First, though, I wanted to highlight two movies that must be seen because I think they are actually two of the best movies of 2013, but they are clearly not my "favorites" for one simple fact: they are so gut-wrenching and powerful that I never want to see them again. They are:
12 Years A Slave
Steve McQueen (Hunger, Shame) makes movies that are hard to watch, but 12 Years A Slave takes this difficulty to another level. The brutality, both physical and emotional, isn't made any easier to watch by the even-handed direction and beautiful cinematography. And Chiwetel Ejiofor's alternately subtle and explosive acting makes you feel Solomon Northup's horrific ordeal so deeply that you may find yourself running to watch 2012 or Kinky Boots just to remind yourself that he can also be fun and campy when he wants to be.
The Act Of Killing
Go watch it on Netflix. Then never watch it again, because it's so horrifying. Decades ago in Indonesia, government-sanctioned death squads murdered over a million ethnic Chinese and progressives, all in the name of eradicating Communism. And today, the leaders of these death squads are revered as national heroes. Director Joshua Oppenheimer, along with several Indonesians who had to work anonymously for fear of reprisals in their home country, convinced these death squad leaders to reenact their murders for the camera. But because these monsters are also film buffs, they decide to stage the reenactments in various film genres— film noir, westerns, gangster films, and even musicals— as they laugh and fondly remember their acts of torture and sadism. The Act Of Killing looks at true evil in the eyes, and it's the most important and effective documentary of 2013. It's truly a relief when the movie ends, and you can finally look away from the evil on display.
In contrast, the following movies on my list of favorites are all pleasures to watch, and I look forward to watching them over and over again in years to come.
10. Captain Phillips
In everything from the gritty realism of United 93 to the over-the-top theatrics of The Bourne Supremacy and Ultimatum, Paul Greengrass is a master of directing action and suspense that makes you feel like "you are there." In Captain Phillips, he takes a story that is still fresh in everyone's mind, a story where everyone in the audience still remembers the ending, and still manages to create tension that builds for two hours. When we get to that final scene where Tom Hanks somehow conjures up one of the most disturbing emotional collapses I've seen on screen, we totally get where he's coming from, even if we don't understand how an actor could get even himself to such a state. I like to think that it's a performance that's too good for an Oscar nomination.
9. The Great Beauty
Both a glorious ode to the good life in Italy and a bittersweet lament to a promising creative talent squandered, Paolo Sorrentino's seeming modern-day update of Fellini's La Dolce Vita is first and foremost a joy to watch. A drunken bacchanal in the first 10 minutes is kinetic and exciting filmmaking and economical storytelling, showing a party that looks both horrifying and enticing, much like the whole of The Wolf Of Wall Street. Much of the remainder of the film is a gorgeous, languid idyll with an underlying sense of loss. By the way, Sorrentino's last movie, This Must Be The Place, starred Sean Penn as an aging goth rocker, clearly based on Robert Smith, who goes on a mission of revenge to find the Nazi officer who humiliated his father during the Holocaust. Shockingly, it's actually good. Don't believe me? Watch it on Netflix.
8. Stories We Tell
When is a documentary not a documentary? That's the question I found myself asking with the revelations at the end of Sarah Polley's fantastically entertaining Stories We Tell. Polley has proven to be an excellent actress (The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen, The Sweet Hereafter, Dawn Of The Dead) and an even better director (Away From Her, Take This Waltz), but in this gem of a film, she turns the camera on her own family's dark secrets. Deciding to investigate years of jokes and rumors that the man who raised her, Michael Polley, was not actually her biological father, Polley sat her family members down to get the true story. And when she finally got the truth, she had Michael Polley sit in front of a microphone and narrate it. The result is funny, sad, and surprising.
7. Inside Llewyn Davis
At first, the Coen brothers' newest practical joke of a movie seems to be about the 1960s folk music scene in Greenwich Village, but instead it turns out to be a portrait of a self-destructive, self-defeating, and insufferable artist who appears to have fallen out-of-love with his art but continues to do it because he can't do anything else. Oscar Isaac's deceptively complex performance is prickly, humorous, and profoundly sad. Good thing there are also lots of beautiful images, healthy laughs, and great music to keep the audience from succumbing to despair.
6. The World's End
It starts off like an uproariously funny buddy reunion comedy. Then it turns into a spectacular alien robot invasion action movie with a satirical Douglas Adams-like edge. And in the end, it reveals itself to be a razor-sharp allegory about alcoholism and rehab. Edgar Wright's latest genre mash-up is all of these things, and the surprise is that it's all great. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost have proven to be excellent comic actors in their previous films together, but in playing against types in The World's End, they finally show that they are simply great actors.
5. The Wolf Of Wall Street
Probably the most divisive movie of the year, and for me, also the funniest. While American Hustle is like a classic Martin Scorsese movie from 20 years ago, The Wolf Of Wall Street is like a movie Scorsese would make if he were 25-year-old hotshot director fresh out of film school. It's almost unthinkable that Scorsese has made this movie in his 70s. It's brash, offensive, energetic, relentless, disturbing, exhausting, sprawling, repetitive, and entertaining as all hell. Leonardo DiCaprio does physical comedy that we didn't think was possible. Jonah Hill is now the unlikeliest two-time Oscar nominated actor ever. Yes, these characters are despicable monsters. The fact that we recognize that is the whole point.
4. Gravity
The dialogue is by the numbers, but the story and the story-telling are magnificent, and the direction is mind-boggling and brilliant. Alfonso Cuarón is challenging David Fincher as my favorite working director today. I've already said that five years ago, I would've found it inconceivable that Matthew McConaughey would one of my favorite actors today... well, the same can be said for Sandra Bullock (just compare her powerful performance in Gravity to her delightful comic acting in The Heat). Sure, you could argue that the movie is nothing more than a thrill ride, but when a thrill ride makes you feel as emotionally exhausted and renewed as Gravity does in its final, glorious shot, you have to admit that even a thrill ride can be a monumental, great film.
3. Nebraska
Bob Nelson's long-gestating screenplay is the first feature that Alexander Payne has directed that he didn't write or co-write himself, but it somehow still feels like a classic Payne script. Many have said that the story is too dour and depressing to call Nebraska a comedy, but what else can you call it when you find yourself laughing so much and so hard? The glowing black-and-white cinematography somehow makes the stark, wintry Nebraska landscapes look beautiful. Career-changing performances by Bruce Dern, Will Forte, and June Squibb are just highlights in a movie loaded with great character actors, some of whom make a deep impression with less than a minute of screen time.
2. Her
On paper, Her sounds like a disaster waiting to happen; it has the makings of a wacky comedy about a weird guy who falls in love with the voice of his operating system. On screen, it's a thing of beauty, a prickly, universal love story that cuts deep. One big reason is Joaquin Phoenix, who hasn't been this lovable or relatable in a movie since he was Leaf Phoenix and playing an awkward teen in Parenthood. It would have been easy to play his character as weird and antisocial, but instead Theodore Twombly is sad and sympathetic, a man so devastated by his divorce that he's shut himself off from other people. When he finally finds joy in his operating system, Samantha, it's a palpable joy. And because of Scarlett Johansson's soulful vocal performance, Samantha feels more human than a vast majority of movie characters last year. Of course, none of this would matter a bit without Spike Jonze's remarkable screenplay, which starts off with a very strange sci-fi premise and turns it into a profoundly human love story.
1. Before Midnight
It's funny that my top two movies of the year are both love stories which on the surface seem too unusual for everyday people to relate to, but in the end speak universal truths about relationships. With Richard Linklater's love story that started in 1995's Before Sunrise and continued in 2004's Before Sunset, the culprit was how impossibly, grandly romantic and idealized the story of Jesse and Celine's meeting, separation, and reunion seemed to be. When we left off in 2004, Jesse and Celine had reunited and reconnected, and we were left with the tantalizing suggestion that they might finally get together for good. And when Before Midnight opens, we learn that they did in fact get together and are vacationing in Greece with two precocious daughters. The romantic dream has come true. Then Before Midnight proceeds to shatter all illusions of idealized romance by chipping away at their relationship, showing the cracks that appear in any long-term relationship, before blowing it all apart in its traumatizing, brutally ugly final half hour, where Jesse and Celine go for each other's throats (figuratively) in a no-holds-barred fight that ends with their relationship in shambles. As explained in this article in The Onion AV Club, it's the Scene Of The Year. Will their relationship survive this disaster? Guess we'll have to wait until 2022.
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