Link Round-Up: New Views

I promise to get better at updating this quicker so anyone who wants to know what I'm doing will not be confused. So here we go.

I am now writing for Variety. Yes, *that* Variety. I am honored to join a team that includes Scott Foundas, Peter Debruge, and Justin Chang leading the charge, among many others. I'll have a few reviews in the month of February, but for now my first piece is on Freezer, a not so good movie about Dylan McDermott trapped in a freezer. Gotta start somewhere.

Were you looking for my Top 10 films of 2013? I talked about my choices with Keith Uhlich on The Cinephiliacs, which you can listen to both Part 1 and Part 2. My choices also come in a list-handy form on Letterboxd.

Thief came out on Blu-Ray via The Cirterion Collection, so I wrote about how Thief is still pretty awesome over at The Film Stage. I also edited this fantastic conversation on the film between Jordan Cronk and Nick Usen at To Be Cont'd.

Jean-Claude Van Damme re-teamed with Peter Hyams for Enemies Closer. Could have been better, but not the worst way to spend January at the movies. I reviewed over at In Review Online.

On The Cinephiliacs: Noah Isenberg, the author of the recent biography on Edgar Ulmer, and former Film Society of Lincoln Center slash New York Film Festival programmer Richard Pena. Both are excellent listens.

On Letterboxd...The Wolf of Wall Street, Dangerous Game, Chaplin's A Day's Pleasure, Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre, Howard Hawks's Red Line 7000 and The Big Sky, Cukor's The Women, Wellman's Lady of Burlesque, The Freshman starring Harold Lloyd, The Color Wheel, Shanghai Express, Hong Sang-Soo's In Another Country, Arthur Penn's The Chase, The Typhoon with Sessue Hayakawa, Aldrich's Emperor of the North, and Minnelli's Gigi.

I finished my graduate degree. More TK on what follows.

Link Round-Up: Year End

Some final posts and catch up before 2014 takes over, which will have much more exciting information in the future...

Firstly: Above is a copy of my piece that appeared in the 50th issue of Little White Lies. Each writer was given a random year and chosen to write about one shot from that year. I went with the final shot of Abbas Kiarostami's Through the Olive Trees. You can find LWL at some major bookstore retailers or subscribe to the magazine here. 

I also contributed to LWL's "Perfect Day 2013," in which I programmed a perfect day of film watching based on four 2013 films and one 2013 repertory release. Read that here.

For In Review Online, I wrote about Asghar Farhadi's new film, The Past, which is his quite striking and beautiful follow up to A Separation. I also burbled Andrew Bujalski's Computer Chess for the site's Top 20 films of 2013.

Speaking of 2013 lists, my own will be part of an upcoming two part Cinephiliacs show with Keith Uhlich. If you cannot wait, you can see a preliminary list of some of my favorite films, performances, and undistributed films at Indiewire among other categories.

You can also pick up the latest episodes of The Cinephiliacs, which have included Imogen Sara Smith on In A Lonely Place, Nellie Killian on Five Year Diary, and Genevieve Yue on Cafe Lumiere. Lots of goodies in those discussions.

Upcoming on Masters of Cinema are booklets for William Wellman's Wings and Sidney Lumet's Serpico. You can currently pre-order both, but look for more information here on what goodies can be expected.

On Letterboxd: Lots of goodies (and a few baddies) have gotten words from me...

For 2013: American Hustle, Oldboy, Gravity, 12 Years a Slave, I Used to Be Darker, It's a Disaster, and Gold.

Howard Hawks: His Girl Friday, The Dawn Patrol, Air Force, and A Song Is Born.

Canonical Films: Providence, Manila in the Claw of Light, Arabian Nights, L'Intrus, News From Home.
 
And some esoterica: Smile, Freedom, Rapado, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.

Wrapping Up 2012

This is the end, my friends. Oh wait that was two weeks ago. (HAHAHAHAHAHA wasn't that a knee slapper?).

Anyways, head on over to The Cinephiliacs to hear my choices for my Top 10 films of the year. I was joined by the ever so lovely Keith Uhlich and had too much fun that we went for over two hours, but got into some intense and honest debates about some of our favorite films. Listen now!

Also, for In Review Online, I was asked to blurb about two favorites, Cosmopolis and Lincoln, so check that out over there.

And finally, my list of honorable mentions that didn't make my Top 10, with links when appropriate. Presented in order from 11 to 25: This Is Not A Film (Panahi, Iran), It's Such A Beautiful Day (Hertzfeldt, US), Goodbye, First Love (Hansen-Love, France), The Loneliest Planet (Loktev, US/Russia), Red Hook Summer (Lee, US), The Imposter (Layton, US), Killer Joe (Friedkin, US), Zero Dark Thirty (Bigelow, US), Bernie (Linklater, US), Damsels in Distress (Stillman, US), Almayer's Folly (Akerman, France), Alps (Lanthimos, Greece), A Man Vanishes (Imamura, Japan), Neighboring Sounds (Filho, Brazil), Tabu (Gomes, Portugal).

To more movies in 2013!

Interlude: TwitCrix Poll

Update: A few more people posted lists. I've updated it to reflect those.


Yesterday on Twitter, a number of the film critics I follow/follow me got around to posting their favorite films of 2012 so far. Curious to see what was the favorite, I aggregated the 25 30 lists I found. I ranked them the usual way (#1 picks got 5 points, #2 got 4 points, and so on—if the lists were unranked I each pick one point). This of course isn't the end all list, but for those wondering what to fill your Netflix queues with for the rest of the year, all these films are great, or at least worth checking out. 

1. Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson, USA) - 73 points/23 mentions

2. Once Upon A Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey) - 29 points/7 mentions

3. The Deep Blue Sea (Terrence Davies, UK) - 26 points/11 mentions

4. Haywire (Steven Soderbergh, USA) - 26 points/10 mentions

5. The Kid With A Bike (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium) - 24 points/8 mentions

6. The Turin Horse (Bela Tarr, Hungary) - 20 points/8 mentions

7. Damsels in Distress (Whit Stillman, USA) - 16 points/5 mentions

8. This Is Not A Film (Jafar Panahi, Iran) - 14 points/5 mentions

9. Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard, USA) - 13 points/5 mentions

10. The Color Wheel (Alex Perry Ross, USA) - 13 points/3 mentions

11. Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranjo, Mexico) - 10 points/3 mentions

My Oscar Ballot: 2012 Edition

Certified Copy

While everyone gets hyped up about tomorrow morning’s Academy Award nominations, I could probably be less interested this year. While Oscar pundits get excited over some of the middling films that will populate the lists tomorrow, I’m hoping that some years down the roads, the films that dominate my own top films list will become cherished classics. For fun, I’ve submitted my own ballot, following the style of the Academy Awards (ten films ranked for Best Picture, five nominations for all other categories). I’ve presented it without comment—again, go to my top 15 list for commentary on most of these picks.

Best Picture

1.      Certified Copy

2.      Martha Marcy May Marlene

3.      A Separation

4.      Meek’s Cutoff

5.      The Interrupters

6.      Margaret

7.      Mysteries of Lisbon

8.      Take Shelter

9.      Tuesday, After Christmas

10.    The Tree of Life

Best Director

·         Sean Durkin, Martha Marcy May Marlene

·         Asghar Farhadi, A Separation

·         Abba Kiraostami, Certified Copy

·         Kelly Reichardt, Meek’s Cutoff

·         Raúl Ruiz, Mysteries of Lisbon

Best Actor

·         Woody Harrelson, Rampart

·         Gary Oldman, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

·         Brad Pitt, Moneyball

·         Peyman Moaadi, A Separation

·         Michael Shannon, Take Shelter

Best Actress

·         Juliette Binoche, Certified Copy

·         Kirstin Dunst, Melancholia

·         Elizabeth Olson, Martha Marcy May Marlene

·         Anna Paquin, Margaret

·         Kristin Wiig, Bridesmaids

This Is The End: The Best Films of 2011

            In probably the pitch-perfect cinematic moment of the 2011, Curtis, the tall and constantly in-check protagonist of Take Shelter, watches lighting dance across the sky while his wife and daughter sleep in the back of the car. “Is anyone else seeing this?” he exclaims. If this is the end, we need to know we’re not the only ones out there realizing the world is about the change.

            Which is perhaps what all these apocalyptic films—Margin Call (fiscal), Contagion (viral), Rise of the Planet of the Apes (special), and Melancholia (literal)—are all about. Even if we’re prepared to face the end, we can’t do it alone. We need to be sure of who we are and understand ourselves, which is why so many films not specifically about the end are about the minor apocalypses within our lives. The strange protagonist of Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In must come to terms with a completely new identity. Werner Herzog explored both the birth of spiritual life (Cave of Forgotten Dreams) and the end of an actual life (Into the Abyss). Attack the Block gave us teenagers who must redeem themselves and their way of life by defeating forces greater than our world. And so many films explored the state of the family and the trials and often failure resulting in those who cannot manage it: A Separation, The Descendants, Take Shelter, Margaret. Apocalypse isn’t about the end of the world, as the idiotic villain (Michael Nyqvist) from Mission Impossible — Ghost Protocol lectures. It’s about what comes after, which is why so many films have focused on our uncertainty to face something new.

            It was also a ridiculously excellent year for film, easily the best since I started writing in 2004. Perhaps not in the Hollywood sphere, where mainstream cinema continues to lead down a series of franchise reboots and post-3D conversions, as much as in the independent and world cinema. This year was simply impossible to narrow down to the best films of the year, and deciding where to stop (20? 25? 40?) made the usual business of top 10s even harder. I decided on 15 films, and any of the top six or seven would have probably been my #1 film last year, showing the quality of excellent cinema today, as long as you know where to find it.

            So for honorable mentions, any of these could have made the top 15 on a different day: The Arbor, Bridesmaids, City of Life and Death, Contagion, Coriolanus, Film Socialisme, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Hugo, The Ides of March, Jane Eyre, J. Edgar, Of Gods and Men, Melancholia, Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, Moneyball, Pina, Project Nim, The Skin I Live In, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and War Horse.

Best of the Year So Far: Big Splashes in the CInematic Pool

Bridesmaids

2011 has already set itself apart from last year with a number of truly unqualified gems of the cinematic order. The medium continues to develop new voices that speak to us in fresh and original ways, and a number of masters have been able to find new takes to stretch the imagination as well. Here are ten favorites, presented in alphabetical order, so far (click on the title to read the full review):

The Arbor (United Kingdom): Clio Barnard’s strange experiment in documentary filmmaking follows the sad story of playwright Andrea Dunbar and the children who begot her sins. But more fascinating is Ms. Barnard’s unique style that only brings the voice in, allowing her to run wild with the visuals, truly accentuating the story in powerful ways.

Bridesmaids (United States): While suffering from some of the minor issues that all Judd Apatow films seem to carry, Bridesmaids is certainly the funniest movie of the year so far, with Kristin Wiig giving it all in a raunchy gross-out comedy with truly realized characters and a unique perspective on female friendship.

Certified Copy (France and Italy): Abbas Kiarostami’s first feature outside his native Iran asks a simple question: Why do we value the original, when the copy can be just as good? And thus Juliette Binoche and William Shimmel play a game across one afternoon that tests this premise, leading us in an insightful drama where the emotional stakes are equaled by the philosophical stakes.