Mean Streets Discussion

When watching The Wolf of Wall Street for the first time, one of the earlier Scorsese films that came to my mind most assertively was Mean Streets, Marty's gritty NYC gangster movie from 1973. I found the resemblances less apparent on my second viewing of Scorsese's latest, but my passing mention of it in my initial review of Wolf was thankfully enough to send Kenji Fujishima down memory lane. He and I had been loosely discussing a possible conversation-style column for In Review Online for a while, so we jumped at the opportunity to further flesh out the deeper connections between the films as well as the special importance of Mean Streets in Scorsese's body of work. We've been cooking up this correspondence for a while now, and if you have time to spare for a long article, you can read the proud results here.

Screening Notes #24

Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (2009): The above image gets at all that's so gently beguiling about Manoel de Oliveira's recent films. It shows a man relaying a tale of thwarted romance to a female stranger on a moving train, and it's the framing device that houses Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl's narrative proper. But what are the characters looking at? And why is the camera placed in this strange location, perched above them so they look like they're transfixed by the tripod legs? Also, why do they never make eye contact? What seems a familiar setup is rendered subtly off through its presentation, a trait I'd use to describe the film as a whole. A straightforward narrative of old-fashioned courtship is observed: the man on the train becomes infatuated with a young girl in a window across the courtyard from his office, tracks her down, professes his love, has his request to marry turned down by his employer uncle, performs an odd job to become financially independent, returns to his object of affection, discovers a character flaw, and angrily casts her off. It's a simple morality tale, or so it seems, but the devil's in the details: the low-decibel but niftily selective sound design of urban Lisbon, telling gestures and bodily positions such as the girl's sudden foot kick or final shoulder slouch, and, again, Oliveira's funky deep-focus framing. I see the critique of female objectification excavated by the film's admirers (Glenn Heath Jr. astutely offers such a reading here), but at the same time I'm not convinced this is quite that cut-and-dry. There's something more in the way this movie moves that I need another look to put a finger on.

Mon Oncle Antoine (1971): Canadian filmmaker Claude Jutra's most well-known film Mon Oncle Antoine has the narrative directness and emotional clarity of a Robert Frost poem. It tells of a little boy gradually opening his eyes to responsibility, sex and death in a small Quebec mining town riddled with working-class outrage at the mandates of a mostly offscreen conservative government. With the exception of a slow-moving first act, which divides its dramatic emphasis in puzzling ways, Jutra centers his focus on this boy (Jacques Gagnon, whose eyes have a Bergmanesque opacity). The film's perspective skews gently towards his sense of dazed discovery, allowing Jutra's naturalistic rendering of the community to come across all the more authentic, never scrutinized or falsely dramatized. A final act involving the botched retrieval of a corpse in a heavy snowfall is the film's real achievement, its best showcase for Jutra's ability to uncover great nuance without any tendency toward overstatement, stylistic or performance-based.

Gremlins (1984): A movie theater nearly overflowing with cackling villains, hysterically absorbed in the screen. A man and a woman conspiring against them in the shadowy alcoves of the theater. A murderous plot involving flammable material and a match. A smoking, flaming screen and its eventual tearing down. Sound a lot like the climax of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds? Sure, but it's also the same template for the climax of Joe Dante's hilarious and stylistically muscular sci-fi holiday film Gremlins. Thus, American cinema's most conspicuous thief pays explicit homage to a no less reverential but far subtler American genre craftsman. Tarantino's steal was inspired; Dante's invention was brilliant. In Gremlins, a boy must put an end to the multiplying effects of his hasty consumerism. The resulting destruction is tied to the act of cinematic spectatorship. Can there be such thing as an active, productive viewer/consumer? It's a question also asked by Inglourious Basterds.

Taken (2008): Like Pierre Morel's District B13 (another Luc Besson production), Taken is first and foremost a showcase for its central performer. But Liam Neeson's strengths are of a different tack than those of the gymnastic David Belle. He's sharp, quick-thinking, internally composed but always on the move, relentless and lethal but nowhere near as athletic as Belle. Taken, then, is a ruthless and single-minded revenge movie that aligns perfectly with Neeson's abilities. Morel's terrible at drama – that much is clear from Taken's bookends (boneheaded attempts at father-daughter bonding), or the entirety of District B13 for that matter – but he's a whiz when it comes to frenetic pacing, dogged pursuits, swift fight sequences, and pulsating testosterone. Thus, sixty minutes of Taken have a breakneck, lupine energy, culminating with a moment of Liam Neeson driving a hijacked car along the Seine that's near-transcendent. Whatever grave extra-diegetic implications exist in its female trafficking plot are neutralized by Morel's termitic filmmaking, prioritizing one hard beat at a time.



Taurus (2001): I had the unfavorable, and frankly inexcusable, misfortune of seeing this on a shockingly atrocious digital transfer in a theater, and not just a run-of-the-mill indie cinema but a...wait for it...actual cultural institution known as the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. When, citing the digital artifacts and near-YouTube quality, I prompted an employee to explain to me the logic of charging money to display a .mov file that should never have even been within shouting distance of a projection room, I received a pithy "it was what the company gave us." Leaving aside the mystery of whether or not the staff even bothered to test the film prior to scheduling it, the bigger issue here is one of standards and general cultural responsibility, the apparently unreasonable assumption being that a museum should be honoring their exhibited mediums with the utmost fidelity. Anyway, it's an even greater shame because Taurus strikes me as one of Alexander Sokurov's best films, and certainly the only one I feel like I've ever had a fairly solid grasp on after a single viewing.

Like the final reel of Citizen Kane elongated into one long, slow yawn interrupted involuntarily by hiccups and grumbles, this two-part dirge watches from its stoned perspective as Lenin completes the transition from once-relevant political figure to stumbling icon of obsolescence in his family's foggy country estate. Sokurov's 4:3 frames, slapped with a vignette of murkiness (or, again, was it just the residue of the transfer?) and lit with a diffuse brown aura, embody the shrinking and decay of Lenin's senile mind and crippled body. Comparisons between Sokurov and his Russian antecedent Tarkovsky have always felt a little superficial to me, as though the mere fact that the two filmmakers trade in vaguely similar visual languages, draw upon similar artistic influences, and come from the same country implies deeper connections, but here the surface parallels are hard to ignore (fog-enshrouded fields and slow tracking shots behind trees are plentiful, and one scene features Lenin and his wife chatting while lying in tall grass). But here, as usual, Sokurov's typically lowly body humor and rambling dramatic structure is after a far more earthbound truth than those pursued by Tarkovsky—specifically, that those having lost power can only exist delusively in the dark waters of their own past, a perceived legacy outweighing the value of the present moment.

Faust (2011): Two weeks removed from this screening and its majestic oddness still eludes me. If Taurus is Sokurov's most straightforward film, Faust is at the opposite end of the spectrum, a slippery concoction whose visuals – alternating between show-stopping moments of clarity traceable to iconic European paintings and inebriated, claustrophobic trudges in soft-focus through damp, dark interiors – seem beamed from another world. My desire to return to the film's revelatory atmosphere of booze, mud, guts, flatulence, and philosophy has been great, but now it looks like my big-screen opportunities have dwindled, which is OK with me; several passages of it have the uncanny, unfinished mystery of the most haunting folk tales (and not just because the movie's based on a folk tale), the kinds whose images never quite leave the brain even through long droughts of contact. At this point, I'm just vomiting baffled reverential nonsense, so I might as well just add more to the pile: Alexander Sokurov is a visionary.

The Color Wheel (2011): Mostly everything about The Color Wheel's climactic post-grad party – the rudeness of JR's old high school peers, her spectacularly awkward dodging of employment-focused conversation, the increasingly macho gang-up on Colin, the superficiality of one girl who's both JR's arch-enemy and Colin's longtime crush – is dug into a bit too hard by Alex Ross Perry, a sudden pivot into subjective fantasy designed to almost legitimize the brother-sister duo's terminal mean-spiritedness up to this point. It nearly throws the film off its rails, but the subsequent 10-minute pillow chat between JR and Colin makes everything right again, in addition to radically deepening the film's emotional landscape. The Color Wheel is pretty much virtuosic in its wall-to-wall chatter; the words are progressively meaningless so as to avoid any possible dead air that might force inner confrontation. In this particular centerpiece, JR's dialogue is entirely superfluous, and when it comes to a sudden halt, the film unleashes a shockwave of emotional comprehension hitherto stifled beneath a facade. Generic acoustic-strummed driving scenes and some awfully broad gags do nothing to suggest the challenging places Perry's film ultimately goes.

Breakdown (1997) A Film by Jonathan Mostow

The scant exposition bestowed by Jonathan Mostow's ruthless all-action action-thriller Breakdown comes in a brief dialogue scene between hero Jeffrey Taylor (Kurt Russell) and his wife Amy (Kathleen Quinlan) in the first ten minutes. Quasi-bourgie travelers from Beantown on a pilgrimage to start a new life out west, the couple offhandedly reveals the relative financial hole they're in, perhaps partly created by the shining red Jeep they're using to power through an imposing southwestern America. While eagerly escaping this void of dust, rock, and cement, Jeff's new engine is tripped by a mysterious gas station passerby, which ultimately causes the titular breakdown and traps him and his wife in the squalid emptiness they're seeking to outrun. Beautifully economical, this setup establishes everything the viewer needs to know in order to go along with the escalating paranoia of the subsequent plot: these are clearly privileged white people in a bind navigating an unknown desert where threat is perceived from every possible direction.

When a dubiously benevolent trucker arrives as if by divine intervention and offers to take Amy to a nearby diner to call for automotive assistance, Jeff's frightened interiority starts to be reflected by an actively malicious environment. He get his car back in order shortly after he sacrifices Amy to this perfectly reasonable sign of relief, but when he tracks down the diner to retrieve his wife she's not there. No one is aware of her ever setting foot on the premises, nor are they remotely concerned about her disappearance. On the surface, the premise is reminiscent of that which kicks off The Vanishing (1988), a darkly existential gut punch from French director George Sluizer that was inexplicably remade with American stars and for "American" audiences by Sluizer himself five years later. But where Sluizer's admirably hopeless original struck a deeply nihilistic tone, revealing the world as essentially cruel and its mysteries unsolvable, Mostow's film is pitched at a more absurd register, the machinations of its wronged-man plot indistinguishably perched between actual peril and the workings of a delusional imagination. It's significant that the villain here is not a single warped mind but rather the entire town, a mustachioed and mob-like mass seemingly conspiring to drain Jeff of his remaining finances and brutalize his life partner.



In exchange for the $90,000 Jeff purports to have left in his bank account, the exceptionally nasty men (the amoral head honcho of which is played with chilling solemnity by J.T. Walsh) who kidnap Amy offer the empty promise of her survival. That the assumed financial reward is so measly in the larger scope of movie theft ($90,000 is hardly the sort of amount that would completely rebuild the dust-caked town) only augments the sense that Jeff's victimhood is subjective rather than circumstantial, the pervasive evil of the world around him a manifestation of his anxieties more than a tangible force. At the same time, the achievement of the film is in making those anxieties ferociously tangible. Mostow's project is not to ridicule or punish Jeff for his endangerment, but rather to cling intimately to his perspective as he pursues the rehabilitation of order in his now lopsided universe—as such, Breakdown is one of Hollywood's most skillful exercises in empathetic engagement. Great portions of the film, particularly in the second act when Jeff's confusion is at its peak, are shot at wide angles and in deep focus, visualizing the floating fear of 360 degree threat. By the film's third act, the alignment of the audience with Jeff is absolute; we share his nervous perspective in voyeuristic telephoto shots, culminating in a garage peeping scene in which the camera is literally placed on a different level than the villains, with Jeff observing their transgressions from a loft above.

The resolution to this inner battle writ large is of the demon-conquering variety in which Hollywood cinema is bound to trade (in this case, The Vanishing's nihilism would spoil the very ideology of self-growth upon which the narrative machine is founded). But give credit to Mostow for rendering this nightmare of personal collapse, however temporary, with such vivid, scraping intensity. The film's most acute lasting impression is of sparks flying and sweaty faces coiled in nerve-popping adrenaline. Furthermore, Spielberg's Duel (1971) is an apparent precedent, but rarely since Two Lane Blacktop (also 1971) have automobiles had such a decidedly weighty presence, here made deadly through their constant high-speed entangling. It's also worth applauding the way in which the audience is finally left hanging (almost literally) after a near-death experience at the precipice of a bridge. Mostow's bow-tying is curt and efficient, hardly cathartic: Jeff and Amy's final embrace is only dwelled upon for seconds before the camera lurches upward to survey the wreckage beneath, the swells of a minor-key orchestra reaching their crescendo. Miles of road still lie ahead.

My Favorite Discoveries/First-Time Viewings of 2013

Jonas Mekas' soft-spoken, broken English; Jack Nicholson's jeans and turtlenecks; a strobed-out vision of a wolf lunging towards a tube video camera; the disconcertingly giddy smile of Götz George's apologetic murderer; a dissolve in which Jean Seberg's essence becomes water; the furniture literally floating through Raul Ruiz's set; a man and his dog dissolving into the back of a frame through a swirling storm of snow and film grain; Roddy Piper's one-liners; the palpable texture of Gunvor Nelson's film stock; Michel Terrazon's lost little brat scurrying around the frame in a derelict French countryside; the hilarious way in which Mark Borchardt and Mike Schank communicate; a glance – loaded with the weight of historical unfairness – of a black groundskeeper at an old white woman; Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson waltzing in seeming romantic bliss, their faces meanwhile dipping in and out of darkness; Craig Wasson finger-picking and humming a reflective tune while the savage chaos of the Vietnam War rages all around him. These are just a sampling of the many reasons why these first time viewings of old films have indelibly lingered throughout the year.

Titles link to writing when applicable.

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1. Reminiscences of Journey to Lithuania (Mekas, US, 1972)

2. 2046 (Wong Kar-Wai, China, 2004)

3. Five Easy Pieces (Rafelson, US, 1970)

4. Army of Shadows (Melville, France, 1969)

5. I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like (Viola, US, 1986)

6. The Deathmaker (Karmakar, Germany, 1995)

7. Lilith (Rossen, US, 1964)

8. Time Regained (Ruiz, Portugal, 1999)

9. Zorn’s Lemma (Frampton, US, 1970)

10. Beau Travail (Denis, France, 1999)

11. The Mother and The Whore (Eustache, France, 1973)

12. Nostalgia for the Light (Guzmán, Chile, 2010)

13. They Live (Carpenter, US, 1988)

14. Mauvais Sang (Carax, France, 1986)

15. Light Years (Nelson, Sweden, 1987, Short)

16. Innocence (Hadzihalilovic, France, 2004)

17. Mississippi Mermaid (Truffaut, France, 1969)

18. Monkey Business (Hawks, US, 1952)

19. American Movie (Smith, US, 1999)

20. L’Enfance Nue (Pialat, France, 1968)

21. The Thing (Carpenter, US, 1982)

22. King of New York (Ferrara, US, 1990)

23. Journey to Italy (Rossellini, Italy, 1954)

24. Make Way for Tomorrow (McCarey, US, 1937)

25. Schuss! (Rey, France, 2006)

26. The Aviator’s Wife (Rohmer, France, 1981)

27. Duck Soup (McCarey, US, 1933)

28. Le Pont du Nord (Rivette, France, 1981)

29. Plumbline (Schneemann, US, 1968-71)

30. Backyard (McElwee, US, 1984)

31. The Evil Dead (Raimi, US, 1981)

32. The Stolen Man (Piñeiro, Argentina, 2007)

33. The Boys in Company C (Furie, US, 1978)

34. Faust (Murnau, Germany, 1926)

35. Ah, Liberty! (Rivers, UK, 2008, Short)

36. Black Sabbath (Bava, Italy, 1963)

37. China Gate (Fuller, US, 1957)

38. Magnificent Obsession (Sirk, US, 1954)

39. Utamoro and His Five Women (Mizoguchi, Japan, 1946)

40. Go! Go! Go! (Menken, US, 1962-64)

My Favorite Films of 2013

The watch-a-lot-of-films-and-try-to-place-myself-in-vaguely-professional-scenarios-doing-so track referenced in the introduction to my end-of-year list last year has continued on a sturdy pace over the past twelve months, a welcome difference being that 2013's crop of films – both on the national release slate and the festival scene – far outclassed those of last year and thus offered me an especially challenging opportunity to expand my sensibility as a viewer and a writer. It may have merely been my increased resources and determination with regards to digesting the great diversity of worthwhile cinema that sees some form of exposure on a weekly basis in the United States (something for which I owe a lot to Kenji Fujishima, editor of In Review Online and savage hunter of pre-release links/DVDs), but I saw far more new films this year than ever in my life. It's been a good year for cinema, as well as for many of the reasons I mentioned in this post a few months ago.

One thing that is going to be different from last year in the forthcoming round-up of films is the criteria I used to select them. I've never cared much for the whole journalistic standard that governs year-end lists and requires that a film be treated to at least a one-week run in NYC during the calendar year for eligibility (a system that neglects regional releases in, well, the 49 other states). That said, I've never been particularly inclined to try to rationalize my own obscure eligibility system either, which has mucked up my year-end lists for a while now and doesn't really do anyone any favors. So, in the name of organization and standardization, or whatever, I'm throwing in the towel and abiding by the "rules." But (another but), there's a catch: the films that would have formally qualified for 2013 list-making that I included in my 2012 list won't be included here for the sake of not repeating myself, with the exception of those which I re-watched during their 2013 public run and radically reevaluated my opinion on; such is the case with my #1, which I simply couldn't let sleep in the comparatively unfavorable #12 slot I smacked upon it last year. To add one last nugget of confusion and hypocrisy to the mix, I have included two films on this list that don't belong here according to any yardstick. However, they are films (noted with a *) for which, tragically, there is in all likelihood no one-week Big Apple run on the horizon (I will hold out hope for other neglected 2013 gems like Leones and See You Next Tuesday). Perhaps their inclusion is part of a measly hope that my words will correct this appalling reality.

Enough banter. Here are my favorite films of 2013. When applicable, bolded titles link to my reviews, and for the most part, unhelpfully specific blurbs are pulled from said reviews and are marked as such with quotations. Do not feel obliged to click these links, but if you do I will not object.

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25. You Ain't Seen Nothin’ Yet (Resnais, France)

"For those entirely unaware or with only a sketchy familiarity with Eurydice, it’s nearly impossible to discern the extent to which the script’s barrage of double-crosses and suggestions of infidelity are germane to the ancient story’s characters or if the several different generations of actors in d’Anthac’s renditions are filling in their own dramas from both memories of the material and their of-the-moment hopes and anxieties. This fuzziness between the textual and extra-textual elements is, I imagine, not only intentional in Resnais’s knotty design, but encouraged to allow us to better drift into the film’s porous representations of time, reality and performance."


24. To the Wonder (Malick, USA)

"The film's finest accomplishment is its melancholy evocation of past selves through its focus on unfurnished houses, unoccupied laundromats, quiet neighborhoods, and empty landscapes, all locations the characters pass through at one point or another. Returned to over and over in the film's loose, flowing montage, these impressions of emptiness, accumulating into one giant void, make To the Wonder the saddest movie Malick has made."


23. Mondomanila (Khavn De Le Cruz, Philippines)*

"A rare thing in cinema, or at least a rare thing to see the light of day in American cinemas: a film about grinding slum life that refuses to condescend, simplify, pity, or hastily polemicize its subjects. Set in the titular district of the Philippines, Mondomanila is a low on budget but high on ingenuity ensemble cartoon that leavens its dire, disturbing subject matter every step of the way with punkish irreverence and a truly perverse sense of humor. The film stands in a tradition of grotesque surrealism that runs from Buñuel to Waters to Makavejev to Jodorowsky, yet I've still never seen anything like director Khavn De La Cruz's anarchic hybridization of genres and styles."


22. Outside Satan (Dumont, France)

"Alternating between statuesque close-ups of faces against skies and rapturous deep-focus views of the rural dunes of Nowhere, France, the film essentially presents a series of richly detailed landscapes to meditate upon, but this desire for contemplation is complicated throughout by a vaguely sinister energy...Dumont's formidable command of screen space, editing tempo, and atmospheric soundscapes is such that every shot feels as if it's on the precipice of a dangerous outburst that never arrives."


21. Blue is the Warmest Color (Kechiche, France)

"Blue is the Warmest Color is a movie of constant, sometimes rocky evolution, a form it shares with that of a turbulent romantic relationship. It channels inward on a plot level but expands consistently outward in terms of resonance, starting out as a film tuned in to the coming out process and its interpersonal repercussions and concluding as a remarkably sensitive, all-inclusive portrait of the challenges and rewards of having a significant other."


20. Side Effects (Soderbergh, USA)
Never got around to writing about this, so until I do, I'd like to just defer to Ryland Walker Knight's beautiful piece on, among other things, the film, which echoes many of my own thoughts (Vadim Rizov's review is also handy, though slightly less compatible with my own verdict. Then again, I already included that in my 2013 film writing round-up here.) Until I see Side Effects again, I'll also reference my TweetReview back in February: "Shifts of control, shifts of fortune, shifts of knowledge, shifts of genre, all w/ dreamy hyper-clarity. Sody in a nutshell." Oh, and Rooney Mara proves herself as one of our most gifted – and, even through onscreen depression, most unbearably gorgeous – actresses, capable of making an icy stare like the one above terribly seductive.


19. This is Martin Bonner (Hartigan, USA)

"Despite the looming presence of Catholic churches and potentially therapeutic religiosity (Travis’ married volunteers found themselves in Nevada because it’s “where God wanted [them]”), the film is not about guilt, redemption or any other Catholicized notions, but rather about something much simpler and more primal: the transformative power of encountering another person at a similar juncture in life in a brand-new milieu. Shot largely in bright, crisp West Coast sunlight, This Is Martin Bonner reconfigures the metropolitan weirdness of Reno as something sobering, luminous and rife with possibility."


18. The Last Time I Saw Macao (Rodrigues & Guerra da Mata, Portugal)

"Unclassifiable and unpredictable, João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata's utterly unique documentary-fiction hybrid (I realize that in today's festival landscape such a characterization might sound contradictory) begins as a fairly straightforward visual travelogue of Macao (a "Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China" that was once a longtime Portuguese colony), then lays over the top of it an entirely invisible narrative with campy shadings of noir and sci-fi before ultimately surrendering the film to some uncanny conspiratorial force that enshrouds the movie's final passage in a cryptic, wordless, vaguely apocalyptic fog."


17. Frances Ha (Baumbach, USA)

"Shot in placid monochrome on location in New York City, San Francisco, and Paris and doused in Delerue, Baumbach obviously has the French New Wave on his mind. At one point, we even glimpse a poster of Francois Truffaut's Small Change (1976) on the walls of one of Frances' temporary dwellings. The debt is both obvious and substantive: Frances Ha echoes the spirit (restless, witty, self-conscious), the narrative (drifting young people in urban environments), and the technical crudeness (the Canon 5D Mark II being a contemporary equivalent of the Bolex or the Cameflex in terms of size and efficiency) of Godard and Truffaut's early films, even sharing deeper thematic resonances with a less fashionable New Waver like Eric Rohmer."


16. At Berkeley (Wiseman, USA)

As captured by Frederick Wiseman's camera and arranged by his editing platform, the University of California, Berkeley is a habitat rife with pointed tensions: radicalism vs. tradition, liberated thinking vs. pragmatism, egalitarianism vs. elitism, genuine passion vs. conditioned behavior, individualism vs. collectivism, and that which is knowable/definable vs. that which is unknown/unknowable. What gradually becomes clear is that the college is a confluence of large-scale forces, rigidly mobilized but not always homogeneously ideological, butting heads and searching messily for some compromise. The film's closing shot of a school theatrical performance lit so as to silhouette the performers bobbing horizontally across the frame evokes the large-scale printmaking of Kara Walker, an artist who similarly charts power structures, often targeting the nature of civil rights in the Antebellum South but also hinting at the defining apparatus of her contemporary nation. A gargantuan, multi-layered and richly associative work, At Berkeley too seems about as comprehensive with regards to the complexities of our country during its lead-up to the scattered Occupy movement as it does to its portrait of higher education.


15. Inside Llewyn Davis (Coen Brothers, USA)

"Initial impulse is that the Coens' latest nails a series of frustrations particular to independent musicians: 1) the feeling that for whatever reason the zeitgeist has passed you by, that the general consensus is slightly out of step with your creations; 2) the resulting sense of diffused irritation, simultaneously pointed at everyone and no one in particular; 3) a tendency to then retreat inward, convinced of your authenticity within a landscape of phoniness. In a sort of masochistic way (I'm a musician myself that has felt like Llewyn more times than I'd like to admit), I enjoyed the hell out of the film for these reasons."


14. Differently, Molussia (Rey, France)*

"In one of the most gorgeous moments of Differently, Molussia, the camera surveys an overcast valley in a continuous tilt-and-pan movement; throughout, the thick dancing grain of Rey's outdated stock nearly overpowers the image's representative components, and in some instances becomes indistinguishable from the precipitation coming from the sky. It's a mysterious, enthralling abstraction brought about by the medium's particularities, and its effect is miles from the machine-like (totalitarian?) rigidity of the digital image. In such cases, the values of Rey's work are not directed or expounded upon, but rather felt."


13. Nebraska (Payne, USA)

"Nebraska's resonant monochrome widescreen images are in the vein of the predominantly gray, sparsely populated Midwestern landscape photography of Stranger than Paradise (1984), another film which regards the stubborn commitment to a fading lifestyle with a tarnished romanticism. But Payne's film offers another level specific to today's America; in the deceptively schmaltzy denouement, we're not quite watching a man's triumphant re-discovery of himself, but rather the full emergence of a new, more dispiriting form of father-son bonding predicated on the temporary relegation of real problems to shiny distractions."


12. Viola (Piñeiro, Argentina)

"Structurally, Piñeiro’s third feature as a writer/director shares a loose resemblance to Eric Rohmer’s Moral Tales: a set of characters devising a playful game to test a philosophical stance on romance only to have their initial expectations complicated and broadened. Unlike in Rohmer though, the final revelation is not one that leads a character back to normalcy and stability but rather towards a sudden, heightened clarity, a hyper-awareness to the pleasures of life. Viola’s sleek, sinuous beauty, then, is part of Piñeiro’s effort to awaken this same sense of hyper-awareness in the viewer."


11. A Touch of Sin (Jia, China)

"Confusion regarding the shifting tides of a modernizing Chinese society—a Jia trademark—has hardened here into outright fury towards the corruption built into a country so damaged by the evil sides of capitalism. That anger spills out across the film, which portrays five different circumstances of initially well-intentioned local Chinese citizens brushing up against some form of economic exploitation and, in their disillusionment, subsequently turning to violence. More abstract in its narrative linkages than what one would expect from, say, the Alejandro González Iñárritu model of outlandish connectedness, A Touch of Sin is defined by the idea that dishonesty is pervasive and inescapable, and correspondingly mounts a conspiratorial atmosphere in which everyone seems tied in some way to a mob."


10. I Used to be Darker (Porterfield, USA)

"Even as Porterfield has moved away from outright improvisation, his latest exhibits the same casual rhythms and miniaturized focus that have defined his cinema so far. The lessons learned from Putty Hill's inspired if decidedly messy blurring of documentary and fiction tendencies – namely, that "realness" is futile if emotional content is pure – have been carefully put into practice in I Used to be Darker, which approximates the texture of daily life in Baltimore while also taking dramatic liberties to pursue with greater precision a specific emotional upheaval."


9. Passion (De Palma, USA)

"To take the lurid twists and turns of Passion’s inconsequential plot at face value is to miss the densely metatextual level on which De Palma is primarily working, both in relation to his own pulp-inflected previous work and a larger cinematic genre lineage. The film is structured as a series of bold reversals of fortune whereby audience empathy is repeatedly jostled around, and at a certain point we are made to realize it is not a question of what is happening but how: how we are complicit in a chain of narrative projection and how the screen looks back at us as passive objects made active."


8. Bastards (Denis, France)

Shaking Claire Denis' latest movie from my system has been no small task. Since seeing it two weeks ago, it has existed in my brain as a daunting, sinister weight, still not quite congealing into any identifiable shape and thus very hard to write about—that is of course to say, one of my favorite kinds of films. I feel a strange tension around the prospect of watching it again: a pull because of the obvious impact of Denis' nightmarish vision as well as my own desire to grapple with the specifics of what happens in it, and a reluctance for fear that two viewings in a short period of time may be mentally unhealthy. It's a film of cavernous corruption and darkness (fleeting bits of lightness are all but smothered) revealed in somber gradations of brown and synth-scored reveries. To watch it is to witness the ugliness of our world condensed into 83 minutes. What a leap from the cozy family fun of 35 Shots of Rum.


7. The World’s End (Wright, USA)

I found Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, the first two installments of Edgar Wright's "Cornetto Trilogy," enjoyable if frequently dumb and fairly hollow genre exercises. The World's End represents a vast improvement by darkening the comedy and injecting a beating core of sadness and despair into what is otherwise an equally loopy entertainment. A brilliantly simple premise – a group of old friends reluctantly band around their ne'er-do-well alcoholic leader in middle age to return to their youthful English hamlet and finally seal the deal on a circuitous bar hop trail – becomes a fogged, increasingly distorted lens through which to observe and empathize with the terrible, universal feeling of irrevocable loss that attends growing up. The 100-mph intensity of Simon Pegg's lead performance and the corresponding rush of Wright's filmmaking (gloriously musical in its rhythms) thus constitutes an accelerated form of denial against life's pint-sized tragedies.


6. The Act of Killing (Oppenheimer, USA)

"In the vigorous pursuit of a seeming greater good, logic can lead inexorably to delusion – this is one of the uncomfortably simple truths at the center of Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing, a startling documentary that dares to dig out the roots of humanity behind heinous genocide. In doing so, the film is packed end to end with, and thrives on, contradictions; both within the casual commentary by the carnivalesque ensemble of amoral gangsters and within the dense compositions, writhing with intimations of justice, heroism, and community on the one hand and overt acts of evil and carelessness on the other."


5. Before Midnight (Linklater, USA)

"Linklater, Hawke and Delpy’s attempts to tackle their key existential concerns have always been defined by a sense of patient searching and a humbling inability to provide any kind of stable judgment; their latest is no different, though it does take a few heroic steps forward. In finding the two crossed souls in the thick of a committed union, Before Midnight is the closest the series has come to providing some kind of shaky definition of love."


4. The Wolf of Wall Street (Scorsese, USA)

"The Wolf of Wall Street has a firecracker pulse, moving from set piece to sight gag to careening montage with the dexterity Scorsese showed off in Goodfellas (1990); only its opening stages, focusing on Belfort clawing his way around unemployment, suffer from a slackness of pacing. The film moves so quickly and raucously that it never has a chance for any suspended critical judgment, instead letting the nose-diving course of the narrative, in which Belfort and his colleagues strand themselves further and further from any sense of human sympathy or logic, speak for itself."


3. Computer Chess (Bujalski, USA)

"The film’s murky, flattened visuals – which leave ghostly trails whenever a bright face moves in a dark frame and confuses the camera’s light-sensitive tubes – suggest that technology can’t keep up with us, but plenty of other moments imply the opposite. Bujalski centers his story on people whose passion is to obsessively control the behavior of computers, and yet the film also playfully ponders the thought of computers exercising a consciousness of their own."


2. Museum Hours (Cohen, USA)

Allow me a moment of relative corniness. No other film this year left for me in its immediate wake such an acute feeling of serenity and appreciation for life. No other film expressed such respect and humility in the face of its filmed world (a tranquilly trash-less Vienna) and the people contained within it (the year's most chemically bound pair, Bobby Sommer and Mary Margaret O'Hara). Museum Hours is not sentimental. It's a calm, dignified film about how we make the hours in our lives go by, how we communicate with one another, how we make sense of our surroundings, and how our attempts to reduce the world to language are healthy if ultimately futile efforts.


1. Like Someone in Love (Kiarostami, Iran/Japan)

Blurb included in In Review Online's Year in Review.

Honorable Mentions (in alphabetical order): 12 Years a Slave, Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, Blue Jasmine, Drug War, Golden Slumbers, The Great Beauty, Night Across the Street, Spring Breakers, The Wind Rises

Blind Spots: All is Lost, Beyond the Hills, The Counselor, Drinking Buddies, The Grandmaster, Gravity, The Past, The Selfish Giant, These Birds Walk, The Unspeakable Act, White Reindeer

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) A Film by Martin Scorsese

Tomorrow's real Christmas miracle will be the release of Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street, a film that's such a vile affront to good taste that it's amazing it's getting nationwide exposure on one of the holiest days of the year. It's also fantastic, one of Scorsese's funniest and craziest movies in a long time and one that revives the antic spirit of his earlier directorial self. My full review is up now at In Review Online.

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (2013) A Film by Adam McKay

Even if the results are unmistakably "messy" and, to some eyes, just plain bad, the improvisational bombast of Adam McKay's filmmaking intrigues me. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues is the director's zaniest achievement since Step Brothers, similarly baffling in its narrative logic and tonal dexterity as well as equally magnetic in its pull of weirdness. McKay and star Will Ferrell routinely push scenes past their seeming breaking point*, which, to me at least, is the domain of hesitation, verbal vomit, and physical awkwardness in which the film really enters a zone of inspired idiocy. My full review is up at In Review Online.

*Of note is McKay's directorial technique, which is described in a stellar review by R. Emmet Sweeney at Film Comment.