(Lynne Ramsay, 2002, United Kingdom / Canada)
Morvern Callar’s boyfriend is dead on the floor of their kitchen, a suicide. She responds by going about her day at a shitty supermarket job, then grabbing his money and passing off his unpublished novel as her own. Then… but I could tell you every single act she performs in the movie, and then we’d both be missing the point. This tremendously unusual character study is a forthright attempt to burrow into the mind and being of a seemingly inexplicable individual by using all the tools of the trade that so many filmmakers seem to forget about: the use of sound and silence, the way the camera watches the protagonist, the careful but invisible manipulation of color; and the secret weapon is the great Samantha Morton as Morvern, in a nearly silent performance that reveals more of this figure than any script ever could. It’s intensely cinematic, and uncannily affecting.
AKA 봄여름가을겨울그리고봄 (Bom yeoreum gaeul gyeoul geurigo bom)
(Kim Ki-Duk, 2003, South Korea / Germany)
Just like it says on the label, this is a story of time passing and a child growing to be a man, and the cycle of life ever repeating itself. It’s a wildly uncharacteristic story for Kim, whose work generally involves romantic plots with a twist of cruelty; nor does Buddhist symbolism figure prominently in the Christian director’s other films. But the aesthetic is pure Kim, languid moments of silence pierced by instances of raw human emotion, and the story’s gentle curves match impossibly well with the beautiful stillness of Baek Dong-Hyeon’s landscape photography. The metaphors involved may be well-worn and overly familiar, but their treatment in this film is marked by the utmost sensitivity and rich humanism. A story of grace and redemption and the peace of coming to terms with the knowledge that what is best is not what is desired, and filmed with ritual elegance. (Reviewed here)
Letters from Iwo Jima
(Clint Eastwood, 2006, USA)
A cheat? Yes, I imagine so. My list, my rules. Letters is great on its own, handily Eastwood’s best since Unforgiven. Yet it’s even greater in the context of its (distinctly weaker) alter ego. Apart, they’re both top-notch creations of Eastwood’s regulars at the height of his late-career renaissance: Tom Stern on camera and Joel Cox cutting and all right with the world, except for some unfortunate Haggisisms throughout Flags. Together, they form a comprehensive vision of war that beggars all the recent spate of World War II films: before and after the battle for Iwo Jima, with the fighting itself seen from both sides. We’re left without an easy conflict: American or Japanese, the dyad presents them all as nothing else than soldiers, doing what they must for duty and honor. Ruthlessly pragmatic with a beating heart, it finds Eastwood at his most clear-eyed and his most sentimental. (Flags reviewed here) (Letters reviewed here)
(Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, 2009, USA / United Kingdom /France)
The Coens’ best film since Fargo – if I am being gregarious, since Barton Fink. The key, I think, is the Midwest: even if you didn’t know that the brothers grew up in a Jewish community in Minnesota rather like the one in the film, it’s still hard not to notice that the usual Coen caricatures, though no less broad, are a great deal more precise and focused this time. This is a movie that came from intimate familiarity with the world it depicts: familiarity that certainly bred contempt, for the traditions of faith that romanticise suffering as “God’s will” rather than for the individuals being made to suffer. It’s, unsurprisingly, a fairly perfect example of cinematic craftsmanship (Roger Deakins’s cinematography is unusually subtle), but the importance of that formal elegance lies in how it contributes to the sense of fatalism and universal indifference that drives this brilliant tragicomedy. (Reviewed here)
AKA 不散 (Bu san)
(Tsai Ming-Liang, 2003, Taiwan)
A director customarily given to depicting human relationships in all their beauty and dysfunction switches gears – mostly – in this celebration of cinema, not the art but the big dark room where people sit and watch movies. Best seen, if you can manage it, in a big movie palace on a rainy night, just like Tsai depicts, this story of the last night of operation of an historic theater is structurally demanding even more than most of his films – the first line of dialogue comes 40 minutes into the movie, and there’s not really even the rudiments of a plot – but the auteur’s customary long takes and shadowbox compositions are wonderfully suited to depicting and investigating the character of a place, and the result is a unique tribute to the act of watching movies: nostalgic and romantic, with a sense of loss that’s sad but never tragic.
(Armando Iannucci, 2009, United Kingdom)
Sometimes movies are great because they gently and invisibly use subtleties of framing and editing to gesture the viewer towards an inevitable emotion, and sometimes they’re just wickedly smart and funny. Iannucci’s vicious satire certainly doesn’t want for solid, subtle craftsmanship – it’s one of the best-edited comedies of the decade – but it really all comes down the script, a magnificent depiction of the (thinly veiled) run-up to the Iraq War as bureaucratic farce, and the fearless ensemble cast, bringing that script and its magnificent black humor to pulsating life. Satire with this much insight, and with this much righteous bitterness, doesn’t come along often; for that matter, full-blooded laugh-out-loud comedies don’t, either, and for In the Loop to kill both birds with one stone is a rarity to justify all the film’s comparisons with Dr. Strangelove. (Reviewed here)
AKA Du levande
(Roy Andersson, 2007, Sweden / Germany / France / Denmark / Norway / Japan)
The absurd, dry, black comedy that made Songs from the Second Floor so marvelous, and made Andersson out to be something of a misanthropic, Scandinavian reincarnation of Jacques Tati, is back in full force with his fourth feature, but here the director dials up the surrealism by refiguring the whole as a kind of half-assed musical, a film that borders on the dreamlike in its creation of a world of desperation and loneliness, with a huge cast of characters all intermingling in the same space without any real contact between any of them. But through it all, and despite an ending that is both funny and foreboding in equal measure, there’s a tough love of humanity running through it all: even as he plays God, forcing his characters through these frightfully precise tableaux and recurring motifs, he never denies them or the audience the eternal hope: “tomorrow is another day”. (Reviewed here)
AKA L’intrus
(Claire Denis, 2004, France)
The plot is vague to the point of incomprehension, and if there’s one film on this list that almost demands to be called “arty” and “pretentious”, it’s certainly this one. But Denis is far too gifted an artist to just make any old piece of snobby puffery for the sake of it: what her film lacks in narrative sense it makes up in emotional development. A study of “intrusion” according to many different senses of that word, including man into nature, the First World into the developing world, and forgotten relatives into an established family, the film does build to a certain inescapable set of conclusions about what’s going on and what the characters think, but it isn’t terribly important that we’ve figured out every last detail about what’s happened and how we’re “supposed” to feel about it; it’s more about the experience and the private reflection it triggers.
AKA Le voyage du ballon rouge
(Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2007, France)
Using Albert Lamorisse’s beloved children’s film as a touchstone, Hou’s characteristically still and static work finds him working in a foreign country for only the second time (after Japan, in Café Lumière), and the result is perhaps the strongest movie of his career: a picture of three people, a mother (Juliette Binoche, the best performance of her career), a son (Simon Iteanu) and a babysitter (Fang Song), observed at a level of detail that must be seen to be understood. All of Hou’s films are at one level another, about the rhythm and pace of life; this film brings that theme to the forefront, mostly content to do nothing else than to stop and watch as these three feel their feelings and live their lives; except for those handful of moments when that red balloon appears, a reminder that in every life, there must come moments of imagination and beauty. (Reviewed here)
(Brad Bird, 2007, USA)
A tribute, more than any movie I can name, to sensory pleasures: and not only because the film itself is a visual glory, perhaps the most visually nuanced and evocative of all Pixar features. Essentially, this is a film about the appreciation of art: for the creator, because creating art is both an act of catharsis and the most generous gift possible; for the audience, because it is joyful and gladdening; for the scholar and critic, because the discovery of something truly perfect is made that much more powerful in the context of months or years of wading through the substandard and dull. A tribute to artistic perfection that’s a perfect work of art itself: gorgeous and perfectly-acted and charming, and oh, my, is Michael Giacchino’s score a thing of wonder and heartbreak. And most importantly, that CGI food really does look like the most mouthwatering thing ever, right? (Reviewed here)