Continued from here and here and here.

GREAT MOVIES / UNQUALIFIED RECOMMENDATIONS

13. How to Train Your Dragon (Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois)- I mentioned that Enter the Void was the second-most visually-arresting film of the year. This is the clear number one. Especially from a textural standpoint, How to Train Your Dragon is the most technically-advanced animated film of all time. Still, that technical quality, which will surely be eclipsed in a few years, would be nothing without the exquisite character work on display. The film manages to teach lessons while never being moralistic, and it isn’t afraid to pursue some dark plot points. Most of all, the thrilling flight sequences have to be seen to be believed.
12. Inception (Christopher Nolan)- In my quarterly wrap-up, I think I sounded too detached in my description of this film. While I am interested in it as cultural event, that doesn’t mean that I didn’t personally respond to it. I think it’s a daringly contemplative film masquerading as a thriller and, warts and all, it’s of such imaginative, ambitious scope that I can’t help but admire it. Because of the production design and resistance to CGI, this is that rare document that still manages an Old Hollywood sense of wonder. While the exposition-heavy dialogue is sometimes cringe-worthy, Inception has a lot of respect for its audience (especially) in (, you know,) the end.
11. Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky)- Aronofsky shows the touch of a craftsman in controlling the tension and slow-build symbolism of what is essentially a genre film. This is a film that hints at the nature of art as a destructive succubus, but it’s still accessible enough to work as a supernatural thriller. And no analysis of the movie would be complete without mentioning the fearless performance of Natalie Portman, who carries every single scene with a quietly devastating elan.
10. Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold)- Fish Tank is the story of a potty-mouthed British girl’s coming-of-age, but explaining the plot doesn’t do it justice. While there is a narrative, it’s not as important as the tiny poetic moments that actually power this stunning, understated gem. There are Malickian moments of clarity that seem both disconnected from and totally relevant to the showier displays of teenaged rebellion. Despite a gentle yet physical performance by Michael Fassbender, those sometimes sexy, sometimes pathetic, sometimes touching moments live on longer than anything else.
9. Easy A (Will Gluck)- Emma Stone is irrepressible and makes a secretly challenging performance look easy here. The impressive supporting cast helps, but she takes over nearly every frame in the film, a Scarlett Letter analog that strikes an interesting chord between teen comedy homage and teen comedy entry. It’s quite simply the most fun I had at the movies this year.
8. The Secret in Their Eyes (Juan Jose Campanella)- At first glance, this looks like a boilerplate murder mystery for the Williams-Sonoma set. But, as we jump from the effete present to a warm, dog-eared past, we realize that this is actually a profound look at the effects of time on love and friendship. Its characters are damaged but still bursting with humanity, and the film hums along with a weary but empathetic tone.
7. Catfish (Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost)- As I wrote at the outset, this year was all about the thin line between the staged and the authentic. With Catfish, we get healthy doses of each, but we still don’t have all the answers as to which is which. To me, it doesn’t matter. While many films have suggested the desperate need for connection within and because of accelerated culture, this one directly addresses it. It doesn’t always like the answers it gets, but it treats them with a gracious and understanding vitality. This isn’t quite the Hitchockian thriller it was marketed as. Instead, it’s something more heartfelt and, in lots of ways, true.
6. Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik)- The sense of place dominates Granik’s unflinching, dangerous, delicate portrait of the Ozarks, as well as the desperate poverty rural Missouri is sometimes home to. This is a gripping, lean film that spotlights performances that are equally terrifying and terrified. It’s not reinventing the wheel, but the tight structure and elaborate characterization take a wheel and make it shine.   
5. Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance)- Roger Ebert astutely wrote of this film: “It is easier for an actor to play the same character at 24 and 60 than at 24 and 30. Though some bodily change occurs, what really happens is a transformation of inner certainty.” Cianfrance’s project, which took him ten years to complete, is about that latter transformation. Every one of its emotionally-exhausting plot points happens internally, and Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling have to communicate sea changes of emotion with no voice-over or hand-holding. Every scene of this film is built on the achingly real moments that bring us together and tear us apart, and the film exists in a timeless, context-less sort of world in which only those emotions matter. As draining and painful as it can be, this is a film that needs to be seen.

INSTANT CLASSICS


4. The Social Network (David Fincher)- By this point, calling The Social Network the “movie of the moment” and “the defining film of a generation” is a cliche, but those designations might not be far off. This seems to be everything David Fincher’s career was leading up to: crackling but discerning, objective but not removed, propulsive but firmly-rooted. If you compare the pulpy spitballing of the source material with Aaron Sorkin’s perspicacious, weighty treatment, you start to see how towering an achievement this actually is. Jesse Eisenberg’s portrayal of Zuckerberg is mannered but never quirky, and he leaves a lasting impression of a guy alone among millions of friends.


3. Dogtooth (Giorgios Lanthimos)- This Greek psycho-drama is so unflinching and savage that recommending it to the wrong person could be a friendship-ender. With no explanation, it drops us into a confusing world that is the extreme result of what happens when parents shelter their children. But more than mere parable, it stands as a hyper-real treatise on situational morality. Lanthimos’ camera rarely moves, but his composition does a lot of thematic heavy-lifting, and the commitment the actors have to the material is stunning. It’s a testament to the film’s compelling nature that we’re willing to follow it to the sometimes brutal depths it plums.

 
2. Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy)- Even if I tried to summarize it in a capsule review, I couldn’t completely describe Banksy’s psuedo-documentary because it innovates and reinvents itself continually through its brisk running time. The story you accept in the introduction, involving found footage and a wise fool documenting the world of graffiti, morphs into a more trenchant examination of art and the necessary evil of influences. The film is soaked with ideas, but it’s so bitingly funny and naturalistic that you can’t even see the strings it’s pulling. It’s effortless, even at its most daring and cerebral moments.


1. Un Prophete (Jacques Audiard)- Thrown into jail as an unconnected peon, a nervous Arab is forced by a Corsican gang—under threat of his own life—to murder his cellmate. While this would be a compelling plot for any other film, it’s basically the first third of the engrossing, pensive Un Prophete. Narratively, racially, religiously, criminally, and emotionally, it goes to much more complex lengths than that first moral challenge in its two-and-a-half hours. Like Dogtooth, its sudden bursts of violence are jarring and effective, but it’s more fragile and soulful—while just as uncompromising—as that film.

Tahar Rahim, with very little dialogue, gives a wounded, subtle performance that neither grasps for nor resists our attachment to him. Audiard paces the film deliberately and fills it with novelistic detail that makes its protagonist’s criminal rise/personal fall convincing and tragic. The movie takes risks—some of which, like the supernatural element, that I didn’t care for—and, because of that, always feels alive and demanding of our attention.