Check out the entire series here.
70. Train to Busan
The zombie genre that flourished in the 2000s was all but dead in the 2010s. But since when do the dead stay dead? Train to Busan is a Korean film that convincingly does what an American film could not: build a contemporary thriller around reliable public transportation infrastructure. The high speed trains that are such an artery of daily commerce in East Asian countries provide the staging ground for wicked suspense. Where World War Z failed, Train to Busan flourishes at demonstrating the terror of a true zombie horde. Busan nails the hopelessness of being outnumbered a thousand to one. The walking dead fill every corridor, every station, every nook and cranny. It's a masterclass of raising the stakes to unbearable levels, anchored always by a straightforward approach to character-based storytelling.
69. Green Room
Speaking of raising the stakes to unbearable levels... Green Room follows a travelling punk band who play a show at a bar that turns out to be rife with white supremacists. They get trapped. They try to get out. That's it. Nothing fancy going on in the plot; the mechanics of suspense get all the love here. Green Room's scenes are a perpetual negotiation of expectation and reality. A character makes a plan, we envision the plan, then we encounter the gnarly truth of how the plan fares against a cabal of shrewd Nazis. None shrewder than Patrick Stewart playing the lead antagonist, a boldly unflattering late career move from the legendarily kind-hearted man. Green Room shows that kindness can be a mask, that violence sometimes must be the answer, and that racecraft is about proximity to whiteness more than inherent qualities. Even white people are not safe from white supremacy.
68. girl walk // all day
This may be the most formally peculiar entry on this top 100 list. girl walk // all day is more of a movement experiment than a narrative film, although there are slight narrative elements interspersed throughout. The host website calls it 'a feature-length dance film of epic proportions.' A handful of extremely talented performance artists dance through urban public spaces, improvising in tandem with the environment as they go. We often think of dance as 'people doing things with their body on a stage,' but so much of it is a twining sensitivity to the particularities of the space around you. These artists create pieces they could never have written, in a way that slices a blade of joy through the turgid goings-on of everyday life. Guerilla art, pure of heart.
67. Brawl in Cell Block 99
In a way, Brawl in Cell Block 99 is also pure of heart. Pure malice.
Vince Vaughn plays Bradley Thomas, a man who is forced to fight his way up the chain of imprisonment into a maximum security facility. Sequence after sequence of pure brutality, complete with astonishing practical effects. It may be one of the most successfully violent movies I've seen, in no small part due to Vaughn's performance. I had never given the actor a second look before, but his physical work here is incredible. Not only does he sell the action, but even watching him loom over the prison guards, or pad back and forth down the corridors, is mesmerizing in a way I cannot describe. He menaces with his posture. It's a vile work of art, impressive in its depravity. And he beats up a car with his fists.
66. Gravity
Gravity is a film so technologically complex that the creative team had to invent new methods of scene construction and lighting over the course of years. Much ballyhoo was made about its admittedly underwhelming story, but in this case I think the story is not the same as the dialogue on the page. Director Cuarón makes up for the surface-level story by locking us into Sandra Bullock's subjectivity. Every disoriented glance, every panicked breath, every mumbled reaction is right in our face as we plummet through space with her. It's a visual story, told environmentally and sonically, with some schmaltzy sentiment applied to glue it all together. Cuarón is famous for his long shots, and they are on full display here. Even more important, Cuarón understands the key to long shots that his peer Iñárritu doesn't: knowing exactly when to cut.
65. The Wolf of Wall Street
This may be Scorsese's most unfairly maligned movie, to the point that I always use it as an example to explain a couple aspects of art criticism: the ending is the conceit, and depiction does not itself indicate endorsement. Leonardo DiCaprio's Jordan Belfort gleefully tears through this movie. He climbs the Wall Street ladder and gets embroiled in drug addiction, constant empty sex, frivolous spending, and all manner of illegal activity. He is a rich white man who gets rewarded, and rewarded, and rewarded. But those who call the film gaudy and indulgent for depicting these things miss one crucial twist of the knife: the movie is about the men like these who never get their just desserts. The movie is about the way that our infrastructure is built for the ruling class to fail ever upward. The movie is about our complicity in allowing this to happen and our weird insistence that the rich earned their wealth. The movie is about us. It is the ending, the final scene, that clues us into the film's orientation. A disgraced but still hustling Belfort explains to us how to make it in the business world. His TED Talk-esque audience, who has every reason to revile him and what he stands for, eats it up with rapt attention. Just as we had been doing for two and a half hours. The Wolf of Wall Street is no panegyric of capitalist excess, it is a frightshow.
64. Inside Out
Pixar has waded into a mire of sequels and prequels that makes Inside Out stand out all the more. Pete Docter's original film is a marvel of worldbuilding that all issues from a simple concept: there are five core emotions occupying our mind and regulating our mood. This deceptively simple anthropomorphic socialization of the bodyspace is an excellent way to help children understand the ways they are and aren't in control of their inner world. The plot may not be as tight as some of Pixar's other masterpieces, but so much inventiveness went into imagining all of these abstract spaces. Plus there's Oing Boing or whatever, that was so sad.
63. The Master
The Master is the story of a violent and impulsive man named Freddie (Joaquin Phoenix) who finds direction and purpose in a cult of personality led by buffoonish but wily Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). This sounds like the backdrop for all manner of tumult, especially given the acting clout of those two leads, but The Master is often styled more like meditation than mayhem. There is a soft impressionism to the cinematography, bookended by the lapping of waves, that indicates a more grand spiritual world than the tawdry one we see at the surface of these affairs. We are drawn in by the surprising sweetness found in the toxic relationship of these two men, the pedant and the animal.
62. Annihilation
Alex Garland followed his knockout directorial debut Ex Machina with yet another challenging sci-fi thriller. Annihilation sees a group of extremely well-equipped scientists, led by Natalie Portman, investigating a mysterious growing bubble that government operatives have been calling 'the shimmer.' Nothing that enters the shimmer returns, including her absent husband's military squad. What seems to be textbook sci-fi smoke and mirrors unfolds into a beautifully complex discussion of the nature of humanity, the death drive, and the abject horror of realizing how permeable we all are. If pondering the cancerous nature of the human race isn't your vibe, Garland makes sure to bring the goods when it comes to incredible plant and creature design, as well as some pretty cracking suspense setpieces. All of this culminates in one of the most daring avant-garde sequences I've encountered in a supposed blockbuster.
61. Hustlers
Director Lorene Scafaria here makes an excellent case for why the stories of oppressed groups are best told by those groups. It's hard to imagine a man filming Hustlers, a sexy thriller about former strippers grifting Wall Street dudes, with such grace and dignity. Scafaria goes beyond this to capture a great deal of what is sensory and sensual about the sex work profession without crassly objectifying her cast. This is all necessary to get to the real complexities of the work. Hustlers teaches us about experience and opportunity, turn-the-tables feminism, and the scarred wisdom of a woman who has seen too much.
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