Check out the entire series here.
Not every arc features steady growth that culminates in transcendence. Not every narrative is shaped like a peak. Great works of art strive to push forward forever into newness, though it is important to examine the ways our lives morph in cycles.
Repetition. Iteration. The myth of eternal return. Cycles can be plot contrivances that force us to recognize patterns, cycles can be thematic recurrences that weave a tapestry of grander truth, cycles can be an exploration of the neverending cascade of trauma. They can be the drag of a cigarette or the thrill of an encore. What's important to understand is that no two cycles are the same, for a repeated gesture takes on new meaning every time it manifests.
40. Raw
Raw's title matches the experience of watching the film. Julia Ducournau blesses us with a coming-of-age horror meat drama. Raw navigates bodily taboo with a fearlessness particular to French cinema. It's not for the faint of belly, but don't let that disclaimer make you think this is an exercise in shock horror. Ducournau wades deeply into the pool of disgust for good purpose, viscerally exploring matters of family, inheritance, and perversion at a level few would dare to tread. All of this is told visually with stunning cinematography that one might call poetic if it weren't so debased.
It might feel gross, but eat it. It's good for you.
39. mother!
One of my favorite film anecdotes of the last decade is the disastrous publicity of mother!'s release to the big screen. The marketing department, clearly unsure of what to do with the material, commercialized mother! as a spooky haunted house horror flick. When audiences flocked to theaters expecting ghostly jump scares, and instead received whatever this is, they were furious. The result was an ignominious "F" on Cinemascore, only the 13th film to receive the failing grade since the mid-90s. I'm sure the dissonance was only compounded by Jennifer Lawrence's recent YA pop cinema success.
What could have revolted audiences so much? Why, a parable, of course! Aronofsky is not remotely interested in the naturalism that has dominated mainstream cinema since the sound era. Lawrence (credited as The Mother) and Javier Bardem (credited as Him) play a husband and wife settling down in a stately manor. As The Mother begins to feel the tightening noose of peaceful domestic arrangements, their homespace gets invaded by friends and well-wishers. None of it makes terribly much sense at the level of plot, so you can forgive the disdain of a viewer seeking a simple A to B to C. The story opens up when you take it at the level of metaphor, symbolism, or myth. The result is a story of social panic that can be read as a polemic on gender, or a Biblical retelling, or perhaps an exploration of the artist who lets an audience into their most private spaces. It's up for interpretation, and that ambiguity is the result of a richness of substance, not a lack of it.
38. Upstream Color
Shane Carruth may be the great hermit genius of contemporary cinema. His accomplishments are herculean: he writes, directs, produces, stars, and composes music for his films. As such, we can forgive him for only releasing two of them since his 2004 debut film Primer. For those who don't remember that one, it achieved cult infamy as 'the most complex time travel film ever made.' Fans mocked up endless convoluted charts and graphs to track the characters through that film, but it ultimately worked because it didn't require the audience to follow every thread to understand the emotional journey.
Upstream Color is a showcase for the same structural genius, but it manifests differently than Primer. Carruth again presents a high concept sci-fi thriller, but one that sidelines its concept almost entirely to focus on some of the most gorgeous and emotional visual storytelling of the decade. A fitting way to tell the story of an ecosystem.
37. Her
For better (Under the Skin, The Prestige) or worse (Don Jon, Iron Man 2), Scarlett Johansson has made a career of positioning herself as a sex object for men. Her is in many ways the culmination of that impulse. She plays a sex object for Joaquin Phoenix's Theodore, yet her performance is done entirely in voiceover. Johansson's disembodied romantic is a definite career highlight.
This is only one of the many inspired choices that director Spike Jonze makes in this seldom seen sci-fi/romance subgenre. Jonze's scope is far-reaching. Her explores not only the commodification of love, but its purity. Not only the embodiment of lust, but its transience. Not only the subservience of technology, but its transcendence. What results is the queerest of heterosexual romances, or perhaps the most het of queer ones. The point may be that these categories cease to make much sense in the face of the intoxicating trauma of falling in and out of love.
36. Melancholia
Melancholia isn't afraid to blast you over the head with a planet-sized metaphor, but this speaks to the impossibility of nuance when discussing depression. It is everything and nothing all at once. As the void expands, the world depletes until the only communication left to us is rife with cliché. It's no wonder depression is so difficult to understand from the outside. That's why we need movies like this: big, bold, annoying, and soft. Kirsten Dunst gives a career best performance that makes the intangible specter of depression recognizable. I shiver when thinking of her character trying to eat her favorite meal only to spit it back out: "It tastes like ashes."
35. Looper
Looper is a marvel of economical worldbuilding driven by emotionally developed dramatic stakes. Most films like this either get lost in the intricate sci-fi details at the expense of the human core, or take as many shortcuts as they can to get the necessary exposition out of the way. Looper's plot does neither, and it feels as organic and alive as the timestream that it proposes.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis play the same character in a feat of technical wizardry that is elevated by Gordon-Levitt's loving mimicry of the aging action star. It's difficult to summarize the ways that director Rian Johnson works his magic on this movie-- every scene is framed with purpose, playfulness, and an eye for compelling imagery. It's easy to fall into the rhythms of the action, the acting, the ideas. At the end of it all, what makes Looper soar is plain and simple: good writing. The final gesture of the climax is one of those flourishes that brings all the threads together while you slap your head and say of course!
34. Holy Motors
Leo Carax's maniac masterpiece is one movie, yes, but it contains multitudes. The film hops skips and jumps between genres, tones, costumes, and characters as if allergic to letting us get settled. These shifts feel abrupt, but the connective tissue is fascinating. We watch lead actor Denis Lavant transition between these personas in a way that draws our attention to the medium of the performance. The entire experience feels designed to draw our attention to craftsmanship, as foreshadowed by the somber introductory scene that uses a passage through a movie theater to frame all of the antics we are about to encounter.
There's also a banger of an accordion interlude that I would share here if it weren't stricken from the internet.
33. The Hateful Eight
This isn't Tarantino's flashiest movie. It's not the most fun. It's not the tightest, the most quotable, the most action-packed. Yet I feel certain that it is his most mature work, and maybe even his best. Tarantino is a showman who squeezes genre conventions for all they're worth, and that has produced an electric career of stylized violence, hatred, and misogyny. These days folks are deeply divided as to whether we should praise or condemn such filmmaking (though most would agree that everything he touches is well-made). The Hateful Eight sees all these impish impulses directed with purpose at the rotten racist woman-hating legacy of the United States of America. This tense chamber piece contextualizes all of the director's most vile impulses by showing where they come from, how they are propagated, and why they are endemic to the USA functioning as it does even today. The Hateful Eight spits in the face of those who believe that racism is mostly a thing of the past, and rubs shit in the nose of those who believe identity politics are our salvation. We are all complicit, the film argues. Maybe that's why so many shrink away from such depictions.
32. Inside Llewyn Davis
Inside Llewyn Davis may be the most subdued film of the Coen bros.' illustrious career. That being said, their signature style is not so much reined in as focused. Oscar Isaac plays a melancholy folk singer waffling somewhere between washed up and undiscovered. The actor is a perfect fit for the role, as we can sense rather than see untold resentments behind his heavylidded eyes. He is tense, coiled, ragged, and just trying to make it through another day. He is burdened by his striving, as embodied by the cat that he is compelled to carry through the film. The systematic Coen zaniness does exist at the edges, as with a boisterous John Goodman character, or the hilarious recording session featuring an early cameo by Adam Driver. But grounding the film in Isaac's steady collapse is a sly way to reveal the pain behind the play.
31. Dunkirk
I don't much care for war movies, and I didn't expect to be blown away by Chris Nolan's foray into the genre. His work falters the more self-important it is. Yet blown I was! I came away from the viewing with the belief that this is Nolan's best work in ways that I couldn't anticipate.
Like all Nolan films, Dunkirk is built around a systematic melding of form to content. This time Nolan finds inspiration in the ticking of a pocketwatch, constructing three different battle vistas all cross-cutting between each other in three different time registers (days, hours, minutes). This gambit gives us a more holistic sense of battle from a macro perspective. What's more interesting is the micro. Nolan pulls off what should be impossible: imbuing every minute of Dunkirk's runtime with a rising tension that offers no relief. Conventional wisdom dictates that a narrative must flex and release like breath in order to give the audience time to reconstitute itself before the next suspense piece. Dunkirk pushes the limits of that wisdom with creative editing and a brilliantly unsettling score. The experience of watching Dunkirk mimics that of being trapped behind enemy lines in this way. There is no relief, no clarity, no rest. Dunkirk goes the extra step of refusing a good guys/bad guys polemic. The enemy is de-emphasized on the screen, faceless and invisible, represented only by gunfire ricochets and explosions. The onscreen ordeal reaches beyond the specifics of the historical event, transforming into an existential scream at a senseless universe.
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