There appears to be a lot of random grousing in the comments sections of movie posts all over the internet about how 2011 was a lackluster year for the movies. That's hardly notable, since, with all apologies to DCist's esteemed commentariat, comments sections are generally where the unhappy naysayers live, especially when it comes time for year-in-review posts.
But for some reason that complaint particularly irks me this year because it's not just a case of it being a pretty much normal year and that some people will never be happy. It's that this was an extraordinary year for film, and I just can't fathom anyone who cares about movies looking at this year's roster—admittedly, making sure to look past many of the wide releases—and not being ecstatic at what they see.
This was a year in which filmmakers weren't afraid to throw out our expectations and play with the form. Terence Malick inserted a 40-minute film about the evolution of the universe and life on earth into a family drama; Clio Barnard made a documentary that found actors lip-syncing interviews with real people; Asif Kapadia, Steven Soderbergh and Andrei Ujica all made documentaries entirely out of archival footage, without shooting a single frame themselves; many filmmakers felt no requirement to offer traditionally satisfying or loose-end-tying endings. Not every experiment succeeded, but watching someone walk a tightrope and fall is far more thrilling than seeing someone walk a well-traveled, safe sidewalk.
If I made this list tomorrow, or the next day, or the next, it'd be different each time. I'm a huge fan of all of them, as well as the rest of the ones (pictured above) that kept trying to jockey for position as I made this list.
One quick note about where you can watch these now; if I mention rental streaming below, you can find out exactly where it's available to watch via CanIStream.It, a great free informational site that compiles the home viewing statuses of a number of streaming services in one place.
10. Submarine: In addition to his debut feature film, British director Richard Ayoade (The IT Crowd) also directed the Pulp Fiction/My Dinner with Andre-homage episode of Community this season. What I love about both films is the same: Ayoade deftly takes cultural references and makes them work in entirely new ways to not just make jokes, but to reveal real character detail about the people in his story. So if one watches the coming of age story in Submarine and feels that they're seeing the marriage of Catcher in the Rye, Harold & Maude and the 400 Blows, all of those references (and more) are entirely intentional. But don't confuse quirk for a lack of heart, because this film has plenty, and the in-your-face cinematic devices Ayoade employs may initially seem like showing off how proficient a filmmaker he is (and that's quite proficient), but they're all in service of getting at the heart of who our slightly egomaniacal (but actually insecure) hero Oliver really is. This is a film that I liked a lot when I first saw it; the longer it's been with me, the more and more I love it.
This one's out on DVD and Blu-ray, and is also available for streaming rental via a number of services.
Read my full review here.
9. Hugo: Like Submarine, I enjoy Martin Scorsese's film about loving film more the more it sits in my head. When I initially reviewed it, I had problems with some of the more kiddie-elements of the first half, which I didn't feel meshed as well as I'd have liked with the film's second half. But it's nitpicking when the film's second half is such a glorious tribute to the medium. I had tears in my eyes as Scorsese puts the images of early silents that Hugo and Isabelle are reading about in a book onscreen; the director captures in just a few minutes the flood of wonder in that moment of discovery when one realizes all the limitless potential of film. It's just as surely a tribute to the act of creation as Malick's "origin of the universe" sequence in The Tree of Life.
Still out in plenty of area theaters, in both 3-D and standard form. I say go for the 3-D; I can count on one hand the number of films that actually merit paying the extra charge for the glasses, and this is one of them.
Read my full review here.
8. The Tree of Life: And, speaking of The Tree of Life, I loved that there was a film this year this hugely divisive, that movie fans could argue so passionately about its merits or lack thereof. I realize that it doesn't work perfectly 100 percent of the time: yes, the dinosaurs hit the nature vs. grace points just a little too squarely on the head, and the Sean Penn sequences might have been developed a little more fully. But there hasn't been a major American film this ambitious, this willing to tackle subject matter this knotty and difficult to put onscreen, in many years. It's a gorgeous, jaw-dropping, sometimes maddening work that I'm sure I'll be returning to many times, and I'm sure feeling differently about it each time I see it.
This film has been out for a while now on DVD and Blu-ray, and the high-definition version is pretty stunning to watch even at home. Available for rental streaming as well.
Read my full review here.
7. Beginners: This was a film I didn't really have high hopes for going in. Mike Mills' previous feature, Thumbsucker, was fairly forgettable, and all I could think after the trailers was that the scruffy subtitled dog seemed awfully precious, and not necessarily in a good way. I wasn't prepared for a film that affected me quite as deeply as it did, as Mills manages to marry some of those more quirky aspects, like the dog, or a meet-cute where only one half of the couple can talk due to a case of laryngitis, with the more poignant story at its core. That tale is drawn from Mills' own life, and is about a thirty-something artist whose septuagenarian father comes out of the closet not long before being diagnosed with terminal cancer. The details of how that event, as well as his parents' entire flawed marriage, affects his entire approach to life and relationships cuts straight through the twee. Christopher Plummer and Ewan McGregor both put some of the best work of their careers on display as father and son. Meanwhile, Mills' technique of use striking narrations from McGregor's character alongside rapid-fire collections of images is the sort of thing that ought to create distance, and instead made me feel more emotionally connected to the material.
Out now on DVD and available for rental streaming.
Read my capsule review here.
6. We Need to Talk About Kevin: Lynne Ramsay is far from prolific, this being only her third feature since her beautiful 1999 debut, Ratcatcher. Of course a large part of that time was taken up by a failed attempt to make The Lovely Bones, and one of the first things I thought after seeing her adaptation of Lionel Shriver's reputedly unfilmable novel, is that it's a shame Peter Jackson ended up making it instead of her. Ramsay takes difficult material—a story with a disjointed timeline, telling the entire life story of the titular boy, hinting around at and leading up to a horrific and disturbing event -- and renders it sensitively without ever softening its impact. A deeply unsettling film that stays with you for a long time afterwards.
The film hasn't hit D.C. yet, but is set to be released locally on Jan. 27.
5. A Separation: This film, hopefully a shoo-in for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nod, starts out seeming like it might be an Iranian Kramer vs. Kramer. What unfolds is more than just a drama about the breaking of a family, but a sharply written, thoroughly engrossing examination of the conflicting forces at work in Iranian culture today. If that sounds a little self-consciously high-minded, never fear: those examinations are embedded deep within a story so full of twists, turns, and who-did-whats that at times it almost feels more like a thriller.
Opens in D.C. on January 20.
4. Martha Marcy May Marlene: If this year's often vague and incomplete endings aren't your thing, you may have found Sean Durkin's debut feature particularly maddening. But the way to the film's big closing question mark, Durkin creates a quiet psychological thriller of identity and mind control, as we see Martha's time spent in an upstate New York cult in flashback as she tries to assimilate back into "normal" life, always with the fear that they might come to take her back at any moment.
Elizabeth Olsen is mesmerizing as a young woman unsure of everything, including who she is or should be, and John Hawkes is as frighteningly charismatic here as he was in last year's Winter's Bone, with a softer, more insidiously creepy turn than in that film.
This is currently in the limbo between theatrical run and home video; it'll be available for the latter on Feb. 27.
Read my full review here.
3. Bill Cunningham New York: Richard Press' profile of the The New York Times' longtime street fashion photographer is hardly the most innovative documentary of the year. But even using the standard tools of the genre—interviews, following the subject around in his daily life with a camera—Press is able to make one of the most inspired and inspiring movies of the year. And, with all due respect to Press for his contributions, a lot of the credit lies with the subject: Bill Cunningham is one of the most lovable characters in movies this year.
Potentially hokey motivational phrases like "follow your dream" and "do what you love" feel like nothing but the sagest wisdom ever devised when one witnesses Cunningham quietly, modestly doing exactly those things. For a movie that's about the city of New York as much as it is just about this one man—because he's spent so long chronicling the daily life of the city—it might come as a surprise that this film is so resolutely free of irony or hardness of any kind. It's a feel-good film that never cheats, and earns every inch of the wide smile you'll have chiseled on your face once you're done watching.
Out now on DVD, available on Netflix streaming, and on iTunes for rental streaming.
Read my full review here.
2. Meek's Cutoff: In last year's best-of list, I felt compelled to throw out an honorable mention to a film that I'd seen at a festival in 2010, and would have certainly made that list if it had seen a theatrical release. A year later, the power of Kelly Reichardt's quiet, unusual take on the western hasn't diminished one bit. From her commitment to accurately reflecting the monotony of life for settlers on the wagon train west, to the nearly imperceptible incremental increases in dread and desperation as this group realizes that Stephen Meek's shortcut has gotten them hopelessly lost in the dusty interior of Oregon, to the inventive ways in which Reichardt uses framing, sound, and even the film's aspect ratio to examine what it was like to be a woman on these grueling journeys, every piece of this film is meticulously crafted and note-perfect. Michelle Williams is going to get an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn, and she is, as always, fantastic in that film; but the award should really be for the subtle and emotional work she does here.
Out now on DVD, available on Netflix streaming, and on iTunes for rental streaming.
Read my full review here.
1. Drive: There were three D.C. press screenings of Nicolas Winding Refn's quietly violent neo-noir. I went to all three, under the guise of wanting to bring different friends who were all interested in seeing the movie as my plus-one. But the fact is, I'd have gone all three times even if I was going alone. Refn's film is, like all his work, relentlessly stylized, and just barely on the opposite side of reality from where we stand. This seemed to put off some people who found the languorous pauses in conversation between Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan's characters self-consciously unrealistic, or who were bothered by the unnatural length of that final, brilliantly constructed elevator ride down to the the very, very bottom.
But every shot and every angle here is constructed with the utmost care by Refn. Like most great noirs, this is the most generic of dime-store novel shorelines, but it's elevated by an uncommon attention to tone and mood that leaves Refn in absolute control of the emotions of anyone willing to submit to it. Every single time I saw Drive, my reaction was the same as it is when I step off a terrifying roller coaster: I want to do that again, as soon and as many times as possible.
http://dcist.com/2011/12/best_films_of_2011.php
This was a year in which filmmakers weren't afraid to throw out our expectations and play with the form. Terence Malick inserted a 40-minute film about the evolution of the universe and life on earth into a family drama; Clio Barnard made a documentary that found actors lip-syncing interviews with real people; Asif Kapadia, Steven Soderbergh and Andrei Ujica all made documentaries entirely out of archival footage, without shooting a single frame themselves; many filmmakers felt no requirement to offer traditionally satisfying or loose-end-tying endings. Not every experiment succeeded, but watching someone walk a tightrope and fall is far more thrilling than seeing someone walk a well-traveled, safe sidewalk.
If I made this list tomorrow, or the next day, or the next, it'd be different each time. I'm a huge fan of all of them, as well as the rest of the ones (pictured above) that kept trying to jockey for position as I made this list.
One quick note about where you can watch these now; if I mention rental streaming below, you can find out exactly where it's available to watch via CanIStream.It, a great free informational site that compiles the home viewing statuses of a number of streaming services in one place.
10. Submarine: In addition to his debut feature film, British director Richard Ayoade (The IT Crowd) also directed the Pulp Fiction/My Dinner with Andre-homage episode of Community this season. What I love about both films is the same: Ayoade deftly takes cultural references and makes them work in entirely new ways to not just make jokes, but to reveal real character detail about the people in his story. So if one watches the coming of age story in Submarine and feels that they're seeing the marriage of Catcher in the Rye, Harold & Maude and the 400 Blows, all of those references (and more) are entirely intentional. But don't confuse quirk for a lack of heart, because this film has plenty, and the in-your-face cinematic devices Ayoade employs may initially seem like showing off how proficient a filmmaker he is (and that's quite proficient), but they're all in service of getting at the heart of who our slightly egomaniacal (but actually insecure) hero Oliver really is. This is a film that I liked a lot when I first saw it; the longer it's been with me, the more and more I love it.
This one's out on DVD and Blu-ray, and is also available for streaming rental via a number of services.
Read my full review here.
9. Hugo: Like Submarine, I enjoy Martin Scorsese's film about loving film more the more it sits in my head. When I initially reviewed it, I had problems with some of the more kiddie-elements of the first half, which I didn't feel meshed as well as I'd have liked with the film's second half. But it's nitpicking when the film's second half is such a glorious tribute to the medium. I had tears in my eyes as Scorsese puts the images of early silents that Hugo and Isabelle are reading about in a book onscreen; the director captures in just a few minutes the flood of wonder in that moment of discovery when one realizes all the limitless potential of film. It's just as surely a tribute to the act of creation as Malick's "origin of the universe" sequence in The Tree of Life.
Still out in plenty of area theaters, in both 3-D and standard form. I say go for the 3-D; I can count on one hand the number of films that actually merit paying the extra charge for the glasses, and this is one of them.
Read my full review here.
8. The Tree of Life: And, speaking of The Tree of Life, I loved that there was a film this year this hugely divisive, that movie fans could argue so passionately about its merits or lack thereof. I realize that it doesn't work perfectly 100 percent of the time: yes, the dinosaurs hit the nature vs. grace points just a little too squarely on the head, and the Sean Penn sequences might have been developed a little more fully. But there hasn't been a major American film this ambitious, this willing to tackle subject matter this knotty and difficult to put onscreen, in many years. It's a gorgeous, jaw-dropping, sometimes maddening work that I'm sure I'll be returning to many times, and I'm sure feeling differently about it each time I see it.
This film has been out for a while now on DVD and Blu-ray, and the high-definition version is pretty stunning to watch even at home. Available for rental streaming as well.
Read my full review here.
7. Beginners: This was a film I didn't really have high hopes for going in. Mike Mills' previous feature, Thumbsucker, was fairly forgettable, and all I could think after the trailers was that the scruffy subtitled dog seemed awfully precious, and not necessarily in a good way. I wasn't prepared for a film that affected me quite as deeply as it did, as Mills manages to marry some of those more quirky aspects, like the dog, or a meet-cute where only one half of the couple can talk due to a case of laryngitis, with the more poignant story at its core. That tale is drawn from Mills' own life, and is about a thirty-something artist whose septuagenarian father comes out of the closet not long before being diagnosed with terminal cancer. The details of how that event, as well as his parents' entire flawed marriage, affects his entire approach to life and relationships cuts straight through the twee. Christopher Plummer and Ewan McGregor both put some of the best work of their careers on display as father and son. Meanwhile, Mills' technique of use striking narrations from McGregor's character alongside rapid-fire collections of images is the sort of thing that ought to create distance, and instead made me feel more emotionally connected to the material.
Out now on DVD and available for rental streaming.
Read my capsule review here.
6. We Need to Talk About Kevin: Lynne Ramsay is far from prolific, this being only her third feature since her beautiful 1999 debut, Ratcatcher. Of course a large part of that time was taken up by a failed attempt to make The Lovely Bones, and one of the first things I thought after seeing her adaptation of Lionel Shriver's reputedly unfilmable novel, is that it's a shame Peter Jackson ended up making it instead of her. Ramsay takes difficult material—a story with a disjointed timeline, telling the entire life story of the titular boy, hinting around at and leading up to a horrific and disturbing event -- and renders it sensitively without ever softening its impact. A deeply unsettling film that stays with you for a long time afterwards.
The film hasn't hit D.C. yet, but is set to be released locally on Jan. 27.
5. A Separation: This film, hopefully a shoo-in for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nod, starts out seeming like it might be an Iranian Kramer vs. Kramer. What unfolds is more than just a drama about the breaking of a family, but a sharply written, thoroughly engrossing examination of the conflicting forces at work in Iranian culture today. If that sounds a little self-consciously high-minded, never fear: those examinations are embedded deep within a story so full of twists, turns, and who-did-whats that at times it almost feels more like a thriller.
Opens in D.C. on January 20.
4. Martha Marcy May Marlene: If this year's often vague and incomplete endings aren't your thing, you may have found Sean Durkin's debut feature particularly maddening. But the way to the film's big closing question mark, Durkin creates a quiet psychological thriller of identity and mind control, as we see Martha's time spent in an upstate New York cult in flashback as she tries to assimilate back into "normal" life, always with the fear that they might come to take her back at any moment.
Elizabeth Olsen is mesmerizing as a young woman unsure of everything, including who she is or should be, and John Hawkes is as frighteningly charismatic here as he was in last year's Winter's Bone, with a softer, more insidiously creepy turn than in that film.
This is currently in the limbo between theatrical run and home video; it'll be available for the latter on Feb. 27.
Read my full review here.
3. Bill Cunningham New York: Richard Press' profile of the The New York Times' longtime street fashion photographer is hardly the most innovative documentary of the year. But even using the standard tools of the genre—interviews, following the subject around in his daily life with a camera—Press is able to make one of the most inspired and inspiring movies of the year. And, with all due respect to Press for his contributions, a lot of the credit lies with the subject: Bill Cunningham is one of the most lovable characters in movies this year.
Potentially hokey motivational phrases like "follow your dream" and "do what you love" feel like nothing but the sagest wisdom ever devised when one witnesses Cunningham quietly, modestly doing exactly those things. For a movie that's about the city of New York as much as it is just about this one man—because he's spent so long chronicling the daily life of the city—it might come as a surprise that this film is so resolutely free of irony or hardness of any kind. It's a feel-good film that never cheats, and earns every inch of the wide smile you'll have chiseled on your face once you're done watching.
Out now on DVD, available on Netflix streaming, and on iTunes for rental streaming.
Read my full review here.
2. Meek's Cutoff: In last year's best-of list, I felt compelled to throw out an honorable mention to a film that I'd seen at a festival in 2010, and would have certainly made that list if it had seen a theatrical release. A year later, the power of Kelly Reichardt's quiet, unusual take on the western hasn't diminished one bit. From her commitment to accurately reflecting the monotony of life for settlers on the wagon train west, to the nearly imperceptible incremental increases in dread and desperation as this group realizes that Stephen Meek's shortcut has gotten them hopelessly lost in the dusty interior of Oregon, to the inventive ways in which Reichardt uses framing, sound, and even the film's aspect ratio to examine what it was like to be a woman on these grueling journeys, every piece of this film is meticulously crafted and note-perfect. Michelle Williams is going to get an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn, and she is, as always, fantastic in that film; but the award should really be for the subtle and emotional work she does here.
Out now on DVD, available on Netflix streaming, and on iTunes for rental streaming.
Read my full review here.
1. Drive: There were three D.C. press screenings of Nicolas Winding Refn's quietly violent neo-noir. I went to all three, under the guise of wanting to bring different friends who were all interested in seeing the movie as my plus-one. But the fact is, I'd have gone all three times even if I was going alone. Refn's film is, like all his work, relentlessly stylized, and just barely on the opposite side of reality from where we stand. This seemed to put off some people who found the languorous pauses in conversation between Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan's characters self-consciously unrealistic, or who were bothered by the unnatural length of that final, brilliantly constructed elevator ride down to the the very, very bottom.
But every shot and every angle here is constructed with the utmost care by Refn. Like most great noirs, this is the most generic of dime-store novel shorelines, but it's elevated by an uncommon attention to tone and mood that leaves Refn in absolute control of the emotions of anyone willing to submit to it. Every single time I saw Drive, my reaction was the same as it is when I step off a terrifying roller coaster: I want to do that again, as soon and as many times as possible.
http://dcist.com/2011/12/best_films_of_2011.php
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