characters sometimes question whether what their actions are helpful, without questioning whether or not they should carry them out. Violence begets more violence, vengeance begets more vengeance, and at the end there is not more peace, but more bodies. There is no trace of the too-saccharine Spielbergian ending that marred this year’s otherwise-excellent War of the Worlds… there is no conclusion at all, the only fitting ending to a story with so many wrongs and no right.

(This film holds up pretty well in Spielberg’s canon, a cut above more recent efforts like War Horse and Lincoln. It’s his best film in the last decade, though I’d like to see him outdo it, since it’s still not amongst his top five or maybe then top ten.)

2. MYSTERIOUS SKIN

While Brokeback Mountain will go down in history as 2005’s groundbreaking gay love story, Gregg Araki’s haunting, little-seen Mysterious Skin is, for my money, edgier, deeper, and far more affecting. In the film, two eight-year old boys are molested by their Little League coach one summer; by the time the boys are 18, one of them is a prostitute while the other has convinced himself the “missing hours” from his life are attributed to an alien abduction. Neil and Brian don’t know each other; the film tells their stories separately until Brian begins to remember another boy who may have been “abducted” too.

The film covers all its bases without resorting to tired cliches about sexual abuse — from what we know about Neil, it was almost inevitable he’d become a hooker with or without his coach’s influence. He remembers that summer fondly. Brian, however, internalizes his trauma to the point of asexuality. By showing us two widely contrasting characters dealing with the same trauma, the film wisely avoids an oversimplified, after-school special mentality. Araki is fearless, delving into the film’s darkest material headfirst to show how a sexual predator might charm his way into the life of a boy under the guise of a father figure.

The performances by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbett are some of the best this year. Gordon-Levitt, in particular, should be commended for making what might have been a teen-whore caricature real and vulnerable. When the boys finally meet again in the film’s haunting final scene, it suggests that the most intriguing, most hopeful part of this story lies just beyond the closing credits — we can only imagine how their lives unwind from here. The need they have for each other at that moment is far greater than love and certainly not motivated by sexual orientation — it’s something even Ennis and Jack could envy.

(I still think this is one of the great underrated indies of the past decade. My admiration has only grown. It was the first real display of Gordon-Levitt’s chops, which have been much heralded since, though I wish Araki would make another film that lives up to this one.)

1. CRASH

Everyone’s a little bit racist. Cowriter/director Paul Haggis takes this hot-button issue so head-on, some critics and moviegoers felt sideswiped… and listening to lovers and haters try to defend their Crash position is one of the year’s best cinematic debates. In any event, that this is one of the most divisive films of the year only proves that Crash is doing something right.

Crash, like many films before it, takes a group of barely-connected strangers and weaves them together on a string of coincidences — here, the forum is race relations in Los Angeles. What many of its detractors missed is that Crash is a metaphor — the characters say blatant, bigoted things to people of other races, things that are often left implied but unsaid in today’s PC world. They’re speaking what is unspoken… the characters experience the world not the way it is, but the way it seems.

Take the film’s most powerful scene, during which a black woman (Thandie Newton) is trapped in a burning car, and a white police officer (Matt Dillon) tries to save her. She tells him to go away — why? Because this is the man who molested and humiliated her the night before. It is unlikely that the exact same man who harassed the woman less than 24 hours ago would find himself pulling her out of a burning vehicle, but it is very likely that the woman, having just been violated by a white policeman, would refuse help from a white officer even when her life depends on it. But during this crucial moment, a new relationship is formed… she is a person who needs help, he is a person who can help her. In a matter of life and death, both put aside their preconceptions and do what most people, no matter how bigoted, would. They fight to preserve human life.

Some call Crash preachy because the white officer “learns something” in this scene — but who could come so close to death and learn nothing? Does he feel guilt now for molesting this woman the night before? Probably. Does it change his life? Does it make him a nicer person afterward? We don’t know, but I bet not. Crash expertly does what it sets out to do, and it is a touching, funny, suspenseful, scary, tragic, superbly acted, beautifully shot, and balanced film, with not one but two of the most emotionally affecting scenes in a movie this year. I could speak volumes more praise for Crash, but suffice to say you either buy into it or you don’t. Trust me on this, though… those of us who do are the lucky ones.

(Yep, I still really enjoy Crash, and I’m still on board with it winning Best Picture in this roster. While it gets a bad rap for highlighting flaws in the Academy, people tend to forget it was a tiny-budget indie that would ordinarily fly under the radar, and it’s kind of amazing that such a small movie could soar to such heights. I find that inspiring, to be honest. I still find myself defending Crash all the time. Every time I watch it, the emotional beats always land just right… except one, involving Ryan Phillippe’s character. I think the film is very misunderstood, and in terms of Best Picture winners, there are certainly more egregious upsets in the years since… Argo and The King’s Speech, for starters.)

*

And now, my awards for the actors, writers, and directors. These awards aren’t wildly original this year. A lot of my picks are already the frontrunners in their races, or at least in the running. A year in which the most deserving people actually get awarded? It’s crazy!

  

BEST ACTOR
Joaquin Phoenix, Walk The Line
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote
David Strathairn, Good Night, and Good Luck.
Heath Ledger, Brokeback Mountain
Jeff Daniels, The Squid and the Whale

BEST ACTRESS
Felicity Huffman, Transamerica
Reese Witherspoon, Walk The Line
Q’Orianka Kilcher, The New World
Laura Linney, The Squid and the Whale
Joan Allen, The Upside of Anger

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Paul Giamatti, Cinderella Man
Terrence Howard, Crash
Brady Corbet, Mysterious Skin
Matt Dillon, Crash
Jake Gyllenhaal, Brokeback Mountain

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Catherine Keener, Capote
Scarlett Johansson, Match Point
Thandie Newton, Crash
Rachel Weisz, The Constant Gardener
Amy Adams, Junebug

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Crash – Paul Haggis
Match Point – Woody Allen
The Squid and the Whale – Noah Baumbach
Nine Lives – Rodrigo Garcia
Me And You And Everyone We Know – Miranda July

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Munich – Tony Kushner
Brokeback Mountain – Larry McMurtry & Diana Ossana
Mysterious Skin – Gregg Araki
The Constant Gardener – Jeffrey Caine
A History of Violence – Josh Olson

BEST ENSEMBLE CAST
Crash
Good Night, And Good Luck.
Me And You And Everyone We Know
Happy Endings
Munich

*

And in case that wasn’t enough, here’s every movie I saw from 2005 in order of greatness (or suckability, as we get toward the bottom).

2005 MOVIES

(in descending order)

1. Crash
2. Mysterious Skin
3. Munich
4. Walk The Line
5. Broke back Mountain
6. A History of Violence
7. Good Night, and Good Luck.
8. The Squid and the Whale
9. Match Point
10. The 40-Year-Old Virgin
11. Cinderella Man
12. Serenity
13. Transamerica
14. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
15. Happy Endings
16. The Constant Gardener
17. Me and You and Everyone We Know
18. Nine Lives
19. Hustle & Flow
20. The New World
21. Junebug
22. Red Eye
23. Cache (Hidden)
24. Mr. & Mrs. Smith
25. Syriana
26. In Her Shoes
27. Capote
28. An American Haunting
29. Ripley Under Ground
30. War of the Worlds
31. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
32. Jarhead
33. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
34. King Kong
35. November
36. The Island
37. My Summer of Love
38. March of the Penguins
39. Sin City
40. Memoirs of a Geisha
41. Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride
42. The Upside of Anger
43. Batman Begins
44. Proof
45. Dark Water
46. The Interpreter
47. Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic
48. Gunner Palace
49. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
50. Rent
51. Kontroll
52. The Family Stone
53. Prime
54. Dear Frankie
55. Sahara
56. Pretty Persuasion
57. Hitch
58. Tell Them Who You Are
59. Flightplan
60. The Libertine
61. Winter Solstice
62. Monster-in-Law
63. Four Brothers
64. Dot the I
65. The Wedding Crashers
66. Just Like Heaven
67. Dust to Glory
68. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
69. Be Cool

*

If you’d told me before the fact that a movie about male strippers starring Matthew McConaughey and Channing Tatum would have been amongst my top five films of 2012, I may not have believed you, except for one key fact — the movie was directed by Steven Soderbergh, who tends to elevate could-be lowbrow material above and beyond expectations.

The first Magic Mike was, seemingly, an anomaly — a relatively light-hearted summer crowd-pleaser with real substance beneath the surface. Shedding genre conventions like rip-away pants, underneath the fairly straightforward plot beats of your average frustrated dancer movie, you could find both hard bodies in thongs and a pretty astute treatise on American economics — a tragedy about the working class. (Yes, seriously.)

Magic Mike XXL jettisons the All About Eve-esque plot machinations of the first film (as well as “The Kid” character who set them in motion, thankfully). In fact, it essentially jettisons any semblance of a plot at all. It’s as frivolous as you’d expect a summer sequel to a movie about male strippers would be, but it’s hardly disposable. Like the original, it’s a rarity, but in a different way. Magic Mike XXL is less about this gang of hunks, and more about the people who drop singles to ogle them. (Women, mostly.) Watch Magic Mike XXL, and you’re not really watching a movie about male strippers — it’s the rare movie that’s true subject is its own audience. If you’ve seen Magic Mike XXL, chances are, you’re somewhere in this movie.

I can confirm this, because at the screening I went to, I was one of about four males in the theater, and it was a full house. The ladies were out in full force — mostly in their late 20s and early 30s, they were drinking wine and laughing and cat-calling the sexy guys on screen, clearly having a great time. In other words, it was a lot like most bachelorette parties, complete with exotic dancing.

Unlike almost any other movie put out by a major studio, Magic Mike XXL doesn’t care at all what straight males think of it — even less than the first Magic Mike did. (Despite the titillating strip sequences, Soderbergh’s original had a certain masculine bro vibe, largely sidelining the ladies.) There’s no gratuitous female nudity here to appease heterosexual men, and why would there be? They’re not at this movie.

Instead, Magic Mike XXL positions itself as a treat for the underserved — namely, gay men, African-American ladies, and women over forty, three audiences Hollywood almost never makes movies for. You could neatly divide the movie into sections titled “Something For The Gay Dudes” and “This Part’s For You, Sisters!” — it’s that obvious, and that goes a long way in making Magic Mike XXL as charming as it is. It makes no apologies for what it is, no concessions for what it isn’t. It is not only a movie about male strippers that will appeal to women and gay men, it is also a movie that gladly depicts women and gay men enjoying said male strippers — no angst or baggage, just pure pleasure. That probably shouldn’t be such a novelty, but it is. And that’s what a strip show like the one put on by the Kings of Tampa is meant to do — allow you to forget your worries for a night and just give in to the fun. In that sense, XXL definitely delivers.The plot, for what it is, has Channing Tatum’s Mike Lane returning to form, taking a holiday from his small but successful furniture business after being ditched by his love interest from the first movie. (I didn’t mind Cody Horn’s flat affect in the first film as much as some people did, but I’m also not sorry she’s absent from this sequel. Her replacement for this film, Amber Heard’s moody photographer Zoe, fares a tad better.) Mike rejoins his old bros on a road trip to a stripper convention where they plan to perform their old routines. Along the way, he convinces them to ditch their fireman and sailor costumes and instead, figure out how to express their own true selves through their “art.” Mike already learned to follow his dream in the first movie; the sequel has the rest of the gang following suit.

The film manages to work in echoes of the first film’s American economics theme in sly ways, as most of these guys have something else they’d rather do for a living than collecting singles for taking their clothes off. “Male entertainment” wasn’t anyone’s first career choice, but life often has us doing something we’d rather not do for money, while we wait on Plan B or C or X to work out. Magic Mike XXL is about embracing your day job (or night job, as it goes in this case), about putting something of yourself into it and making the best of whatever that may be. That theme may not resonate as well if these guys were all, say, accountants, but it works nicely here.

These very basic character arcs would be enough for a perfectly average sequel, but XXL is much less concerned about male angst than its predecessor was. More weight is given to how the audience feels — which is unusual in any movie, but especially unusual in one in which the major roles are still mostly populated by men. The stripping sequences focus less on the moves and machinations of guys taking their clothes off, more on how much the women are digging it. The audience in the big strip-off is filled with women of all colors and sizes — real women, not typical supermodel-y extras — and they look like they’re loving every minute of it. (Most of them probably were — if you’re going to be an extra, why wouldn’t you want to be an extra in Magic Mike? They provide the strippers and the singles!) It’s a fun reflection of what we all, in the actual audience, paid to see — what’s on screen is essentially exactly what’s happening in the movie theater, except with less money flying around, because we spent all our dollar bills on popcorn.

Yes, the extras are plenty well cast, and good for you on that, Magic Mike XXL. But what’s even more novel are the “set pieces.” Before the big strip-off in the finale, we visit a gay bar, a strip club for African-American “queens,” and a gathering of post-menopausal women guzzling wine. These are not locations you’ll find in any other summer sequel, it goes without saying. (Though I’d argue that any one of them would have vastly improved Jurassic World.) Writer Reid Carolin takes his sweet time in each sequence, to the extent that any forward momentum of the plot virtually stops to pay these demographics tribute.

First, Mike and the gang happily unleash their gayest dance moves at the gay bar presided over by a drag queen named Tory Snatch, and no one has to make any sort of “no homo” joke. These guys are straight — even Matt Bomer’s vain pretty boy Ken (though the actor who plays him is not). We get it, and we don’t need it spelled out for us, thank gawd. I doubt we’ve fully entered an era in which straight male characters don’t have to make gay jokes just to double-confirm their heterosexuality all the time, but Magic Mike XXL is a heartening sign of changing times. When was the last time you saw a bunch of straight guys hanging out in a gay bar in a movie, actually having a good time, and not even once reminding us that they don’t swing that way?

Next, the film introduces its Matthew McConaughey stand-in — Mike’s former mentor and paramour, Rome (played by a surprisingly up-to-the-task Jada Pinkett Smith, who’s pretty great). If this isn’t the film’s longest sequence, it certainly feels that way, as we take plenty of time away from our lead characters to observe various African-American hotties, including Michael Strahan and Donald Glover, strip down to their underthings. Technically, most of this is totally inconsequential the movie’s narrative, but it’s hard not to enjoy Rome’s confidence-boosting sermons as her “queens” get their laps danced. We see that Rome has built an entire business out of making women feel good about themselves, and that’s pretty cool, really.

Finally, in the very best of the three pit stops on the way to the big show, Andie MacDowell (!) of all people pops up as Nancy, a wealthy divorcee who is utterly delighted to have her home invaded by her daughter’s stripper buddies during a pinot noir-drenched girls’ night. Like the previous two sequences, XXL could easily have resorted to reducing these women of a certain age to cheap jokes, but there’s not a hungry cougar in the bunch. Instead, there’s a rather beautiful moment in which Ken tells a shy married woman that her husband needs to appreciate her for the gorgeous creature she is. We understand that Ken is, essentially, doing his job — making women who are not often fawned over feel desirable for a night — and so does she. But he’s also doing her a great kindness, the kind of kindness you wouldn’t expect in a summer comedy. Magic Mike XXL doesn’t punish its extras or supporting female characters for desiring our male leads, no matter how old or big or gay they might be.

(Also on the roster of women we might not expect to find in this movie: Elizabeth Banks, who, after The Hunger Games and Pitch Perfect movies, I fear is never not playing an emcee.)

Magic Mike XXL cuts “male entertainment” down to its essence. These guys truly enjoy giving women pleasure, whether it’s Mike trying to turn Zoe’s frown upside-down, or Big Dick Richie (Joe Manganiello) performing a ridiculous Backstreet Boys striptease in a convenience store trying to make a sourpuss clerk crack a smile. Yes, sure, the fact that all these hot male strippers are such nice, thoughtful, respectful guys underneath is totally a fantasy — in the same way that almost every action movie has a perfectly idealized female for its hero to smooch in the end. Fair’s fair — it’s long past time for the women to get their wish fulfillment, and that’s what this summer sequel is all about.

Magic Mike XXL probably has less male nudity (or near-nudity) than the first Magic Mike, and most of the dance scenes aren’t quite as inspired — that doesn’t seem to be director Gregory Jacobs’ specialty. (It wouldn’t have hurt to give us an extra few minutes of Channing Tatum doing his thing at any point. Who would complain?) The movie is clearly more concerned with giving us a good time than giving us a raunchy sexy time, and I’m fine with that. It may have been even more daring to deliver a similar story that really hammered home the sexuality, but ultimately, women aren’t going to strip shows for masturbatory material — they’re going to have fun. It’s not about getting off. (There’s a whole other genre of movie for that.) I’d argue that Magic Mike XXL delivers what any show at Chippendale’s aims to — a campy, slightly risque night of fun and laughter.

Will Magic Mike XXL end up on this year’s Top Ten list? For most critics, doubtful. For me? It’s definitely possible. Magic Mike and Magic Mike XXL are quite different, yet feel of a piece. The first one delves deeper, but I had a better time with the sequel. They’re both deceptively smart, and this one really knows its audience. We know it knows us, because we’re in the movie. It was made for us.

With that in mind, I’ll be saving up my singles in hopes of a Magic Mike XXX.*

These days, the state of the film industry can be disheartening. Studios are focused almost exclusively on franchises, reboots, and colossally expensive tentpole releases. Mid-budget movies have gone the way of the dodo, and even the “indies” aren’t as independent as they used to be — three out of the last five winners of the Independent Spirit Awards’ Best Film have also won Best Picture (Birdman, 12 Years A Slave, and The Artist), and the other two starred Natalie Portman and Jennifer Lawrence. Few of the more notable independent films in recent years stand for what independent cinema used to be — narratively original, formally daring, possessing a spirit that is totally unrestrained by the Hollywood hit-making machine.

They were once an alternative to what the studios offered, not just a cheaper version.

It’s not that honest-to-God independent films aren’t being made anymore — it’s just increasingly difficult for them to cut through the noise in the digital age, when making a film has never been easier or cheaper. Apps like Vine have turned every user into an amateur filmmaker. Sean Baker is not the first to attempt shooting high-quality entertainment on an iPhone, but with Tangerine, he’s done it exactly right, allowing the flexibility of the camera to capture the kinds of shots we don’t often get to see in a low-budget movie. In most moments, the movie looks absolutely incredible — but none of that would matter if he hadn’t found the right story to tell with his handy Apple product. Many of the characters in Tangerine can’t even afford an iPhone, but there’s something about their ultra low-budget lifestyles that totally gels with the energetic but inexpensive way the film is shot. If these ladies were to decide to document their misadventures on an iPhone, it’d look a lot like this. (That is, if they had some help with post-production.) Tangerine is the story of a friendship between two male-to-female transsexual prostitutes with very different temperaments. The first is fiery Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez), who has just spent 28 days in prison and emerges with exactly two dollars to her name. The second is drama-eschewing Alexandra (Mya Taylor), who is currently turning tricks for cash to bribe the bouncer at Hamburger Mary’s to let her perform a small set of holiday tunes. The story starts and ends on a typically golden Christmas Eve in Hollywood — the sun-drenched cinematography aptly underlines the absence of wintery coziness we normally associate with the season.

The plot kicks into gear as Sin-Dee and Alexandra are reunited at the seedy real-world location Donut Time — which, if you’ve spent much time in Hollywood, you’ll know is exactly where these characters would hang out. Alexandra’s loose lips let Sin-Dee know that her pimp boyfriend Chester (James Ransone) has been unfaithful to her. That isn’t terribly surprising news to learn about a sleazy, meth-addicted pimp, but it sure doesn’t put Sin-Dee in the Christmas spirit. She goes on a frantic tear through Los Angeles to locate Dina (Mickey O’Hagan), the “real fish” (AKA, natural-born woman) Chester’s been kicking it with. Meanwhile, an Armenian cab driver named Razmik (Karren Karagulian) picks up assorted colorful characters — you know, the sort of folk who aren’t hip enough to Uber — before his life intersects with Sin-Dee’s mission to drastic effect. This is already more plot than you’ll find in a lot of indies, and that’s just for starters. Baker and his co-writer Chris Bergoch don’t skimp on story, which is just one of several elements that helps Tangerine stand out as a truly innovative indie. When Sin-Dee does find Dina, there’s some outrageous catfight comedy before the film briefly becomes something like a road trip movie, even if the “trip” in question is only a trek down Santa Monica Boulevard to see Alexandra perform at Mary’s. (It’s a beautifully sad sequence.) Razmik’s wife and mother-in-law also become significant characters in an unexpected way, pulling Tangerine into domestic drama territory. Baker moves so nimbly between tones and genres, the film can be uproariously funny and immensely depressed all at once.

Los Angeles is the most overexposed movie star in film history, but Baker’s vision of Hollywood is a world away from what we generally see. These are not the kinds of characters who usually get whole movies made about them, and when they do, they’re often portrayed as tragic figures. There’s a little Christmas misery in store for every character in Tangerine, but Baker doesn’t pity them. They are agents of their own free will, even if their options are limited. If there was ever another choice for Alexandra and Sin-Dee besides the working girl life, it seems to be long gone by the time we meet them here. Tangerine is matter-of-fact about who these people are. They don’t apologize for it, Baker doesn’t apologize for it, and we aren’t asked to feel sorry for anyone. We witness moments of truth and grace from each character (except low-life Chester), but also the kinds of behavior you’d likely find in most prostitutes, cheaters, and drug addicts. These are not hookers with hearts of gold — they’re just hookers with hearts. Much has been made of Tangerine being the first film to premiere at Sundance shot entirely on an iPhone. That’s impressive, but it’s the film itself that’s worth raving about. Mya Taylor turns in a just-about-perfect performance as Alexandra; as Sin-Dee, Kitana Kiki Rodriguez isn’t quite as expressive, but her feisty presence feels essential. Neither of these ladies is a polished performer, but that works just fine for a movie shot on something you might be reading this on right at this very moment. (Performance-wise, the first scene is the roughest — get past that, and you’ll have a good time.) Editing, cinematography, and soundtrack are all top-notch, not just “pretty good, for a movie shot on an iPhone,” but damn good for any movie. Happily, Tangerine doesn’t feel like a film that had to be shot on an iPhone, but one that wanted to be.

Baker previously made 2012’s terrific Starlet, the story of a pretty young porn star who befriends an elderly lady, and starred multiple members of the cast of Tangerine. Both films are nuanced portrayals of characters who would often be looked down on as sex workers, but feel quite different otherwise, especially aesthetically. Tangerine made me excited about the future of independent cinema for the first time in a long time. As indies seemingly get lighter and more studio-friendly, Tangerine dares to be different. Scroll through Vine, and most of what you’ll see is underwhelming, if not eyeroll-inducing; this is what you can really do with an iPhone.

Few artists reach the literary legend status David Foster Wallace did — and fewer still do it with, essentially, one work. Many who do die tragically young. Perhaps there are certain eras more likely to breed this kind of tortured artist — Wallace was five years older than Kurt Cobain, and didn’t commit suicide until 2008. He was in his forties when he died.

Yet, captured in the earliest moments of his celebrity in James Ponsoldt’s The End Of The Tour, Wallace might as well be the other poster boy for Gen X angst — the literary Nirvana. The film depicts him on the last stop of his book tour with Infinite Jest, the 1,000-page tome that became an instant, unlikely runaway success — hailed as a masterwork upon release, prompting comparisons of Wallace to once-a-generation luminaries like Hemingway.

Stories about such figures tend to be larger than life, featuring screaming fans and flashing lights and usually at least one lonely shot of said celebrity staring mournfully in the mirror. An anguished artist battling an addiction of some kind — pills or booze or sex or fame itself, or maybe all of these — succumbing to the monstrous pressures of success.

But it should come as no surprise to anyone who’s read his work: Wallace refused to adhere to such a conventional narrative, and the first movie to be made about him follows suit. In The End Of The Tour, it’s not being a preternaturally gifted artist that comes at a price — it’s being human.

The protagonist of The End Of The Tour is an ambitious novelist named David who is not David Foster Wallace. That would be David Lipsky, whose debut novel The Art Fair didn’t make nearly the splash that Infinite Jest did. Lipsky also has a gig writing for Rolling Stone, suggesting to his boss (Ron Livingston) that the magazine conduct its first author interview in a decade with the hot new commodity on the literary scene. This makes a lot of sense for the magazine, given the cult of personality that rose up around Wallace, building him up as one of the tortured gods of the 1990s — a young, prophetic rock star in the literary world.

Lipsky prepares to meet this rock star, as eager as anyone to buy into the myth of the untouchable genius. But the man he finds refuses to be the man Lipsky is expecting. Lipsky keeps trying to unlock an easy, central mystery, the Key to Being David Foster Wallace — the kind of thing that makes for an easily digestible celebrity profile. (Ironic, since Wallace’s work takes so much mental mastication to get through.) What Lipsky’s discovers is that there is no tidy narrative, no singular addiction, no buried breakdown, and no pithy quote that can account for the painful prudence of Wallace’s writing. David Foster Wallace is not an addict; he’s a person. He’s depressed, and there is no glamour in it, no meaning or rhyme or reason. It is what it is, and it isn’t pretty.

Jesse Eisenberg played a troubled wunderkind to Oscar-nominated effect in The Social Network. Here, he portrays David Lipsky on the other side of that fence — a man who would love to be a tortured genius, but is neither quite tortured nor quite genius enough to achieve what Wallace did. (In the years since this 1996 interview, Lipsky has gone on to become a notable writer in his own right, but it’s ironic to note that his most meaningful work may be the one that’s all about Wallace’s brilliance.) Eisenberg, as usual, doesn’t care to be terribly well-liked by the audience, allowing Lipsky to come off as self-serving and vaguely monstrous through most of the film (though he’s ultimately not a bad guy). Lipsky’s a hypocrite — unhesitant to poke through Wallace’s medicine cabinet and hit up his ex-girlfriend for the dirty deets, but flinching when Wallace wants to know anything about him, and flying off the rails when Wallace has a conversation with Lipsky’s girlfriend.

By contrast, The End Of The Tour has nothing but reverence for David Foster Wallace, though it’s a more grounded reverence than we’re used to from most biopics. Eisenberg and Lipsky both step aside to make room for Wallace’s greatness, which goes rather undisputed by Ponsoldt even if the subject himself is rather humble about his talents. At one point, Lipsky suggests that Wallace dumbs himself down in everyday conversation so as not to alienate the “common people”; Wallace denies this, believing (or at least professing to believe) that all inner lives are equally rich. Regardless, Jason Segel’s performance is so full of vulnerability and depth, it’s impossible to take Lipsky’s side in this or any other matter that poses their ideals against each other. Generously, Eisenberg doesn’t fight to give his character equal standing — The End Of The Tour is Wallace and Segel’s show, hands down. (And this gives us every reason to believe Segel will be a part of the Oscar conversation come winter.)

As portrayed by Jason Segel, Wallace is both tremendously sad and almost heroically good-natured. Having suffered serious bouts of depression, he now makes a concerted effort to show kindness to the people around him and set himself on the same playing field as everyone else, despite a cult of celebrity that could and has devoured similarly talented men. Wallace could have moved to New York City or Los Angeles and been the toast of the town. He could have received nothing but fawning praise from friends and strangers. Instead, he’s a bit of a recluse, spending most of his time with his two dogs in chilly Illinois suburbs. He dresses for a radio interview the way most of us wouldn’t even dress to run to the corner store for milk. Fame is what he fears — or, rather, the inauthentic bullshit that comes along with it. Wallace lived for 13 years after the (never published) Rolling Stone interview, but his death hangs like a heavy cloud over the proceedings. Everything Wallace says in 1996 we know, in some part, fueled his hanging himself in 2008.

Most of the film unfolds in conversation, with Lipsky trying to provoke certain responses from Wallace, who rarely takes the bait — instead, firing back with some insightful nugget of quiet wisdom that outdoes whatever pull-quotable sound bite Lipsky was hoping to get out of him. It is reminiscent of a slightly bigger two-hander between a pretentious wannabe and a complicatedly private public figure, one that also boiled down to a tete-a-tete made available to millions — that would be Ron Howard’s Frost vs. Nixon. That was a great film, thanks largely to Frank Langella’s dynamic portrayal of Richard Nixon, and The End Of The Tour similarly owes a lot to the affable, unaffected way Segel plays Wallace, aided by Donald Margulies’ deft script. There’s never exactly an antagonistic relationship between these two men the way there was between Frost and Nixon — the script doesn’t build to anything quite so climactic. The friction between these men is more about the sadness they feel about themselves, yearnings and longing brought to light through this interview.

The leads are the movie — The End Of The Tour features only brief appearances from very few supporting characters. Mamie Gummer and Mickey Sumner play college friends of Wallace; Anna Chlumsky appears as Lipsky’s Wallace-adoring girlfriend; Joan Cusack is the chipper Twin Cities driver who knows nothing about Wallace, though she is quickly won over by his radio appearance. In a movie dominated almost entirely by two charismatic males, it’s worth nothing that every other character, besides Lipsky’s little-seen boss, is female — even the young intern played by Maria Wasikowska (Mia’s sister). I’m not sure this means much, but at least the women here are more than just objects of longing and lust for the men at its center. Though their appearances are brief, all of these women are fully realized characters, which is more than you can say for a lot of movies that are largely concerned with the male ego.

Though much trimmer than Infinite Jest, The End Of The Tour provides an awful lot of thematic weight to chew on, which is probably inevitable for any good film about David Foster Wallace. It’s drenched in 1990s nostalgia — Alanis Morissette and the John Woo’s Broken Arrow are featured prominently — in that strange cultural moment that fell between grunge and bubblegum. Wallace gorges on candy and junk food. He loves popcorn movies and brainless television. He’s addicted to these empty pleasures — activities, like masturbation, that provide a temporary, numbing solace from his despairing mind. (Which is the reason he’s given up drinking.)The film isn’t cheap enough to reduce either Lipsky or Wallace to “one or the other” cliches, but there is a battle between art and commerce central to the narrative. Wallace rues the irony that the more fame he acquires, the more he’ll end up feeling like a fraud; Lipsky takes note of Wallace’s lonesome life and still can’t help but covet his success. And then, of course, there’s the fact that this conversation is only happening so it can be published and devoured by the readers of Rolling Stone — which has a fine reputation for journalism, sure, but also exists mainly to feature rock stars looking all sexy and badass on its glossy cover.

Wallace is the complicated novelist who lives for McDonald’s and John Travolta movies, while Lipsky is the rock-and-roll magazine writer who tries to prove how “serious” he is by reading, well, David Foster Wallace. In The End Of The Tour, the literary world, like everything else in America, is depicted as the serpent eating its own tail. An artist like Wallace can only be celebrated through the magic of mass consumption, but the more popular his work gets, the less value it has in the eyes of consumers — and Wallace himself. Lipsky visits Wallace’s home searching for juicy details that will sell Wallace as a certain kind of author — maybe a reason for readers to feel smugly superior to him, or maybe a reason to elevate their blind worship to even greater heights.

What he finds instead is just a lonely human being who feels sad a lot of the time. Yes, Wallace has channeled that sadness into a book that a lot of people like, but ultimately, that celebration doesn’t change his situation any, and in fact might just isolate him further. It certainly doesn’t cure his depression, either, and for a wannabe luminary like Lipsky, the revelation that fame isn’t a panacea for all life’s ills is very bad news indeed. We like our artists tortured, maybe because we want to believe that there’s a price to pay for stardom, or maybe because we hope there’s some dirty, terrible secret that separates them from us. Or else, why do they have it, and we don’t?Every generation has its superstars, tormented and otherwise, but there’s something particularly downbeat about Generation X’s icons. Kurt Cobain isn’t mentioned in the film, but it’s hard not think, too, about his suicide while watching it. Like Cobain, Wallace produced one work that rocketed him to star status and suddenly posed his talents as a commercialized product — essentially, everything he thought his work was railing against. Ponsoldt does a spectacular and rather depressing job of miring this movie in its era — the mid-1990s comedown from the excessive highs of the 80s feels very ingrained in who Wallace was, both as man and as artist. His melancholy feels less particular to his character, and more emblematic of Gen X itself. (Which might be what made Infinite Jest so resonant.)

Culturally, it is probably only about now, in 2015, that we are ready to delve into what the 1990s meant, the way we’ve already exhaustively deconstructed the 1970s and 1980s. I’m not sure Margulies or Ponsoldt consciously meant to take on such a lofty topic, but it’s a fitting task for the movie that explores the mind behind one of the essential pop cultural products of the decade. (Can it be a coincidence that Wallace’s work has “infinite” in the title, while Ponsoldt answers it with “the end” of the tour? I doubt it.) In 1996, America was hungry for an icon — to replace Cobain, perhaps — and Wallace happened to come along at the right time with the right book. But ultimately, even award-winning literary titans are have to be packaged a certain way to make an impact. It may not look it on the outside, but The End Of The Tour is one of the most insightful works about modern celebrity in ages.

It’s nice to think that the silver lining of sadness might be great art — which is why we have The Bell Jar and Nevermind, Starry Night and Aladdin‘s wisecracking Genie. The list goes on and on — writers and musicians and actors and artists are our modern-day Christs, dying for our sins. They create greatness and, in the process, destroy themselves, and we consume it, enjoying their soul-searching insight without having to look so deep within ourselves. At least, that’s the romantic version. But there’s no indication in The End Of The Tour that David Foster Wallace would be any happier a person if he never wrote a single word. He is neither bolstered nor undone by fame. His stories and his depression seem to be entirely separate entities. But then, we can’t ever be truly sure, can we?

For all that he opens up to Lipsky (and us), The End Of The Tour‘s David Foster Wallace remains elusive. We believe he’s being honest, but still, he never comes fully into view. We don’t get the little detail that clicks everything into place and allows us to nod our heads and say, Aha! Yes, I understand him perfectly now. And that’s the point. It’s easy to define a person, particularly a celebrity, by their untimely death, especially when it’s their own doing. But there was a whole life that came before that. David Foster Wallace may have committed suicide at one moment in 2008, but there were many moments up until then when he didn’t. Moments when he wanted to, thought about it, decided against. These are the moments The End Of The Tour decides to define Wallace by — not so much by what we see on screen, but by everything we don’t that’s implied.

We are not 2,000 words in a magazine. We are not a 106-minute movie. We are not even a 1,000+ novel hailed by everyone everywhere as a masterpiece. The End Of The Tour is about many things, but ironically, it is most about how no biopic, no biography, and certainly no celebrity profile interview in Rolling Stone can ever tell us who a person is, famous or otherwise. No matter how big a book we write, we are so much infinitely bigger.

*

(A “Then & Now” perspective.)

Like my 2005 list, this Top Ten comes at you twenty strong, because that’s how I wrote it back in the day on my LiveJournal. And like last time, I’ll be adding my commentary about how the movies have held up 11 years later, because tastes change. Some of these movies have aged well in my mind, and others? Not so much.

I don’t think of 2004 as a particularly strong cinematic year in the abstract, mostly because the movies that dominated the Oscars fell, in my mind, in “good, but not great” territory. (They’re in my Top 20 here, but mostly not in the Top Ten.) A Clint Eastwood movie cleaned up in Best Picture, Best Director, and two of the acting categories, and three biopics of varying quality also made stronger showings than they probably deserved. (Those would be the biopics of Ray Charles, Howard Hughes, and J.M. Barrie.) Even the year’s critical darling, Sideways — which did manage to come away with several nominations, including Best Picture — felt too uneven for me to wholeheartedly embrace, despite some lovely moments. (More on that later.)

However, now that I’m looking at 2004 again, I realize how many incredibly strong films came out that year, several of which I’d count amongst my favorites. They just weren’t incredibly well-represented at the Oscars.

So here it is. Let’s revisit 2004.

*

THE TOP 20 FILMS OF 2004

20. RAY

Jamie Foxx had the Oscar for Ray before the film was even released; now that he’s won a Golden Globe, he’s almost a shoo-in to take home the golden guy. I’m happy to say it’ll be a well-deserved award, for Foxx not only captures Ray Charles in a way that few other actors could, but also makes him a dynamic character. Smartly, the film avoids using his blindness as too much of a foil, and allows the story to delve into some of the darker elements of Charles’ life (heavy drug use and lots of womanizing, though they’ve been toned down a bit). Supporting performances are solid and the film has a nifty structure, though I wish it didn’t devolve into Trainspotting territory toward the end. The best moments in Ray are far better than the picture as a whole; those moments are good enough for me. Congratulations in advance, Jamie.

(I haven’t revisted Ray. Of course, Foxx did win the Oscar, and that remains the primary reason the film is at all noteworthy. Like Walk The Line, released the next year, this one became the go-to example for a “typical” musician biopic, the sort mocked in Walk Hard. I’d be curious to see how it plays now, but not quite curious enough to seek it out.)19. MEAN GIRLS

There aren’t many comedies these days that actually get funnier every time you watch them; Tina Fey’s first screenplay (adeptly adapted from a nonfiction book) isn’t a triumph of storytelling, but its consistently wry humor makes repeat viewing enjoyable. No movie this year has spawned half as many worthy one-liners, and the performances are all tons of fun. Lindsay Lohan is a capable leading lady, but Rachel McAdams steals the show as Plastic Regina George, a complete bitch we’d still totally hang out with. Lots of stuff, like a running joke that compares teen girls to feral animals, is funny, but it’s the little things that make this movie stand out: Amy Poehler’s hilarious “Cool Mom,” for one. It’d be pretty lame to call this movie “so fetch,” so… I’m not going to try and make fetch happen. But it’s, y’know… fun.

(Oh, here we go. It’s almost funny to see a comedy staple like this on a Top 20 list. Mean Girls really has held up as one of the most consistent comedies of this century. It hasn’t aged a bit, and in fact, a lot of its more subtle jokes really do take a few viewings to catch on… but now, of course, you’ll hear them quoted often. Fey’s zany brand of humor plays a little better now that we’ve seen 30 Rock and gotten used to it. I still don’t know that this is Top 10 material, but I’m sure I’ve seen it more than any other movie from 2004, so maybe it deserves to be up there.)

18. SIDEWAYS

Critics have overpraised this simple comedy, stretching a small, low-key movie into “the best movie of the year!!” In its straightforwardness and lack of focus, Sideways can’t quite fulfill that hefty obligation, but let’s not forget the movie’s charms: a solid leading man in Paul Giamatti and a lovely supporting performance from Virginia Madsen; a setting and subject that allow for lush, wine-soaked set pieces; and some delicious dialogue in the film’s best scenes. Parts of the movie are superbly written and directed, others left me wanting more from the script. The best scenes center around two middle-aged men struggling with new relationships mid-life. (Have they aged as well as the wine they’re drinking? Not really.) The worst scenes depend partially upon Thomas Haden Church’s one-note, sitcom-level performance, which would be a complete bust if not for his character’s funny lines (as is, he brings nothing to the underwritten character or the movie itself). Still, there are enough funny and touching moments in the film to recommend it — though it’d be far more enjoyable if you imbibed some merlot beforehand.

(I had a bone to pick with Sideways in 2004. I simply didn’t enjoy it as much as most critics did, and I got tired of the heapings of praise I kept hearing. I stand by my assessment of Sideways as a flawed movie, though I’m probably not quite as bothered by it anymore. I’d still call it ever-so-slightly overrated.)

17. HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN

Harry Potter has hit puberty, and so has the series of films based on his adventures. Director Alfonso Cuaron infuses new life into the series, lifting the story off the page and creating a story that truly is as magical as it ought to be. The film isn’t afraid to go a little darker than the prior films in the series, no doubt setting up even further mayhem at Hogwarts. Almost universally agreed to be the best of the Potter films, Harry Potter and the Prisoner Azkaban has me eager for more.

(While all of the following Potter sequels were good enough, none were quite as daring as this. Cuaron was the only filmmaker to really put his own stamp on a Potter movie.)

16. FINDING NEVERLAND

A story can’t really be any cuter than one about the creator of beloved childhood hero Peter Pan and his make-believe games with the real-life boys who inspired it. Really, it just can’t. Unless that man is played by Johnny Depp, doing an accent. Hooray for Finding Neverland, then! It’s a bit somber for a family film, a bit light for an adult drama, but Finding Neverland tells an engaging story with a fine cast (Kate Winslet, Julie Christie, Freddie Highmore, Radha Mitchell, and Dustin Hoffman all do solid work). It touches on important, mature themes, but never strays far from childhood, much like its subject. Strangely enough, the figure who never quite comes into focus is J.M. Barrie himself, but the movie is so good-natured and well-executed we hardly notice. Seeing “Peter Pan” performed for the first time (and how people react to it) is especially fun.

(This review tells me I liked this movie a lot more in 2004 than I thought I did. I don’t recall any particular for it, maybe because Depp has overstayed his welcome as a movie star in his latest endeavors. On the other hand, Kate Winslet is worth watching, always. I still don’t see myself going out of my way to see this again.) 15. A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT

Audrey Tautou more or less reprises the role of Amelie for Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s wartime love story about a woman determined to find her lost lover against all odds. The cinematography is beautiful, and the more serious subject matter lends itself to Jeunet’s talents for creating big moments out of small things. Tautou is winning, as always, and the supporting characters are just as well-drawn. A sweeping love story, an epic war, comedy, drama, suspense, Jodie Foster, and the French — A Very Long Engagement has it all.

(I’ll have to trust my 2004 opinion. This isn’t a movie I’ve thought much about, though I’m sure it’s perfectly fine, still. The problem with Top 20 lists is that they’re bound to be padded with some decent but unremarkable films.)

14. MILLION DOLLAR BABY

Okay, so Clint Eastwood looks like an exhumed corpse and the trailer made this movie look godawful. It’s actually pretty good. Hilary Swank deserves the Oscar she’s probably going to get for her portrayal of a driven boxer-wannabe who won’t give up because she’s got no other future. Morgan Freeman lends his graceful presence as the narrator and Eastwood’s longtime friend, and he too will be nominated for his efforts here. Eastwood’s gruff presence is sometimes right on target and sometimes a little awkward (I personally think it’d be a better film with someone else as the lead), but that’s the way he likes it. He takes his sweet time getting to where the story is going, but it thankfully deviates from the usual sports champion film formula and instead delves into some dark, somber themes. Eastwood should be praised for his originality in tackling the material, from his moody (lack of) lighting to his willingness to abandon the tried-and-true Hollywood champ-movie formula. Million Dollar Baby packs in a few surprises — one of them being that it’s not terrible.

(Ouch. Some harsh words from 2004 me. I think Eastwood’s movies are often more acclaimed than they should be — though many of his more recent efforts have earned dwindling praise for this very reason — but this one does feel like a bit of a classic. It’s easy to see why it won so many Oscars, including Best Picture, though I still wouldn’t count it amongst my favorite films. Leaving it off my Top 10 may have been a reaction against its frontrunner status — fair enough, though it’s possible I’d find room for it now. Then again, maybe not.)

13. HOTEL RWANDA

It’s hard to compare a movie about mass genocide to one about a few characters squabbling over adultery or enjoying a hootenanny in wine country. As far as big themes go, Hotel Rwanda is the most important film of the year. While the film is competently (but not super impressively) written and directed, the subject matter transcends any flaws that could be found in the storytelling. Hotel Rwanda tells the true story of a man who used his hotel-manager savvy to do an entirely different sort of negotiation, saving the lives of hundreds of Rwandans targeted for death. As that man, Don Cheadle gives an utterly convincing performance that should pave the way for his status as a leading man — and earn him an Oscar nomination. (Sophie Okonedo, as his wife, deserves props as well.)

Though absent of graphic violence, Hotel Rwanda can be difficult to watch — there is constant tension as we wonder how these people are going to stay alive. But the film’s refusal to wallow in unimaginable horror — criticized by some for treating genocide too lightly — and the protagonist’s modest heroism make it watchable and even, at times, uplifting. Director Terry George makes a subtle but clear point about international relations with Africa (basically, that the Western world is unwilling to concern itself with Africa’s troubles), but thankfully leaves unnecessary politics aside, focusing the story entirely on Rwandans. There’s no denying the power of a story like this one, one that many moviegoers will know nothing about. There are some haunting moments here, and while the film doesn’t leave the kind of imprint Schindler’s List does, it isn’t too far off.

(Through a twist of fate, I ended up sitting through this twice in week, which was not ideal. I haven’t watched it since, but I still have a high enough opinion of it. #13 seems like the right slot to me.)12. MEAN CREEK

It’s easy to dismiss or even forget Mean Creek as the subtle gem that it is, but writer-director Jacob Aaron Estes has made a tiny masterpiece that perfectly captures the ferocity and frailty of adolescent males. The film avoids cliches, making every character — even its meanest ones — a real person. Led by an unusually talented young cast (some familiar faces like Trevor Morgan, Scott Mechlowicz, and Kieran Culkin joined by newcomers Ryan Kelley, Josh Peck, and Carly Schroeder — all considerably talented and spot-on), the story is a straightforward, simplistic one, tackling big themes with its young characters. These kids don’t act like adults when faced with tragedy — they act like adolescents, making big, stupid mistakes, and they deal with the consequences. The film is layered with male-male relationships: between brothers, friends, a bully and his victims, all of which seem like natural, uncharted territory. I can’t think of a film that better understands the unspoken rules and hierarchies of adolescent males, the ways they interact with one another, their fears and insecurities. Truly one of the most underrated, underseen films of the year.

(Yep! And still not a movie most people know about. It probably deserved to be in my proper Top Ten, which made me want to cheat and sneak it in there, but instead I preserved the list as it was in 2004, so here it is at #12.)

11. THE BOURNE SUPREMACY

If Collateral was the 2004 film that showed that thrillers can be done in exciting new ways, The Bourne Supremacy is the one that proves there ain’t nothing wrong with tradition. That isn’t to say that Bourne is by-the-numbers in any way — everything here feels fresh, which is particularly impressive since this film is a sequel. This time, Jason Bourne is the hunter, under the false impression that Treadstone is still after him. He still struggles with his memory loss; he is still tortured by his dual-sides: sensitive Matt Damon guy versus calculating killing machine. Damon proves again that he’s a true movie star while Paul Greengrass directs with a fresh, almost documentary-like approach, so the action is all the more immediate and engrossing. It’s all pretty standard fare, but the superb cast (also including Julia Stiles and the always-outstanding Joan Allen) and stylish direction make this an action film that is truly, truly exciting. (Perhaps my favorite moment is the film’s last scene, reincorporating Moby’s “Extreme Ways” at just the right moment.) There are no frills here, just pure, unadulterated wham-bam action. And it’s so much fucking fun.

(This film is actually even more notable than it seemed at the time, one of the first to usher in the handheld camera in a blockbuster — which is now such an action staple, you’ll see almost zero movies that don’t use it. It remains the strongest of the Bourne movies.)

And now, for our main attraction… The Top 10!

10. THE AVIATOR

In a year where most of the would-be epics were anything but (Troy, Alexander, The Alamo), it’s refreshing to see one of those big-star, big-director, big-movie movies actually get it right. Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio make up for the misbegotten Gangs Of New York with the Howard Hughes biopic that deftly balances the man’s soaring career and dazzling public persona with his shadier private life (madness and womanizing and nudity, oh my!). As an added bonus, we are taken back to the glory days of Hollywood to fraternize with icons like Ava Gardner, Louis B. Mayer, Jean Harlow, Erroll Flynn, and Katharine Hepburn.

Like any Scorsese production these days, the film rounds up one of the most impressive casts imaginable — Alec Baldwin, Alan Alda, John C. Reilly, Jude Law, Kate Beckinsale, Willem Dafoe — plus, of course, Cate Blanchett’s very showy turn as the very showy Katherine Hepburn. DiCaprio’s performance is one of his very best and Scorsese’s filmmaking is exciting. You can call the movie bloated, but it’s bloated with so much good stuff it’s hard to complain. There’s something to be said for the big prestigious Hollywood drama that actually delivers.

(I know not every Scorsese fan ranks this amongst his best, and sure, it’s no GoodFellas or Taxi Driver. I have a fondness for Scorsese’s excesses, which is how I picked the similarly sprawling The Wolf Of Wall Street as my favorite film of 2013. I can understand anyone who feels like it’s all too much, but I’ll take this over Ray or Finding Neverland any day.)

9. THE INCREDIBLES

There’s no question that The Incredibles provides some of the most entertainment value you’ll get in any movie this year. What it also does is redefine our expectations of the computer-animated film: The Incredibles masquerades as a family movie, but most of it is pitched at an adult level — which isn’t to say the kids don’t love it too. (Pleasing the parents and the kidlets accounts for the boffo box office.)

Director Brad Bird has taken Pixar to a new level, doing away with the standard Disney formula “kiddie story + some jokes for the adults = all-around hit” and making a bona fide action movie that just happens to be animated. (It’s not hard to imagine a live-action version that plays out in almost exactly the same way.) Will Pixar ever fuck up? After watching The Incredibles, I’m compelled to say, “Probably not.”

(I’m not sure anything Pixar has put out counts as a “fuck up,” but a handful of their attempts since have not found the same level of unanimous praise — take Cars, Brave, or Monsters University. Still, with WALL-E, Toy Story 3, Up, and Inside Out under their belt post-Incredibles, they clearly still have the magic touch most of the time. I did recently see this again, and while many stories since have definitely played in this same superhero sandbox, this remains one of the strongest entries in the genre.)8. KINSEY

Biopics are tailor-made for Oscar season. A famous actor playing a famous persona, often with some sort of accent or disability (see Ray or The Aviator), is bound to get an Oscar nomination. Kinsey, at least, never seems like it’s actively going for the gold; written and directed by Bill Condon, Kinsey is content to tell a fascinating story without being flashy or grandiose.

Kinsey, as portrayed by Liam Neeson, is certainly a worthy subject for a movie, and his ambition to explain sexuality in scientific terms is not only an interesting story, it’s an interesting character study. Why does Kinsey do this? How does it affect his life? More than telling us what happened, Kinsey centers around the man at the heart of it all, and doesn’t try and make light of the fact that his actions, though monumental, might also have been damaging to the people around him.

Neeson and Laura Linney (as Mrs. Kinsey) both turn in great performances, and Condon’s script is tidy and effective. Condon shows us everything we want to see and nothing more; it’s a well-crafted story about an interesting man studying something that fascinates and baffles us all.

(I remember almost nothing about this movie.)

7. BAD EDUCATION

Oh, Pedro Almodovar. What a task you’ve given me, trying to explain why Bad Education is one of the 10 best films of the year. How could I ever summarize what this movie is about, or why it is so compelling? Suffice to say that Bad Education is about real life versus how films depict real-life, and is also an homage to Alfred Hitchcock, and is also a disturbing tale of molestation and abuse in the Catholic church, and also stars Gabriel Garcia Bernal as a cross-dressing prostitute (and that’s just one of his personas). If that doesn’t at least make you curious, I don’t know what will.

Bad Education isn’t a perfectly executed movie — at least, not by traditional Hollywood standards — but that’s part of it’s charm. It forgoes some character development and obscures what, exactly, is going on in order to keep an aura of mystery and suspense. And that’s all right with me. There are excellent performances all around, but Almodovar’s energetic direction is the glue that coheres the choppy individual pieces into a fresh, satisfying whole. The film’s final moment is a chilling stroke of genius — and this is bound to be the creepiest use of “Moon River” ever put to the screen.

(This is probably the film that first set me aflame with Almodovar love, though I saw Talk To Her before this. I’ve only come to appreciate him more since, though this probably remains my favorite. Definitely my cup of dark, fucked up tea.)6. COLLATERAL

Collateral was one of few films this year to give me that geeky film student thrill of excitement at its very coolness. Sure, it’s basically just a standard Hollywood thriller at its core, but it’s such a damn good one! Michael Mann gives us a kinetic jolt in every electrifying scene, even when it’s just a seemingly innocent conversation between a cabbie and his fare. Jamie Foxx and Tom Cruise are pitch-perfect in their respective roles: the daydreaming cab driver and the merciless hitman who holds him captive. The action scenes are plenty good, but what makes the film is the smart dialogue by Stuart Beattie — between Foxx and Cruise, between Foxx and Jada Pinkett Smith, between Cruise and whoever he’s planning to kill. (It’s fun to see Cruise’s usual stalwart hero persona subverted, allowing him to come off as a bloodthirsty asshole for a change.)

You might expect a story centered around a taxi to take place in Manhattan, but this one plays like a nasty love letter to the City of Angels. Mann makes after-hours Los Angeles a very sinister place indeed, and the film packs some smart surprises without getting too caught up in plot twists and turns. A smart thriller (I’d rather call it an “action drama”) is a rare thing, but Collateral has it all — an intelligent plot, compelling characters, plus an exciting visual style.  equals one of the best movies of the year. Not bad, for a Tom Cruise action flick.

(Like The Bourne Supremacy, Collateral looked and felt a lot more “different” than it does now. Its style has been aped, though it is still one of the most respectable thrillers of the past dozen years. Alongside a win for Ray, this was definitely the Year of the Foxx, though it marked an interesting departure for Cruise, whose career is robust as ever in 2015, while Foxx has had only a small handful of memorable parts since. Long story short, this is still a great movie.)

5. BEFORE SUNSET

It was a big year for high-quality sequels, with Shrek 2, The Bourne Supremacy, and Spider-Man 2 repeating themselves all the way to the bank. But the year’s best sequel is Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, reuniting Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy as strangers whose one-night stand in Paris nine years ago left the question “What if?” imprinted in the back of their minds. Hawke and Delpy co-wrote their own stories and dialogue — the performances are fresh and genuine, but also as precise as anything you’ll see elsewhere. (They’re not as improvised as they may seem.)

Best of all, the film unfolds in 80 minutes of real time, following these two characters on a walk through Paris with the sinking sun reminding them that, again, they only have a short time together. Somehow, Linklater pulls all this off flawlessly, and although the film is essentially one long conversation, it’s never boring for a single second. I sincerely hope that this is only the second entry in a series of inspired films.

(And I got my wish! This was actually the first of these films I caught, and it took me several more years to catch Before Sunrise. I still find this the best of the trio, but each film makes the others stronger and more layered. There’s basically no limit to the praise I could heap on Linklater, so I’ll just stop.)

4. CLOSER

It’s unfortunate that many critics were turned off by the morally questionable actions and frank sexual dialogue in Mike Nichols’ Closer (I guess USA Today‘s Mike Clark and Entertainment Weekly‘s Lisa Schwarzbaum never raise their voices or speak of cum). To each their own, but for my money I identify more with Closer‘s fierce, angry lovers than the mopey loser Paul Giamatti portrays in critical darling Sideways. (Come on, guys — everybody gets a little nasty when it comes to sex and love.) Likable or not, the characters in Closer are vividly brought to life by four outstanding performers who, in a just world, would each get an Oscar nomination. (Why Julia Roberts’ delicious foray into bitchville hasn’t received more praise is a mystery to me. She’s fantastic.)

Patrick Marber, who adapted his own stage play, has crafted playful, biting dialogue that puts most Hollywood movies to shame, and Nichols has brought the production to life in a way that rarely betrays the film’s theatrical roots. The movie’s two best scenes occur back-to-back — the supercharged confrontation between Roberts and Clive Owen as they admit their infidelities (it has to be some of the best acting ever), and Natalie Portman’s coy striptease that simultaneously shows us how much and how little she’s willing to reveal. Closer is great fun to watch — how can you go wrong with four incomparable actors spouting off acidic dialogue in a film directed by one of Hollywood’s greatest?

(It surprises me to find this at #4, given that I have the poster in my living room and count it amongst my favorite films. I’ve seen it more than any of my other Top 10 films from 2004. It’s just one of those films that seems like it was made for me — four of my favorite actors screaming at, crying about, and fucking each other, plus some super gorgeous cinematography. It’s not really in the wrong spot on this list, but as I’ve found in other years, sometimes the movies you rank the best don’t necessarily become your favorites.)

3. MARIA FULL OF GRACE

Maria is full of heroin, full of fetus, or full of shit in any given scene in this movie; she is rarely full of grace. But the movie is. Joshua Marston’s documentary-like tale of a young, knocked-up Colombian girl who becomes a drug mule to escape her humdrum home life is both subtle and searing, an exercise in restraint that doesn’t shy away from the real dilemmas girls like Maria face.

At the center of it all, Catalina Sandino Moreno turns in a fantastic first performance. She’s neither a sinner nor a saint but rather your average teenage girl, one who takes a huge gamble that could cost her her life (in several ways). Marston’s movie is smart enough to avoid drug-movie cliches and the sense that you are watching A Very Special Film. It’s all utterly real, unfolding in front of you, neither melodramatic nor underwritten. Maria Full of Grace never makes a misstep — it truly is a graceful picture.

(Still holds up, though we haven’t heard as much from Marston as I would have expected since. Moreno pops up here and there, though she also hasn’t had a role quite as juicy as this. Maybe it’s time for a sequel?)

2. ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND

There’s no doubt that Charlie Kaufman is one of the most original screenwriters out there, but until Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, he hadn’t proven that he could write a story about real people. The ideas in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are brilliant and intricate and unique and absurd, but they’re also rooted in the deepest of human emotions, and that’s what makes it work.

As Joel and Clementine, Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet give some of the most heartfelt performances of their careers. Like the gang from Closer, they’re real people — sometimes they’re cuddly, sometimes they’re assholes. They flirt, they fight, they fuck, they drink — they do all the things that real couples do. Since their relationship is essentially seen backwards, Kaufman shows us their uglier final fights and then slowly reveals the better times, the reasons they were together in the first place. By the end, we’re fighting for their memories to survive not because they’re perfect for each other, but because we know these are the moments that defined their lives, for better or worse.

Director Michel Gondry handles Kaufman’s script masterfully, the perfect visual accompaniment to such a kooky, bizarre screenplay. The supporting characters, too (portrayed by Elijah Wood, Kirsten Dunst, Tom Wilkinson, and Mark Ruffalo) round out the story. It’s a convoluted premise based around a very simple notion: that love is too painful to remember and too important to forget. Anyone who’s ever been in a relationship gone sour should relate. There are beautiful moments both visually and narratively — this is truly a landmark cinematic achievement.

(And has remained so ever since. This might very well be the most enduring film of 2004. If I had to pick one film from this year to preserve for a future civilization to remember us by, it’d probably be this.)

1. DOGVILLE

Lars von Trier’s Dogville is perhaps the year’s biggest anomaly; I moved it around everywhere between #2 and #11 before deciding that it belonged here. It’s difficult to place because it is such a challenging film to enjoy — in some ways, it’s hardly a film at all. What it is is a Dogma 95 study in bare bones moviemaking essentials: a compelling story and strong performances, that’s it. There’s nothing else in Dogville: no sets, no special effects, no locations save the stage itself. Even the titular dog is imaginary.

The ensemble cast is great, and Nicole Kidman proves exactly why she’s Hollywood’s hottest actress in a performance that would be unbearably sweet if not for the film’s tongue-in-cheek finale. It’s easy to see why one would claim that Dogville is a bad, or even terrible, film — with its purported anti-American sentiment, three-hour running time, and blatant disregard for the comforts we look for in today’s moviegoing experience, it’s a film that many (particularly those who are virgins to Von Trier’s always-unconventional storytelling) won’t understand or enjoy. For me, it was a groundbreaking cinematic achievement that went above and beyond its experimental mission statement. My favorite films are those that take risks, and Dogville does so in a major way. There’s simply no way to compare it to these other films. Dogville is in a league of its own, and for me is the year’s crowning cinematic achievement.

(I have soured on Von Trier since this film. I didn’t even bother to see Dogville’s Kidman-less “sequel” Manderlay. I try not to let his more recent efforts get in the way of what was so daring and brilliant about his first few films, which remain great — I just wish he’d move on and do something else for a change. I wrote more in my “#1 Club” revisitation of this film.)

*

BEST DIRECTOR

Michel Gondry — Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Mike Nichols — Closer
Michael Mann — Collateral
Martin Scorsese — The Aviator
Bill Condon — Kinsey

Honorable Mention: Joshua Marston — Maria Full of Grace

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Charlie Kaufman — Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, and Julie Delpy — Before Sunset
Joshua Marston — Maria Full of Grace
Stuart Beattie—Collateral
Bill Condon—Kinsey

Honorable Mention: John Logan — The Aviator

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Patrick Marber — Closer
Paul Haggis — Million Dollar Baby
Jean-Pierre Jeunet — A Very Long Engagement
David Magee — Finding Neverland
Tina Fey — Mean Girls

Honorable Mention: Larry Gross — We Don’t Live Here Anymore

BEST ACTOR

Jamie Foxx — Ray
Leonardo DiCaprio — The Aviator
Liam Neeson — Kinsey
Gabriel Garcia Bernal — Bad Education
Don Cheadle — Hotel Rwanda

Honorable Mention: Ethan Hawke — Before Sunset, Jim Carrey — Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

BEST ACTRESS

Catalina Sandino Moreno — Maria Full Of Grace
Hilary Swank — Million Dollar Baby
Julia Roberts — Closer
Julie Delpy — Before Sunset
Laura Dern — We Don’t Live Here Anymore

Honorable Mention: Nicole Kidman — Dogville; Kate Winslet — Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Clive Owen — Closer
Morgan Freeman — Million Dollar Baby
Jude Law — Closer
Freddie Highmore — Finding Neverland
Peter Sarsgaard — Kinsey

Honorable Mention: Alan Alda — The Aviator

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Virginia Madsen—Sideways
Natalie Portman—Closer
Laura Linney—Kinsey
Cate Blanchett—The Aviator
Sophie Okonedo—Hotel Rwanda

Honorable Mention: Regina King — Ray

BEST ENSEMBLE CAST

Dogville
Closer
Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind
Mean Creek
Collateral

*

2004 FILM RANKINGS

1. Dogville
2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
3. Maria Full of Grace
4. Closer
5. Before Sunset
6. Collateral
7. Bad Education
8. Kinsey
9. The Incredibles
10. The Aviator
11. The Bourne Supremacy
12. Mean Creek
13. Hotel Rwanda
14. Million Dollar Baby
15. A Very Long Engagement
16. Finding Neverland
17. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
18. Sideways
19. Mean Girls
20. Ray
21. Alfie
22. Shrek 2
23. Open Water
24. Garden State
25. Spider-Man 2
26. Saved!
27. Kill Bill Vol. 2
28. Born Into Brothels
29. Fahrenheit 9/11
30. We Don’t Live Here Anymore
31. I, Robot
32. I Heart Huckabee’s
33. In Good Company
34. Good-Bye, Lenin!
35. Little Black Book
36. The Passion of the Christ
37. The Phantom of the Opera
38. Coffee & Cigarettes
39. Hero
40. 13 Going on 30
41. The Terminal
42. Spanglish
43. Ocean’s Twelve
44. Meet the Fockers
45. Napoleon Dynamite
46. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
47. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
48. Alexander
49. Around the Bend
50. The Dreamers
51. Eurotrip
52. The Manchurian Candidate
53. Starsky & Hutch
54. Shark Tale
55. The Day After Tomorrow
56. Saw
57. Troy
58. The Village
59. The Stepford Wives
60. Tarnation
61. Van Helsing
62. The Forgotten
63. A Home at the End of the World
64. The Chronicles of Riddick
65. Catwoman

*

(A Then & Now perspective.)

The further back I go in time, the less secure I am in my Top Ten choices. That’s largely because I haven’t seen all these movies again since, and I have no idea how, say, House Of Sand And Fog measures up to The Last Samurai.

On the other hand, there are a few of these films I know very well, which always makes me feel they belong higher on the list. On some level, isn’t the movie I’ve watched the most times probably my favorite?

That’s what makes ranking films fun in the first place. There’s no need for a list that changes as you do — it wouldn’t tell us anything. Instead, we look back on where we were, where the movies were, and think about what’s changed in both cases. Sometimes, the path a filmmaker took after a given year makes me look upon his film less favorably. Other times, I see more of a director’s work and then appreciate a film they made more than when I first saw it. It goes without saying that creating a Top Ten list is not a perfect science.

Few of these films from 2003 are ones that I’ve revisited often or count amongst my favorites. But in 2003, I thought they were damn good, apparently — or at least better than everything else I saw — and so did many others. If I were to re-rank them now, I know exactly which one would be my favorite, and it’s not my #1 or #2 choice. But as much as it may pain me, I am keeping the list intact for historic accuracy. You’re welcome, Mystic River.

*

TOP TEN FILMS OF 2003  10. KILL BILL VOL. 1

Quentin Tarantino proves he’s still the king of violent, edgy, ain’t-it-cool postmodern entertainment. Over-the-top and in your face every step of the way, the film packs a mean punch despite its showiness. The B-movie plot is given grade-A Hollywood production value, making it a fun ride from start to finish. A blood-spattered action pic is the perfect forum to showcase Tarantino’s talents (and disguise his shortcomings).

(I probably appreciate Kill Bill now more than I did after viewing just this first half. I like but do not love most of Tarantino’s films, as there’s always a cool post-modern detachment that keeps me from fully investing in the story. That’s certainly true in Kill Bill. I found this one to be the better of the volumes by far, given that it has the most epic action sequences. The “two volume” gimmick might have worked better if they’d been rearranged a bit, but both the visuals and the storytelling work better for me in this first film.)

9. IN AMERICA

A genuinely heartfelt piece of filmmaking, made all the more poignant due to its close ties to the true story of writer/director Jim Sheridan. It’s increasingly rare to see a movie that so openly and straightforwardly deals with familial love, free of the usual contrivances. In America is sometimes melodramatic, but never manipulative. Solid performances all-around (especially from the kids) support a charming, funny script. A rare entry in a dying, oft-clichéd genre: the feel-good film.

(I haven’t seen this since and remember, mostly, the warm and loving tone of the film, as well as a surprisingly tense sequence set at some fairgrounds. Plus Samantha Morton’s short haircut. I would happily watch this again sometime.)

8. MONSTER

A complex character realized on screen with astonishing results. Charlize Theron goes beyond physical transformation to play serial killer Aileen Wurnos — she channels her. Theron doesn’t hold back, but unfortunately, the script does, at times — going too far for us to sympathize with her but not far enough to take us inside her head. Some aspects of her lesbian love affair with Christina Ricci’s Selby feel underexplored. Regardless, Aileen is always compelling to watch, even when we want to look away from her ugly misdeeds.

(A dozen years later, Theron’s performance is still just as riveting as ever. These “transformative” acting stunts don’t always age well, but Theron really went for it, and it shows. Her Oscar win came relatively early in her career, but all these years later I think she’s one of the most respectable leading ladies we’ve got. That’s pretty good, especially for someone who’s been starring primarily in big budget sci-fi/fantasy endeavors lately.)

7. MYSTIC RIVER

One of the best ensemble casts of the year comes together for the involving story about two crimes — one in the past, the other in the present, but both equally pervasive in the lives of the characters. The script is solid, in spite of a few awkward moments (typical of Eastwood), keeping up the suspense with some nifty twists and turns. But the top-notch performances are what really drive the story — it’s solid work all around from Tim Robbins, Marcia Gay Harden, Laura Linney, Thomas Guiry, and Sean Penn. If only Clint Eastwood hadn’t done the music.

(Though it displays several of Eastwood’s recurring sins as a director, I found this held up well when I watched it again a couple years ago. Eastwood’s last seven films have not been stellar, but he had a good run with this, Million Dollar Baby, and Letters From Iwo Jima.)

6. AMERICAN SPLENDOR

It’s not a film for everyone, but it is a film about everyone — the average joe who tirelessly survives the mundanity of everyday life. It mirrors the attitude of its protagonist — content to be imperfect, irregular, and unremarkable — and in doing so, becomes something remarkable after all: a love letter to weird people. Harvey Pekar’s life is drab, in essence, but colorfully and richly portrayed by the film. American Splendor goes beyond truth by placing the real Harvey Pekar in it, defying genre and formula for a strikingly original approach.

(American Splendor is one of those movies I kind of forget about, but I feel like I would probably appreciate even more now than I did as a film student. It was pretty much the first signal of Giamatti as a serious leading man for a certain kind of movie… usually an offbeat movie about someone grumpy. Plus, it has Hope Davis, from back when Hope Davis was in a lot of things. Maybe she still is, but I don’t see her enough.)

5. FINDING NEMO

It can be hard to review Pixar movies without overusing the word “delightful.” Arguably the most purely enjoyable film of the year, there’s nothing not to like: beautiful animation, a clever script, hilarious voice work (especially from Ellen DeGeneres), and a charming story. It is certainly the best major animated film in years, but it also transcends the genre to become not only something that an entire family can enjoy together, but something that even the most sophisticated adult viewer can admit to loving without shame.

(Finding Nemo intentionally brought back happy flashbacks to Disney’s The Little Mermaid, one of their very best. Animated films can do “under the sea” like no one else, and in a lot of ways this is the quintessential Pixar movie… though it certainly has competition. It’s surprising that the sequel has been such a long time coming. I watch this when I’m in the mood for nothing but unadulterated joy, though they do make room for some brief, melancholy echoes of Bambi early on.)

4. LOST IN TRANSLATION

A delightful and distinct film with two solid leads playing superbly-written characters. Sophia Coppola proves that she has a unique, fresh point of view in both her writing and direction, and Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson are not only completely convincing as foreigners in a strange land, they also look like they’re having a hell of a lot of fun. Watching the film leaves the viewer with an indefinite emotion that is neither happy nor sad, a tell-tale sign of a talented filmmaker. A pleasure to watch.

(Well, this takes us back to a time when neither Sofia Coppola nor Scarlett Johansson was a proven commodity. Coppola was known only for The Virgin Suicides, while Johansson was still a rising starlet with her biggest roles ahead of her. Coppola is a polarizing auteur — people tend to either love her or hate her, and this film achieves similar results. I tend to like what she does more often than I don’t, and I still appreciate this movie, even if it does somewhat overdo it on ScarJo staring vacantly out of windows.)

3. COLD MOUNTAIN

A wartime epic told the old-fashioned way, which is not easy to do these days. The love story between Ada (Nicole Kidman) and Inman (Jude Law) is well-crafted without inducing any eye-rolls. What makes it fresh, however, is not the romance, but the separate journey each character makes — he tries to make his way back home, she struggles to take ownership of hers. They must find themselves before they find each other, encountering violence, horror, and hardship galore along the way, as well as a robust supporting cast featuring Natalie Portman, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kathy Baker, Renee Zellweger, and plenty more. It’s a well-crafted, well-executed film in every way, thanks to Anthony Minghella’s superb talents as writer/director.

(I have a special fondness for this movie, since I met Minghella around its release and he died a few years later. This was, unfortunately, his last major release… if you don’t count the little-seen Breaking And Entering, an odd little romance starring Jude Law and Juliette Binoche. Cold Mountain was largely snubbed come Oscar time, which I find particularly unfortunate in a year where Seabiscuit was nominated for Best Picture. I think it has held up remarkably well and is one of my favorite romantic epics. It would probably be my #1 movie from 2003 if I was doing it over again, though I don’t know many who like it as much as I do.)

2. 21 GRAMS

Though the jumbled plot is a unique, bold choice, the film is really a showcase for some of the most talented actors of our time. A phenomenal Sean Penn (who made another big splash in Mystic River this year) gives the film its heart (no pun intended), while the fearless Naomi Watts gives it some bite. The film is wrenching and emotionally exhausting, but the performances put us right there every minute, unable to look away.

(Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu got a bad rap after this for essentially making the same movie again and again, and I have a particular grudge against him for robbing Richard Linklater and Boyhood with his Oscar wins for Birdman, which I will never not think is ridiculously overrated. This is the kind of story that feels overdone now, but was reasonably fresh at the time, and a good showcase for its actors.)

1. LORD OF THE RINGS: RETURN OF THE KING

A fitting finish to a truly remarkable achievement in filmmaking. Peter Jackson has literally brought magic to the screen with a masterful gift for fantasy storytelling unseen since Spielberg’s heyday. A true epic, filled with heroism and honor, mercifully free of postmodern cynicism. Though it could not be made without today’s technology, the film itself is a timeless story that will be beloved for years to come.

(I basically never have the time required to rewatch these movies — that’s what I get for buying the Extended Editions on DVD. I really appreciated several of these performances and the genuinely moving story at the time. For whatever reason, my feelings about Peter Jackson are less pure these days, as I’ve had no interest in any of his Hobbit movies, which may have retroactively turned me off of Middle Earth completely. Aside for the laughably bloated ending to this installment, I will go ahead and stand behind this choice as my #1 film, even though it seems highly unlikely I’d place it here if I were evaluating these films today. I can’t really imagine finding this more powerful than Cold Mountain, but maybe that’s only because I’ve had time to get over what a massive technical achievement this trilogy was, in addition to some solid storytelling.)

BEST ACTOR

Sean Penn, 21 Grams
Paul Giamatti, American Splendor
Ben Kingsley, House Of Sand And Fog
Tim Robbins, Mystic River
Bill Murray, Lost In Translation

Honorable Mention: Johnny Depp, Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl; Jude Law, Cold Mountain

BEST ACTRESS

Charlize Theron, Monster
Naomi Watts, 21 Grams
Scarlett Johansson, Lost In Translation
Hope Davis, American Splendor
Jennifer Connelly, House Of Sand And Fog

Honorable Mention: Keisha Castle-Hughes, Whale Rider; Nicole Kidman, Cold Mountain

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Dominic Monaghan, Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King
Tom Guiry, Mystic River
Judah Friedlander, American Splendor
Albert Finney, Big Fish
Billy Boyd, Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King

Honorable Mention: Djimon Hounsou, In America; Sean Astin, Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Shohreh Aghdashloo, House Of Sand And Fog
Renee Zellweger, Cold Mountain
Marcia Gay Harden, Mystic River
Samantha Morton, In America
Christina Ricci, Monster

Honorable Mention: Miranda Otto, Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King; Patricia Clarkson, The Station Agent

BEST ENSEMBLE CAST

Cold Mountain
Mystic River
Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
21 Grams
American Splendor

BEST SCORE

Hans Zimmer, The Last Samurai
Gabriel Yared, Cold Mountain
Howard Shore, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
Danny Elfman, Big Fish

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Cold Mountain
Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King
Big Fish
American Splendor

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Lost In Translation
In America
21 Grams
Finding Nemo

BEST DIRECTION

Peter Jackson, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
Anthony Minghella, Cold Mountain
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, 21 Grams
Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation
Edward Zwick, The Last Samurai

*

2004 MOVIE RANKINGS

1. Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
2. 21 Grams
3. Cold Mountain
4. Lost in Translation
5. Finding Nemo
6. American Splendor
7. Mystic River
8. Monster
9. In America
10. Kill Bill—Vol. 1
11. The Station Agent
12. The Last Samurai
13. Big Fish
14. School of Rock
15. Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World
16. A Mighty Wind
17. Whale Rider
18. House of Sand and Fog
19. Calendar Girls
20. Shattered Glass
21. Down With Love
22. The Matrix Reloaded
23. Love Actually
24. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
25. Bend It Like Beckham
26. X2: X-Men United
27. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
28. Something’s Gotta Give
29. Sylvia
30. The Triplets of Belleville
31. How To Lose A Guy in 10 Days
32. The Matrix Revolutions
33. The Shape of Things
34. Elephant
35. Seabiscuit
36. The Hunted
37. Bruce Almighty
38. Hollywood Homicide
39. Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, & Blonde
40. The Hulk
41. Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle
42. Dreamcatcher
43. View From The Top

Movies these days tend to be events. Even the smaller ones are often given the royal treatment, when it comes from a beloved, established filmmaker. Noam Baumbach is certainly one of those, yet he’s managed to avoid making capital-E Events out of his efforts, even when The Squid And The Whale had him hailed as one of the hottest auteurs of the new century.

In the past few years, Baumbach’s movies have been received as trifles instead. They come across as cinematic shrugs. “Maybe this works, and maybe it doesn’t!” each new film seems to say. In part, it might be because he’s been fairly prolific recently — 2015 saw him release both While We’re Young and Mistress America. Or maybe because it’s easy enough to compare his movies to those of Woody Allen — both in craft, content, and recent frequency of output.

Allen’s movies aren’t often that ambitious, either, and they come out so often, it’s easy to give the less inspired ones a pass — if one doesn’t quite ring our bell, there will soon be another. The same is true of Noah Baumbach. I know this sounds like a back-handed compliment, which is really not how I mean it at all. I don’t mean to say he’s not trying that hard, because making a movie of any kind or quality requires herculean effort, especially ones that are as enjoyable as While We’re Young and Frances Ha. It’s just that the effort doesn’t show. I hate to say that they feel “tossed off,” but they do, in a way. It’s just that they’re tossed off incredibly well that makes them feel so unique.

The latest is Mistress America, a spiritual sequel, of sorts, to 2013’s Frances Ha, which ended up unexpectedly sneaking onto my Top Ten list that year. I wasn’t sure I loved Frances Ha until I started remembering so many moments from it so fondly — like a spontaneous weekend trip to Paris that Frances accidentally sleeps through, or the way she merely squawks when a friend makes what might be a pass at her. Like its titular character, whose name is cut off on her mailbox the same way her life has fallen short of its full potential, it is a movie content with its quirks, effusive and engaging despite not necessarily amounting to much in the grand scheme of things. (Frances Halladay’s life looks rather puny when you stack her up against The Wolf Of Wall Street‘s Jordan Belfort in my #1 pick from 2013, just as Frances Ha is a much slighter movie. But in their own ways, they both have plenty to say about the power of money in New York.)

Frances Ha is deceptively simple, while at the same, revisiting a similar creative bohemia as the one found in Woody Allen’s Manhattan (and plenty of his other films) — writers, actors, and artists finding kinship in each other, spouting more ideas than credentials. Fittingly, Frances Ha updates Allen’s formula with a post-recession, millennial brokeness that is essential for any accurate account of present day twenty-something life in the big city. Yes, I know it sounds a lot like I’m re-reviewing Frances Ha, but you can’t examine Baumbach’s latest without at least a glance back at what he’s done with Gerwig previously. Mistress America is less of a throwback — its look and feel are more contemporary, and, by design, its vision of New York City has far less charm — but it’s also talking about “our generation” in a major way. Like Frances Ha, it is a half a throwback, while the other half is as immediate and relevant as a movie can be.

While Frances Halladay and Mistress America‘s Brooke Cardinas certainly have plenty in common — particularly that they’re both co-written and played to perfection by Greta Gerwig — the movies have a few key differences. For one, the wide-eyed protagonist of Mistress America is actually Tracy Fishko (Lola Kirke), a freshman at Barnard and aspiring writer who finds herself at odds with her classmates, gravitating instead toward her thirtyish stepsister-to-be. Like Frances, Brooke is passionate and charismatic, with big ideas and not so much follow-through or finesse, having a hard time paying the rent. (This isn’t Baumbach repeating himself — technically, almost any story set in New York City these days should revolve primarily around paying the rent.) But Brooke is also a bit of a self-involved monster, who seemingly only considers what other people have to say when it’s something she can poach for a tweet. (As Tracy eventually tells her, Brooke’s relationship with social media is awkward.) Brooke is a singular construction, more the butt of a joke than Frances Halladay was, and at least somewhat less sympathetic — but still, it’s hard not to root for her on some level.

I have a feeling I’ll have more to say about Mistress America‘s themes when I have a chance to watch it again, perhaps around the time my Top 10 list comes out? (Hint!) For now, I mustn’t forget to praise its more surface-level highlights, including an absolutely hilarious sequence set entirely in a Connecticut mansion that takes up most of the second half of this movie, but moves at such a clip it feels like the best (and possibly only) screwball comedy in decades.

Mistress America occasionally threatens to turn into one of those tired films where someone writes a story based on someone else, and that person gets mad at it — and that does happen, it’s just somehow fresh again as Baumbach and Gerwig present it. The movie zigs where other movies zag to keep us guessing. Baumbach’s While We’re Young was a perfectly enjoyable 2015 trifle, but it’s obvious where Mistress America is very subtle, while exploring some similar ideas. (Brooke is at least a decade younger than Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts’ characters in that movie, but she still manages to feel like a dinosaur when she’s hanging out with a bunch of college kids.) Baumbach has always managed to include vital female characters in his films, but this one is almost totally dominated by women, and in my opinion, it’s his best work. To be honest, I was too busy enjoying Mistress America‘s madcap pace to bother thinking about it much in the moment, but beneath the absurdity is a biting and relevant piece of work, one that will reward many multiple viewings. I can’t wait for it to so.For an even more contentious rivalry between a misguided older woman and an ingenue, consider The Diary Of A Teenage Girl, the controversial tale of a fifteen-year-old who begins a passionate affair with her mother’s boyfriend. (Ick!) Minnie (Bel Pawley) is a talented budding artist whose hormones go a-ragin’, as hormones tend to do at that age. However, most teenagers don’t have a single mother who regularly holds cocaine-fueled ragers and encourages the flaunting of pubescent T&A. (Or maybe they did in 1976, when this story takes place.) Minnie’s absentee mom Charlotte (Kristen Wiig) all but advocates for her daughter’s sexual experimentation, which unfortunately for Charlotte includes the 35-year-old Monroe (Alexander Skarsgard), simultaneously boning mother and daughter. (Ick!)

An affair between a teenager and a much older dude is slightly more taboo now than it was then (though equally illegal), but the film doesn’t make any particular judgments about the characters. While not exactly condoning the romance, writer/director Marielle Heller doesn’t demonize Monroe or depict him as a depraved pervert. He’s just a guy who gets involved with someone he obviously shouldn’t, for multiple reasons. Their love story is given as equal a consideration as any other — he’s not just a pervert, and she’s not just a victim. The two have a genuine bond and genuine feelings, however illegal those feelings may be. Minnie’s emotions aren’t dismissed just because she’s a teenage girl who only recently went through puberty.

Heller is remarkably competent as a first-time filmmaker, nailing the period details and guiding the cast’s uniformly strong performances. But it’s the subject matter itself that feels freshest. The Diary Of A Teenage Girl contains some fairly graphic sexuality and an even franker look at a young woman’s libido, without shying away from the more uncomfortable bits. By the end, Minnie will have engaged in some behavior we probably wouldn’t want our own daughters or sisters engaging in, but it’s hard to judge, given how honest Heller is in depicting the confusing tug-of-war between childhood and womanhood that hits every girl at one point or another.

Minnie makes choices many of us wouldn’t make, exploring her sexuality more freely than a lot of people would at that age (though, again, it is the 70s), but none of it is out of character. Heller knows we have a tendency to throw the book at a woman — particularly such a young woman — who shows such sexual agency. So do some of the characters — like one of Minnie’s teen peers (and sexual partners), who is intimidated by the mere fact that a teenage girl knows what she wants and expects sex to be mutually satisfying. (The nerve!) In this way, the film is practically daring us to judge it, or any of its characters. Ultimately, The Diary Of A Teenage Girl shows that growing up isn’t about being ashamed or dissuaded from sex, but merely learning how to navigate around fleeting desires to find what one truly wants.And finally, there’s Queen Of Earth, the new film by Alex Ross Perry that somewhat defies categorization by genre, because what happens in the storyline doesn’t necessarily match the murky mood it strikes. Queen Of Earth begins with a lengthy close-up of a very distraught Catherine (Elisabeth Moss) reacting to the very bad news that her boyfriend James (Kentucker Audley) has been seeing someone else and is leaving her. Catherine takes off for an indefinite stay at the family vacation home of her best friend Virginia (Katherine Waterston), kicking off a third notable arthouse flick this summer that relies heavily on conflict between its female leads.

Things are not exactly warm and fuzzy between Catherine and Virginia. Flashbacks reveal that the friendship was almost equally toxic a year ago, when Catherine and James visited this very lake house in somewhat happier times. (For Catherine.) Also of note: Catherine’s father, a famous artist, recently committed suicide, and Catherine, an artist herself, is having a hard time slipping out from underneath his shadow. Complicating matters is Virginia’s perpetual fling Rich (Patrick Fugit), who seems to enjoy subtly tormenting Catherine.

The less said about what truly happens in Queen Of Earth, the better, but suffice to say that the unsettling direction and agonizingly creepy score by Keegan DeWitt make everything feel entirely off-kilter, even when there’s nothing explicitly unnerving happening on screen. In ways, Queen Of Earth could be construed as a partial remake of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, though it attacks some different ideas. The title refers to Catherine’s high opinion of herself — at least, before those twin tragedies befell her — which is pointed out by Virginia numerous times in the flashbacks. (We see less evidence of Catherine’s haughtiness than Virginia seems to.) Both  women come from wealthy and/or well-known families; Virginia does not ever work, it seems, and Catherine was a glorified assistant for her father. Their privilege may or may not have something to do with how things turn out.Queen Of Earth ultimately goes down a more traditional path than you might expect, given how unusual its aesthetic is. The color palette is reminiscent of a 70s film, and aspects like the film’s titles and poster are also throwbacks, while the tone itself is entirely in keeping with a post-modern indie. Individual haunting moments hang together better than the movie as a whole, and a nagging question or two may linger once it is over. Katherine Waterson is as captivating and elusive a figure as she was as Shasta in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice. In both films, we end up feeling like she’s hiding a lot of her character from us, and in Queen Of Earth, it might have helped to know her a little better, if only to explain some of her actions. But this is really Elisabeth Moss’ showcase, and she’s phenomenal from the first frame — even if the journey Catherine goes on is not a terribly original one for the plot of a psychological thriller. (The ending is fairly ambiguous, though at least it’s clear exactly what psychological state Catherine is in.)

If the story of Queen Of Earth lets us down somewhat, Perry’s direction keeps us guessing — unfolding largely in long takes, it’s the kind of film where watching someone listen tends to be more revealing than watching a person speak, and the flashbacks feel so immediate that it’s sometimes jarring to return to the present day story because we were so invested in what happened before. Without further examinations upon repeated viewings and a clearer grasp on what’s happened by the end, I cannot say with complete confidence that Queen Of Earth is about the narcissism of artists and rich people, but that’s the direction I’m leaning. A high-and-mighty, privileged woman like Catherine may get used to things turning out a certain way, and when they suddenly go wrong, the effect can be quite a wake-up call. This film is the sound of her thudding back down to Earth.

*

It seems exactly enough time has passed to allow for a film that prominently features New York City’s fallen World Trade Center without any explicit reference to September 11. Though Joseph Gordon-Levitt has top billing, The Walk really belongs to two much bigger stars — the Twin Towers themselves, brought back from the dead in all their steel majesty in Robert Zemeckis’ latest technological feat.

Though the shadow of 9/11 inevitably looms large, The Walk does an admirable job of leaving the past — or, in this case, the future — behind, telling a solid story that doesn’t really need to acknowledge the sad truth that we all already know anyway. Movies have had a shaky time confronting that horrific attack head on — Oliver Stone’s overwrought World Trade Center and bewildering Best Picture nominee Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close being notable examples, with United 93 as one masterful exception. It’s hard to believe that Zemeckis would have ended The Walk with the same loving, lingering shot of the towers had they not met such a cruel fate, but the film also acknowledges that we’ve mourned and grieved enough to do some celebrating of what was for a change.

The Walk is respectful of the towers’ legacy, but not overly cautious about it. Unlike its hero, it feels no need to tip-toe around the truth, and instead immerses us in a moment — 1974, to be exact — when the towers were just being built, met with mixed feelings by the people of New York City, but certainly a thing to behold. Zemeckis takes us back to to a time when we were not awed by what happened to them, but amazed by the towers themselves. He allows them to be a symbol of wonder and possibility, which is no small feat, given that we all know what came later. As a love letter to the enduring spirit of New York City in the wake of a tragedy, The Walk is a masterpiece.

As a movie? It’s alright.

Like the celebrated documentary Man On Wire, The Walk tells the story of Philippe Petit, who is, as his name suggest, very, very French. He is played by the very, very American Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who does an admirable job not only with a French accent, but with a certain… how do you say?… je ne sais quoi. The casting of Gordon-Levitt tells you everything you need to know about Zemeckis’ approach — though he’s probably about as good as any American actor could be in the part, it’s impossible to see the character as anything but Joseph Gordon-Levitt “doing” French. The part doesn’t exactly leave room for a nuanced performance. It’s a stunt, and so is the whole movie.

Maybe that’s appropriate for a movie about one of the greatest stunts of all time, and maybe if you want the real story, you should watch the documentary. This version gives us schmaltz and spectacle in equal measure, a family-friendly sheen brushed with the broadest of strokes. Narrated from atop the Statue of Liberty, The Walk takes us back to Petit’s days as a street performer in Paris, shown first in black-and-white, followed by an unmotivated, unceremonious switch to full color. (It probably won’t bother anyone else, but I find it weird that the midpoint of what we see of Petit’s life is black-and-white, while his childhood and later years are in color.) Petit has a genuinely cute meet-cute with fellow street performer Annie (Charlotte Le Bon), who quickly becomes his own personal cheerleader. (I wouldn’t say Annie is a terrific character, given that she’s the film’s sole femme, but Le Bon at least adds some welcome spunk to the typical “girlfriend” role — though it’s unfortunate that women are still limited to a few scenes of nagging, followed by lots of crying/smiling/clapping reaction shots, in such films.) There’s also an offbeat performance from Ben Kingsley as Papa Rudy, a mentor of sorts. (One of the film’s “happy endings” moments involves Papa Rudy’s dogs getting extra dog treats, even though we’ve never seen them before.)It is clear early on that The Walk is not really interested in real human drama. Philippe’s rejection by his parents is shrugged off in a mini-scene and never mentioned again, and there’s no other indication of what might be driving him to perform an insane, illegal, death-defying stunt, except that he saw a picture in a magazine and just, you know, decided to. The film’s nimble, whimsical tone is able to pull this off for a while, until The Walk tries rather half-heartedly to become a heist film in its mid-section, collecting a team of perfectly adequate supporting characters like Jeff (Cesar Domboy), conveniently afraid of heights, and J.P. (James Badge Dale), conveniently fond of illegal activities. (There are also plenty of cartoonish caricatures of cops, stoners, and other Noo Yawk stereotypes.) This section of the film reminded me of Argo, in the sense that it’s trying to ratchet up suspense about something I already know the outcome of — which certainly works in some films, but did not at all work for me in Argo, thanks to stale screenwriting. (The Academy clearly disagreed with me.) The Walk‘s screenplay tries even less than Argo‘s did — the heist business is shamelessly borrowed from other movies, and even Zemeckis doesn’t seem fully committed to it (though Alan Silvestri’s very heist-y score sure is). The only real suspense in this film is in the cable connected between the towers! (Yep. Went there. Deal with it.)

Which brings us to the walk section of The Walk, also known as the Reason You Paid Money For This. It more or less does the trick, without resorting to cheap tricks (such as, say, having Petit dangle from the wires, about to plummet to his death, which did not happen). Given how short it is on substance, would The Walk have been equally or more satisfying as a 30 or 40-minute experience, without the lengthy setup? Probably. Zemeckis’ most egregious error is the corny device of having Petit narrate the film from atop the Statue of Liberty. The location itself is a nice nod to that original gift to New York City from the French, which pays off in the film’s touching finale, which suggests that Petit’s walk may be what made the towers such an endearing landmark in the first place — another architectural gift from France, albeit a very indirect one.Perching Petit on the Statute of Liberty, talking directly to camera, immediately frames the movie as a fantasy, which is kind of an odd choice for a true story, but I could have forgiven it if the constant voice-over wasn’t so intrusive, interrupting moments that might be genuinely moving with dialogue from Petit telling me how genuinely moving this moment was. Petit narrates all kinds of moments for no reason, pointing out things we can already clearly see are happening. (This is the perfect movie for blind people. You won’t miss a thing.) Zemeckis co-wrote the script with Christopher Browne — this being Browne’s first feature credit on a screenplay — and writing has rarely been Zemeckis’ strong suit. The film’s best scenes are the ones where Petit the Narrator pipes down for a minute, but those are few and far between. The story is already as simple as can be, so the constant explaining grows maddening. Petit’s walk, in its first few blissful seconds, is chatter-free, but then Future Petit cuts in to tell us how he’s feeling, rather than just letting us feel it with him. Do we need to be told that crossing the Twin Towers on a wire 110 stories off the ground is super exhilarating? Apparently, we do. And for those of you thought Forrest Gump‘s CGI feather was bad? No joke — in The Walk, we get the whole bird.

Yes, The Walk is coated with a hefty helping of Hollywood cheese; by comparison, it makes Cast Away look like it was directed by Michael Haneke. More often than not, Zemeckis gets more excited about computer-generated wizardry than he does about storytelling. That pays off in the sense that this 3D is some of the best you’ll find (and I’m not generally a fan of 3D), and the CGI recreation of the Twin Towers is sometimes (but not always) astonishing. It’s impressive special effects work, though I couldn’t help but feel short-changed by the fact that it’s so much easier to cross the World Trade Center with computer graphics than it was on a steel cable for Philippe Petit. Now, I don’t expect them to actually string Joseph Gordon-Levitt 110 stories off the ground just for the sake of realistic stunt work, but when Philippe furiously refuses to wear a safety belt during the walk because it would be inauthentic, it rings a little false because this whole movie is a cheat.Yeah. I know, I know — all movies are, in a sense. But not all movies are about an act of high-wire athleticism like The Walk. And while a lot of what’s accomplished here looks reasonably impressive on a big screen in 3D — and will probably not hold up so well on smaller screens in 2D — there’s a disconnect between what the movie is and what it’s about, how Zemeckis asks us to applaud little CGI Joseph Gordon-Levitt for his high-stakes artistic “coup” when almost nothing we’re seeing has any real risk, art, or physicality to it. The real Gordon-Levitt was walking across the floor against a green screen. As good as the digital effects are, I never found them truly convincing, just as I was never convinced that Joseph Gordon-Levitt was actually French. You never for a moment forget that it’s all artifice, which is strange for a movie that purports to be all about artistic authenticity.

But I don’t think Robert Zemeckis cares about that, and much of his audience won’t, either. The Walk is really a ride, meant to provoke only the most surface-level responses. And that’s fine. I won’t say the film never pulled my heartstrings, though I was more moved by the Twin Towers than anything involving the character of Philippe Petit. Is there something wrong, when steel and concrete provoke more emotion than flesh and blood? Zemeckis doesn’t exploit 9/11 — this is a lovely tribute to the towers — but this film would be much more of a dud if it didn’t have the emotional weight of a real tragedy bolstering our emotions. Despite the artifice, it’s rather magical to see something that was so suddenly and ruthlessly taken away from us brought back by the movies. The Walk transports us to a time before tragedy, temporarily erasing the pain of the present and letting us relive a more innocent moment. (Okay, maybe 1974 wasn’t so innocent, but it is in this movie.)

The Twin Towers were already gone by the time I made it to New York. As much as I cringed at its chatterbox voice-over and paper-thin characterization, I can’t stay mad at The Walk, because it gave me a chance to go up there and see what all the fuss was about. I’m glad I made the journey.*

Here it is, straight from the mouth of a film student.

(Sort of.)

I made this Top 10 list relatively early in awards season, before I’d seen a number of films that factored into the race that year — including The Hours, 8 Mile, Secretary, Frida, Talk To Her, and The Pianist, some of which came away with major wins (Best Actress and Best Actor included).

Reconsidering this list in 2015, I wouldn’t change a whole lot. There are a couple films I like better now than I did back then — like Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can, which didn’t quite do it for me the first time around. Others, like Talk To Her, Secretary, and 8 Mile, I know I did like quite a bit when I saw them, but now it’s been so long that I’d need to see them again to know if they’d find their way onto my list.

And, full disclosure: I did make one change to this list from back in 2002, adding a film I saw shortly after making this list that has since become one of my favorites of the year. It seemed a shame to leave it off, considering that it was one of my favorites both back then and still now.

Which film did I add, and which one got kicked off to make room for it? I’ll never tell…

10. THE TWO TOWERS

The second installment in the Lord Of The Rings trilogy suffers slightly at not being nearly as fresh and exciting as the first, and lacks the inevitable climactic pay-off of The Return Of The King, but it does bring one cinematic marvel to the screen — Gollum, performed by Andy Serkis but entirely rendered by CGI, to date probably the most impressive computer-generated creature we’ve seen. (And definitely the most preciousss.)

The Two Towers adds several new characters we didn’t meet in The Fellowship Of The Ring, and many favorites from the first movie are shoved into supporting roles far away from the main action. And sure, these guys are pretty much in the same predicament at the end of this movie as they were in the beginning, and not a whole lot closer to Mordor. The battle of Helm’s Deep is the central focus, and director Peter Jackson brings his expected flair for technical wizardly and large-scale spectacle. It’s big and awesome, even if it seems there’s less at stake than at other points in this series.

Viggo Mortensen does an excellent job of carrying the movie as this film’s hero, leaving Frodo in the backseat, and Gollum is somehow the best-developed and most captivating character in the film. The Two Towers‘ main purpose is keeping audiences invested long enough to make it to the series’ grand finale, but as big budget fantasy epics go, it certainly delivers the goods.9. PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE

It’s Paul Thomas Anderson! So, it’s excellent, right?

Well…

Punch-Drunk Love is a surprise on almost every level from the uber-acclaimed director of Magnolia, Boogie Nights, and Hard Eight. Anderson’s films up until now have mostly been sprawling epics that don’t shy away from sex, violence, and some very dark themes, so it takes some adjustment to prepare for this quirky, smaller-scoped love story about Barry Egan and his quest to buy a whole lot of pudding — with some evil Mormon sex phone operators thrown into the mix.

This movie proves Adam Sandler can be at least a halfway decent actor, aided by the always lovable Emily Watson as patient love interest Lena and a pretty crazy turn from Philip Seymour Hoffman as an ill-tempered Mormon. (We can assume he’s Mormon since he lives in Provo, although his foul mouth and sex phone operation may suggest otherwise.) As in Magnolia, Anderson doesn’t follow the typical three-act structure — he marches to the beat of his own drummer, and this one is willfully offbeat.

At a scant 95 minutes, Punch-Drunk Love seems to gloss over some story elements and instead spends its screen time on a fair amount of chaos and randomness, but you gotta give it credit for being unpredictable. It’s funny, clever, crazy, quick, and entertaining, and Emily Watson lights up the screen, though it falls well short of being a masterpiece like Magnolia and Boogie Nights. I guess they can’t all be instant classics… (but they can still be very good).

8. INSOMNIA

Insomnia is a remake of a Norwegian film I haven’t seen, so I’m sure some of the credit goes to the original — but this adaptation definitely does it some justice regardless. Al Pacino is a tough-guy cop from Los Angeles struggling with his own morals and police ethics   while trying to solve a murder in Nightmute, Alaska. (A real place, apparently — despite the noirish name.) As his conscience eats away at him, so does the titular lack of sleep he struggles with in a town where the sun never sets — a nice twist on the typical murky nighttime setting of such thrillers.

Al Pacino is awesome as always, if you like that sort of thing (and I very much do!). Hilary Swank is perfect as the eager young local cop trying to learn from Pacino, unaware that he is not quite the good detective she idolizes. The real revelation, though, is Robin Williams in icy-cold killer mode (previously shown in One Hour Photo, which somewhat undermines the surprise of the comedian’s malevolent turn here).

Christopher Nolan, best known for Memento, pulls off some brilliant editing that puts us in an insomniac state of mind, and the film’s morality plays are almost epic. Certainly one of the best American thrillers to come along in quite some time. (Even if it did come from Norway first.)7. ADAPTATION

This movie probably plays better to screenwriters than anybody else — sorry! The ultimate scribe’s wet dream has Charlie Kaufman literally writing himself into the movie he was supposed to be writing, an adaptation of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief. Most writers who tried this would get a swift “no, thank you,” be fired, and never work in this town again. Somehow, Kaufman got a critically beloved film made — one that could easily win some Oscars. (It would be a sweet irony if a film called Adaptation won Best Adapted Screenplay, especially considering that it is basically an original story.)

Nicolas Cage gives two very solid performances as the frustrated screenwriter of Being John Malkovich and his half-witted twin brother. In addition to basically ruining the move version of her book, Kaufman also begins stalking Susan Orlean, who is played perfectly (of course) by Meryl Streep. Chris Cooper also provides a memorable turn as the kooky subject of Orlean’s book. But none of that orchid-thieving business is what ultimately makes Adaptation such a breath of fresh, weird air — it’s the bizarre mix of fact and fiction, with the real-life Kaufman and his made-up brother battling for screenwriting supremacy, tossing in plenty of industry in-jokes along the way.

The film goes spinning off on a strange tangent in the third act that embraces everything the movie is against. I get the point of it, thematically, but I didn’t love it. Adaptation is funny, clever, and twisted, and probably quite a bit more interesting than a straightforward Orchid Thief movie would have been — though let’s hope it doesn’t spark a dangerous trend of writers inserting themselves into their screenplays ever time they get writer’s block. This will only work once, people.6. MINORITY REPORT

Steven Spielberg proves once again he’s a peerless entertainer. In 2002, he delivered two very different chases movies, this one and Catch Me If You Can. (“Everybody runs” could be the tagline of either film.) While not as diverse as the films in other years when Spielberg has delivered a one-two punch (1993’s double-offering of Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List obviously takes that cake), I can’t help but be impressed that one man can craft a breathless piece of action-packed science fiction as well as a moving drama within a few months of each other, and have them both be so good. Let us never take Spielberg for granted.

Between the two, it’s Minority Report that gets my full-on Top 10 stamp of approval, with an utterly convincing (and somewhat terrifying) vision of the future despite a far-fetched premise — cops using prescient humans to predict crimes before they happen, but nevertheless arresting criminals for their murderous intent. Tom Cruise is at the top of his form as the detective who goes from hunter to hunted, grabbing an ethereally excellent Samantha Morton to prove his innocence along the way.

Spielberg once again blunders the ending to an otherwise great film — I had third-act issues with Catch Me If You Can and A.I. too — but it’s not an egregious error when so much that came before was so very good. The vision of the future presented here is the most original I’ve seen since, well, Spielberg’s last film (A.I.), and the maestro of wonder delivers several of his trademark Great Movie Moments — particularly the exhilarating mall chase scene. In a world that so often gets them wrong, this is a blockbuster done right.5. 25TH HOUR

Countless filmmakers have made movies in and about New York City, but few are as closely tied to it as Spike Lee. He’s as essential to the city as Woody Allen, depicting a very different, but equally vital slice of life in the city that never sleeps.

So it’s almost impossible to think that Lee wouldn’t somehow respond to the devastation faced on September 11 by New York (and all of America, of course) — and it’s entirely appropriate that he is, essentially, the first. Though it’s probably too soon for cinema to cover the attacks in their entirety, 25th Hour finds a perfectly subtle way to pay homage without letting that dark shadow loom over the film overall.

The story itself has nothing to do with the World Trade Center — it’s about a drug dealer named Monty (Edward Norton) who has just one last day of freedom before he heads to prison for dealing drugs. He spends that day with his best buddies Frank (Barry Pepper), a Wall Street hotshot, and Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a shy high school teacher with a crush on his student Mary (Anna Paquin). Another key figure is Monty’s girlfriend Naturelle (Rosario Dawson), whom he suspects might have been the one to give him up to the cops.

25th Hour spends more time on character development than on mystery or suspense, though, and that’s a very good thing. It takes its time and isn’t afraid of some random detours to explore its supporting characters or a slice of New York City life. (One incredibly memorable sequence features Monty’s foul-mouthed disparagement of virtually every person in New York, which somehow still comes across as a love letter to the place.)

Developed before 9/11 and shot afterward, the film’s only reference to the tragedy is a mournful look down at Ground Zero — and it’s all that’s needed. September 11 would be easy to exploit for some added emotional weight, but that’s now what Lee is doing here. Sure, it can be read as a metaphor for Monty’s life in ruins, but it would feel more conspicuous for a Spike Lee joint about these New Yorkers to pretend like it never happened. Monty’s angst is front and center, but 25th Hour is also very much about the rest of the people who inhabit his world. That single shot of Ground Zero hits just the right note, and then quickly moves on.
4. Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN

Hollywood loves a good coming-of-age story, but apparently it takes a Mexican to get it right. Y Tu Mama Tambien treads in waters you’ll rarely see in any American film about teenage boys, with graphic sex scenes that are both hetero- and homoerotic. (Something for everyone to enjoy!)

The film takes us on a road trip, as two teenage boys (Diego Luna and Gabriel Garcia Bernal) woo the same older woman (Maribel Verdu) who has just left her cheating husband — and is carrying an even more heartbreaking secret, too. They go in search of a beach and instead find all kinds of romantic and sexual complications that come with the territory of growing up.

Cowriter and director Alfonso Cuaron understands that sexuality is complicated, especially when we’re young. The fact that these teen boys explore their sexual curiosities with each other doesn’t mean that either is gay, necessarily, but that the lines between friendship and romance aren’t always explicitly defined. (To be fair, there is a female present when they’re making out, which makes it a little less queer.)

The film is all about the journey instead of the destination, and the journey is not so much the road trip but adolescence itself. The most remarkable thing about the film is how natural it feels — less like a movie, more like eavesdropping on these people’s lives. Part of this is due to the raw, explicit sex scenes that leave nothing to the imagination.

The performances by all three are stellar, though it’s Maribel Verdu that really brings the film to life. The final scene is a real heartbreaker, because of what we learn happens to one of the characters, but moreso because of what it says about what happens when friendships grow a little too intimate. For better or worse, I’ve never seen a more honest movie about being a teenage guy.

3. CHICAGO

I had a hard time figuring out where, exactly, to put Chicago on this list. It’s the songs and the spirit that make it so great, and that’s lifted pretty much verbatim from the musical. However, Rob Marshall finds a pretty nifty way to pull off a stage-to-screen adaptation, suggesting that the musical numbers take place in Roxie Hart’s warped mind. That could easily be cheesy, except that Roxie is so obsessed with being a star, it’s easy to see how she’d be deluded enough to imagine that everyone around her is starring in a musical that’s all about her.

Based on entertainment value alone, Chicago might have be the most enjoyable entertaining movie I saw all year. Shockingly, Renee Zellweger can sing! She’s great in Chicago, playing a character anyone who hasn’t seen this on Broadway may be surprised to learn isn’t very likable at all. (It’s a nice way to subvert the actress’ usual cutesy charms.) Balancing her out is Catherine Zeta-Jones as another murderess bitch, one who plays off Zellweger very well. Zeta-Jones’ Velma Kelly is more upfront about her killer instincts, though not necessarily the more ruthless — she may look darker, but both of these women are devious vamps.

Chicago is all about fame versus infamy, and Marshall nails every musical number, giving each one its own distinct flair. (Not always the case in movie musicals.) “Cell Block Tango” in particular is a real knockout. And though much of the film is a cynical look at criminal celebrity — witness Richard Gere’s turn as a sharky defense attorney — the film also has a tiny bit of heart in John C. Reilly’s poor schlub of a husband, who sells the melancholy “Mr. Cellophane.” Chicago feels perfectly poised to sweep the Academy Awards, and for all its gloss, it’s hard to fault a film that’s so much fun for painting the Oscars red.2. ABOUT SCHMIDT

Jack Nicholson is an icon — he’s won three Oscars and been nominated for many more, turning in essential performances in classic films like Chinatown, The Shining, and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. And while I haven’t seen his entire body of work, I’m prepared to say that this might be his best performance ever.

We all know Nicholson can rant and rave like a madman. It’s become a bit of a shtick, which doesn’t mean it doesn’t still work when used effectively. (Call it the Al Pacino Syndrome.) But Nicholson rarely does that here, instead delivering a subdued and understated turn as a man grappling with aging, retirement, and the death of a spouse — and that’s just the first act.

Nicholson is fearless in his touching and honest portrayal of the perils of being a senior citizen, an underexplored topic in cinema to be sure. He allows his Schmidt to be vulnerable and pathetic, weak and petty. As good as he was in As Good As It Gets, that was not as good as Nicholson gets — it’s this performance that deserves an award. It’s the rare turn from Nicholson that’s more about acting than performance.

The movie as a whole is filled with solid work from a cast including Kathy Bates, Hope Davis, and Dermot Mulroney, reveling at times in the mundane cultural squalor of Middle America. Alexander Payne’s film is alternately very funny and very sad, and just when it seems like it might get boring, the plot goes in a new direction and makes us laugh all over again. About Schmidt proves that Election was no fluke, trading some of that film’s biting comedy for genuine pathos instead.1. FAR FROM HEAVEN

This is both the best movie of 2002 and the best movie of 1955 — or at least it feels that way. Todd Haynes presents a pitch perfect pastiche of Douglas Sirk’s 1950s melodramas, though here the ideals of the “perfect” 50s family are shattered by topics that the world wasn’t ready to tackle back then. (Namely, homosexuality and interracial relationships.)

Julianne Moore plays Cathy Whitaker, a seemingly happy housewife whose cheerful suburban bubble is about to pop. When Cathy finds her husband engaging in unspeakable acts with a fellow gentleman, she discovers her marriage, her friendships, and basically her entire white hetero Connecticut world are nothing but surface — and longs to find something deeper. That causes her to fire up a flirtation with her black gardener, which is almost as taboo as her hubby’s same-sex hanky-panky in this era.

Anchored by Moore’s immaculate performance, Far From Heaven looks and sounds like it was made 50 years ago — with no sex or profanity, it’s certainly tame in comparison to today’s films, though it probably would have been the raciest, most controversial movie of 1955. The period details are simply flawless, with a Technicolor-like sheen that makes this by far 2002’s most beautiful picture to look at. The supporting cast — Dennis Quaid, Patricia Clarkson, and Dennis Haysbert — does plenty of good work too, but this is Moore’s movie, and she shines. If there’s any justice, she’ll win the Oscar this year.

Far From Heaven also contains my favorite line in a movie this year, because of its simplicity and importance to the story: “Here’s to being the only one.” Though it isn’t the only great film of the year, it is certainly one of the most strikingly original, in that it inhabits the tropes and mores of a 1950s melodrama while simultaneously critiquing them. That’s not an easy maneuver, but Haynes pulls it off in spades. And as good as Julianne Moore is in absolutely everything, this may endure as her most essential performance.

BEST DIRECTOR

Todd Haynes, Far From Heaven
Spike Lee, 25th Hour
Steven Spielberg, Minority Report
Rob Marshall, Chicago
Peter Jackson, The Two Towers

BEST ACTRESS

Julianne Moore, Far From Heaven
Renee Zellweger, Chicago
Maribel Verdu, Y Tu Mama Tambien
Diane Lane, Unfaithful
Emily Watson, Punch-Drunk Love

BEST ACTOR

Jack Nicholson, About Schmidt
Daniel Day-Lewis, Gangs Of New York
Nicolas Cage, Adaptation
Edward Norton, 25th Hour
Leonardo DiCaprio, Catch Me If You Can

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Catherine Zeta-Jones, Chicago
Kathy Bates, About Schmidt
Patricia Clarkson, Far From Heaven
Susan Sarandon, Igby Goes Down
Meryl Streep, Adaptation

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Dennis Quaid, Far From Heaven
Paul Newman, Road To Perdition
Chris Cooper, Adaptation
Dennis Haysbert, Far From Heaven
Colin Farrell, Minority Report

BEST EDITING

Chicago
Insomnia
About Schmidt
The Two Towers
Punch-Drunk Love

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Far From Heaven
Minority Report
Chicago
Punch-Drunk Love
Road to Perdition

BEST SCREENPLAY

About Schmidt
Far From Heaven
Changing Lanes
Y Tu Mama Tambien
Insomnia

Many of us have had the experience of returning to a place we know from childhood. A place that once served as the stage for everything we knew, and suddenly, looks very small. Room stars Brie Larson as a woman we know only as “Ma” in the first act of this movie, because that’s the only context a five-year-old boy has of his mother. She is not a person with her own name, and her own history, and her thoughts and moods. We begin our lives as inherently selfish, and only gradually to we come to realize that everyone else’s inner lives are as rich as our own. They don’t just revolve around us.

Jack and Ma live in “Room,” which need not be classified as a room because it’s the only room Jack has ever been in, and the only one he knows about. Unlike most of us, who early on learn to distinguish between the bedroom and the bathroom and the living room, for Jack, there is just room. When Room begins, he believes that this room is all their is of the world, and everything else is “just TV.”

While the circumstances that put Jack and Ma in this predicament are far from universal, the film serves as a metaphor for feelings and relationships we’ve all experienced. Even if we’re not literally trapped in one room for the first five years of our lives, the world as we experience it in childhood is very, very small. Most of our time is spent at home with a caregiver — probably a parent — eating and learning and playing games. Parents create fictions for their kids in order to soften the harsher blows of reality, and gradually reveal the truth as they get older. Then, suddenly, there are moments when we realize the world is much bigger than we previously believed. Often, we wish we could go back to when it felt safe and simple and small. Room occasionally injects itself with a shot of menace through the presence of Old Nick, Ma’s captor (and Jack’s biological father, though he’s far from paternal toward the boy). On the whole, however, writer Emma Donoghue (adapting her own novel very faithfully) and director Lenny Abrahamson are more interested in what makes Jack and Ma’s lives similar to most mothers and sons, rather than the horrifying details that set them apart from those of us who haven’t been locked in a shed for seven years.

Room is intentionally claustrophobic, both because its first act is set entirely within the confines of Room, and also because the film locks us into Jack’s juvenile point of view. The bulk of the film is not about Jack and Ma’s time together in captivity, but what happens following their hasty exit strategy. In the moment many films would use as a happy ending, this one is just beginning. We learn that Ma is actually Joy Newsome, daughter of Robert (William H. Macy) and Nancy (Joan Allen), abducted as a teenage girl by a man who baited her with an invented sick dog.

Room makes room for a lot of the elements you’d expect from a story about a kidnap victim’s homecoming — fear, anger, depression, and of course, thorough hounding from the media — but only in its periphery, because we experience it through Jack, who may get the gist of what’s going on but doesn’t really understand what any of this means. All he knows is that the world is suddenly colossal and terrifying, and now he’s competing with a lot of new factors for Ma’s attention.In a sense, this is a brave choice on the part of the filmmakers — one that clearly follows the example of its source material, which was written entirely in Jack’s voice from his point of view. But it also somewhat limits the dramatic impact of this movie, as we get only glimpses of the juicy stuff we can’t help but want to know about, like what happens to Old Nick after he’s caught by the police, and how Joy is going to reacclimate to being a young woman of the real world. (I wouldn’t want this to become an episode of Law & Order: SVU, but there might have been a clever way to satisfy both requirements.) We get little bits of information here and there, but not enough to flesh out all the intricacies Joy must be facing upon her return. Room focuses primarily on Jack’s journey, which, between the two, is a lot less complicated.

Despite its subject matter, Room is not ultimately a story that tackles grand ideas or big moments. In scenes that might be tense if handled by another director, Room goes for a more lighthearted touch. (The score, by Stephen Rennicks, is a little more upbeat than I’d like.) Its best scenes are the quieter moments, like the one in which Jack first learns to trust Nancy’s new beau Leo (Tom McCamus), or the growing relationship between the grandmother who only just learned she was a grandmother and the grandson she never knew about. There are a handful of dark moments, but Room dwells more on love and hope. Children have an astounding resilience when it comes to accepting hard truths and adapting to new challenges. They’re the reason we push aside past tragedies and carry on, when we might rather just give up. I might have preferred the film to keep us more in the dark about certain elements, like Ma’s backstory, until after their great escape. In several moments, Joy’s emotions feel understated, in part because we’re meant to focus on Jack. But since we’re missing key moments of her experience, we miss out on what feels like essential character development. Whether Room intends to or not, it’s telling a much bigger story than the one we ultimately get; even if showing it from Jack’s perspective is a novel approach, we can’t help but feel a little cheated when so many other characters have more complicated and nuanced perspectives. Both the script and Abrahamson’s direction ultimately split the difference between keeping us in a five-year-old mindset and letting us in on the real world of the adults. Had the film been stylized more subjectively from a child’s perspective, we might not miss what’s left out quite so much. But the camera is more often neutral, shooting the action the way a straightforward adult drama would be, but then pulling us away from that when Jack leaves the scene. Jack doesn’t know or care about these things, but we do. We’re watching his story, but we identify more with Ma. It doesn’t sink the movie, but it’s bound to leave many viewers slightly frustrated.

Across the board, the performances are phenomenal. The film has a serious chance at a Best Picture nomination, and it’s practically a shoo-in for a Best Actress nod for Larson. Joan Allen is typically stellar as Nancy, a role that reminded me of Laura Dern’s turn in Wild last year — which did eke out a Best Supporting Actress nod, but was a bit too light on screen time to be a fighting contender. The same could be true here. As Jack, Jacob Tremblay is tasked with carrying the film on his small shoulders, and he’s simply tremendous.

Room is dark enough to feel important but not so dark that it’ll turn off mainstream audiences. That’s basically the Academy’s sweet spot, though the way this film tackles its subject still somehow feels both too heavy and too light to compete out of the performance races. Some of us like our dramas to be a shade darker and more daring; others prefer them without any rape or attempted suicide at all. You can probably guess which camp I’m in.

*

Whether you’re a fan of former president George W. Bush or not, you have to admit his term contained some profound low points, kicking off with 9/11 and ending in a nasty recession. You may or may not blame Bush himself for these and other pieces of unfortunate Americana in the 21st century, but let’s face it: as a nation, we’ve had better.

Several of the big blights the nation grappled with during the (second) Bush regime are reflected in films from the past 15 years, dealt with explicitly in Farenheit 9/11, Recount, United 93 and Oliver Stone’s W., and more subtextually in Munich or 25th Hour (or any number of others). It’s only about now, though, that we’re able to step back and see things in context, which is why we’re getting movies that deal with these themes at a smaller, more intimate level. We’ve seen a lot of movies about the forest. Now we’re seeing the ones that are about the trees.

99 Homes centers on the financial debacle Bush dropped in Obama’s lap on his way out of the Oval Office. The 2008 recession has been the subject of a few films already, of course — we saw it from a Wall Street’s point of view in Margin Call, way up high at skyscraper level. Now 99 Homes gives us a ground’s eye view: the perspective of the families forced to relinquish their homes to the very banks who effed up in lending to them in the first place. Andrew Garfield plays Dennis Nash, a construction worker facing hard times because in 2008, there isn’t a whole lot of new construction going on. Nash has a mortgage on the home he grew up in and still lives in with his mom Lynn (Laura Dern) and son Connor (Noah Lomax). Then, one day, they’re out on the street, with only a few dollars in their pockets. Theirs is not an uncommon plight.

Nash is resourceful enough to find a (literally) shitty job cleaning up a house its owners left riddled with feces as a “fuck you” to the bank. Real estate mogul Rick Carver (Michael Shannon) takes a shine to Dennis’ plucky attitude and recruits him for some shady but lucrative dealings. Dennis is a good guy at heart, but he ultimately doesn’t have a lot of qualms about screwing the system that screwed him first. Soon, Nash has the cash to buy his family home back — or buy a dreamy mansion, as he is tempted and seduced by the very factors that got him in trouble in the first place. Carver advises him to not get sentimental about real estate, but that doesn’t end up being very good advice. Despite the way it may look on paper, homes are not just the boxes we reside in. They contain our whole lives.Carver is a bastard and he knows it, but as the film unfolds, the twisted logic he uses to justify his riches starts making a lot of sense, both to Dennis and to us in the audience. Michael Shannon takes pleasure in this dirty, greasy rich prick role, the way Shannon manages to sink his teeth into despicable villain roles that many actors would be afraid to take. Dern is unfortunately underused, beginning in “worried mom” mode and never permitted to go beyond it. Buying Garfield as a low-income construction worker takes a moment to get used to, but he ably carries the film once we settle into the story.

Directed by Ramin Bahrani, 99 Homes has  moments of life-and-death suspense, but the real tension comes from scenes in which we see everyday Americans fight the powers that be — the bankers, the government, the police — to save their homes… and lose, over and over. These people did nothing wrong, except believe in the myth of the American dream, listen to the “authorities,” and follow the road map every middle class American is handed, telling us we’re supposed to buy houses, and cars, and whatever else we can get our hands on. It’s practically a birthright — or it seemed that way, before it became painfully obvious that no one in this scheme knew exactly what they were doing. It’s a horrible injustice.

Unfortunately, Bahrani’s plot takes a slightly more conventional and melodramatic turn toward the end of 99 Homes than it really needed to, as if it didn’t trust that the stakes were high enough when it was just ordinary people faced with greed and corruption and a very broken system. This is a horror most of us already lived through, at some level — if we didn’t lose a home, perhaps we lost a job or our sense of security. Its setting in the very recent past injects 99 Homes with more urgency than you’d usually get from this sort of drama. A couple of Michael Shannon’s juicier monologues spell out this movie’s themes, but we didn’t really need them to. We’ve been living those themes since 2008.A similar but much higher profile injustice is explored in Truth, the dramatization of news producer Mary Mapes’ eventual firing by CBS following a 60 Minutes segment that questioned George W. Bush’s military service. The issues raised by Mapes and Dan Rather have a lot of legitimacy and are worthy of investigation, but instead the public gets hung up on whether or not CBS got fooled by forged documents. The point of the piece gets completely lost amidst all the nitpicking, and Mapes, Rather, and a handful of others lose their jobs due to bureaucracy and implied pressures from the Bush administration.

George W. Bush ends up being the villain in this movie without even being seen in it; he’s probably not directly responsible for any of this, but we never actually see the minions do their bidding. By the time it gets down to Mapes, the ill will has been funneled through a number of levels, which only adds to the feeling of helplessness she (and we) feel against The System. In the third act, Mapes is scrutinized and demonized by a committee of conservative lawyers who are hell-bent on uncovering Mapes’ “radical liberal” agenda, standing in for a large segment of the population who holds the same beliefs. (And whom we can thank for voting for Bush. Twice.) As its in-your-face title may suggest, Truth is not terribly subtle about the issues it’s exploring. Like 99 Homes, it feels the urge to monologue its Big Ideas, with plenty of grandstanding about journalistic integrity and corporate corruption along the way.

This is Zodiac writer James Vanderbilt’s first foray into directing. The result is that a few scenes work like gangbusters, while others come off as a bit stagey. A key component of Truth‘s more successful moments, of course, is Cate Blanchett as Mary Mapes, who proves that she can deliver a near-Oscar caliber performance in just about anything. Any time Blanchett and Robert Redford, who plays Rather, are on screen together, the film gets an electric charge from its high-wattage stars. The film contains a host of other recognizable faces in smaller roles — Dennis Quaid, Elisabeth Moss, Dermot Mulroney, Stacy Keach, Topher Grace — but they don’t all fare as well as Blanchett and Redford, since they’re mostly saddled with exposition and monologues. It’s impossible not to compare Truth to another tale of 60 Minutes segments gone haywire, Michael Mann’s The Insider, one of the all-time great films about journalism. Blanchett is every bit as good here as Al Pacino was there, but Truth spends so much time examining the Big Issues that it never quite gets around to developing its characters as individual human beings. Ultimately, the ideas on Vanderbilt’s mind end up being more compelling than the execution.A third film delving into fairly recent Americana is Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs. This one is set closer to George H.W. Bush’s reign than his son’s, however. (It takes place in 1984, 1988, and 1998, thereby avoiding the first Bush presidency altogether, despite its proximity.) There’s nothing terribly political about Steve Jobs, of course, except that it leaves us on the eve of the tech revolution that introduced the iMac to consumers, kicking off a whole wave of innovation that would bring us the iPod, iPhone, and iPad — all of which changed modern life as we know it. Technically set in the past, Steve Jobs is very much about the now. It’s the kind of movie that wouldn’t work at all unless we all knew what happened after.

Predictably, Steve Jobs feels like a spiritual sequel to The Social Network — or technically, a prequel, since without Steve Jobs there is no Mark Zuckerberg. Both films were written by Aaron Sorkin. Both play fast and loose with facts. Both portray their subjects as ego-maniacal assholes who push away the people they love (or the people they should love) in favor of unbridled genius. This is a particularly dicey position to take with Jobs, a man who is essentially worshipped, perhaps the closest we’ve come to a modern deity. You can write Mark Zuckerberg off as a spoiled whippersnapper who got lucky, if you wish, but with Steve Jobs, it’s more complicated. Jobs really worked before he was able to change the world.

As concocted by Sorkin, Steve Jobs unfolds in three theatrical acts, each revolving around the same handful of characters buzzing in and out of Jobs’ orbit just before he embarks on one of his now-infamous product launches. It’s a nifty gimmick, one that’s obviously meant to be taken with a grain of salt, given that there’s not a chance in hell any of these events actually unfolded as depicted here. This is an excuse for Sorkin to do what he does best, which is to portray very smart, very articulate professionals in their workplace, spouting ideas that say more about the macro state of the world than they do about any of them as individuals.

Steve Jobs isn’t all that much about Steve Jobs, the same way The Social Network wasn’t exactly about Mark Zuckerburg or Sean Parker, and Citizen Kane isn’t really about William Randolph Hearst. The Social Network‘s main takeaway was about loneliness in the digital age, and the central irony that no amount of virtual “friendship” can truly replace person-to-person intimacy. It depicted a shift in the power balance between the old guard of moneyed upper-crusters to pajamaed freshmen who could make millions without leaving their dorm rooms — a shift that would never have been possible without Steve Jobs. Most of us would agree that Jobs was ahead of the curve, but Steve Jobs depicts him as so ahead of the curve, he’s all but clairvoyant.

In its first act, Jobs is frustrated with the limits of the Macintosh computer, which refuses to say “Hello” as it’s programmed to do; this is crucial because the computer needs to appear friendly and appealing to consumers, and not like the emotionless killer people have in mind thanks largely to HAL9000 of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Ironically, the second act has Jobs unveiling the NeXT computer, a charmless black cube reminiscent of 2001’s mysterious Monolith. Ultimately, neither the Macintosh nor NeXT is a sustainable venture, which leads to the fun and frisky iMac launch of 1998, which we all know turned out just dandy.

But Steve Jobs suggests that it wasn’t just that the iMac had the right look and feel to appeal to the mass market, but that Jobs was essentially just waiting all along for technology to catch up to him. Ultimately, computers couldn’t be a staple in every home until there was a reason for them to be, and that reason was, of course, the internet. Steve Jobs didn’t explicitly know how the internet would start shaping our lives in the 90s, but intuitively he was aware that something like this would create a demand for his products. He was just a little too early with his ideas, and had to wait for the rest of the world to catch up.

Boyle gives us only hints of glimpses at the tech obsessives who made Jobs a god for the 21st century — stamping their feet and hollering for their deity, though the film focuses exclusively on Jobs’ closest confidantes and family. Despite posing Jobs as a prickly mogul who sacrificed personal relationships for his status as one of the most influential innovators of all time, the film is ultimately optimistic about all the wonderful toys Jobs left us with, treating technology not as a harbinger of doom the way it’s portrayed in most movies, but as something that is ultimately poised to bring human beings closer together.

Steve Jobs spends a lot of time on Jobs’ non-relationship with his daughter Lisa, who he refuses to acknowledge is his daughter in the film’s earliest segment. This is obviously tied to his complicated feelings about his own biological parents, who gave him up for adoption. It’s an echo of the way Zuckerberg isolates his friends in The Social Network, but in Steve Jobs, technology is the link that allows Jobs to connect with his daughter, rather than what comes between them. Jobs cherishes Lisa’s childhood drawing on a rudimentary paint program more than any time actually spent with her; a teenage Lisa’s Walkman inspires him to create a device that will allow her to carry  a thousand songs instead of just one album. As wondrous as technology is, in Steve Jobs, it is ultimately only as magnificent as what people can do with it. A computer is just a machine until we turn it on and use it for something incredible. Jobs’ Macs evolve in a way that mirrors Lisa’s own development, but Steve Jobs‘ third act in particular spends a lot more time on the people than the product.Steve Jobs is basically a mash-up of the themes explored in The Social Network and Moneyball, which occasionally make it play more like Aaron Sorkin’s Greatest Hits than a brand new movie standing on its own two feet. There’s sparkling banter and a constant flurry of activity from characters who never sit still but also never go anywhere; the same effect could be achieved for a fraction of the budget if Sorkin just put everyone on a treadmill. Aaron Sorkin has never not been Aaron Sorkin and Steve Jobs is no exception, but the crackling dialogue still contains as much genuine insight into the human condition as it does nifty zingers. As in 99 Homes and Truth, there are on-the-nose monologues that essentially spell out the themes Boyle and Sorkin are dealing with — but nobody does a monologue like Aaron Sorkin, so Steve Jobs can get away with it in a way that those others don’t quite pull off.

In the end, social networks may be slightly juicier cinematic material than the machines that deliver them to us, and so The Social Network will be the more enduring masterpiece. David Fincher had just the right sensibility to mitigate some of Sorkin’s most Sorkinian qualities, and while Daniel Pemberton’s score is plenty good, it’s not going to change the cinematic soundscape the way that Trent Reznor and Atticus Roth did. Boyle does good work here, but also adds a few stylistic flourishes that feel like overkill in a film that’s already so heightened. (Hello, rocket ship! Where did you come from?) The third act focuses too heavily on wrapping up the Lisa story, and the film’s final moments are possibly more upbeat than they needed to be, ending on a Jobs-as-rock-star moment the movie has up until this point wisely avoided.

Steve Jobs has disappointed in wide release, which somewhat mars its chances for major awards consideration — though it’s definitely still in the running. The sterling cast — mainly, Kate Winslet, Jeff Daniels, and Michael Fassbender — all have shots at Oscar nods, and Sorkin’s screenplay seems like a shoo-in. Steve Jobs is ultimately a fascinating look at the dawning of the modern age, its subject matter coming across as both ancient and current simultaneously. It sure is quaint that a computer saying “Hello” used to be a big deal, isn’t it? But at the same time, most of us have witnessed this revolution with our own eyes. And it’s still happening. There’s something almost spooky about seeing the birth of our era brought to life in this way, by a man both out of touch with basic human emotion and eerily prescient about what humans would want and need in the near future. Steve Jobs tells us only a little about who Steve Jobs was. It says a lot more about who we are.

*