Check out #50-21 here.
Read about #20-16 here.
Read about #15-11 here.
And read about #10-6 here.
5.) Two Days, One Night (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne)
After a
nervous breakdown, a Belgian woman named Sandra (Marion Cotillard) loses her
job, but is given one weekend to convince her
co-workers to give up their bonuses so she stay employed. Each encounter
builds in intensity as Sandra faces increasing opposition from her co-workers
and her own depression, and, as usual, the Dardennes are content to simply let the
story unfold. It all builds to a cathartic final scene that makes every
moment that came before seem so much more meaningful.
4.) National Gallery (Frederick Wiseman)
Frederick
Wiseman is known for his in-depth explorations of institutions, and I suppose National Gallery, his new documentary
about the London National Gallery, works on that basic level, too. But saying
it’s just another great Wiseman film would be selling it short. National Gallery is nothing less than an
attempt to create the most concise possible answer to the question “What is
art?” That it succeeds at all is awe-inspiring enough, but that it’s able to
infuse it all with real emotional power puts it on the short list for the best
documentaries ever made.
3.) The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson)
I’ll
admit to being a little disappointed by The
Grand Budapest Hotel after my initial viewing. It felt like, for the first
time, Wes Anderson had let storytelling get buried by his aesthetic. Upon revisiting,
it quickly became clear how wrong I was. The
Grand Budapest Hotel is a Wes Anderson film about Wes Anderson films, a carefully constructed middle finger to
all the critics who moan that he just makes the same film over and over again.
Everything, from the nesting doll structure to the numerous references to
classic filmmakers like Hitchcock and Lubitsch, is done to show why Anderson makes
films the way he does; to preserve a piece of the past in a world that's always looking toward the future.
2.) Listen Up Philip (Alex Ross Perry)
I’ve
been championing Alex Ross Perry’s 2012 feature The Color Wheel as a modern masterpiece since it was released, so I
obviously had pretty high expectations for his follow-up. Listen Up Philip utilizes the same sharp wit and brutal sense of
humor that defined its predecessor to tell a more complex story about a self-centered
young author named Philip (Jason Schwartzman. That setup would make for a
pretty compelling character study, but Perry goes much deeper, examining the
collateral damage Philip’s egotistical behavior causes to the ones closest to
him. Entire sections of the film are devoted to characters affected by Philip’s
narcissism, such as his ex-girlfriend Ashley, his equally self-obsessed mentor
Ike (Jonathan Pryce), and Ike’s resentful daughter Melanie (Krysten Ritter). It’s
a scathing portrait of the artistic ego that suggests that Philip, no matter
how much pain he has caused, will never understand just how big an asshole he
is.
1.) Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson)
“Was it possible
that at every gathering – concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in,
here, up north, back east, wherever – some dark crews had been busy all along,
reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to
everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear.
‘Gee,’ he thought. ‘I don’t know.’”
Paul
Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel centers on a perpetually
stoned P.I. named Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) as he tries to unpack a hilariously convoluted mystery
(or three) in the search for his ex-girlfriend, but like a lot of noirs (most
notably Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye),
Inherent Vice is less interested in
the plot than it is in the world around it.
Drug use of all kinds is prevalent throughout the film, but its slightly
fictionalized version of a 1970 Manhattan Beach makes it seem like the whole
country is in a state of withdrawal. The idealism and sense of possibility that
defined the previous decade has dissipated, and all that’s left is a romanticism
for a time and place that seems like it never even existed.
"Does it ever end? Of course it does. It did."
That's all, folks.
