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20
Rabbit Hole
There are an awful lot of indie movies about grieving families starring an awful lot of talented actors fishing for awards-season attention. For the key to what makes Rabbit Hole stand apart, simply observe Nicole Kidman’s face. She’s received some attention in recent years for china-doll immobility, but playing Becca, a suburban mother who hast lost her four-year-old son, lines reappear and lovely cracks begin to form. When she regards her husband Howie (Aaron Eckhart), waves of complex feelings—affection, resentment, patience, anger—ebb and flow across Kidman’s face with beautiful subtlety. John Cameron Mitchell’s attentive but unfussy direction and playwright David Lindsay-Abaire’s script provide strong material, yet it’s Kidman and Eckhart, the good-looking movie stars, who make the whole thing feel so honest. 
Jesse Hassenger
Blue Valentine
Derek Cianfrance
Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams, Mike Vogel, John Doman, Ben Shenkman, Faith Wladyka
19
Blue Valentine
This funny valentine has been described and praised by many usually cool and detached critics for being “raw”—and certainly the emotions depicted in Blue Valentine are rough-hewn—but I would argue that Derek Cianfrance’s achingly melancholic film, in terms of construction, is the the opposite of “raw” in every way. Thoroughly refined imagery is lovingly strung together to thoughtfully examines the relationship struggles of Dean and Cindy, a simple premise, maybe, but it’s one that soars in unforgettably cinematic ways. Cianfrance, who studied with renowned experimental filmmakers Stan Brakhage and Phil Solomon, shows loving attention to every aspect of the film, from the searing, modern performances from stars Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, to the poetic use of both natural and artificial light and subtle digetic sounds, to of course, the taut dialogue. If ever there was a cinematic equivalent to the music of Patti Smith, it would be very much like Blue Valentine: a bit punk, a bit cocky, a bit obvious, a bit too scary, but always a moving, gripping artistic expression. Matt Mazur
Fish Tank
Andrea Arnold
Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender, Kierston Wareing, Rebecca Griffiths, Harry Treadaway
18
Fish Tank
In the tall, washed-out grey ranges of council-flat towers somewhere in a banged-up northern England town, a single mother shares a few rooms with the two borderline-feral girls she is theoretically raising. Mia is the older of the pair, stalking the concrete wasteland looking for a fight or something (family?) that she can’t put a name to. The younger, Tyler, is a gutter-mouthed urchin with the fierce, thoughtless courage of a woman three times her age. When a sense of succor comes, it’s in the absolute worst form—her mother’s half-wild boyfriend—and the sense of frustrated vengeance that takes over the film’s later sections has a pulsating fury but stirring humanity that echoes Dickens at his evocative best. Writer/director Andrea Arnold’s second feature is very simply the most deeply felt and deeply feeling film of the year. Chris Barsanti
Restrepo
Tim Hetherington, Sebastian Junger
Capt. Dan Kearney, Sgt. Misha Pemble-Belkin, Sgt. Miguel Cortez, Sgt. Sterling Jones, Master Sgt. Lamonta Caldwell, Sgt. Aron Hijar, Sgt. Brendan C. O’Byrne, Spc. Kyle M. Steiner, Staff Sergeant Kevin Rice, Staff Sergeant Joshua McDonough
17
Restrepo
At the start of Restrepo, the men of Second Platoon, Battle Company, land in the Korengal Valley of eastern Afghanistan. It’s May 2007, and they’re going to be here for 15 months. Coming off the chinook, they look around—at a vast expanse of nowhere. Remembering his first impression, Sergeant Aron Hijar says, “I thought, ‘Holy shit, we’re not ready for this.’” The company’s experiences make up the entirety of this outstanding documentary, recorded by embedded filmmakers Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington. Culled from some 150 hours of footage, the movie shows a range of interactions at the outpost called Restrepo, named after a company medic who is killed early during the deployment, some harrowing battlefield imagery as well as post-deployment interviews conducted in Italy. It is, as Junger says, “about soldiers and it reflects their reality and their internal dialogue.” But as discussions go forward concerning funding and policy for this very long war, the film is something else as well, of course, resulting from Junger and Hetherington’s choices, as well as the soldiers’ memories. Their very specific realities are consistently compelling and disconcerting. If their stories are not explicitly “political,” they are all profoundly subjective and persuasive: this war, like all wars, is a terrible thing. The very immediacy of Restrepo makes this case. No matter how America’s campaign in Afghanistan is won, lost, or reframed as “history” in years to come, it is, right now, a series of events, small and large, productive and destructive. Cynthia Fuchs
A Prophet
Jacques Audiard
Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Adel Bencherif, Reda Kateb, Hichem Yacoubi, Jean-Philippe Ricci, Gilles Cohen, Antoine Basler, Leila Bekhti, Pierre Leccia, Foued Nassah, Jean-Emmanuel Pagni, Frederic Graziani
16
A Prophet
Jacques Audiard’s mesmerizing French prison epic starts down a predictable path, but takes its young character on a journey of hard-fought survival told with an unforgettable verve and originality. The first time that we see young prisoner Malik El Djebena (the astounding Tahar Rahim) kill a man, it’s a shattering event. Planned beforehand with excruciating care, the hit goes wrong from the start and ends up a bloody fiasco, Malik’s victim spraying the cell with blood from his butchered neck. Malik can only watch, trembling with adrenalin and terror, as the man’s life shudders out of him before he can return to his own cell and try to live with himself. Many crime narratives demand for their protagonist a chained linkage of tasks completed, rivals defeated, glories attained. While Audiard’s film is a crime story to its very core, he doesn’t appear to feel the same need as many of his fellow filmmakers to valorize his young criminal hero. Yes, A Prophet delivers many expected crime story hallmarks, particularly the satisfaction that comes from seeing a criminal enterprise being pieced together and operated with little more than a few conversations and fear. Chris Barsanti
