Yesterday, we shared the first half of our poll to determine the best films of the decade, as voted on by staffers and regular contributors to The Dissolve. Without further ado, here’s the top half.
Dogtooth (Dir: Yorgos Lanthimos, 2010)
It’s true what Tolstoy wrote, that all happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The family at the heart of Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2010 Best Foreign Language Film nominee (it lost to Denmark’s In A Better World) isn’t exactly unhappy, but they’re entirely dedicated to refracting their emotions and experiences through a unique lens. Trapped inside a microcosmic culture entirely of their own making, the parents of Lanthimos’ unnamed family have hit upon a canny way to keep their offspring entirely at their mercy: lie to them, repeatedly, consistently, about everything. As much a comment on parenting techniques as a meditation on the power of popular culture—has Rocky IV ever mattered to anyone as much as it matters to the misled eldest daughter?—Dogtooth gets away with all its big ideas thanks to sharp writing, biting humor, and a singular dedication to letting things go wildly off the rails at every turn. Tremendously strange and compellingly unique, Dogtooth could make viewers do almost anything, including identifying an armchair as a sea; a cat as a monster; and a masterpiece as, well, a masterpiece. —Kate Erbland
Exit Through The Gift Shop (Dir: Banksy, 2010)
Legendary graffiti artist turned art-world superstar Banksy semi-broke his cultivated veil of anonymity by directing and being an on-camera participant (albeit with his image masked by dark lighting and a voice modulator) in Exit Through The Gift Shop, a prankish satire of the art world, exploring how imitation can be the biggest and most obnoxious form of flattery. The mind-bending, reality-questioning documentary begins with a gentleman who eventually rose to fame as Mr. Brainwash compulsively turning his cameras on Banksy and his peers, ostensibly for a massive documentary about graffiti outlaws that turns out to be unwatchable. At some point, a turnabout occurs, and the voyeur becomes the subject of the camera’s mocking glare: Mr. Brainwash decides to stop chronicling his favorite pop-culture graffiti artists, and joins their ranks with a style that could charitably be called “derivative,” or less-charitably, “insanely derivative to a legally actionable degree.” When Exit Through The Gift Shop triumphed at Sundance, there were whispers that the film itself might represent an enormous prank, a too-strange-for-fiction hoax perpetrated by the enigmatic Banksy. But regardless of the film’s ultimate authenticity, Exit Through The Gift Shop resonates as a profound, hilarious commentary about the nature of art and the slippery line separating fans from artists, and artists from charlatans. —Nathan Rabin
Winter’s Bone (Dir: Debra Granik, 2010)
Before Jennifer Lawrence became a perennial awards nominee, a blockbuster action heroine, and everyone’s favorite late-night talk-show guest, she played 17-year-old hillbilly Ree Dolly in Debra Granik’s adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s novel Winter’s Bone. Structured as a gripping mystery story—with Ree traveling up and down the mountain, talking to dangerous criminals while trying to find her deadbeat father before the state takes the Dollys’ house away—the film doubles as a vivid depiction of Ozark poverty. And Lawrence’s tough, fully engaged performance helps ground the movie’s occasional mythic overtones, as Ree’s odyssey sees her persuading an ogre (played by John Hawkes) and being tipped off to the family’s secrets by a shadowy cabal of matriarchs. Winter’s Bone was a sensation at Sundance, and signaled something of a new era at the festival, with less of an emphasis on wan, star-filled dramedies, and more on vibrant new American artists. —Noel Murray
Take Shelter (Dir: Jeff Nichols, 2011)
Take Shelter isn’t a thriller about the apocalypse. Sure, its central conceit is that its main character, Curtis (Michael Shannon), is having nasty premonitions of a world-ending storm, dreams so bloodcurdling that they’ve possessed him, moving him to build a shelter for his wife (Jessica Chastain) and young daughter (Tova Stewart). But much like Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, Jeff Nichols’ indie thriller is a parable of sorts, a story that meditates seriously on the stigma of mental illness, the faltering state of America’s health-care system, the fixation with “traditional” masculinity, and collective fears about the damage humanity has wrought on the planet. The film’s multiple layers and versions of reality make it all the more affecting—a sense of dread and disorientation pervades each scene, and it’s never completely clear what’s just brewing in Curtis’ head, what’s actually happening to him, and what the audience has projected onto him. And its ending is the kind of ambiguous that keeps viewers staring at the screen long after the credits have finished rolling. —Rachel Handler
Before Midnight (Dir: Richard Linklater, 2013)
Even before Boyhood’s 12-year stretch of filming, Richard Linklater was examining and playing with the concept of the passage of time. In all three entries in his Before trilogy, Linklater lets the relationship between Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) unfold in real time. Then, between films, he skips ahead several years, homing in and zooming out on what’s become a one-of-a-kind cinematic love story. Before Sunrise watches as the youthful, romantic American and the brilliant, fiery Frenchwoman meet on a train and fall in love. Before Sunset sees them reunite in Paris and ultimately (though ambiguously) reconnect. And Before Midnight is privy to what happens after the ride into the sunset. Like its predecessors, the third installment is rife with both the poetic and the prurient, and packed with conversations that sound like real life, but better. In Midnight, though, the years Hawke, Delpy, and Linklater have spent honing their collective instrument are more apparent than ever—the direction and acting feel as effortless as Jesse and Céline’s partnership can no longer be. —Rachel Handler
Meek’s Cutoff (Dir: Kelly Reichardt, 2010)
Director Kelly Reichardt and star Michelle Williams followed up Wendy And Lucy, their excellent drama about a stalled-out woman with no money and dwindling options, with a survival story on a much grander scale. Following three pioneer families on a journey through the Cascade Mountains via the Oregon Trail in 1845, Meek’s Cutoff has the harsh, austere beauty of Gus Van Sant’s death trilogy, particularly Gerry. But the life-or-death stakes, pinned to the choices Williams’ character has to make for the group, fill the arduousness of each mile with agonizing tension. She has to decide who to trust—the grizzled guide who doesn’t seem to know where he’s going, or a Native American they capture and ask to lead them to a water source—but it’s never clear whether either, both, or neither are going to lead them in the right direction. Shooting in “Academy ratio,” Reichardt meticulously re-creates the period with an emphasis on the journey’s immense physical toll: The heaviness of the clothing and the covered wagons; the arid, vast, unforgiving landscape; the tenuous physical health (and in one case, advancing pregnancy) of the pioneers. At its best, it’s like a thriller played at half-speed, with seemingly mundane tasks, like dragging the wagons up a steep incline, becoming the difference between survival and tragedy. In Reichardt’s film, civilization is one shaky wagon-wheel away from oblivion. —Scott Tobias
Selma (Dir: Ava DuVernay, 2014)
It seems unconscionable that it took until 2014 for audiences to get a theatrical Martin Luther King, Jr. biopic, but Ava DuVernay’s Selma proved the wait worthwhile, with a portrayal of the civil-rights movement that’s as relevant to the present as it is reverent of the past. Though set in 1965 during the voting-rights marches in Alabama, Selma arrived in theaters just as the modern-day echoes of that struggle had grown deafening, lending the film an added emotional and moral heft. But Selma is timeless, too, as a nuanced portrait of a great man that deftly sidesteps hagiography; as an examination of the tension and compromise involved in wide-ranging political movements; and as a celebration of the bravery of those who gave themselves to the cause, both willingly and unwillingly. It’s a great, important story, but it’s also a wonderful piece of filmmaking, thanks to Bradford Young’s breathtaking, refined cinematography, DuVernay’s canny grasp of staging and timing, and a nuanced lead performance by David Oyelowo that brings unforced humanity and ambiguity to a historical figure who’s rarely allowed either. —Genevieve Koski
Short Term 12 (Dir: Destin Daniel Cretton, 2013)
On paper, Destin Daniel Cretton’s coming-of-age drama Short Term 12 sounds like a typical Sundance exercise in trembling, low-key earnestness: A troubled social worker (Brie Larson, in a revelatory performance) works through her deeply buried issues and inability to love while counseling a series of troubled group-home kids who desperately yearn for love and connection, but are unwilling to let down their defenses. In actuality, Short Term 12 is something much greater and more lasting: an exquisitely wrought exploration of the troubled psyches of both the staff and the clients of a foster home that radiates compassion and empathy for all of its characters. It’s a deeply humane, ultimately devastating, legitimately tearjerking movie with plenty of acting-friendly moments of high drama and almost unbearably intense emotion. But it’s defined as much by its portrayal of those wonderful, life-affirming in-between times when kids with nothing to do and all day to do it toy with each other, savor rare moments of connection and humor with their peers and mentors, and generally behave like kids, albeit fucked-up kids who have seen more of the ugly side of life than anyone should in a lifetime. —Nathan Rabin
Moonrise Kingdom (Dir: Wes Anderson, 2012)
The fictional children’s story books Moonrise Kingdom’s Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) packs to take on her clandestine camping trip with orphan Sam Shaukusky (Jared Gilman) serve as an appealing distillation of Wes Anderson’s film: familiar yet not quite of this world, childlike yet imbued with free-floating nostalgia, and just the tiniest bit bizarre. Moonrise Kingdom is set within its own storybook world, a cloistered island off the New England coast—an island populated by typical Andersonian eccentrics, plus Bob Balaban—that reveals other little worlds inside it: the quietly chaotic Bishop home, haunted by Suzy’s gloomy, distracted parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand); Camp Ivanhoe, a Khaki Scout enclave presided over by a be-shorted Edward Norton; and the hidden cove discovered by Suzy and Sam that gives the film its name. It’s a typically lovely and quirky Anderson diorama, as satisfying from beginning to end as anything the director’s done. By focusing his story on children who act like little adults, and adults who often act like children, Anderson achieves a sort of balance that makes his signature whimsy feel more natural and emotionally charged than some of his other efforts. It’s unmistakably an Anderson film, and unmistakably one of his best. —Genevieve Koski
Margaret (Dir: Kenneth Lonergan, 2011)
Shot in 2005, finished in 2008, and dumped in a few theaters for a week in 2011, Kenneth Lonergan’s looooong-delayed follow-up to You Can Count On Me remains one of the great critical (and social-media) success stories of the new millennium. Clocking in at seconds shorter than its contractually obligated 150 minutes, after a lengthy studio war over its editing, the film feels unfinished, with abandoned subplots and other visible scars. But to some degree, Margaret was always going to be messy, because the moral issues it engages so thoughtfully and passionately resist tidy answers. Anna Paquin holds it together with a volatile performance as a strong-willed but typically narcissistic teenager who witnesses a woman getting killed in a bus accident, gives a false report to protect the driver (Mark Ruffalo), then attempts to reverse course and seek justice in the case. This aligns her with the victim’s closest friend (an outstanding Jeannie Berlin), but also finds her meddling in people’s lives recklessly, as if their tragic crises are merely the catalyst for her personal growth. At the same time, her idealism is genuine, and sullied by adults who have less-than-noble motives of their own. With Margaret, Lonergan has taken a single incident and built a drama of prismatic fascination, with insights into morality, family, adulthood, and the state of New York City after 9/11. It is the very definition of a flawed masterpiece. —Scott Tobias
15. The Act Of Killing (Dir: Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012)
It’s a mark of The Act Of Killing’s creative ambition that a film about the Indonesian mass murders of 1965-66 manages to create a thematic connection between killers justifying their actions and dancers cavorting in front of a defunct restaurant shaped like a giant fish. Director Joshua Oppenheimer found and interviewed some of the original killers, now in positions of minor power. Unraveling the ways they identified with Hollywood gangsters, he enlisted them to re-create their murders for the cameras, moving from abstract, colorful, and stylized re-enactments to a grotesque realism that throws his subjects off balance. The process brings a grim, awful humor to the process of puncturing their self-images, and trying to bring them to understand and confront their crimes. But while it’s informative, surreal, and astonishingly bold in exploring the psychology of these specific murderers in this specific environment, it reaches significantly further in exploring the banality of evil. As Oppenheimer’s subjects justify their actions, or even boast about the people they framed and slaughtered, they reveal a great deal about the ways people distance themselves from their own actions, and in the process do unconscionable things without feeling the pangs of conscience. Oppenheimer’s film is innovative, stylish, and strange, but it’s also staggeringly important for anyone trying to understand why terrible things happen in the world. —Tasha Robinson
The Tree Of Life (Dir: Terrence Malick, 2011)
For his fifth feature, Terrence Malick seemingly set out to tell both the smallest story possible and the biggest. Drawing from his own life growing up in Texas, it’s primarily a coming-of-age tale in which Jack (Hunter McCracken) confronts the twin influences of his nurturing mother (Jessica Chastain) and oppressive father (Brad Pitt), and also his notions of right and wrong. But its perspective shifts more than once over the course of the film, to years after Jack’s childhood, to a present in which the grown-up Jack must sort through the past, to some kind of afterlife, and back to the beginning of time and the first stirrings of life on the planet. These shifts, particularly that last one, should be jarring, but they’re as graceful and beautiful as the rest of the film, which comes as close as any movie has come to simulating what it might be like to see the universe through the eye of God—as simultaneously aware of the whole of time and space as the smallest torments in the heart of one kid in the suburbs outside Waco in the 1950s. That isn’t the only element of Malick’s film that approaches the miraculous, either. It sustains a tone of wonder and heartbreak through remarkable imagery, lyrical narration, and musical selections that match so perfectly to the film around them, they could have been composed with Malick in mind. It’s a singular film, particular to the vision of a one-of-kind filmmaker, but also the most universal movie this decade has yet produced. —Keith Phipps
The Master (Dir: Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012)
Much was made of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master being shot on 70mm, and for good reason: Those lucky enough to live close to a theater projecting the film in that format had a much different experience than other viewers. While some puzzled why Anderson would use a format traditionally associated with epics for a film dominated by conversations captured in close-up, an optimal format viewing quickly clarified this reasoning: There are strong lights behind the characters, and in 70mm, viewers are positively irradiated by dazzling levels of whiteness.
Moving away from the entrancingly over-the-top, aggressively in-your-face Punch-Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood, The Master outlines the relationship between the loosely L. Ron Hubbard-ish figure Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and sexually troubled World War II vet Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix). After sneaking onto Dodd’s yacht during a party, Quell becomes Dodd’s aide-de-camp: ad hoc bartender, attack dog against skeptics, and partner in partying. Both lead actors are at their rhythmically idiosyncratic best, justifying Anderson’s confidence in paring back his visual fireworks.
The film’s investigation of male bonding through bad behavior is one thread in a rare film that wonders, without snickering, how trauma and asocialization are shaped and expressed through sexual dysfunction. If it’s not as memorable a spectacle viewed at home, that just means Anderson made his point about the glories of shooting on and projecting celluloid. Even stripped of that factor, The Master is typically dense, unexpectedly funny, and predictably unpredictable, an actor-fueled installment in Anderson’s ongoing portraits of 20th-century American history. —Vadim Rizov
12 Years A Slave (Dir: Steve McQueen, 2013)
At what point does artistic formalism become divorced from emotional provocation? At what point does style overcome substance? Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave proves that such questions are invariably pointless, and that form, no matter how well-realized, rigorous, or high-minded, should always follow function and the heart of the story. 12 Years proves that a movie about a serious, politically charged subject like American slavery, based on the real life story of Solomon Northrup, a free black man kidnapped and sold in the South, can be reverently depicted, as well as revelatory about both the ongoing and evolving narrative of American history and the possibilities of formalist filmmaking. Like McQueen’s previous work, 12 Years is interested in tapping into the many, sometimes unknowable multitudes of the protagonist’s emotions—through many a harrowing silent long take and a bombastic score—and equally focused on situating a character in the systemic corruption of his time. The way everyone in 12 Years needs to hold power over everyone below them, regardless of race or gender, is a consistent narrative thread that deeply affects the spiritual nerve of Northrup’s psyche, as well as revealing the contagious nature of human monstrosity. —Tina Hassannia
11. Toy Story 3 (Dir: Lee Unkrich, 2010)
The people currently throwing online temper-tantrums about the idea of a new actress-driven Ghostbusters violating their childhoods should probably consider re-watching Toy Story 3, which has plenty to say about the powerful joy of passing beloved playthings into the hands of a new generation. The third installment in the Toy Story series came at a perfect time for viewers who became fans of 1995’s original Toy Story in early childhood: They got to grow up alongside the series, and tearily confront their own rites of passage into adulthood, just as the film does. Viewed with any sort of objectivity, Toy Story 3 is a mighty weird film that packs adventure and goofy comedy into a strange, bittersweet story. The stars of the first two films (a bunch of now-iconic toys voiced by an ever-expanding celebrity cast, top-lined by Tom Hanks and Tim Allen) undergo a sort of metaphorical religious schism over whether to give up on their original beloved owner, who at age 18, has consigned most of them to a box in the attic. Their determination to be loved again takes them to a day care, a junkyard, and other places that make for a startling ride. But ultimately, like all the Toy Story movies, this is a film about friendship, loyalty, and what it means to be a kid. It wins points for being strange and daring, but more for being emotionally powerful, especially about letting go, growing up, and moving on. (Which makes the idea of Toy Story 4, scheduled for 2017, a wee bit iffy. But that’s a matter to take up in 2020, when we survey the best of the completed decade.) —Tasha Robinson
Holy Motors (Dir: Leos Carax, 2012)
“In this competition,” Cannes jury president Nanni Moretti said after awarding Amour the Palme D’or in 2012, “the filmmakers seemed more in love with their style than with their characters.” This, it was widely felt, was Moretti’s thinly veiled explanation for leaving Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, strongly favored during the festival to claim the top prize, without any award at all. It’s only been three years, but history has already proven Moretti wrong. Holy Motors is a dazzling film, and perhaps its radical sprawl was too much to take in amid the mad rush of Cannes. But from the present vantage, it seems clear that the film is no mere exercise in style. Carax confronts film’s demise with an intensity that in its own way fights valiantly against it, acknowledging the medium’s obsolescence while inarguably proving its worth. In part, that means adopting the language of new media: the fractured, drip-feed format of the YouTube video, flipped through like channel surfing, always poised to deliver another fix. At first blush, Holy Motors seems like a film with an identity crisis—a family drama one moment, a murder-mystery the next. On their own, the vignettes are sublime, each in turn an exhilarating bout of pure cinema. (A mid-film plunge into accordion-led rock opera, in particular, is among the most purely delightful sequences in recent film history.) But the cumulative effect is what counts. Death hangs over these proceedings, however occasionally ecstatic the register. It’s apparent from an early shot of an audience of corpses in the cinema that Holy Motors is concerned with the death of film. What emerges by the end is a deeper fixation: the death of us all. Mortality has never before been reckoned with so vigorously. —Calum Marsh
Frances Ha (Dir: Noah Baumbach, 2013)
After spending the better part of a career making movies about faltering misanthropes, Noah Baumbach delivered the most upbeat film of his career with Frances Ha, thanks in large part to Greta Gerwig, who co-wrote and stars as a happy-go-lucky New Yorker struggling to master basic life skills. Over the past half-decade—heck, over the past two decades—American independent cinema has been overstocked with poignant comedies about quirky arrested adolescents, but Gerwig turns her Frances into more than just a collection of tics and flaws. She’s like everyone’s college best friend: a funny, chatty person whom everyone pities a little, though not enough to keep helping her out. Baumbach adjusts his style to fit his star, making a movie that feels like he just followed Gerwig’s Frances around the city (and elsewhere) for a year, so he could keep cutting to quick lines like, “I tried to make a frittata, but it’s really more of a scramble”— amusing fragments of dialogue that define the character. —Noel Murray
The Grand Budapest Hotel (Dir: Wes Anderson, 2014)
Every Wes Anderson movie is about trying to preserve something that can’t be saved—school days, the blissful-in-hindsight time when a family shares one roof, first love. In The Grand Budapest Hotel, it’s civilization itself whose days are numbered. The Nazis (though they aren’t called Nazis) are bulldozing across Europe, rounding up immigrants like Zero Moustafa (played, with equal acumen, by Tony Revolori as a teen and F. Murray Abraham as an old man)—a refugee who works 6.5 days per week as a lobby boy in Zubrowka’s opulent, funicular-accessible Alpine getaway, under the demanding tutelage of chief concierge Monsieur Gustave (Ralph Fiennes, in the warmest and by far funniest performance of his career.)
Gustave is the closest Anderson has come to giving himself an alter ego onscreen. He’s a swishy, poetry-reciting, dowager-seducing dandy, vain yet generous; impatient yet loyal, tough and resourceful. He’s as meticulous about controlling guests’ experience at the Grand Budapest as Anderson is about controlling every atom in every frame. Plus, it’s rewarding to see so many veteran members of the Wes Anderson Players used so well, if only for a line or two.
The movie opens in the present day, then jumps to 1985 and 1968 before settling down in 1932. (Anderson shot each section in the dominant aspect ratio of its period.) In every era, different people read or write or hear or tell the story of Zero and Gustave’s friendship. Unlike the lifelong bond depicted in The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp—one of the classics Grand Budapest quotes, along with Vertigo and many others—the relationship is brief. This nesting-doll structure gently asserts that storytelling is the only time-travel or immortality we’ll ever know. —Chris Klimek
Under The Skin (Dir: Jonathan Glazer, 2013)
A cosmic journey toward death and understanding that plays out within the borders of modern Scotland, Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin is the closest any film has come to offering an outsider’s perspective on humanity. Scarlett Johansson plays an alien who preys on men for some unclear purpose, luring them to their deaths. Though capable of simulating human emotions, particularly flirtatiousness, she brings cold calculation to the process. She’s less a hunter going after prey than a farmer harvesting a crop. Glazer shoots the film at an eerie remove that’s enhanced by Mica Levi’s unsettling score. But the film becomes more and more about empathy as it goes along, and Johansson’s character starts to understand, feel for, and even envy her victims.
It isn’t a cuddly process, and one of the questions left to linger by Under The Skin’s final act is whether she’s gained her soul, or just dug herself into an evolutionary dead end by taking on a trait that does ultimately does her harm. If her changes feel redemptive, is that because we can only see them through human eyes? —Keith Phipps
Inside Llewyn Davis (Dir: Joel and Ethan Coen, 2013)
Joel and Ethan Coen became unlikely hit-makers in the 2000s with O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Burn After Reading, then started the 2010s with their biggest hit to date, True Grit. But Inside Llewyn Davis found the brothers working again in the muted, allusive mode of A Serious Man, their best film from the previous decade. Set in the (literally and metaphorically) cold world of the early 1960s New York City folk scene, Inside Llewyn Davis follows a talented but abrasive troubadour (Oscar Isaac) as he outstays his welcome with scattered mentors, backers, and exes. Like a lot of the Coens’ work, the movie couches an episodic plot in layers of mythology and symbolism, but while the strongest flavor here is “sour,” Inside Llewyn Davis does have a movingly human center in Llewyn, an unapologetic screw-up still shaken by his partner’s death. It’s a moody movie, but also one that speaks to the frustrations of all creative people, who do the best work they can, only to be met with a shrug and the comment, “I don’t see a lot of money here.” —Noel Murray
A Separation (Dir: Asghar Farhadi, 2011)
In the last decade, stricter censorship laws in Iran have challenged the national cinema’s creative output, resulting in more than one auteur working outside the country. (Thankfully, the tides have begun to change again.) This made the international success of Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation in 2011 that much more culturally significant, for it seemed as if overnight, Farhadi had made up for his country’s creative dearth. The dramatist mastermind also showed the world a new kind of Iranian cinema. Farhadi proved the family melodrama need not be punished for its populism, and that narrative cinema could be visually articulate. Through his thematically dense tale about two families torn between truth, doubt, and self-preservation, Farhadi suggests that morality matters to everyone, regardless of faith, culture, gender, or age. Nader (Peyman Moaadi), recently separated from his wife Simin (Leila Hatami) and having been blamed for causing his employee Razieh (Sareh Bayat) to miscarry by shoving her, epitomizes the stubbornness of the Iranian upper middle class. The film doesn’t rest at subtly critiquing only one tier of society: Razieh and Hodjat’s financial desperation, for example, challenges their adherence to Muslim principles. The question in the film—is Nader responsible for Razieh’s miscarriage?—is less important than the convictions and actions of these characters, as they try to understand a quickly devolving situation and shoulder the weight of moral decisions. A Separation gets viewers to sympathize with every character, to recognize their flaws, which makes it difficult to judge them. —Tina Hassannia
Certified Copy (Dir: Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)
Maybe there’s a lot to unravel in Certified Copy, and maybe there’s nothing at all. The bulk of Abbas Kiarostami’s film concerns an afternoon journey through Tuscany taken by English writer James Miller (opera singer William Shimell) and a never-named French antiques dealer (Juliette Binoche). Fraught with nervous tension from the start, much of their conversation concerns the notion of authenticity in art, the subject of Miller’s latest book. Then, at a certain point, the conversation takes a turn that calls into question the nature of the couple’s relationship. From that point on, it becomes impossible to find solid footing in the narrative of the film, which Kiarostami shoots in long, immersive takes, using his signature driving scenes. Still, it’s easy to get lost in its emotions as the couple struggles to reach an understanding, and possibly save a relationship in desperate need of saving. Maybe who these people are matters less than what they feel—and what they make viewers feel. Maybe that’s as close to an understanding of how art works as we’ll ever get. —Keith Phipps
The Social Network (Dir: David Fincher, 2010)
Eleven years after Fight Club blitzed American movie theaters, David Fincher directed another film about two men who found a radical organization, but are torn asunder when the enterprise takes on a life of its own. Which film was more ideologically potent? Project Mayhem could never exist in real life. Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin’s friends-club currently claims more than 1.35 billion active members. The Social Network is a confluence of so many elements going exhilaratingly right in perfect tandem. There’s hundred-take Fincher directing in full perfectionist mode; a towering script that deflates Aaron Sorkin’s signature histrionics until all that’s left is a bulletproof core; a host of fully realized performances, from one-scene-wonder Rooney Mara to double-dutied Armie Hammer to a too-cool-for-school Justin Timberlake, with Jesse Eisenberg’s nuanced, bitter nerd brooding above it all; even Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor’s sinister, sinuous score fits perfectly. It’s a morality play for the digital age, a geek tragedy without the divine comeuppance. It’s a slobs-vs.-snobs college movie. It’s the rare biopic that sympathizes with its subject, but never absolves him. It’s a crackling courtroom drama. It’s a work of entertainment that swings for the fences in its grand statements on the modern era, and clears it with yards to spare. Like the solitary piano-plinks within the misty strings on Ross and Reznor’s “Hand Covers Bruise,” a poignant irony hums at the center of The Social Network: Even as technological leaps appear to bring us all closer together, we feel more alone than ever. Several Facebook layout updates later, Zuckerberg’s screeds about keeping the site ad-free seem adorably dated. But with every passing year, the film’s understanding of its time and place seem savvier. —Charles Bramesco
Her (Dir: Spike Jonze, 2013)
Like a lot of great science fiction, Spike Jonze’s Her uses the future to articulate the present more profoundly than wholly contemporary films could. No film of the last five years has better defined the relationship people have with technology and each other, and few have been as insightful about the mysteries of the heart, and how lovers connect and drift apart. In Her, the affair happens between Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), a high-waisted writer still reeling from a divorce, and a computer operating system named Samantha (Scarlett Johansson). That relationship gives Her a novel gimmick that Jonze makes utterly plausible. He’s aware that it’s a leap for audiences to buy into an affair between a man and an OS, and he finds small ways to make it easier, from Theodore’s funny, embarrassed self-awareness to Johansson’s voice, which has its own vivid associations. There’s a flirty intimacy to their conversations that reflects the bonds people can make over IM or email exchanges.
It would be enough for Jonze to show the modern appeals of a virtual relationship, of being able to love a compliant, responsive, fully customizable mate instead of a thornier, non-virtual one. But Her doesn’t stop there. The phenomenon it ultimately expresses, with heartbreaking insight, is the trajectory of a doomed relationship—how people (and the Operating Systems that represent them) are constantly changing, and sometimes evolve past each other. Jonze has made a break-up film that doubles as a capsule-worthy snapshot of how we live today, when technology has torn down some barriers and erected others that are difficult to scale. The quest for a real, human moment is movie-long, but Her doesn’t lack warmth or feeling. It simply finds it, like Theodore, in surprising, unconventional places. —Scott Tobias
Boyhood (Dir: Richard Linklater, 2014)
Shot over 12 years, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is less a sweeping story than a series of episodes offering annual check-ins on the progress of Mason (Ellar Coltrane) from age 6 to his first day of college at age 18. Apart from a mid-film section in which an alcoholic stepfather figures prominently, there’s little conventional drama. Mason and his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, the director’s daughter) bounce back and forth between his father (Ethan Hawke) and mother (Patricia Arquette, doing standout work). He develops interests, has his heart broken, and watches as the world changes around him, growing a little more observant with each passing year.
Boyhood won this poll by a healthy margin, which raises a question: Why? Were we all still so dazzled by the consensus choice for the best film of 2014? Or was there something else at work in Boyhood turning up on so many ballots? Its structure makes it unique, but it might also have made it merely an interesting experiment. Ultimately, its everydayness is what makes it so compelling. Mason’s story is particular to his character—and to the corner of the world and era in which he grows up—but the passing of time is universal, as are many of the rites of passage he encounters along the way. Linklater almost goes out of his way to gloss past many of those rites of passage—Mason’s first kiss, his first drink, the loss of his virginity—leaving viewers to piece together what’s happened from the way he behaves. But they’re still felt. The drama comes less from individual incidents than what it’s like to live in the wake of change. Much of how we experience life is in that idea: Time is less a series of milestones passed than the long stretches between those milestones. Boyhood compresses 12 years of life, but it also slows them down, pausing at telling points to capture what life means for this boy at this point in time, and finding a much bigger story in those small moments. —Keith Phipps
(Contributors: Charles Bramesco, Jen Chaney, Mike D’Angelo, David Ehrlich, Kate Erbland, Samuel Fragoso, Tim Grierson, Rachel Handler, Tina Hassannia, Genevieve Koski, Andrew Lapin, Kevin Lee, Calum Marsh, Noel Murray, Sheila O’Malley, Keith Phipps, Nathan Rabin, Vadim Rizov, Tasha Robinson, Scott Tobias)