December 5, 2011
The Best Films of 2011
“Hugo”—In Martin Scorsese’s wondrous 3-D masterpiece, you feel like you’re inside a giant box with the entire history of the cinema playing on the walls. The movie is intricate, touching, a reverent summing up of the past of movies, and a triumphant, heart-swelling surge into the future.
“The Tree of Life”—Yes, I know, Terrence Malick’s movie is unbearably high-minded and humorless. But still! There are sequences that rival the greatest things ever done in movies, especially the long family episodes with Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, and the little boys, in which the camera floats around the characters, and all of eternity is summoned in the minutest motions of love and rage. Brad Pitt gives an amazing performance; he’s a shoo-in for the Oscar.
“Margin Call”—Or, as Werner Herzog might put it, Der Sheisse fliegen in der Whirligig, i.e., the bottom falls out of the mortgage-backed derivatives market. J. C. Chandor’s first feature film is sparely but eloquently written and perfectly played by a large cast whose attitudes towards one another, in the roles of financial executives, mutate through a long day from wary collegiality to outright hatred or desperate loyalty. The movie has a keen, bitter sense of the sudden breakdown of preposterous illusions. Great performances by Kevin Spacey, Zachary Quinto, Paul Bettany, and even Demi Moore.
“Certified Copy”—In Abbas Kiarostami’s puzzling fable, a British art historian (William Shimmel) and a French gallery owner (Juliette Binoche) meet, seemingly for the first time, in Arezzo, and take off for a day of sight-seeing in the village of Lucignano. For their own amusement, they play at being married. Or are they really married? In the end, we realize that both stories are true; that both have been woven together in a double-sided fiction abut the varieties of intimacy. Beautifully shot in Lucignano, with a hand-held camera that smoothly recedes as the two, walking together, quarrel and flirt in the handsome stone village.
“A Separation”—This somber but spirited look at the concentrics spreading out from the break-up of an attractive and intelligent couple—its effect on elders, servants, children—holds you from first to last. An Iranian film written and directed by Asghar Farhadi.
“Contagion”—A businesslike, unexaggerated vision of catastrophe. Steven Soderbergh’s depiction of a new toxic virus spreading, well, virally, is frightening in its sober-minded attention to specifics. Some people wanted more filmmaking excitement, but the plainness and sureness of the movie are its greatest virtues.
“The Descendants”—Nothing could be more suggestive of the screwed-up nature of Hollywood’s current business arrangements than the seven-year wait for a new movie from Alexander Payne (“Sideways”). In this lovely film, the director takes his time, pausing for observation, reflection, puzzlement, but there are two clear, intersecting story-lines: The cluelessness of a father (George Clooney) who has to take care, for the first time in his life, of his two daughters; and the debate within a large family over what to do with a large hunk of virgin property on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. The movie asks: Who shall inherit Hawaii?
“J. Edgar”—Clint Eastwood does his best to inject some soul into the creaky biopic form in this epic portrait of the F.B.I. director as a mother-dominated man whose furious sexual self-suppression erupts into a broadly authoritarian drive. By casting Leonardo DiCaprio as the young Hoover, the movie traces how an attractive young man thickens with power and age. Armie Hammer is suavely appealing as Hoover’s lifetime inamorata Clyde Tolson.
“Source Code”—Duncan Jones’s crackerjack time-travel thriller injects Jake Gyllenhaal into a speeding train booby-trapped with bombs. The entire thing is wild fantasy, of course, but the separate eight-minute segments of Gyllenhaal looking for the bombs are shot in real time, and the suspense is terrific.
“Rise of the Planet of the Apes”—The best use of digital in a big commercial movie this year. The apes, injected with DNA intended to prevent Alzheimer’s, become super intelligent, and develop humanish traits like empathy. But then their inner apeness comes out, and they climb and jump all over San Francisco. Enormous fun. Directed by Rupert Wyatt.
Illustration by Jim Stoten.
Photograph by Merie Wallace/Fox Searchlight.
“A Separation”—This somber but spirited look at the concentrics spreading out from the break-up of an attractive and intelligent couple—its effect on elders, servants, children—holds you from first to last. An Iranian film written and directed by Asghar Farhadi.
“Contagion”—A businesslike, unexaggerated vision of catastrophe. Steven Soderbergh’s depiction of a new toxic virus spreading, well, virally, is frightening in its sober-minded attention to specifics. Some people wanted more filmmaking excitement, but the plainness and sureness of the movie are its greatest virtues.
“The Descendants”—Nothing could be more suggestive of the screwed-up nature of Hollywood’s current business arrangements than the seven-year wait for a new movie from Alexander Payne (“Sideways”). In this lovely film, the director takes his time, pausing for observation, reflection, puzzlement, but there are two clear, intersecting story-lines: The cluelessness of a father (George Clooney) who has to take care, for the first time in his life, of his two daughters; and the debate within a large family over what to do with a large hunk of virgin property on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. The movie asks: Who shall inherit Hawaii?
“J. Edgar”—Clint Eastwood does his best to inject some soul into the creaky biopic form in this epic portrait of the F.B.I. director as a mother-dominated man whose furious sexual self-suppression erupts into a broadly authoritarian drive. By casting Leonardo DiCaprio as the young Hoover, the movie traces how an attractive young man thickens with power and age. Armie Hammer is suavely appealing as Hoover’s lifetime inamorata Clyde Tolson.
“Source Code”—Duncan Jones’s crackerjack time-travel thriller injects Jake Gyllenhaal into a speeding train booby-trapped with bombs. The entire thing is wild fantasy, of course, but the separate eight-minute segments of Gyllenhaal looking for the bombs are shot in real time, and the suspense is terrific.
“Rise of the Planet of the Apes”—The best use of digital in a big commercial movie this year. The apes, injected with DNA intended to prevent Alzheimer’s, become super intelligent, and develop humanish traits like empathy. But then their inner apeness comes out, and they climb and jump all over San Francisco. Enormous fun. Directed by Rupert Wyatt.
Illustration by Jim Stoten.
Photograph by Merie Wallace/Fox Searchlight.
THE NEW YORKER
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2011/12/denby-the-best-films-of-2011.html#ixzz1fhKtU0KY
No comments:
Post a Comment