Check out the entire series here.
90. Doctor Sleep (director's cut)
The prevailing sentiment was that no good sequel to The Shining could be written, and for a while that sentiment held true. Stephen King took a crack at it with Doctor Sleep, a decades-later novel following an adult Dan Torrance. Even with low expectations, it was a colossal disappointment. So we have a film that is both a sequel to one of the greatest horror movies of all time, and an adaptation of a high profile failure of a novel. The kind of project doomed from the start... until they hired the right director.
Mike Flanagan has made a career of taking tawdry ideas and forging wonderful horror films about the perils of family trauma. Flanagan is able to decouple Doctor Sleep from our expectations just enough to do some significant worldbuilding of his own. What was on the page a chintzy story of vampire gypsies and fan wankery becomes a psychic thriller filled with dread and hope. Ewan McGregor and Kyliegh Curran have astonishing chemistry as the leads, buoyed by Rebecca Ferguson's razor sharp villain. Best of all is Flanagan + cinematographer Michael Fimognari's work on the visual representation of psychic battles. It's hard to represent such things onscreen without resorting to two individuals in an astral plane shooting brain lasers at each other, but Doctor Sleep always finds the most compelling (and sometimes queasiest) shorthand for representing our mental clutter.
89. Attack the Block
I've seen it lamented more and more that every movie about Blackness has to be about racism, slavery, and/or trauma. Why can't we have escapist movies starring Black folks shooting lasers or casting spells that aren't a turgid allegory for race relations? For every Bright we have to suffer, we could stand to remember an Attack the Block.
Attack the Block is an alien invasion movie, and wouldn't it stand to reason that if aliens invade our urban centers, inner city kids would be the first to have to deal with it, not white men in cushy government offices? The leader of our particular group of protagonists is Moses, an early breakthrough role for John Boyega that may still be his best work. Moses holds the weight of his community on his shoulders. Attack the Block may be a fun sci-fi adventure, but the writing is savvy enough to anchor everything with a stellar Boyega monologue that explains better than most 'race-conscious movies' what the ghetto actually is.
88. Enemy
I don't remember Enemy very well but there's two Jake Gyllenhaals and also a spider. I enjoy a good 'double thriller' (shoutout to The Double, Moon, and uhhhhh Fargo season 3?) and Gyllenhaal has quickly become one of my favorite actors to watch. This earlier Villeneuve might not be his best work, but it's got atmosphere and peculiar tension in spades.
87. All Is Lost
Robert Redford has low key had an all time great Hollywood career. I've only scratched the surface, between his iconic work in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and his excellent directing in Game Show, and even I have so much respect for the guy. This makes All Is Lost all the more brutal and enthralling to watch.
The film is uniquely singular in its scope. The protagonist, designated only as "Our Man," is the only accredited character. Our Man barely even speaks. The entire film is a story of survival told in the minutiae of Redford's physical performance. It's intimate and melancholy to be taken along on this journey with an old man whose grander story we barely even glimpse. Even more impressive is an actor carrying an entire film by himself, at this age, and on the famously inhospitable shooting conditions of the open ocean.
86. Ready Or Not
So often films come in twinned pairs. The Prestige and The Illusionist. White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen. By all appearances Ready Or Not was set up to be the forgotten half of the 'quirky old money family attempts to extricate young outsider ingenue from their home and family legacy in order to keep colonialist tradition alive' pairing. I'm talking about Rian Johnson's Knives Out of course. I may have been in the minority of folks who actually enjoyed Ready Or Not more.
Whereas Knives Out is a funny mystery, Ready Or Not is more of a horror comedy. We follow Grace (Samara Weaving), a young woman freshly married into a family made rich by a board game empire. She discovers that their success is predicated on a certain barbaric family ritual: a game. Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett know how to alternate between cynical gags, special effects, gore, and suspense sequences. Their greatest weapon is Weaving herself, the most exciting breakthrough of the film. Her ragged bride takes what could be an empty archetype and makes her into an extraordinarily charismatic and relatable force to be reckoned with. I haven't seen a performance this commanding in a middlebrow horror film in a while. If that wasn't enough, the climactic setpiece was delightfully audacious enough to drop my jaw in the movie theatre. The final few scenes of the film, with Weaving dragging herself to the finish line in a gloriously tarnished wedding dress, are enough to cement this as one of my favorite horror films, in sickness and in health.
85. Only God Forgives
Nicolas Winding Refn is an aesthete. He makes mood films. As with most art that lives and dies on its tone and style, many people despise it. For a lot of folks, Refn is a boring, pretentious filmmaker, and Only God Forgives is one of his worst movies. But if you can catch the wavelength of this film, a rich and rhythmic world opens out before you.
I don't remember the plot, and it's not terribly important. What's central to the project is primarily three things: the vibrant colors, Gosling's hypnotic pace, and the thumping music. As is generally the case, Clint Mansell's score is the highlight of the creative partnership, and the music here is the backbone of the entire trip.
84. We Are the Best!
We Are the Best! is a Swedish coming of age film written and directed by Lukas Moodysson (just now I learned that it's adapted from a graphic novel written by his wife!). The film follows two androgynous punk rock teenagers as they attempt to get a band of misfits together. Like any good 'getting the band together' movie, Best! is about trying to find a place for yourself in a cold and uncaring society. I am most impressed by the natural performances that Moodysson pulls out of his young cast. I'm so drawn to the rare movies that invest so heavily in exploring the deep and raw humanity located in children and young folks.
83. The Conjuring
This James Wan film is my platonic ideal of a straightforward horror movie done right. No pretenses at prestige casting or deep thematic resonance, just a bunch of kids in a haunted house.
That doesn't mean making The Conjuring was easy. Horror that gets you on the hook is one of the most difficult things to pull off, especially in terms of pacing and scene composition. This bread and butter of the horror genre is how The Conjuring succeeds. Wan has a real eye for darkness-- it creeps in at the edges, sometimes swallowing the entire frame, suffocating us. But it's the little games that work best of all, the rhythmic patterns that play on our expectations. No one who's seen this film is going to forget 'hide and clap,' one of the best uses of sound, visuals, and negative space in a horror sequence this decade.
82. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Westerns come and go, but anthology films are long dead. Of course the Coen bros. would take their opportunity working with Netflix to make a Western Anthology, five films bound into one package. In typical self-aware but earnest fashion, they stylize this package as a grand old tome of a book that flips from story to story. This tome, like the movie, like the first of the five short pieces, is titled The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
That particular short is also the best of the bunch, a brief musical parable about a singing sociopath cowboy that is almost showing off how inventively it uses cinematic language to ribbon us through the twists and turns. This highlights a necessary truth about anthology: there will always be some parts that are better than others. Luckily the Coens are as good as it gets, so every segment in this collection is at bare minimum Great. It also helps that it ends with its other strongest segment, a somber carriage ride approaching death, destruction, or some sort of metaphorical End... a far cry from the peppy wordplay offered up by Buster Scruggs at the top of the whole ordeal.
81. Lincoln
Late in his life, Spielberg has mostly departed from the iconic escapism of his youth in favor of overtly political historical fiction, for better or (more likely) for worse. Lincoln stands out as the highlight of this era, perhaps because a bit of Spielberg's old whimsy sneaks into the proceedings. Lincoln mythologizes Lincoln, but it does not idealize him. It shows the way he could enter a room and put everyone at ease by spinning some tale or elliptical allegory. It also shows bursts of his venomous and petty rage. Most importantly, it juxtaposes his personal quirks with his ability to work the political process, demonstrating that the personal is political, and demolishing our notion that history was inevitably going to turn out the way that it did.
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