Birthdays have a way of focusing one’s attention on where he has been and how he got here. Birthdays that end in 0 do this even more so. Today is my birthday, and it’s one of the ones ending in 0.
I have built the four decades of my life around movies. Watching them, writing about them, teaching other people how to watch and write about them. For a very, very short period, making them. It’s not that I only like movies; but they are at the center of what I do and what I think and how I interact with the world. So for me to reflect on how I got Here from There, that necessarily means looking at the cinema that happened along the way.
What follows is a list of forty motion pictures, one for every year I’ve been on this planet (I’m not counting 1981, since it was basically over by the time I showed up). These are defining works of cinema for me: they have shaped my taste, shown me what the medium of cinema is and can be, or exemplify what I love about it. Some of them are great masterpieces, some are not, but I love all of them. Except for the one I think sucks. I made a point of not doubling-up on directors, except for the one who’s here twice. They aren’t my favorite film of each year, or the ones I think are best, though some of them incidentally are one or both of those things. But really they’re the one movie from each year that occupies the biggest territory in my brain, the one that feels like it most “belongs to me”. Some years this choice was easy. Some years this was brutally hard. Some years it was easy even though it should have been hard (I am sorry, my dear Truman Show: you matter as much to me as any other film I’ve ever seen, and it’s a real shame that you came out in 1998). Some of these are films that mattered to me in “real time”, and what I think about when I think about them is who I was when I encountered them and they were new and how they changed me. Some seem to exist totally outside of my own history.
Doing this is terribly indulgent, of course, as you’ll see if you get to the end and you realise how many words I’ve put into this post. But it’s my birthday. You have to indulge me.
Draw a straight line that connects all forty of these movies, and you’ve found my theory of cinema.
1982: Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, USA)
Maybe it’s kitsch, maybe it’s experimental cinema for people who think that jean advertisments are high art. But for me, it’s the film where I learned of the transporting, downright metaphysical pleasure of shape, movement, and music all dancing together, irrespective of story, of characters, even really of emotion and meaning (though you can read those things into it). When it was over, the friend I first watched it with declared, very earnestly, that he wanted to watch it every week for the rest of his life. I never did that, and I don’t think he ever did that, but it feels exactly right: this pure sensual experience, sound and sight creating a wall of aesthetic pleasure, and every single time I return to it, it always brings the most incredible feeling of simply dissolving into its rhythms.
* * * * *
1983: Nostalghia (Andrei Tarkovsky, Italy / USSR)
One of the sweetest pleasures of cinema, to me, is how it can remove you from the flow of time. Some of the movies that are dearest to my heart are ones that make me unaware of anything but a constant sense of the present, every new frame serving as the entire universe from its inception to its demise. It’s one of the things I love about slow cinema, a movement that substantially post-dates this film, but I also feel that this might have been the first time I got that special slow cinema feeling, in the extraordinary swimming pool scene that removes everything from the world but exactly what’s happening right now, stretching out for infinity. And this in the context of a movie that is all about feeling that the time we occupy is irretrievably and painfully linked to the past. Genuinely meditative like almost nothing else. It’s not my favorite Tarkovsky, nor the one I think is his best, but it is the one that feels the most “mine”.
* * * * *
1984: Stop Making Sense (Jonathan Demme, USA)
I don’t listen to music, really. I don’t object to it. It’s just something that takes up time, which none of us has enough of (I never got the knack for putting on music and doing something else while I was listening to it; I always get a vaguely guilty feeling that I’m slighting the artists). But I do like music, and as we’ve already seen and will see again, I particularly like when it can interact with imagery, creating a full sensory experience that’s the closest we have to a true Gesamtkunstwerk. And in this case, we have a miraculous construction in which the music, the people performing it, and the camera crews recording it are all swirled together in one of the only concert documentaries that goes beyond “you are there, watching the band” to actually dive into the physicality of the performance space as a pleasing cinematic object in its own right. And while it’s no bold take to call Stop Making Sense my all-time favorite concert doc, I wonder if it’s a little nuttier to call it my all-time favorite Demme film.
* * * * *
1985: Brazil (Terry Gilliam, UK)
A film that I over-watched in my early- and mid-20s until I broke it. One day, I have faith that I’ll be able to go back and see it again as a movie, and not the object I’ve memorised and internalised and generally turned into part of my DNA. Until then, I’ll have the happy memories of encountering at a crucial age a film in which excessive style and bold-faced storytelling work hand-in-hand to create an engrossing nightmare. It’s not at all the first movie I ever saw where world-building through production design is one of the major components of how it creates its themes and characters, but it is probably the first movie that made me really sit up and take notice of production design as a vessel for narration and psychology separate from everything else. And it’s still the first place my mind goes when I hear “Aquarela do Brasil”, or honestly any other samba piece.
* * * * *
1986: Luxo Jr. (John Lasseter, USA)
My taste in art is fundamentally conservative, and there’s nowhere that’s clearer than in how I feel about animation: as I’m sure I’ve made very apparent over the years, I basically don’t regard CG animated films as “legitimate”, or capable of the same richness of expression as even mediocre hand-drawn animation. But when you’re wrong, you’re wrong, and here is an example of me being wrong: the film that put Pixar Animation Studios and the entirety of 3-D computer animation on the map is all about giving a pair of desk lamps the most vivid, endearing, engaging personalities you could ever hope for, and getting it done in under two minutes. It’s unassailable proof that the grandest emotions can come from anywhere, no matter the technique and no matter the scale. You don’t need more than this to justify the entire medium – and, by extension, my graduate school career.
* * * * *
1987: Empire of the Sun (Steven Spielberg, USA / UK)
Steven Spielberg is arguably the most popularly-accessible filmmaker in the history of the American film industry, so you shouldn’t be able to pick one of his films and say that it’s “yours”, your own private Spielberg film. And yet. From the first time I saw it, to this very week when I wrote a little blurb about it (besides this blurb, I mean), Empire of the Sun has always felt to me like a film that time forgot, and one that needed all of my caring attention to make sure it survived in the harsh desert of cinema history. It doesn’t make me feel more than other Spielberg movies; it doesn’t entertain me more. But when I’m watching it, it seems like I’m truly alone with it, enjoying its sensitive and fraught story of childhood’s end just for myself, without the indescribable weight of the film’s place in culture weighing down on my reactions to it. And for this director, that is an experience to treasure very much.
* * * * *
1988: My Neighbor Totoro (Miyazaki Hayao, Japan)
I promise not to play the “look, what can you say?” card too many times in this post, but truly: look, what can you say? This is the most generous, gentle, loving children’s movie ever made, a tribute to the awestruck wonder of big forests to poke around and get lost in, and new best friends, and simply a feeling that there is security and safety and comfort in this world. It is the very incarnation of warm blankets and falling asleep to the soft patter of rain in cinematic form. I can name no film that is more kind.
* * * * *
1989: The Little Mermaid (Ron Clements & John Musker, USA)
This isn’t the first animated film I ever say in a theater, not by a longshot. And it’s not even the first animated film for which I have extremely vivid, concrete memories of the precise circumstances under which I saw it in a theater. But it’s the first animated film that genuinely transformed me, putting me in a state of deeply impressed amazement and dazzlement at the awesome power of animation to plunge me into a state of folkloric, mythic abstraction. None of which are words I would have used a month before my eighth birthday, obviously. But I knew something profound had just happened in my brain, and it was here, not any other film but right here, that I started to wondering where I could learn more about how animation worked. 32 years later, it is literally not possible to imagine what person I would be if I hadn’t wondered.
* * * * *
1990: Miller’s Crossing (Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, USA)
I honestly believe that I could have justifiably selected a Coen brothers movie for every single year of this list that they released something. Even the shitty ones, since my deeply unnerved response to that shittiness was and remains so keen in my mind. But that would have been no fun, and there was never any doubt which single solitary Coen picture was going to get the nod: my favorite, sure, but also the one that has sunk the must tendrils deepest into my brain. There are line readings, passages of music, acting beats, even individual edits, all throughout this film, that feel as essential to me as any fragments of cinema in the 126 years since the Lumière brothers borrowed that café basement. And to the argument that the Coens are chilly technicians who hate their characters, I can only offer this film’s final scene, a devastating two-hander from Gabriel Byrne and Albert Finney that leaves me as wobbly-kneed and overwhelmed as anything else on this list.
* * * * *
1991: Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise, USA)
I have seen 8385 feature films over the course of my life, many of them more than once. I’m not sure how many of those I’ve seen in a movie theater; very conservatively, it’s undoubtedly more than 2000. And out of all of those trips, I know exactly which one stands above all the rest as the ideal circumstance for me to watch a movie: at a shitty little two-screen theater in Libertyville, Illinois, on a December night in 1991, when we went into the movie during the day and there wasn’t snow, and we came out at night and there was snow. That I had just seen the movie that my almost-ten-year-old self already knew beyond a shadow of a doubt was my very favorite that I had ever seen was perhaps unnecessary to make this a perfect moment, but I’m certainly glad it was there – and to this day “leave the theater when it’s dark and it’s snowing” is the best experience I can possibly have watching a movie. Years of experience watching animation have given me some perspective on the places where this shows its seams – it was a remarkably rushed production and it has some of the most conspicuous animation flaws of the Disney Renaissance – but not once in 30 years have I revisited it without that snowy night hiding in the back of my mind. This is my nostalgia film, the one movie of all movies that I will never view with anything other than completely untroubled love, and while I can be more articulate about that love nowadays, it’s really just that now I’m a nine-year-old with a much more sophisticated vocabulary.
* * * * *
1992: Candyman (Bernard Rose, USA / UK)
The intersection of horror, urban legends, Philip Glass, and the city of Chicago is a one-time combination of some of the things I love most in the world, which would already make it tough to resist this one; the fact that it’s also extremely good at being horror, and right smack in maybe the single worst period for horror in the genere’s history, just seals it. The whole thing is a perfect mixture of atmosphere, cryptic storytelling, and unusually deep thematic resonance, engagingly creepy and grounded in a physical reality like few ghost stories have ever enjoyed, and when we add in Tony Todd and his aggressively mixed voice, it’s basically the pinnacle of how much art can be poured into relatively grungy horror material.
* * * * *
1993: Three Colors: Blue (Krzysztof Kieślowski, France / Poland / Switzerland)
I could go on a whole thing about how, autobiographically, this swept into my life right at the exact moment I was starting to get a handle on the canonical masterpieces of ’50s and ’60s art cinema, and I was just perfectly ready to start working on the ’90s version of the same, and that’s why it matters to me. And that would be true. I could also talk about how, 28 years later, I still think this is the great Juliet Binoche’s most haunting performance and the one it’s most rewarding to grapple with, and that’s why. And that would be true too. But honestly, the real reason this is playing on a constant loop in my brain is because it’s a film structured around the piecemeal evolution of a piece of orchestral music that ranks among my favorite compositions ever written for a movie, taking on the rhythms of that music slowly coalescing and then bursting forth in melancholy triumph. It is purely emotive, on an abstract level, despite having a very precise screenplay, and as much as any other film, it’s not one I “watch” so much as just let it wash over me.
* * * * *
1994: Star Trek: Generations (David Carson, USA)
In my lifetime, there have been 12 Star Trek features released, and if I do absolutely everything in my power to be as maximally generous as it is possible to be, this still isn’t in the top half of those. I have never once actually enjoyed the experience of watching it. And yet, it somehow exerts the most persistent, even urgent nostalgic pull of any of them. It was the first one I saw in a theater, which I’m sure helps, but it’s also the movie that came out during the period in my life when Star Trek was most desperately important to me, and while I unmistakably prefer several of the others more as movies – and as Star Trek – this is the one that puts me most viscerally in contact with that part of my brain, sometimes buried more or less successfully, but always there. Even now, Star Trek is my franchise, the corner of pop culture that stirs my soul and triggers my imagination more than any of your Star Warses or Harry Potters or Lords of the Rings or, fuck knows, any of the comic book stuff. And Generations, boring and stupid and insulting as it is, is the movie that puts me in touch with that the most directly.
* * * * *
1995: Apollo 13 (Ron Howard, USA)
For reasons I’d have a difficult time articulating, I was very anxious to find a better 1995 option than this one, but at a certain point, I realised that the mere fact I was fighting it was a sign of just how firmly Apollo 13 set its hooks in me. I liked space shit before I saw this movie, but nothing like so much as I loved space shit afterwards. And not just the NASA space program, absolutely everything: stars and stellar objects and how orbits work and how many moons Saturn has and what the surface of Mars looks like, and I’m incredibly prone to romanticising it a completely inane degree (most recently: I took a nap on November 18 of this year specifically to make sure I’d be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to sit up through the longest lunar eclipse in 500 years, at like 3:00 AM or whatever damn hour it was). Which is a lot of influence for a fella to take from a Ron Howard film – his best film, pretty easily, but still.
* * * * *
1996: Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie (Jim Mallon, USA)
To be perfectly honest, I’m flat-out cheating with this one: The Movie isn’t anywhere close to the top of my MST3K rankings, and I hardly ever sit through it when I have three or four dozen better options right at my fingertips. But 1996 was the toughest year out of all 40 to find anything that sparked that “yes! this is me! this speaks to my heart!” response, and how dare I talk about my life as a cinephile without at least nodding to the TV show that turned my idle affection for crummy, inept B-movies into a full-blown obsessive passion? The thing that non-fans don’t get about MST3K is that it’s not coming from a place of contemptuous superiority, but of genuine enthusiasm for the dopey, dipshit stuff that happens in these films, and I don’t know that I would have ever made the transition from the former to the latter without the help of Joel, Mike, and the Bots. And I frankly don’t know if I’d have made it through the 2020 lockdowns without them, either. So three cheers for a show that defined a terrifying amount of my sense of humor as an adolescent and still feels as right and comfortable as well-worn slippers.
* * * * *
1997: The Fifth Element (Luc Besson, France)
A film that I can use to very precisely track my development as a viewer and a human being. In 1999, when I first saw this, I hated it intensely, as mindless incoherent trash, and thought it represented the worst kind of stylish, empty mess. In 2021, I think it’s one of my favorite popcorn movies, unapologetically spectacular in its knock-out gaudiness and infinite imagination. If we got one film every summer half as wild in its creativity and half as devoted to the weird adolescent impulses fueling its creator, and made at this kind of bombastically over-priced scale, I imagine I’d be much less prone to complaining about how bad movies are getting. This is pure candy, almost uninterrupted movie-movie pleasure, and really just fuck 17-year-old me for being such a prig that he didn’t get that.
* * * * *
1998: The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, USA)
This is it. This is the one. You honestly don’t need the other 39 films on this list; everything else is just an asterisk to what happened the first time I saw this movie, on a dark winter night in January 1999, when I heard those strings and saw that crocodile gliding beneath the scum on a still pool of water, and I learned that movies could be no-two-ways-about-it, Art-with-a-capital-A. I revisit the film rarely and with much deliberation, so as not to dilute to potency that still hits me like a tidal wave every time I watch that moment, or any one of a great many others dotted across these three very thoughtful and reverent hours. This, to me, is cinema: the thing that Terrence Malick does, and then other cinema is good or bad mostly as a function of how much like this thing it is. Not literally, of course, but spiritually – and I think that’s telling right there, that it wouldn’t even cross my mind to use the word “spiritual” to describe any other filmmaker active during my adulthood.
* * * * *
1999: The Limey (Steven Soderbergh, USA)
There’s nostalgia at play here: this was Baby’s First Formalist Experiment, and just exactly the right amount of easy but not hit-you-over-the-head obvious to make a film-hungry teenager feel like he was starting to fire off neural synapses that had never been turned on before. But even knowing far more now than I knew then, I still thing this is a beautifully piece of color-coded metanarrative, a top-tier Soderbergh picture, and one of the few films of the post-Tarantino ’90s that could go toe-to-toe with that man on using classic rock song cues to create extraordinary new aesthetic textures, creating little dreamy music videos right in this midst of a crime thriller that was pretty dreamy all on its own. Once it made me feel very smart, now it soothes me; either way, it feels like it’s responsible for the wiring in my brain almost as much as The Thin Red Line does.
* * * * *
2000: In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong / France)
If the game here is to pick films that feel like they’re special to me in ways that they aren’t to other people, clearly this one fails: to know In the Mood for Love is to adore it as one of the most sensual, sumptuous movies created in the modern era. But just because everyone else is right doesn’t mean I should go out my way to be wrong, and In the Mood for Love is just pure, unadulterated luxury: encasing two of civilization’s most beautiful people in gorgeous clothes, gorgeous colors, gorgeous textures of gorgeously noisy film grain. It is a film that aches with hopeless romantic grandeur and beams itself directly in the viewer’s brain to ache there, too. This is another one I try to avoid over-watching, not for fear that I might exhaust its appeal, but for the same reason one doesn’t eat truffles or foie gras or bittersweet chocolate at every meal: if you train your taste buds to expect that kind of impossible pleasure, how on earth can you go back to eating normal food every day?
* * * * *
2001: Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann, USA / Australia)
If In the Mood for Love is like savoring expensive chocolate, Moulin Rouge! is like shoveling bonbons into your mouth two and three at a time: no less pleasurable, but almost indecently excessive about it. There are virtually no commonalities between this and The Thin Red Line, but I somehow feel like this finished off the job that movie started: my ongoing preference for movies to be as giddily overstuffed and maniacally colorful as possible, formally audacious and spectacular not merely at the expense of storytelling and character development, but with a healthy dose of “fuck you” distaste for those things, that preference clearly stems from the fact that I’ve been chasing the high this movie gave me for literally half of my life at this point. Overstimulating in the very best possible way.
* * * * *
2002: Blissfully Yours (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / France)
I rather blithely assumed once upon a time that Apichatpong’s ascendance to the ranks of international art film icon meant that his 2000s films (which I frankly like better than his more recent stuff) would start to become more readily available with spiffy restorations and all, but this hasn’t been the case. Which is just horrible, given that it means the world at large is missing out on what I truly believe to be one of the most purely sublime films of the current century. It’s a two-part structure, the second part twice as long as the first; we begin in the chaos and clutter and alienation of city life before moving to an idyll in a forest outside of Bangkok for what surely must be one of the most intoxicating portrayals of the natural world as emotionally and erotically nourishing that I have seen. It’s an art film, so obviously the title is meant semi-ironically, but “bliss” truly does describe so much of this languid, droning film.
* * * * *
2003: The Triplets of Belleville (Sylvain Chomet, France / Belgium / Canada / UK)
Maybe the last film I was ever truly, head-over-heels obsessed with, seeing it no fewer than four times in theaters if I recall correctly (one of those was a film festival screening; it counts). That kind of fixation is for idle young people, and 2004 was the year I stopped having the luxury of being idle. It is, at least, a very worthy object for obsession, combining the most rosy, sweet-natured sentiment with some remarkably grotesque character design in a world where nobody speaks, making them somehow more grotesque still. And all of this is bundled up in a loopy tribute to ’20 cabaret culture. It’s so extremely weird in ways that are angular and off-putting, but also adorably silly and charming and warm. All these years later, I still haven’t seen anything more than glancingly like it, and while my love doesn’t burn so hot as it used to, the film is every bit as delightful to my as ever.
* * * * *
2004: Moolaadé (Sembène Ousmane, Senegal / France / Burkina Faso / Cameroon / Morocco / Tunisia)
Of all the films on this list that feel like “mine”, this is the one that I feel most fortunate to have come across, and one that I love far more than anyone else ever seemed to. Sembène is a world-renowned master director, but somehow, what proved to be his final film (he died in 2007) never picked up any appreciable “the new work from a great artist” attention from U.S. critics; I don’t even really recall why I decided that this had to be on my list when I was buying tickets for the 2004 Chicago International Film Festival, because it’s certainly not that anybody was telling me to go. Which is maybe for the best, since it meant that I got to enter completely ignorant, and so got to be blindsided by the perfection of a film with an angry social conscience expressed through joyous images coursing with human energy and bravura use of color. I know a lot more now about African cinema than I did in 2004, but this still is one of the African films that gets me the most excited, moves me the most, and tells me the most about the human condition.
* * * * *
2005: The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu (Cristi Puiu, Romania)
We are all of us beholden to the historical context in which we live. If I were a budding cinephile in the 1950s, or the 1970s, the films that shaped me would have been different, and maybe I’d have different interests and tastes into middle age. But I came of age cinematically in the 2000s, and it was my good fortune to get in on the ground floor of the Romanian New Wave, which was to spend the next several years competing only with South Korea for the honors of being the most interesting national cinema in the world. I have since run into several Romanian films I respond to more strongly than Mr. Lăzărescu, but my love for the bone-dry satiric humor, slow-moving minimalism, pessimistic politics, and acid-etched view of human behavior that all make up the heart and soul of 21st Century Romanian art cinema traces emerged fully-formed from the very instant that I first saw this and was knocked on my ass by what felt at the time like a brand new mode of realist filmmaking.
* * * * *
2006: INLAND EMPIRE (David Lynch, France / Poland / USA)
I love things that can be described as “anti-” versions of other things, and I don’t know if that started here or if I responded so extremely strongly to it because I already had that tendency in my brain. But either way, this still is to me the exemplar of anti-cinema, an illegible epic of identity breaking down to be replaced by nothing but instability, as captured in some of the most actively ugly videography ever shat out onto cinema screens. It is a film both enraged at the falseness of the moving picture image and utterly besotted with the dreamlike, transportive qualities such images can contain within them, a film made up of individual moments of cinematic bliss captured in a web of cinematic incoherence. It’s a purely horrifying film, one in which signifiers of meaning have broken down until there’s nothing left by a constant rush of images, some calming and some nightmarish, but all of them feeling carved out of Lynch’s distressed id.
* * * * *
2007: My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, Canada)
I think you cannot merely “like” Guy Maddin; if you’re into his thing, you have to get all the way into his thing, or just find it irritatingly arch, self-indulgent, and so detached from life, history, and humanity as to be unwatchably smug. Maybe I only feel that way because Maddin was a love-at-first-sight prospect for me; that first sight was not, incidentally, My Winnipeg, though it’s my favorite of his films, a fictional docu-memoir in which an alternate universe of the title city is created through images that appear to be constructed out of the fragments of Maddin’s dreams. It’s extremely dense but playfully watchable, a collection of moments constructed with bouncy joy and faith in the power of cinema to discombobulate and entertain; at the same time, the whole thing is founded on a certain wistful sadness at the broken soul of the city the filmmaker is obliged to call home. The most I enjoy watching one of my favorite working filmmakers.
* * * * *
2008: WALL·E (Andrew Stanton, USA)
I still believe now as I did in 2008: the opening 10 minutes of this film are the most perfect stretch of moviemaking to come out during my life. Drawing from the delicate sentimentalism of Chaplin and using all of the flashiest tools of cutting-edge CGI to bring it to life in a way that would have been impossible to imagine two years earlier (I think it remains the animated film to best use photorealism for a particular aesthetic effect, rather than just as a lazy default). The rest of the movie isn’t perfect, and it has a disinctly deflating tendency to consistently get weaker over the course of its running time, but it always has WALL·E himself to keep it straight and true, the most adorably expressive and emotionally available of all 3-D animated characters. My affection for it is so strong that I paid the ultimate tribute of building my entire dissertation around the question, essentially, “why is WALL·E so gosh-darned good?” And that’s a level of intimacy you only share with, like, your spouse.
* * * * *
2009: Sweetgrass (Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Ilisa Barbash, UK / France / USA)
I tend to think of my tastes as always running towards gaudy maximalism, so it’s nice to have films that remind me of the deep and abiding joys of minimalism; and there’s no film more small and delicate that gives me such absolute pleasure as the first, and still the best, film to come out of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab. It’s as pure as documentaries get: it never tells us what we’re look at or why, simply presenting us with beautiful footage of sheep meandering through the natural world, so still and simple as to verge on abstract art. It’s not a film that tells a story or puts across an argument; it just lets us watch life happening within the confines of the film frame, assembled like a tone poem, and in the process creating one of the most revelatory cinematic portraits of nature in modern times.
* * * * *
2010: Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, USA)
A lot of what I just said applies equally as well to this still, slow, terrifyingly quiet Western. But if Sweetgrass presents us with a vision of men, sheep, and nature that insists upon the free-flowing qualities of its images as reality itself, Reichardt’s film (possibly her best, and definitely her best-directed) is all about immaculate, implacable control, precisely pinning its characters into the ruthless 1.37:1 frame that box them in with the desolate emptiness of an Oregon that know no human civilization. And I’d be lying if I denied that a big part of my love for it is that it’s probably the most careful and deliberate use of that squared-off aspect ratio in a decade where it became something of a fad. But it’s also because it’s such a thrilling balancing act between the understanding humanism of Reichardt’s whole career with a stern, austere fatalism about the ways that we can and will fuck up our futures just by virtue of being dumb animals that think we’re something smarter. There have been only a handful of movies that have ever stayed right at the forefront of my brain more tenaciously.
* * * * *
2011: The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, USA)
A film that I had the most outrageous, overheated expectations for, and it somehow managed to effortlessly surpass them. A decade on, it still feels bigger and richer than I know what to do with, telling a story of humanity’s tiny place in the terrifying grandeur of the cosmos that’s focused on the ways we find meaning and grace in the small details of our lives, and staring right down the barrel of the toughest question art can examine: if God exists, what is our correct disposition towards a being who could create a universe so full of beauty and pain? It is a fearless work in which a dance between image and music, nostalgia and theology, human and nature constantly generates moments of pure emotion that goes through and beyond conscious thought. Never fails to leave me quivering and wrecked, in the best ways.
* * * * *
2012: Cloud Atlas (Tom Tykwer & Lana Wachowski & Lilly Wachowski, Germany / USA)
I’ve made no secret of preferring ambitious messes to just about any other kind of movie; honestly, maybe even more than ambitious successes. The more narrow the possibilities become for filmmakers working with major studio resources, the more I treasure films that manage to get away with something, pursuing ideas without worrying about whether they’re coming together, just because there might be something there that won’t survive if you try to logic it out ahead of time. This is the reigning masterpiece of that reckless, fearless type of filmmaking: it’s largely successful on the terms it sets for itself (but when it fails, it fails huge), and everything about is big, brazenly unsubtle, and unstintingly sincere. It’s taking one fucking huge swing after another for three straight hours, and when it connects, it’s pure movie grandeur of the most enthralling sort.
* * * * *
2013: At Berkeley (Fredrick Wiseman, USA)
A movie I needed at exactly the moment it entered my life: in the autumn of 2013, I was in need of direction, and that direction turned out to be grad school. And even if this extravagant epic of the ebbing and flowing of every aspect of life and work on a college campus isn’t specifically what pushed me to make that decision, it at least reinforced that I’m one of those dismally unfortunate people for whom the rhythms and idiotic pressures of Academia are just the right fit. Flash forward to my seventh year in grad school, and the world Frederick Wiseman captured in his customarily stately, authoritative, hands-off way – still my favorite of his films, though I don’t pretend I’m objective about it – feels natural and familiar in ways that are comforting and worrisome in equal measure.
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2014: Black Coal, Thin Ice (Diao Yi’nan, China)
There are films on this list because they are inexorably bound up with my life history. There are films on this list because something about them feels like a small piece of my soul got captured in the movie. There are films on this list because something about them feels like it defines my answer to the question “what is cinema?” Black Coal, Thin Ice, more than anything else here, is on this list because I think it’s really cool. It’s thoughtfully grim and beautifully shot, depicting the exhaustion of city life and the cold emptiness of the surrounding countryside with a paradoxically expressionistic realism, sort of like Diao and cinematographer Dong Jingsong found that the unadorned world was itself an expressive world of contrast and color and vividly hyper-real textures. So much of it seems unassuming, a meat-and-potatoes crime thriller; but I bet a fortnight hasn’t gone by in the last seven years when I haven’t thought about it. Sometimes, a film will just stick with you for some alchemic reason of its own. And that’s really cool.
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2015: World of Tomorrow (Don Hertzfeldt, USA)
Artists have spent decades-long careers trying to express the sentiment “I am very proud of my sadness, because it means I am more alive” as succinctly and powerfully as this film does, and here it’s just random thought in a stream of consciousness with many more just like it. And it’s presented as the punchline to a dark joke. I’ve watched it for its humor, for its dense litany of ideas, for its intense, eerily stable digital colors, and I think I can declare with serenest confidence that I am not capable of exhausting these 17 minutes.
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2016: Kubo and the Two Strings (Travis Knight, USA)
The embodiment of why I love animation: a multi-media extravaganza combining the fustiest old hand-made techniques with elaborate digital trickery of a sort that had to be invented just to make this project happen, all in service to creating a whimsical, scary, colorful, sumptuous tactile world for the protagonist to lose himself in. It’s both cozily grounded in the physicality of its form and the simple emotions of its characters, and a soaring work of untethered fantasy and mythic resonance. Everything is immaculate and precise, yet it all adds up to an impression of a messy, organic, sprawling adventure in which everything seems to be made up on the spot. It’s the freedom and control that only animation can provide, and its one of the most lovingly-crafted animated films in recent years on top of that.
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2017: The Tesla World Light (Matthew Rankin, Canada)
One of those movies that reignites your faith in the power of the moving image. Eight and a half minutes and not a second of it wasted in crafting a tale of scientific utopianism and delirious horror built around the question of whether progress is indeed possible, or if things will always end in ruin. And it’s expressed in the form of a breathtaking silent film pastiche that revels in the flatness of the film image, using stark contrasts between black and white to create a world of engineered lines, organic bodies, and bursts of scratches, carefully but violently attacking the medium itself to create an impressionistic rendering of the electricity that will either save or damn us all. Maybe the most mind-altering first-time watch I’ve had in 2021.
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2018: Mandy (Panos Cosmatos, USA)
Wantonly indulgent; repulsively, irresponsibly so, even. It is to me the stuff of pure cinema. I know my love for it was hastened along by seeing it in a very loud theater, where the maximalist soundtrack shoved me into my seat just as hard as the maximalist images made my eyes feel as though they might burst like grapes. But in an era of safe, tidy filmmaking where even the good movies have been refined and sanded into something familiar and beige, I’m increasingly grateful for anything whose main goal is apparently to make me feel like I’ve been run over by a truck made out neon lights and progressive rock album covers. It is a desensitised moment for cinema – it makes me crave the most base, intense experience, mainlining sensation through a wall of sight and sound. And nothing in recent years has done that so aggressively as this. As Emily Dickinson said, “if I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry”.
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2019: Cats (Tom Hooper, UK / USA)
Is it weird if I say that this feels to me like the last real shared cultural moment from the pre-pandemic world? Maybe it’s just that I live in a very specific and highly perverse cultural bubble. But really, doesn’t Cats feel like it mattered in some horrible way that the empty blockbuster obligation of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, which opened the same day and made about 15 times as much money, never possibly could? There’s something real and urgent and vital here, something that expresses itself in deeply repulsive ways most of the time. But it is inspired, a work of art that risks everything and dies horribly as a result, but also left more of an impression on me with every new scene – practically with every new shot – than anything else I saw that year, and not by an even slightly close margin. It’s supremely, giddily unsafe, and that is the most exciting thing to me of all.
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2020: Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (Bill Ross IV & Turner Ross, USA)
As one approaches middle age, it’s the easiest thing in the world to start to feel reflective. You have in front of you more than 7000 words dedicated to that fact. So this came into my life at a very opportune moment, letting me see both the beauty and the trap of letting the past speak too loudly into the present. As a collection of human lives, presented in an undefinable mixture of fact and fiction, this is a wonderful piece of quiet observation, letting people fade into oblivion with dignity and piece. And it’s also a remarkable portrait of how we can lose ourselves in the thrum of a communal moment, feeling like we become more by a conscious act of lessening, letting our own personal identity and all of the bullshit we’re carrying with us right now dissolve into the teeming crowd of life. It’s about loving the old things that are worth loving, and knowing when it is time to let them go, and it is about the miraculous way that the past and the future always combine perfectly to make the present moment. Never a bad set of things to meditate on; particularly gratifying in the hellstorm of 2020-’21.
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2021: Malignant (James Wan, USA / China)
What is film for – what is art for – if not to feel some communion with the soul of the artist? Lots of things, probably, but that’s always been one of my favorite parts of movies or books or songs or anything else; that chance to feel like I’m stepping out of myself and seeing the world, briefly, as a different human being sees it. This is an extremely high-minded way to start talking about a movie where a woman has to fight a sentient cancerous tumor that’s become a serial killer. And yet it’s a perfect example of that glorious, almost sacred sense of empathically linking with an artist. It is so very clear in every moment of this fucking weird genre-mashup that James Wan was so excited to make it – he got to cash in all of his accrued good will to make some freaked-out, bizarre, broken, wholly unmarketable bit of slapstick horror that has a natural audience so small that statistically we don’t exist. And yet I’ve talked to so many people who liked it, people I would have bet money would have hated it, and I wonder if they all felt what I felt? That empathic bond to Wan, feeling enthusiasm to match his enthusiasm and delight to match his delight, making an agreement that we’ll take it just as seriously as he did, which is to say not really at all, but also 100%. Surround on all sides by films that feel like they’ve been assembled by committee, this one feels like it was bashed together by an overcaffeinated little kid who gets to do the coolest thing: he gets to make movies. It makes me feel awe, genuinely. And what the hell are we doing watching movies, if it’s not to find the ones that fill us with some kind of awe? Happy or sad, visceral or intellectual – awe comes in many forms, but it’s somewhere in the heart of every movie I’ve ever loved.