The middle of a decade isn’t often a cause for reflection, but maybe it should be. We tend to break time down into whatever segments make sense, especially within art, fashion, and culture, where things move quickly and change significantly: The teen world of 1982’s Fast Times At Ridgemont High, for instance, is markedly different from the teen world of 1989’s Say Anything… Inspired by our friends at Pitchfork, The Dissolve polled its regular contributors and some friends of the site about the best films released since January 1, 2010. We compiled the results in an effort to help give shape to the decade in progress, as the cinematic landscape keeps evolving around us. When the math was done, we found the results surprising, with a No. 1 none of us predicted. (Though we probably should have.) Let’s start from the bottom and work our way up with Nos. 50 through 26; then head to part 2 for the top 25.
Gravity (Dir: Alfonso Cuarón, 2013)
Gravity is the rare movie that manages to succeed on two contradictory fronts. On one hand, it’s a spectacle of massive visual scope that demands to be seen on the largest possible IMAX-ified screen. But it’s also perfectly correct to describe it as an intimate, borderline claustrophobic character study of a terrified but determined newbie astronaut deciding between life or death. Thanks to the famous marketing tagline for Alien, everybody knows that in space, no one can hear you scream. While watching Gravity in a theater, it’s difficult to hear, or even feel, yourself breathe.
Gravity won seven Academy Awards out of the 10 for which it was nominated, including Oscars for direction, cinematography, editing, and visual effects. But what makes this a landmark work—one that, in five years, will likely rank on many best-of-the-decade lists—is the way it restores one’s faith in the promise of the modern blockbuster. Alfonso Cuarón and his collaborators raised the bar for awe-inspiring technical artistry, making 3D seem like a newly essential and exciting device at a moment when its popularity was spiraling downward. More importantly, they did that without losing sight of their central mission: to follow a single determined woman on her journey away from grief and back toward Earthly light. —Jen Chaney
Wreck-It Ralph (Dir: Rick Moore, 2012)
Pixar has set a high bar for the thriving American animation field, and it’s been fantastic seeing other studios strive to produce similarly heartfelt, intelligent, beautifully designed, and above-all original work. Under Pixar honcho John Lasseter, Disney Feature Animation rose to the challenge, as Wreck-It Ralph attests. Rich Moore’s sparkling, speedy Disney feature takes place in a world inside videogames, where clumsy, destructive thug Ralph (John C. Reilly) eternally fights prim do-gooder Fix-It Felix Jr. (Jack McBrayer) in a Donkey Kong-meets-Rampage-style arcade game, until Ralph gets lonely and annoyed with his role, and starts breaking rules in an attempt to be a hero. It’s a surprisingly complicated, dense narrative, with plenty of loose plot threads that all come neatly back together in the end, and some stellar voice work, including Sarah Silverman as cutesy-poo racer-wannabe Vanellope, Jane Lynch as a science-fiction action hero, and especially Firefly’s Alan Tudyk, doing his best classic-Disney Ed Wynn impersonation. It’s also a narrative that trades in the broad emotions and bright colors of childhood fantasy, but with plenty of darkness and depth for older viewers. Many animated features mix references designed to sail over the kiddies’ heads with body-function jokes designed to make parents groan. Wreck-It Ralph does something more sophisticated in hitting both quadrants, especially in a heartbreaking scene where Ralph has to make a choice for Vanellope’s own good, but that she sees as as arbitrary cruelty. Any parent who’s punished a kid—or kid who’s been punished—should be able to relate. This is actually, authentically a story for kids and adults. —Tasha Robinson
Inherent Vice (Dir: Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014)
Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation kept the title of Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel, the first of Pynchon’s books to be turned into a film. But it could just as well have been called Highnatown, what with the druggy yarn it spins about a vast Southern California land-use racket, with the specter of the Manson trial creeping in the background. Then again, The Long Goodbye, which Anderson’s friend Robert Altman made the year before Chinatown, is the resigned, Nixon-era private-dick classic that feels most simpatico with Inherent Vice. The movie follows pothead P.I. “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix at his most playful) on a byzantine, mostly irrelevant quest: His ex, Shasta (Katherine Waterston, in what should be her breakout performance) visits his oceanfront pad in affordable “Gordita Beach” to say she and the wife of her new boyfriend are plotting to have the boyfriend—a high-rolling land developer—committed, and she needs Doc’s help. Confused yet? Only 130 minutes to go. Along the way, Doc finds that he and his ball-busting frenemy, LAPD Lt. “Bigfoot” Bjornsen, a bulletheaded cop (and TV cop-show adviser) “with an evil little twinkle in his eye that says ‘civil rights violation,’” are both but flecks of dust before the grinding wheels of an impenetrable but hilarious conspiracy. Robert Elswit’s sun-bleached cinematography makes the movie look like a hallucination, or a Lucky Brand catalog. —Chris Klimek
Melancholia (Dir: Lars von Trier, 2011)
In 1621, scholar Robert Burton published The Anatomy Of Melancholy, a mammoth study of the malady, in which he wrote: “And from these melancholy dispositions no man living is free, no Stoick, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous, so godly, so divine, that can vindicate himself… more or less, some time or other, he feels the smart of it. Melancholy in this sense is the character of Mortality.” Such a grand topic requires a grand film, and Lars von Trier's Melancholia is an audacious masterpiece, operatic in scope and tone. (And soundtrack: The film starts with a surreal prologue underscored by Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.) Early on in Melancholia, Justine (Kirsten Dunst), in her fluffy wedding dress, stops and stares up into the night sky. She asks her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), “What star is that?” It’s actually a planet on a collision course with Earth. Justine’s depression prepares her for mortality better than Claire, who falls apart. In one of the most gorgeous scenes in the film, Justine goes out at night and lies naked in the grass, luxuriating in the bright glow of the oncoming planet. There has rarely been a better depiction of the siren call of melancholy. And so despite its grim fatalism, Melancholia puts into images an experience so difficult to describe that even great writers falter. “There it is,” the film says. “That’s what it’s like.” —Sheila O’ Malley
The Turin Horse (Dir: Béla Tarr, 2011)
Some filmmakers’ final work has an autumnal grace: Robert Altman’s Prairie Home Companion, for instance. Others’ stare grimly into the abyss, such as Ingmar Bergman’s Saraband. And then there’s The Turin Horse. Once asked to describe his film, which he swears will be his last, Hungarian director Béla Tarr replied, “You are doing always the same thing every day, but every day is a little bit different, and the life is just getting weaker and weaker, and, by the end, disappears. This is what this [expletive] movie shows you.” Does it ever: The Turin Horse depicts oblivion through endless driving wind, empty skies, and black-and-white photography so charcoal-y that it looks like soot on the characters’ faces.
The movie stars Janos Derzsi and Erika Bók as an elderly father and his daughter. They’re not trying to survive in the desolate countryside so much as hoping to ward off the inevitable. In the tradition of slow-cinema classics such as Jeanne Dielman, The Turin Horse illustrates the terrifying drudgery of repetitive daily actions: the feeding of a horse, the preparing of potatoes. The father takes to staring out the window, as if keeping an eye out, lest the Grim Reaper appear over that distant hill. And yet the film’s blankness and bleakness are an invigorating middle finger to the banality of existence, like a metal band playing the same heavy riff over and over again to prove they can. The Turin Horse is a monument to nothingness, an angry howl at the void that’s coming for us all. It’s probably just as well Tarr retired after it. After the world ends, what else is there to say? —Tim Grierson
Guardians Of The Galaxy (Dir: James Gunn, 2014)
How do you reinvent a Marvel movie that’s in danger of ossifying into successful formula? For starters, you forget the character A-team from The Avengers and reach deep into the archives for a team most folks have never heard of, a gang of outlaws and misfits led by Chris Pratt’s adorable Star Lord. That gang should include a bipedal raccoon wearing people-clothes and voiced by Bradley Cooper at his raspiest; Dave Bautista’s hilariously literal Drax The Destroyer; Zoe Saldana’s tough, sexy Gamora; and most surprisingly, Groot, a sentient tree-person Vin Diesel made into a heartbreakingly Christ-like figure, even though the character’s vocabulary is limited to four words. Then give the reins to this mega-budgeted blockbuster to the idiosyncratic James Gunn, who graduated from Lloyd Kaufman’s Troma University (where the only two majors are “filmmaking on a budget” and “being exploited”) and have him give the material the demented edge and deep personal emotional investment he previously brought to his demented superhero riff The Specials and his melancholy, sneakily powerful coming-of-age novel The Toy Collector. All this happened, and the result was a Star Wars for a new generation, a rakish space adventure overflowing with personality and humor, not to mention some of the catchiest hits of the 1970s. Assuming Pratt can make time in his busy schedule of headlining every franchise ever, the sequels cannot come soon enough. —Nathan Rabin
Love Is Strange (Dir: Ira Sachs, 2014)
Love Is Strange is almost sneakily political, the kind of film that’s so well-done and singularly moving that its quiet, activist message seeps into the subconscious via osmosis. The film begins on the wedding day of Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina), two older men who’ve decided to tie the knot after decades together. As a result, George is let go from his job as a choir director at a Catholic school, and the two are forced to live with separate family members, spending their first months as newlyweds apart. Though the plot is set into motion by an act of homophobia, what follows isn’t as much an indictment or criticism of cultural and religious biases as a bittersweet, restrained, and stunningly shot meditation on long-time love, the way our culture sidelines its elderly, especially those who’ve fallen on hard times, and the unique combination of irritation and adoration people usually reserve for their families. By the time the movie concludes, the audience has come to feel those emotions for George and Ben, and the ending is all the more heartrending—and, after some consideration, enraging—because of it. —Rachel Handler
Upstream Color (Dir: Shane Carruth, 2013)
When Shane Carruth’s second feature premièred at Sundance in 2013, a festival programmer reportedly declared that cinema would now have to be divided into two categories: everything before Upstream Color, and everything after. Whether or not such a pronouncement occurred, it speaks to the anticipation that greeted Carruth nine years after unveiling Primer, one of the century’s great watch-it-and-then-watch-it-again science-fiction mind-benders. Cinema didn’t radically transform after Upstream Color, but the movie did change how people think of Carruth. Rather than making another Primer-esque puzzle movie, Carruth (previously a software engineer) delivered what is, essentially, a big, fat, beautifully sentimental story about loss and recovery. There are complicated color schemes and riddles within Upstream Color, but its beating heart couldn’t be more visible.
It’s a love story about two people: Kris (Amy Seimetz), who is brainwashed and gives away all her assets to a nameless thief; and Jeff (Carruth), a former broker who was put under a similar spell. The complications of what happened to them and how they go about uncovering the truth is handled wondrously by Carruth, who plays with time and repetition in such a way as to suggest the trauma of losing one’s identity. Upstream Color is the process by which these characters reclaim theirs. Before Upstream Color, Carruth was regarded as a mysterious, deeply intellectual filmmaker. But this movie revealed a newfound streak of deep tenderness, which includes his own strongly felt performance. It’s funny: Upstream Color is a movie he wrote, directed, scored, co-edited, co-produced, and co-financed—but this dazzling one-man show is dedicated to a story that argues we can’t go it alone. —Tim Grierson
Only Lovers Left Alive (Dir: Jim Jarmusch, 2014)
What becomes of the brokenhearted? Motown’s Jimmy Ruffin crooned that eternal question in 1966, and Motown’s eternal Adam and Eve (Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton) offered a sweet, blissful answer in 2014, right there in their movie’s title. In Only Lovers Left Alive, these two delicate immortals cruise Detroit at night, ghostwriting humanity’s greatest cultural achievements while taking blood like heroin. Jim Jarmusch has crafted a cool ballad to love, drugs, music, and the Rust Belt (he grew up near Akron) that finds poetry among the Motor City’s crumbling infrastructure. He contrasts Adam’s unspoken love for his home with his public disdain for the “zombies” who built and then destroyed it—not the usual ruin-porn.
Only Lovers has two superb performances from Swinton and Hiddleston, killer wit (John Hurt’s Christopher Marlowe vampire wrote the Shakespeare canon), and beautifully shot Detroit neighborhoods that capture the city’s contrasting chaos, beauty, and isolation. It’s the perfect digs for an ageless rock musician who thrives on self-reliance, and for a filmmaker whose dynamic style turns familiar locales into surreal wonderment. (A 2005 New York Times Magazine profile pegged his movies as “foreign films set in America.”) Jarmusch’s knockout ending in Tangiers perches the audience somewhere between eternity, Lebanese indie singer Yasmine Hamdan, and nothingness. —Andrew Lapin
Coherence (Dir: James Ward Byrkit, 2014)
Ingenuity trumps a meager budget in James Ward Byrkit’s cerebral science-fiction psychodrama, which he shot entirely in and around his own Southern California home. What begins as a casual dinner party among eight yuppie friends turns into an existential conundrum when mysterious events—apparently caused by a comet passing unusually close to Earth—lead to the conclusion that reality has been temporarily fractured, or perhaps fragmented. Byrkit and co-writer Alex Manugian (who also plays the weaselly Amir) didn’t give the other actors a script; they guided them through a series of improvisations toward certain prearranged goals. The result is a movie in which it genuinely feels as if the characters are actively puzzling through their bizarre situation, making decisions that seem rational but have unintended consequences. Coherence is so much fun as a mind-bender that its true protagonist and central theme emerge only in the final minutes, to powerful effect. As tricky to parse as Primer and as cleverly plotted as a classic Twilight Zone episode, its philosophy is neatly summarized in an early throwaway line that has one person respond to the assurance “I’m not saying no” with a rueful “If you don’t say yes, it becomes a no.” Say yes. —Mike D’Angelo
Martha Marcy May Marlene (Dir: Sean Durkin, 2011)
Though ostensibly a family drama, Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene is often terrifying, following Martha (Elizabeth Olsen), who escapes a charismatic cult led by charismatic Patrick (John Hawkes), and moves in with her uptight upper-class sister (Sarah Paulson). The flashbacks to Martha’s apprenticeship with a Manson Family-like band of home invaders are nerve-jangling, playing off the audience’s fears of looking out a picture window at a remote estate and seeing burglars approaching. But the movie also works as a study of two very different sisters who don’t get along, and a consideration of what each woman really values. What’s most chilling about Martha Marcy May Marlene is that its multi-named lead character may not fit in anywhere, and that it’s only a matter of time before she’s drawn back to the outlaws. This is a stellar feature debut, from a young director who’s been part of a collective of filmmakers bringing more edge and energy to American independent cinema. —Noel Murray
Bridesmaids (Dir: Paul Feig, 2011)
The strong critical and cultural response to the Paul Feig-directed, Kristen Wiig-starring 2011 comedy Bridesmaids had the unfortunate side effect of resurrecting the “Are women funny?” question. But the film at least had the brass to answer with a resounding “Yes, dammit, now stop asking!” A few years on from the deluge of thinkpieces it inspired, Bridesmaids is more easily appreciated as what it is: An often-sweet, frequently vulgar, wall-to-wall silly story about female friendship. Wiig’s go-for-broke performance as depressed, unemployed baker Annie was overshadowed slightly at the time by a name-making performance from Melissa McCarthy—a performance that’s influenced most of her subsequent projects. But Wiig’s chemistry with co-star and former SNL compatriot Maya Rudolph, playing Annie’s altar-bound best friend Lillian, is what gives Bridesmaids its heart, revealing the insecurities that drive Annie to act out in her role as the world’s least-capable maid of honor. Bridemaids is often spoken of in terms of its memorable comedic setpieces, of which there are many—Annie’s airplane freakout, her bridal-shower tantrum, and of course the infamous food-poisoning incident—but the sum of those parts is a remarkable, screamingly funny account of the many, many ways in which women can indeed be really damn funny. —Genevieve Koski
The Interrupters (Dir: Steve James, 2011)
During a year that saw more killings on the streets of Chicago than American deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, director Steve James (Hoop Dreams, Life Itself) followed the members of CeaseFire, a controversial organization that seeks to stop violence in the city. “The Interrupters” act as mediators in disputes between rival factions, and provide counsel to particularly volatile men and women before they act out. They often have criminal histories or prior gang connections themselves, which enhances their credibility. James tracks four of them through a never-ending series of riveting encounters where they risk their own lives putting themselves in the crossfire—sometimes literally. The subjects of The Interrupters are vivid characters in their own right, like Ameena Matthews, the live-wire daughter of a notorious gang leader Jeff Fort, and Eddie Bocanegra, a former Latino gang member haunted by a murder he committed at age 17. James finds just the right balance between the day-to-day scenes of these mediators at work and the plague of retaliatory violence that cripples the city’s poorest neighborhoods and schools. And certain scenes are unforgettable, like an ex-con apologizing to the people he terrorized in a barbershop robbery, and a street fight that suddenly breaks out in front of the cameras, with one person wielding a butcher knife and the other a block of concrete. The Interrupters shines a light on the problem of gang violence—and the people committed to preventing it—but it makes viewers aware that when its cameras (and the national spotlight) go away, the hard work continues. —Scott Tobias
The Wolf Of Wall Street (Dir: Martin Scorsese, 2013)
When The Wolf Of Wall Street howled into the zeitgeist at the tail end of 2013, the conversation it kicked up was dominated by opinions about whether director Martin Scorsese was endorsing the hedonistic lifestyle of Ponzi schemer Jordan Belfort. Unfortunately, a far more interesting question was lost in that black hole of critical thinking: what does The Wolf Of Wall Street think about us? Scorsese’s white-collar whirlwind of sex, drugs, and “victimless” crimes doesn’t allow for viewers, only accomplices. Destined to be regarded alongside the likes of Raging Bull and Goodfellas as one of the director’s masterpieces, The Wolf Of Wall Street moves at such a blazing pace that the experience of watching the film reflects the experience of living it, Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing contributing to a palpable inertia of immorality. It helps that Leonardo DiCaprio, Scorsese’s squinting muse, delivers the best performance of his career in his giddy take on Belfort. The true offense here wasn’t that Scorsese endorsed Belfort, but that he understands him. Ultimately, viewers have to do the same to appreciate the movie, but there’s plenty of fun along the way. —David Ehrlich
Leviathan (Dir: Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, 2012)
Isn’t it something that we now live in an era whose singular cinematic achievements include two Harvard professors wildly tossing GoPro cameras tied to fishing poles? To be honest, a first viewing of this Sensory Ethnography Lab project, a you-are-there experience that might jokingly be called The Blair Fish Project, can be pretty exhausting. As with that 1999 low-fi horror movie game-changer, this gothic nautical odyssey, shot aboard a commercial fishing vessel with no explanation about what the camera catches, has a core of audacious rawness that inspires equal parts awe and ridicule. But repeat viewings tip the balance decisively toward awe. Its so-direct-there-wasn’t-even-a-viewfinder-involved visions of the infinite mysteries of seas and skies are a far cry from conventional nature docs or YouTube explorer vids. It’s a forceful critique of multiple pockets of today’s reality aesthetics. —Kevin Lee
This Is Not A Film (Dir: Jafar Panahi, 2011)
Like what Winston Churchill said of democracy, cinema is sometimes only possible when all other options have failed. When Jafar Panahi supported a democratic reform movement in Iran, he was sentenced to house arrest and forbidden to make movies. Panahi nonetheless tries to realize his cancelled project within the confines of his home, equipped with only a prosumer videocamera, a smartphone, and his eloquent despair. “If one could just tell a film, then why make a film?” he asks after trying to playact a scene from his script. It’s one of several seemingly failed approaches to conjure the movie before his audience’s eyes; what he summons instead is the power of a film unseen, revealing the mechanisms behind movies that we take for granted whenever the big screen puts us in a slack-jawed state of unquestioning rapture. This isn’t just an expression of the enduring freedom of cinema, but a necessary freedom from cinema. —Kevin Lee
Blue Is The Warmest Color (Dir: Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013)
Much of the initial buzz about Blue Is The Warmest Color did the film a massive disservice by fixating on its lengthy, graphic sex scenes—specifically, questioning how realistically they depicted lesbian sex, and whether they pandered to the male gaze. A year and a half later, the chatter has died down, making room for the uninitiated to be surprised by the movie, to fall just as head-spinningly in love with it as its two leads, Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and Emma (Léa Seydoux), do with each other. The three-hour movie spends much of its time fully realizing the electric passion between these two women, who catch each other’s eye crossing the street and don’t just fall, but collapse, into love; the intimacy of the sex scenes underscores the pair’s rapid, raw descent. Blue is a highly specific story, but it’s one with an arc and a heart that encapsulate exactly what it feels like to get lost in another person and emerge, reeling, both with a confused identity and with a deeper sense of self-knowledge. —Rachel Handler
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Dir: Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)
Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul—or “Joe,” as he’s affectionately known to U.S. cinephiles—burst onto the festival circuit last decade with a series of truly sui generis pictures, including Blissfully Yours, Tropical Malady, and Syndromes And A Century. All the same, few were prepared for the singular strangeness of his Palme d’Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, in which the title card immediately follows a shot of a hairy man-ape hybrid with glowing red eyes, staring directly into the camera. The borders between the fantastic and the mundane are forever porous in Joe’s world, and Uncle Boonmee gives the same weight to the title character’s dialysis routine as it does to visitations from his long-dead wife (who casually rematerializes at the dinner table one night) and his long-missing son (who shows up as one of the red-eyed ape things). Other unexplained sequences may or may not represent Uncle Boonmee’s previous incarnations as a water buffalo, or as a talking catfish that’s into oral gratification. Puzzling out the meaning of Joe’s films isn’t an exercise in futility, but it’s arguably wasted energy—they’re meant to work on a level that transcends cognition. Beautiful, languid, and mysterious, Uncle Boonmee finds one of world cinema’s most unique artists at the top of a game no one else is even playing. —Mike D’Angelo
Amour (Dir: Michael Haneke, 2012)
Michael Haneke’s Oscar-winning film Amour is the story of Georges and Anne, an elderly couple played by the great Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant, and their experiences following Anne’s debilitating stroke. A careful, meticulous examination of mortality, intimacy, and loss, Amour is the rare film with the patience and courage to stare unblinkingly at the process of aging and impending mortality. Amour does not tell its story with sweeping violin strings. The emotion comes honestly (and devastatingly) through Haneke’s commitment to small details: how the frail Georges manages his caretaking duties, how Anne’s body begins to fail bit by bit, how their adult daughter (Isabelle Huppert) cannot deal with what is happening. All this is anchored by the performances from the two leads, so intimate with each other that it’s easy to believe they’ve been together for decades. Georges and Anne made mutual promises long ago, and they continue to keep them. It was probably inconceivable to them that they would ever be this old. And yet they are, and reality must be faced; the promises remain, and they must be honored. As painful as Amour is, it’s also a redemptive story of love and marriage. It looks where most people don’t want to look, and it isn’t afraid. —Sheila O’Malley
Force Majeure (Dir: Ruben Östlund, 2014)
Imagine the worst family vacation you’ve ever been on. Now double its terribleness. Now triple it. Now throw in an avalanche. You’ve got some idea of what the characters in Ruben Östlund’s painfully funny Force Majeure go through. Östlund takes a purposely melodramatic premise—a seemingly average family goes on a ski trip, is almost crushed to death by an unexpected avalanche, then must reevaluate its very core in the aftermath—and twists it into one of the most amusing movies of the decade. Nothing about Force Majeure should be funny, and trying to explain just why it’s so funny to people who haven’t watched it doesn’t really do much to add any necessary clarity. (“What do you mean there’s an avalanche and the parents fight all the time and the children are always crying?”) Yet Östlund’s keen ability to shine a light on the banalities of life and how they often betray our true natures is consistently hilarious. The film’s take-no-prisoners attitude puts everyone—even strangers! even children!—in the crosshairs. This is a film that begs to be seen with a well-humored audience (preferably not one that includes a hefty number of married couples, however), because its rewards are rich and communal. —Kate Erbland
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (Dir: Edgar Wright, 2010)
Actioner, videogame homage, comic-book movie: There are lots of possible lenses for viewing Edgar Wright’s smart, sly adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s cultishly beloved graphic-novel series. It’s difficult to pigeonhole in the same way all of Wright’s films tend to be, but, like those other films, it is first and foremost a comedy. Wright’s script skews close to the source material, which follows hapless early-twentysomething Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) as he meets the literal girl of his dreams, Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and embarks on a 8-bit-videogame-indebted mission to win her by defeating her seven “evil” exes. O’Malley’s books are packed with ironic and pop-culture-influenced humor, which Wright translates capably and cleverly with assistance from his talented young cast, but he also adds his signature visual and tonal wit to the piece in a manner that renders it unique from all its potential cinematic comparison points. It’s unique both within Wright’s filmography—thus far the only straight feature adaptation he’s done—and within the comic-book-movie genre as a whole. Though it was pitched and presented with a blockbuster scope it never managed to meet, its box-office disappointment and subsequent revival as a cult favorite ultimately feels truer to the film’s scrappy, singular spirit. —Genevieve Koski
Goodbye To Language (Dir: Jean-Luc Godard, 2014)
What do we talk about when we talk about late Godard? Audacity, difficulty, obscurity: These and other synonyms for “hard” are the usual shorthand for anything the nouvelle vague master produced after 1968, the year when for a lot of people, Godard effectively ceased to exist. (Scarcely has a director’s filmography lent itself so readily to narrativization.) Godard’s late films are, if nothing else, tremendously, imposingly dense, affording patient viewers (or scholars) a constellation of history, theory, and intertextual references to trace and explain. And yet for all the formal rigor and intimidating erudition of Goodbye To Language, Godard’s latest feature, its pleasures as a moviegoing experience remain simple. The joy of the film lay in seeing the world in a new way—perhaps, as the presence of Godard’s pet and film co-star Roxy suggest, in seeing the world through the awestruck eyes of a dog. This is a film of staggering intelligence, but also one bristling with more immediate virtues. Godard’s playfulness, his exuberance, and above all his inspired virtuosity with the 3-D image—including an extraordinary split-eye shot unlike anything seen in a motion picture before—make this a movie to relish as spectacle, purely and without pretension. —Calum Marsh
Whiplash (Dir: Damien Chazelle, 2014)
In an Oscar season so plagued with based-on-a-true-story movies that mess with the truth (some in ways more justified than others), Whiplash offered a different model: Writer-director Damien Chazelle based the story, about the psychological war between a young drummer (Miles Teller) and his horrifically abusive mentor (J.K. Simmons), on his own high-school experiences, but without slapping the “real-life story” tag on his film. That gave him unlimited license to explore his own subjective experiences and the resulting questions any way he wanted. Instead of a literal film beholden to real-world signposts and multiple points of view, he ended up with something that feels far more honest and pointed. His sweaty, breathtakingly intense showdown relies heavily on Teller’s real-life drum skills and Simmons’ powerhouse performance, which launched him into Oscar contention. The film is up for five Oscars, including Best Picture and Adapted Screenplay—because Chazelle first did the story as a proof-of-concept short—but while it deserves to sweep those categories, particularly Editing and Sound Design, Simmons is the only Whiplash nominee regarded as a lock. That makes sense—he stands out as the film’s biggest, loudest, most uncompromising element—but Whiplash’s power comes equally from the blistering music, the unrelenting tension of the script and editing, and Chazelle’s stylish shooting. —Tasha Robinson
Zero Dark Thirty (Dir: Kathryn Bigelow, 2012)
Now that the controversy has quieted down, it seems all the more ridiculous that so many got tangled up in the notion that Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, a film about the manhunt for Osama bin Laden, is primarily—or at all—about the effectiveness of torture. Not only does the film portray torture as a reprehensible tool of questionable value, Bigelow makes it part of a film that’s ultimately as much about how much the civilized world is willing to trade away its values in the name of safety and revenge. As a dogged CIA operative who pushes the case toward its conclusion, Jessica Chastain embodies the cost of that bargain. Bigelow stages the action thrillingly, particularly that final raid, but she brings a horror-film tension to almost every scene, and lets the horror linger even after the monster has been slain. —Keith Phipps
Stories We Tell (Dir: Sarah Polley, 2012)
Successful child actors tend to go one of two ways: they’re often stuck emotionally at the age of their greatest fame and success, unwilling to let go of that fabulously successful 10-year-old personality even as they enter middle age, or they grow up to be precocious high achievers blessed with a sense of perspective on the craziness of their youth. Child-actress-turned-filmmaker Sarah Polley certainly falls into the second category, and in the heartbreaking documentary Stories We Tell, she turns the camera on herself and her own complicated childhood and coming of age. In lesser hands, the result might have come off as hopelessly self-indulgent, but Polley’s treatment of her family is empathetic, yet unsentimental. The film ultimately revolves around the loaded question of Polley’s true parentage, and the web of lies, half-truths, and evasions that kept it cloudy even as Polley grew up to be an astonishingly self-possessed and gifted young woman wise beyond her years. Stories We Tell is ultimately about forgiveness, and how the ability to forgive others their emotional felonies and misdemeanors can help free us, as well those who have harmed and deceived us, either through neglect or obliviousness. The film is a journey for truth, and when Polley finally uncovers the secrets of her origins, the result is cathartic for her and her audience alike. —Nathan Rabin
Next: The top half of the list, featuring some Pixar, some Coen brothers, some of our longtime favorite directors, and some whose feature debuts were knockouts.