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My friends at Culture Sonar let me dive deep into another music genre’s cinematic catalog—and despite the photo, there’s SO MUCH MORE to disco on film than Mr. Travolta. 

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I did the math so you don’t have to. According to science*, these are the best-reviewed TV series of 2017′s freshman class. 

*well, according to Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes

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A little something I whipped up on the very weird but surprisingly watchable non-Beatles films of Mr. Richard Starkey. Co-stars include Peter Sellers (above), Marlon Brando and Mae West (among many, many others) and the roles include not one but two Mexicans—a horny gardner and an evil bandito. Join me down this particularly obscure cinema/Beatlemania rabbit hole, won’t you?

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10 (or 11) Movies Released Last Year That I Really Liked, 2016 Edition

Before I get to my “official” Top 10, one title has been excluded for consideration due to conflict of interest, but would otherwise top my list.  

Darling

Mickey Keating’s 3rd feature (produced by the fabulous Jenn Wexler, a.k.a. my girlfriend) is, of course, my favorite film of the year. I’ve seen it three times in theaters—twice in 2015 on the festival circuit, and again last April on opening night—and still keep finding new, subtle things about it to love.

The story: a young woman is paid to housesit a glorious old building while its eccentric owner is away. Is the house haunted? Is she unhinged? Maybe both? Star Lauren Ashley Carter—rightly recognized as “the Audrey Hepburn of indie horror” by The Austin Chronicle, is in almost every frame of the film and is never short of mesmerizing, whether answering the telephone, putting on make-up or getting her hands dirty by...well, let’s not give away the fun. 

The black and white cinematography is gorgeous, the score crawls under your skin and the editing is legit terrifying. Watch with the lights out.

And now back to our official, less personally biased top 10, in order...

Moonlight

Without question, the most accomplished, most moving film of 2016. 

James Joyce once noted, “In the particular is the universal.” Moonlight is atop my list in no small part because it’s so breathtaking in its particular intimacies. 

Moonlight is like Boyhood on a budget: it drops us into three important periods in the life of a boy who becomes a teen who becomes a man—at first bullied and confused, increasingly neglected by his crack-addicted mother and influenced by a kind-hearted, drug-dealing surrogate father. We see him harden, over time, under the pressure of a world with no use for softness, and then, perhaps, reconnecting with a lost bit of himself, at long last.  

Writing that synopsis, it strikes me how easily such a story could have tipped into cliché and melodrama. Perhaps because writer/director Barry Jenkins and playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney are both from the Liberty City projects themselves. their knowledge—coupled with a great cast, an impeccable soundtrack, a deft use of color and Jenkins’ masterful control of tone—l gives Moonlight specificity, and that makes it universal.

Jackie

Tone is a theme for the first three films on my 2016 list—four if you count Darling, and you most definitely should. Pablo Larrain’s Jackie puts us inside the experience of First Lady Jackie Kennedy in the aftermath of JFK’s assassination, in a way I never thought I could experience:

Your husband was just murdered; his blood is on your dress. Your life is cracked, and even if you put the pieces back together, nothing will ever be the same. Oh, and he’s the president—was the president—so your country is broken, too. History has its eye on you, so while the crushing weight of grief bears down, try to look good for the cameras. It’s only his legacy at stake.

It seems ludicrous to say that Oscar-nominated Natalie Portman is underrated, but somehow she is—and I adored her in Black Swan. In Jackie, she’s working at another level. Open and wounded when no one but us can see, calculating and brittle and angry before an eager reporter. I am excited to see Portman does next.

Special mention to Mica Levi’s score, her second feature after 2013′s Under the Skin. Can’t wait to hear what she does next, too. 

The Witch

Someone had the terrible idea to market The Witch as “the year’s scariest movie.” It’s not, nor is it trying to be. It is, however, among the most unsettling films of this year or any other. (Again: tone.)  

The story: it’s 17th century New England. William, his wife Katherine, and their five children have been kicked out of the settlement being too religious (it seems, or perhaps just too self-righteous) and must find a way to survive on their own on the fringes of the deep, dark wood. 

Before you have time to wonder if the titular witch might be metaphoric, she shows up and does something unspeakable to William and Katherine’s newborn son. Things go downhill from there, exacerbated by both outside, malevolent forces and unacknowledged tensions within the family unit.

The Witch looks gorgeous, as well it should. First-time director Robert Eggers made his bones as a production and costume designer, and reportedly built an actual, mostly working 17th century farm for the film. Even the dialogue itself was built out of scraps of things people wrote and said back then. You can feel the authenticity, which makes the family’s isolation feel that much more acute and dangerous. 

O.J.: Made in America

Bob Dylan never asked “How many minutes does a film have to be, before we can call it TV?” but the answer, my friend, is probably not much more than the 467 minute runtime of Ezra Edelman’s O.J.: Made in America. (For comparison, that’s almost 3 hours longer than a full season of HBO’s Veep.)

It doesn’t help that it was produced by ESPN, or that it aired on that cable network less than a month after it’s Oscar-qualifying theatrical run. And yet...it was my favorite documentary in a year of many great docs (more on that later), so if wants to call itself a movie, I’ll roll with it.

2014 marked the 20th anniversary of the murders. The revived attention around the so-called “trial of the century” led to two great works of art, Edelman’s doc and FX’s American Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. Simpson. (One can only wonder how our present political moment will be filtered through the culture of 2018).

Rather than produce O.J. overload, the two projects complement one another—the dramatic series taking us inside the lives and hearts of key figures on both legal teams, while the doc simultaneously expands the scope and deepens the focus—showing us more about who O.J. was before, during and after, and what America was and still is, especially but not only in Los Angeles, but also in Ferguson, on Staten Island, everywhere. If it takes Edelman 8 hours to set up all details to knock us down with his larger point, well, that’s 8 hours well spent. 

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrB3rOcrJxg&list

The Lobster

Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth was one of my favorite movies of 2010. He’s back on the list with a film that’s just as strange but far more accessible. 

I love absurdism, deadpan humor, magical realism and dystopian fantasy, but I can’t recall a film that manages the trick of juggling all three at once as The Lobster does—with an honest-to-goodness love story right there in the middle.

I’ll skip the premise—if you don’t know it, watch the trailer. 

The cast is great, and Colin Farrell is a revelation, topping my previous Farrell favorite, the criminally under seen In Bruges. Lanthimos packs the film with small details that make the surreal world of The Lobster believable. The first shot packs an entire story of love, betrayal and murder (which is never revisited) into a single, long take. And its final, wrenching moments will stay with me forever. 

Film critic Britt Hayes got to the heart of the filmmaker’s uncanny alchemy when she noted “Lanthimos doesn’t heighten reality to an absurd degree; he heightens the absurdity of our existing reality.” Or put another way, he doesn’t add absurdity, he just turns the heat up on reality and our own absurdity bubbles to the surface.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTNZmOJxuAc

Hail, Caesar!

There’s this other movie that’s sort of a throwback to old Hollywood, with some singing and dancing in it. That movie’s fine, but don’t hold your breath, it didn’t make my list. For my money, the real love letter to Hollywood—and why the movie industry matters—came from the Coen Brothers. 

Now, it wouldn’t be a Coens movie if that tender heart weren’t covered under many layers of arch cynicism, stylized reference bordering on “acting” “in” “quotation” “marks” and the occasional silliness. But you don’t have to peel much of it away to see the real love they have for not just the magic of movies but also the joy in so many abandoned film genres that once ruled the box office—be they Gene Kelly musicals, Gene Autry oaters or C.B. DeMille bible epics, to name but a few recreated here. 

For me, Hail, Caesar! sits perfectly between the sour cynicism of the Hollywood in Woody Allen’s misanthropic Cafe Society and the false romanticism of the ambition-for-ambition’s sake “dreamers" of La La Land who prize the warmth of the spotlight over any real human affection. 

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NYpz_j3e38

13th

Ava DuVernay’s 13th is a civics lesson for a country in dire need of one. With a controlled but searing ferocity, the documentary lays out the case that the 13th amendment allowed the continuation of a system of oppression and control not all that from slavery: the criminal justice system. If you haven’t read your Constitution lately, here’s a refresher on the 13th, the amendment that ostensibly ended slavery:

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

This one, terrible clause not just perpetuated slavery under another name but incentivized an expansion of the definition of criminality, in order to profit from the subjugation of mostly brown and black bodies, which has led to an explosion in America’s incarcerated population. In effect, through laws designed to maintain segregation, blackness itself has been criminalized.

With Jim Crow, redlining, lynching (terrorism by another name) and the like, the 13th has led to a more unequal society—and, indirectly, to leaders who lie and stoke racial, as well as religions and ethnic, divisions in order to maintain the ever-growing class divide from which they profit. 

This poor summation doesn’t do justice to the full weight of the case DuVernay and her experts make, or how well they make it. 13th should be required viewing by everyone, but most of all by those who hold the power to make and enforce the law.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V66F3WU2CKk

The Love Witch

Let’s start with the obvious: Anna Biller’s The Love Witch is a gorgeous film. Turn the sound off, re-order the scenes at random and you still can’t take your eyes off what looks like a lost Technicolor American Giallo from 1972. Biller not only wrote, edited and directed the film but also handled production design, art direction, set decoration and costuming, almost single-handedly crafting one of the best looking films of 2016. 

Beneath that dazzling frosting is a rich, feminist layer cake. Elaine is a witch specializing in sex magic, who believes her path to happiness lies in finding the right man, seducing him and pleasing him in every way. On paper, she’s a patriarchy’s dream come true. But when these lustful men inevitably fall short—as they all must, as patriarchy itself is built on a lie—she gets rid of them, permanently. Poor, unfulfilled Elaine. 

The Love Witch is Biller’s own magic trick, casting its spell over us with its color, its throwback ‘70s sexploitation vibe and its razor-sharp message we don’t notice until the blade has slid, quietly, between our ribs and stabbed us in the heart. Metaphorically.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXjDEDYlu7c

I, Daniel Blake

Daniel Blake has spent a lifetime working with his hands, supporting a modest but pleasant life for himself and his late wife. After a heart attack, his doctors tell him he’s not fit to return to work—yet with a simple questionnaire (and absent any input from his doctors), the government’s welfare bureau deems him too fit to qualify for disability. 

He can apply for unemployment benefits, but only if he’s actively seeking work—work which, according to his doctors, he can’t accept. Caught in a catch-22, he must appeal to an unreachable “decision-maker” for relief—provided he can find a way, without income or assistance, to get by while he waits. Then Daniel meets a single mother in stuck in a similar situation and does his best to help her struggling family, even as his own situation grows worse.

Ken Loach’s drama won the Palm D’Or at Cannes but has received not much notice since then, at least outside the UK, perhaps because of the specific criticism of the British welfare bureaucracy at the heart of the story. But you don’t need much imagination to see how things can be as bad or worse for the many Daniel Blakes of this country.

Loach has been making socially conscious films about the struggles of the working and lower classes for longer than I’ve been alive. As with Jenkins and Moonlight, it’s clear Loach knows this world, these people and their struggles, and knows how to tell their particular stories in a simple yet powerful, moving and universal way.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4KbJLpu7yo

The Handmaiden

Apologies if you’re getting whiplash. I went from a highly stylized Love Witch to a pared-down I, Daniel Blake. Now I’m going to swing back the other way with Park Chan-Wook’s sensual, sensuous The Handmaiden. 

As has been the case in years prior, the 10th (really, 11th) and final spot on my list could have gone to a number of worthy films, and almost did—I began writing up another film here before realizing there’s no way I could round out 2016 without giving The Handmaiden its due.  (Sorry, Elle!)

The story of The Handmaiden is...too complex to go into here, frankly. There’s a con man and his female accomplice. There’s a rich heiress and her controlling uncle. Some of them are Japanese occupiers; others native Koreans. Oh, ands there’s a library of dirty, dirty books. 

Cons are conned, crosses are doubled, no one is quite who they pretend to be and everyone is up to something. In the end, something real is found and, through it, freedom is won.

The Handmaiden is a thriller as elegant as it is perverse. Every change in perspective brings new meaning to all that’s come before. Every twist revealed is a delight. Park Chan-Wook is at the top of his game.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4Z5jfjxdvQ

Honorable Mentions & More 

Wait, don’t get up. There’s more! 

First, let’s start with honorable mentions that you already know are great: 

Paul Verhoeven’s psychological thriller Elle, which features Isabelle Huppert in one of my favorite performances of the year, or maybe ever.

Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, which goes on my list of essential smart science fiction, along with Gattaca, Ex Machina, Primer and Under the Skin, to name a few.

Sing Street, one of the most joyful films of the year. A misfit ‘80s Irish teen starts a band so he can cast the girl he likes in their highly creative music videos. From John Carney, the filmmaker behind the equally charming Once.

Nicolas Winding Refn’s mad look at fashion, envy and unchecked ambition (kind of the anti-La La Land?), The Neon Demon.  

Next, films that might have been off your radar but are well worth seeking out:

Benjamin Dickinson’s Creative Control, a very-near-future sci-fi film about augmented reality, and the augmented lives we all want to pretend we’re living (at least on Instagram). A must-see for all my friends in media, marketing or technology. 

Elizabeth Wood’s directorial debut, White Girl, in which a New York City undergrad moves to Queens, dates her local corner drug dealer and learns first hand the limits of her privilege in both their lives.

Taika Waititi’s The Hunt for the Wilderpeople, a reluctant buddy comedy/coming-of-age film that’s way more fun than it has any right to be.

Todd Solondz’s Weiner-Dog, a dark, dark comedy stringing together four tales of unhappy people, all of whom at one point own the same sad canine. Or, for you hard-core cineastes: Au Hasard Dachshund.

American Honey, Andrea Arnold’s sprawling tale of wayward youth living for the moment across a vast swath of America, high and low.

The animated documentaries Tower, which looks back on America’s first campus mass shooting in a surprisingly moving way, and Nuts!, which is the rare doc with an unreliable narrator, which fits the unreliable (Trump-like) conman at the center of its story. 

Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto, which I was fortunate enough to experience as a multi-screen installation at the Park Avenue Armory but has been adapted (rather successfully, it seems) as a traditional film. Either way, Cate Blanchett takes on a dozen different guises in a sequence of stunning short films, the text of each comprised of bits of famous manifestos, from Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto to Jim Jarmusch’s Golden Rules of Filmmaking. 

And last, because the horror genre in near and dear to my heart, here’s #4-#10 on my year’s best horror list. (The top 3 being Darling, The Witch and The Love Witch.)

The Invitation

Green Room

Demon

Under the Shadow

Train to Busan

10 Cloverfield Lane

Southbound

Honorable mention: the “Happy Father’s Day” segment of Holidays

Past years: 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008

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10 Movies Released Last Year That I Really Liked, 2015 Edition (part 2)

Tumblr only allows 5 video embeds per post, so here are 6-10, plus a few honorable mentions. Picks 1-6 can be found here.

Inside Out

I think if Pixar’s animators could peek inside the head of Ex Machina’s Ava, they would just see a smaller, equally serious Ava, right? Fortunately there’s a lot more emotional turmoil inside the head of an 11-year-old girl, as demonstrated in the captivating personifications of Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust in the studio’s latest masterpiece, Inside Out.

Apart from working as a great story (Riley’s “coming-of-age” powered by Sadness and Joy’s “voyage and return”), the central metaphor offers a powerful framework for thinking about memories, emotions and, in particular, the value of sadness. Director Pete Doctor, who was also responsible for Up and Monsters, Inc., is carving out a remarkable legacy as Pixar’s most soulful auteur.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl

Marielle Heller’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl would make an interesting double bill with Inside Out. Both show us the world through the eyes of young San Francisco girls experiencing major life changes. I suppose in the case of Diary’s Minnie, the Joy character inside her head is trying out a new persona: Lust.

Set in San Francisco in the (far too) permissive 1970s, 15 year-old Minnie (played by the remarkable Bel Powley) is obsessed with losing her virginity. She sets her libidinal sights on the age-inappropriate Monroe (Alexander Skarsgard), her mother’s couch-surfing boyfriend.

While that may sound seedy and lascivious — Monroe’s actions are both illegal and immoral — the movie never fails to treat Minnie as subject, not object. It doesn’t judge its characters, though it doesn’t mind if you do. “This is what girlhood is like,” it seems to say. “Deal with it.” We’ve seen this story before from the male point of view — Lolita, Manhattan, American Beauty, and on and on. Diary is a warm, welcome corrective to the lot of them.

Sicario

I’m not sure why Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario didn’t get more audience attention. It’s $47 million in domestic box office ranks #60 for the year, right below the unwatchable Jupiter Ascending and ahead of an unnecessary Man from U.N.C.L.E. reboot. Personally, I blame the title -- it translates to “hitman” but is meaningless to non-Spanish-speaking audiences.

Sicario offers the kind of tense shootouts and high body counts you’d expect from a Michael Bey or Tom Cruise action movie, but with a soul-weary resignation supplanting the usual popcorn heroics. It’s a gut punch of a story: an idealistic FBI agent (played by Emily Blunt) learns the hard way that there are no good guys in the brutal U.S.-Mexican war on drugs.

Blunt is strong as the stoic central figure, matched by Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro, doing his best work since Traffic. Roger Deakins makes sun-blasted border towns look strangely beautiful with his Academy Award-nominated cinematography. It, along with Johann Johannsson’s electronic-heavy original score, cemented Sicario’s spot in my top 10.

Mustang

If you’re looking for a unifying theme to this year’s list, it’s central female characters. Eight titles in and arguably only one, Ex Machina, gives more narrative weight and screen time to a male protagonist. (Sorry Tom Hardy, but we both know Fury Road is Furiosa’s movie.) That trend continues with my ninth pick, first-time filmmaker Deniz Gamze Erguven’s Mustang.

Set on the Turkish coast at the start of summer, the film follows five orphaned, school-aged sisters who share the free and untamed spirit of the film’s title. Fearful of the girls’ burgeoning sexuality, their grandmother and uncle collude to cut them off from the outside world, forcing them to conform to religious and patriarchal ideas of roles suitable for women.

If that description sounds like a downer, the film is anything but. It’s clear from the start that the five girls are smarter and stronger than the forces that conspire against them, most of all the youngest sister, Lale (Gunes Sensoy).

Erguven’s camera loves her actresses and the sun-drenched Black Sea setting. The film is like an Instagram feed come to life. Thought not every sister finds her way to a picture-perfect outcome, Mustang tells their story with an abundance of grace, charm and courage.

Anomalisa

The last spot was a bit of a toss-up but I’m going to give it to Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s Anomalisa, the third animated film to make my list and the only R-rated movie ever nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar. Stunning in its attention to detail, the film’s stop-motion animation achieves a kind of cinematic realism (with occasional forays into surrealism) unlike any feature I’ve seen before.

In some ways, it’s the flip side of fellow nominee Inside Out: There, an adolescent girl. Here, a middle-aged male protagonist. There, interior voices as stand-ins for emotions. Here, a singular, ubiquitous exterior voice as a sign of the lead character’s emotional detatchment. Where Inside Out teaches us that sadness helps us connect with others through empathy, Anomalisa shows that indulging in a solipsistic sadness cuts off any hope of real connection. Maybe I’m overselling it, but I find it instructive to think of Anomalisa as a kind of “Outside In.”

Kaufman is a master of metaphor and here his central conceit, a world drained of surprise and joy through one common face and voice, is rich with possibilities. To me, it resonated equally as a metaphor for depression as for the power of infatuation.

A few honorable mentions before I close the books on 2015:

Friends and loved ones made some damn fine films that either were released in 2015 or played in festivals and will be coming soon: The Boy (the one with the guy from The Office not the one with the chick from The Walking Dead), We Are Still Here and Darling.

White God came close to making my top 10. It’s basically Conquest of the Planet of the Apes except with dogs. Worth seeing for the scenes of 200+ dogs (real dogs, not CGI) racing through the streets of Budapest.

Also nearly on the list: Room (which is not as depressing as you think, I swear), Creed (the second surprisingly great reboot of the year after Mad Max), existential “comedy” A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence and What We Do in the Shadows, which does to vampires what This Is Spinal Tap did to heavy metal.

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10 Movies Released Last Year That I Really Liked, 2015 Edition

This is my eighth successive Tumblr-posted top ten list. Like last year’s Boyhood, only one Best Picture nominee made my top 10.

Mad Max: Fury Road

Let’s cut to the chase, literally. George Miller’s Mad Max sequel was the most exhilarating experience I had in a theater last year. Did any of us see this cinematic war rig coming? How did a decades-defunct franchise rise from a wasteland of remakes and reboots with such unstoppable vitality? How did a 70-year-old director who spent the last ten years giving us talking pigs and dancing penguins conjure up this adrenaline- (and estrogen-) fueled masterpiece?

On its shiny and chrome surface, Fury Road succeeds as a summer popcorn film. Christopher Nolan and everyone else, take note: here’s how you shoot action. But under the hood, this remarkably feminist film is as smart and “artistic” as any “important” Oscar contender you care to mention. Everything you need to know about its broken world, you learn through its production design. All you need to know about its characters, you learn through action. Exposition and dialogue? Crutches for lesser filmmakers.

World of Tomorrow

Is it breaking the rules to give the number two spot to a short? If so, consider them broken for Don Hertzfeldt’s astounding World of Tomorrow.

The log line: a third-generation clone travels back centuries for a chat with her genetic ancestor, age four. With just simple stick figures, gorgeous abstract backgrounds and perfect voice acting, Hertzfeldt conjures up a future that’s both seriously funny and profoundly sad. Go stream it now on Netflix and make your future better by investing in the best 17 minutes of sci-fi cinema you’re likely to catch all year.

Tangerine

I’ll admit, despite great word of mouth, I was nervous during the first scene of Sean Baker’s Tangerine. Transgender working girls Sin-Dee and Alexandra’s table-setting chat in Donut Time felt forced, as you might expect from non-professional actors in their first film. The camera placement and the cutting was odd, worrying me that the film, famously shot on a tricked-out iPhone, was more notable for its novelty than its quality.

88 minutes later, I was in love with Tangerine, its two leads and its color-rich, gorgeous depiction of Christmas eve in the least glamorous corners of Hollywood.

The lead performances find their groove quickly. In their Hollywood strip mall milieu of tricks, pimps and the occasional “fish,” the identities “Sin-Dee” and “Alexandra” are themselves performances within performances. Actors Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor are subtle enough to show us the pain and love under the artifice. Tangerine is heartbreaking, vulgar, surprising, beautiful and one of the year’s best comedies to boot.

It Follows

I see a lot of horror movies. I enjoy a good scare but what really gets me is slow, creeping, inescapable dread, which is why David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows is my favorite horror movie of the year.

The titular “it” is an unstoppable entity that can look like anyone and come from any direction. I can’t think of another horror movie in which shots of crowded public spaces, daylight exteriors and 360-degree pans put me so on edge. With danger lurking in plain sight, I couldn’t stop scanning every inch of the frame.

Good horror traffics in great metaphor. At first glance, the metaphor in It Follows is the specter of sexually transmitted disease. The film’s curse is spread from character to character by sexual intimacy, each successive partner in the chain delaying but not deterring the entity’s inevitable deadly return.

But I believe Mitchell’s story, set at the end of summer in a world virtually without adults, taps into a much more profound fears — loss of innocence, the responsibilities of adulated, the inescapability of death. As baseball great Satchel Page often said, “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.” It Follows knows that something always is.

Ex Machina

Charlize Theron’s Furiosa is Mad Max’s bald, badass cyborg (thanks to a machine arm), committed to the liberating of women from entitled, powerful men. I suspect she’d approve of bald, badass, artificially intelligent robot Ava (Alicia Vikander) and the journey she takes in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina.

Vikander’s Ava vaults straight into the pantheon of sci-fi cinema’s great robots and A.I.’s (alongside Roy Batty, Ash and HAL 9000). Oscar Isaac is mesmerizing as Nathan, the eccentric, solitary billionaire who built her, while his Star Wars co-star Domhnall Gleeson holds his own as a young programmer invited into Nathan’s claustrophobic world to test his creation.

Is man destined to be superseded by machine? What does it mean to be human? Maybe Turing had it wrong - the real test might be how far man AND machine are willing to go to get what they want.

Tumblr only allows 5 video embeds per post, so keep reading here...

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10 Movies Released Last Year That I Really Liked, down to the wire 2014 Edition

After much contemplation and procrastination, here now is my seventh annual “wait, you’re still doing these?” list of 10 movies released last year I really liked, a.k.a. the last “best-ish of 2014” movie list you’ll ever read.

Last year, I omitted any Oscar Best Picture nominees from contention, figuring (rightly) that nobody needed to hear my thoughts on Gravity in mid-February. I’m keeping that tradition alive this year, with one inescapable exception, so let’s start there.

Boyhood is the best movie I saw last year. Nothing else comes close. It starts with an audacious conceit, telling a twelve-year-long story by shooting, a bit at a time with the same cast, over that exact span of time. High marks on degree of difficulty alone. It’s the artistic equivalent of putting your family into the Mayflower and hoping you make it to the New World.

That’s the how. The what is, in some ways, even more impressive. Though not without dramatic moments, the script avoids the cliche “coming of age” milestones and melodrama you might expect. Instead, it gives us moments of life lived, glimpses of gradual changes to its characters and their world.

Looking back on Boyhood weeks or months later, I don’t recall a plot or a three-act structure. I recall moments - remember that time camping? Remember that visit to grandma’s? Remember that time at school? That’s exactly how it feels when I remember my own childhood.

Director Richard Linklater’s first notable feature, Slacker (1991), documented a day in the life of dozens of characters living on the margins of Austin society. Where Slacker goes wide and shallow, Boyhood goes narrow and deep. Together, both showcase a filmmaker pushing the formal boundaries of mainstream narrative film.

My second favorite movie of the year is Under the Skin. This is a cold, slow, dark film with moments that are deeply disturbing and utterly heartbreaking. Scarlett Johansson does outstanding work portraying an alien sent to Earth to...well, I won’t spoil that, but it doesn’t bode well for humanity. Filmmaker Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast) casts a light on how strange our everyday lives are when seen through the POV of a character whose humanity is literally skin deep. No film from last year (or many other years) better embodies the concept of “alienation.” Months on, this one still haunts me. The electronic score from Mica Levi (Micachu) is my favorite of the year.

In his finest performance of the year, Bradley Cooper stars as a traumatized, morally questionable killer. Who is also a talking raccoon whose best friend is a walking tree. I speak of course of Rocket Raccoon, one of the titular Guardians of the Galaxy. James Gunn’s over the top space opera delivered the most fun I had in a movie theater in 2014. He makes it look easy (it’s not - see Film Crit Hulk’s excellent analysis for why). Guardians is the spiritual successor to Star Wars my inner ten-year old has been longing for. Good luck trying to do better, J.J. Abrams.

2014 also introduced me to the spiritual precursor to Lucas’ 1977 masterpiece (as well as Scott’s Alien and Cameron’s Terminator), in the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune. Hollywood is full of tales of mythic, almost-made movies but this one tops them all. Stop for a second to consider that we almost lived in a world in which Salvador Dali, Orson Welles and Mick Jagger co-starred in a sci-fi flick. At the center of it all is Alejandro Jodorowsky, the now 86 year-old director whose creative energy burns brighter than any six directors a third his age. Inspiring and mind-blowing.

While we’re talking genre films, the best horror movie of 2014 was The Babadook. The film, from first-time Australian director Jennifer Kent, tells the story of a single mother and her young son whose home is invaded by a sinister spirit harkened by the arrival of creepy pop-up book. Strong characters, good performances and well-constructed scares aside, what makes The Babadook is the emotional truth underlying all its terrors.

In Calvary, Brendan Gleeson plays a thoughtful priest in a small Irish town who is told, in confession, that he’ll be killed in one week - not because of anything he did, but precisely because he’s done nothing to deserve it. And that’s just the opening scene. Writer/director John Michael McDonagh’s dark comedy shows a spiritual man trying to navigate a world that may not have much use for spirituality. Added bonus: the photography of the Irish coast is gorgeous.

Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida offers a different look at a spiritual figure surrounded by characters who have lost their moral bearings, this time in the shadow of the Second World War. Ida is a novice on the verge of taking her convent vows, encouraged by the Mother Superior to seek out an aunt, her only living relative. The film is in many ways Calvary’s opposite - quiet vs. talky, black and white vs. color, muddy and cramped vs. bucolic and wind-swept. Yet I can’t help but think that their central figures would kind of hit it off.

Speaking of morally bankrupt, the characters in Cheap Thrills hit bottom, then grab a shovel and dig to new depths of depravity in search of a purely material salvation. Craig (Pat Healy) and his sometimes friend Vince (Ethan Embry) are invited home by a rich couple (Sara Paxton and the wonderfully cast David Koechner) and pitted against each other in increasingly degrading competitions for ever-greater sums of cash. First-time director E.L. Katz keeps the audience guessing at how far the games will go in this darkest of dark comedies, and cringing as things go exactly where you fear - and beyond.

Like Boyhood’s coming-of-age story, Blue Ruin is a film firmly situated in a genre but committed to subverting the usual genre trappings. A revenge thriller, the film quickly dispatches the quest for vengeance - in this case, the main character’s desire to kill the recently paroled killer of his parents. It spends most of its runtime dealing with the violent aftermath of that act, reminding us that one man’s closure may be another’s freshly opened wound.

There are many good contenders for the last spot on my 2014 list. Since you already know Everything is Awesome, I'm going to give it to Honeymoon, a really smart horror movie from Leigh Janiak, another a first-time female director. Rose Leslie (Game of Thrones) and Harry Treadaway (Penny Dreadful) star as newlyweds on their honeymoon in a cabin by a lake. He gets worried when she starts acting less and less like herself and wandering off into the woods.

Honorable mentions:

Keep an eye out for yet-unreleased indie Brooklyn comedy Fort Tilden.

Movies that would have made this list if you cut out all the scenes with humans talking: Godzilla, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

Frank, which is a little twee and uneven in the early going but sticks the landing straight through my heart by the end.

Two must-see performances in good but not-perfect movies: Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler and Gene Jones in The Sacrament.

[sevendeadlyseans]

At Tumblr, on Tumblr.

[sevendeadlyseans]

10 Movies Released Last Year That I Really Liked, way too late 2013 Edition

Hello Tumblr, my old friend. I've come to list movies again.

I started an amazing and demanding new job on December 2, which reaaaally ate into my awards season moviegoing. I've caught up with all but a few titles and I swore to myself I would get this posted before the Oscars, so here we go.

Speaking of the Academy Awards, this year I've decided to omit any Best Picture contenders from my list. I've seen eight of the nine (sorry Philomena) and liked all I saw, some a little (Nebraska) and some a lot (12 Years a Slave, Gravity). Odds are you don't need to read 100 words from me about any of them.

Instead, here is my list of 10 films that didn't make Oscar's list but should be on yours, presented in alphabetical order.

The first and certainly oddest on the list is Computer Chess, the (fictional) story of an early '80s gathering of oddball software programmers at the dawn of the computer age, and the strange encounters they have while ostensibly pushing the boundaries of machine intelligence. Director Andrew Bujalski captures the look and feel of the early '80s with uncanny perfection, aided by the fact that he shot the entire thing in black and white on '70s-era video cameras. (Undoubtedly, Computer Chess is the only 2013 theatrical release shot on analog video.)

The film observes its striving, seeking nerds and misfits with open eyes but without judgment. Look closely and you'll recognize the straight line from their eccentric pursuit of chessboard dominance to the far more powerful i-gadgets we carry in our pockets today. The meandering story goes to a few surprising places but is in no hurry to get there. By its final frames, Computer Chess reveals itself as a very sneaky prequel to Her.

More black and white. Broke but privileged white girl in her 20s flails around New York City in search of artistic fulfillment, honest friendship and, you know, meaning. Sounds exactly like HBO's Girls but is in fact Frances Ha. Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach's film takes its inspiration from Manhattan-era Woody Allen, capturing the spirit of the earlier era while updating the vision in a way that's true to Frances's time and gender. The one thing it does take from Girls is Adam Driver, who is excellent here, there and everywhere.

Adam Driver brings said excellence (and an excellent "OUTER...SPACE!") to the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early '60s in the Coen Brother's Inside Llewyn Davis. The Academy has a tenth Best Picture slot. They committed a grievous error by not bestowing it here. Oscar Isaacs is a revelation. The use of music is masterful. But I imagine the films melancholy charms run counter to the lavish spectacle and self-importance Oscar favors. The Coen brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis is a masterpiece of sadness, loss and unspoken anger, of trying to make art when you're good but not quite good enough, or maybe just good in the wrong way. There's also a cat.

And we return to black and white with Joss Whedon's William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, a masterclass in effortless charm. It's evident in every frame that the writer/director of The Avengers and his friends are having a ball playing dress-up with Shakespeare's original screwball comedy. If I could, I would leap from my seat through the screen to join the party.

Matthew McConaughey, too, has charm to burn, and he puts it to good use in Mud as a larger-than-life fugitive who enlists the help of two boys to avoid bounty hunters are reunite with his one true love. Jeff Nichol's previous film, Take Shelter, was one of my favorites of 2011. Mud is not quite at that level but it is an engaging coming-of-age story, anchored by McConaughey's performance and featuring some of the best acting I've seen from Reese Witherspoon in years.

Short Term 12 is one of the films I didn't catch up with until February. I'm glad I did, as it more than earns its spot on my list. Brie Larson stars as a young woman working in a group home for at-risk teens, coming to terms with issues of her own. The story could easily have slipped into "after-school special" territory, but writer/director Destin Daniel Cretton  keeps it grounded, with a setting and cast of characters who feel real through and through.

If Much Ado is the party you dream of, Spring Breakers is the one that haunts your nightmares. (And probably vice versa, but if you're on the other side of that equation let's agree to never hang out.) There's much more going on here than James Franco's over-the-top, over-praised "Alien." Harmony Korine bait-and-switches filmgoers with a candy-colored critique of youth culture, gangsta culture and twenty years of televised, bikinied youthful excess courtesy of MTV's Beach House and Girls Gone Wild. This is a deeply subversive film that will sit like a Netflix time bomb waiting to blow the minds of unsuspecting teens for decades to come.

From a metaphoric hell on earth to a literal one: This Is The End, starring (among others) Academy Award nominees James Franco and Jonah Hill as themselves. This quintessential smart-dumb comedy starts off mining humor from the tabloid reputations of famous stars, and ultimately carries its apocalyptic premise to the most extreme places imaginable. Remarkably, it does so with a lighter touch than you might expect from such a bro-heavy ensemble. Still, your enjoyment of This Is The End will be predicated on your tolerance for large doses of Seth Rogen. Mine are just high enough.

Upstream Color is, to quote its wikipedia page, "a film written, directed, produced, edited, composed, designed, cast by and starring Shane Carruth." I stand in awe of Mr. Carruth, who I imagine probably helped with the catering too. His outstanding feature debut, Primer (2004), is one of the smartest, knottiest time travel films ever made. Nine years on, his second film is even better. Another smart science fiction film without the usual sci-fi trappings (rockets, robots, explosions), Upstream Color can be loosely described as the tale of a couple whose brain chemistries are mysteriously altered unbeknownst to them, resulting in usual side effects including paranoia, telepathy with pigs and a surprising familiarity with Thoreau's Walden. But more than any of that, Upstream Color is a profound and moving love story. With pig telepathy.

No pigs in You're Next, but there are violent men wearing stark white tiger, wolf and sheep masks. A smart story and great characters sets this film apart from the run-of-the-mill "home invasion" movie (including the far inferior The Purge). You're Next delivers well-crafted scares but it isn't interested in dwelling on suffering and kills. Rather, it presents believable family relationship/sibling rivalry in the midst of a life-or-death struggle. It's also got real laughs, something you wouldn't know from the official trailer. Best of all, it showcases one of 2013's most empowered heroines outside of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.

Honorable mentions: horror movies Here Comes the Devil and The Conjuring, Eraser Head-worthy weirdness in the Disneyworld-esque Escape from Tomorrow, and supremely dark but funny depravity in the soon-to-be-released Cheap Thrills.

Links to 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008 editions.

[sevendeadlyseans]

10 Movies Released Last Year That I Really Liked, 2012 Edition

Beasts Of The Southern Wild

Holy Motors

Zero Dark Thirty

Moonrise Kingdom

The Master

Looper

The Cabin In The Woods

Skyfall

This Is Not A Film

Cloud Atlas

Why do we go to the movies? One oft-cited reason is "to escape." For me, 2012 offered little need for escape. The year graced me with a new job, a new apartment, a new (old) city, and with the cherished company of a special person with whom to share it all. 2013, you've got a lot to live up to.

Me, I went to the movies to see something new, to feel something real, and to think, period. But not to laugh, it seems, since the only comedies to make my list this year are dark (Cabin) and minor-key (Kingdom). But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's take it from the top.

Beasts Of The Southern Wild comes at audiences like a stampede of aurochs, heart pounding, anthem blaring. Some resisted, I succumbed, and loved it all the more for sweeping me up and carrying me away. Director/co-writer Benh Zeitlin invited us into a world I never knew existed and let me experience its full measure of majesty and terror as seen through the eyes of its six year-old protagonist. Beasts is not only my favorite film of the year, it's the rare film that gets both childhood and fantasy exactly right (along with Coraline, Pan's Labyrinth and Let the Right One In).

In key ways, Holy Motors reminds me of an automotive-themed entry on my 2011 list, Rubber. Both films openly question what movies are for, showcasing scenes of audiences passively observing and of performers sliding into and out of roles like drivers changing lanes. But where Rubber uses the tropes of genre and a permeable fourth wall largely to celebrate its own cleverness, Holy Motors plays with form and style because director Leos Carax's love of cinema is too overwhelming to be contained by things like plot or logic. What does it all add up to? Damned if I know, but each scene offers its own rewards, like the prizes inside a case full of Cracker Jack. One resolution for 2013: see more of the work of star Dennis Lavant.

Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker topped my 2009 picks so it's no surprise her even more impressive 2012 offering sits high on this list. Both films feature protagonists who are exceptionally good at one thing but not much else. Society, or at least our political system, has made these professionals what they are — but at what cost? The more you contemplate Zero Dark Thirty, the more questions it raises about its own agenda as well as the whole of American foreign policy since 9/11. Director Bigelow and her collaborator, writer Mark Boal, pull off a nifty trick: by keeping politics out of their text, they pack it like dynamite into their subtext. Zero Dark Thirty's final shot lights the fuse.

I just adored Moonrise Kingdom. Child actors Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward hold their own (and then some) in a film with no shortage of acting heavy hitters. Along with Beasts' Quvenzhané Wallis and Dwight Henry, it was a hell of a year for first-time talent. Director Wes Anderson somehow managed to blend the excitement of youthful adventure with the wistfulness of adult disappointment — and it doesn't hurt that his meticulously crafted visuals are so well matched by a score that makes inspired use of the music of Benjamin Britten.

Speaking of visuals, The Master offered some of the most beautiful images ever captured on 70mm. Initially the plot (or lack thereof) left me as flat as the optics and the acting left me elated. With time, I've come to appreciate the kind of interior character story director Paul Thomas Anderson is after. I look forward to seeing this one again and may in hindsight wish I'd placed it higher on my list.

Looper and The Cabin In The Woods are the kind of smart genre films (sci-fi and horror, respectively) that come along all too rarely. Both respect their audiences enough to stay one step ahead of them, and respect their genres enough to embrace the tropes while transcending them. More like this, please. It's hardly news, but Rian Johnson and Drew Goddard are writer/directors to watch.

Skyfall, too, respected and transcended its genre, all too aware of the weight that comes from dragging 50 years of Bond movies behind you. I admired the way that it functioned both as an end and a new beginning, delivering the familiar pleasures of the Bond movies in a defamiliarized way. Sure, it isn't terribly kind to its leading ladies, but that too is part of Bond lore. Special mention must be made of Javier Bardem's evil genius villain; the man is simply never not interesting.

This Is Not A Film is, in fact, a film, but don't tell the Iranian censors. Let's call it a documentary, though that word doesn't do justice to the impossible slight of hand filmmakers Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb pull off. Panahi, a leading voice in the Iranian New Wave and the director of films like The White Balloon and Offside, has been censored by the Iranian government with a 20-year ban on writing screenplays, directing films, talking to the media or leaving the country. Given that kind of artistic death sentence, what does a creative person do? Pick up an iPhone and turn life into art. Then smuggle that art out of the country on a flash drive hidden in a birthday cake. This Is Not A Film is the ultimate found-footage film and a triumph of art over oppression.

Finally Cloud Atlas, which edged out Argo and Paranorman for the final spot thanks to its virtuoso editing, on the page and on the screen. Amazingly, the trio of Tom Tykwer and Andy and Lana Wachowski found a way to adapt the notoriously unadaptable novel. I usually find myself allergic to easy sentimentality, but damned if it didn't get me - big noses, bad wigs and all. Now how can we get Halle Berry to star in a bunch more Luisa Rey Mysteries™?

See my top 10s for 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008.

[sevendeadlyseans]

Also check out the video interviews with Romero we shot that day here (part 1) and here (part 2). 

It’s George Romero’s birthday! Please enjoy this photo of my boyfriend hanging out him.  And yes Sean has a zombie on his t-shirt.

Also, a zombie-themed haiku, written by my bestie, @Rebekahruby:

door is breaking down guess this is my last goodbye please update my blog. - Rebekah B.

[sevendeadlyseans]

Andreanna and Mike reviewed the Dine LA meal we shared Sunday night. (Bubblegum & Blood and I were the other couple mentioned.)

Check out their full write up via the link below, but first here's my 10 Word Review*: elevated pub fare, a tasty bit of UK in LA

*I haven't done one of these since February '09. I may have to get back into the habit.

Usually, the words ‘gourmet’ and ‘British food’ don’t end up in sentences even remotely near each other, so the idea of a restaurant like Waterloo + City is potentially abhorrent to those who are unable to conceive of it. Andreanna and I joined another couple, also foodies, to give it a taste...

[sevendeadlyseans]

2011 Honorable Mention: Best Movie Trailer

The trailer that got the most attention in 2011 was for Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo with its powerful Trent Reznor/Karen O cover of classic Zeppelin. Smart, effective...and completely obvious. "I come from the land of the ice and snow," yeah, we get. 

For me, true artistry was found in the first trailer for Battle: Los Angeles. A serviceable if unremarkable sci-fi action movie, B:LA will be memorable for years to come mainly for this brilliant teaser featuring music from modern composer Johann Johannsson's IBM 1401, A User's Manual.

Filmmakers, take note: this is how it's done. Johannsson's haunting, coldly alien sound elevates routine Michael Bey-esque clips into something both terrible and beautiful.

[sevendeadlyseans]

2011 Honorable Mention: Best Reboots

Hollywood is bashed - and rightly so - for an over-reliance on sequels, remakes and rebooted franchises. This year's 7 highest grossing movies (worldwide, according to THR) were all sequels: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Pirates of the Caribbean: on Stranger Tides, Kung Fu Panda 2, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn (Part One), Fast Five, and The Hangover 2. Potter aside, that list makes me sad.

So let's give credit where credit is due. Last year, two very different bands of misfits got franchise reboots well worth seeing: The Muppets and X-Men: First Class.

Jason Segal is clearly a lifelong Muppets fan. For my money, his clever update did Jim Henson proud, reminding us what makes these characters indelible for those of us who grew up with them. 

Meanwhile, who would have dreamed Mad Men-plus-mutants would work so spectacularly? Sending the franchise back to it's swinging '60s Cold War origins was a stroke of genius. James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender pull off the neat trick of evoking and surpassing Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan's performances as Professor X and Magneto.

Added bonus: putting the ubiquitous (and enormously talented) Fassbender on screen with Kevin Bacon as the villainous Sebastian Shaw automatically changes the game to "Five Degrees of Kevin Bacon."

[sevendeadlyseans]

2011 Honorable Mention: Best Middle Thrid of a Movie

"The Diary of Anne Frankenstein" is writer/director Adam Green's contribution to the entertaining but uneven Chillerama. Set on the last night at bankrupt drive-in movie, the film offers three and a half movies-within-a-movie, of which "Diary" is by far the funniest. 

Green is clearly a graduate of the Mel Brooks School of Hitler Humor (with a minor in Young Frankensteining). Joel David Moore (Avatar) sends it over the top, playing der Fuhrer with a gibberish German that would do Sid Caeser proud.

[sevendeadlyseans]

2011 Honorable Mention: Best First Third of a Movie

We Need To Talk About Kevin is impressive from the get go, from its bold, expressionistic use of color to its temporal fluidity. (Has any film ever relied so much on an actor's hair style for narrative comprehensibility?) Tilda Swinton, in nearly every scene, is captivating as a strong-willed woman whose life is upended by her dark offspring.

Unfortunately, director Lynne Ramsay's spell over me was broken when it came time to talk to Kevin. Played at different ages by Jasper Newell and Ezra Miller, Kevin is such an obvious, cliched "bad seed" that the movie threatens to tip from serious drama to total kitsch.

The camera clearly loves Swinton, though I am hard pressed to think of a performance in which she elects to reflect it back. Crucially, I wish they had cast as her clueless husband someone who could match her intensity. Pairing John C. Reilly with Tilda Swinton is a bit like putting a beer jingle up against a Mahler symphony. I like to imagine John C. Reilly and George Clooney swapping roles in Kevin and The Descendants. In my mind (and perhaps in only in my mind), the switch betters both.