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5
Martha Marcy May Marlene
Debut director Sean Durkin has an instinctive sense of the power of mood, especially in movies about the breakdown of the mind. His film, about a young girl’s escape from a cult, excels at conjuring an atmosphere of icy, oppressive dread. We feel Martha’s paranoia, as everything about her new identity keeps triggering fragments of her old one. Aided by a terrific, enigmatic performance from Elizabeth Olsen, Durkin cleverly reinforces Martha’s growing sense of alienation, slowly revealing just how traumatized and hollowed-out her personality has become. Martha Marcy May Marlene slow burns like a dark and disturbing dream.
Andrew Blackie
4
Le Havre
The most uplifting film you’ll see all year about illegal immigration, death, and poverty Aki Kaurismaki’s fantastic new film is is ultimately a modern fairy tale underscored by a searing realism. A light tone and hopeful tenor runs through the entire film, but Kaurismaki never turns away from the sad realities that his characters must live through. It’s an important lesson to learn: that a movie can leave you smiling without having to be blind to the most basic sources of pain in our lives. Tomas Hachard
The Artist
Michel Hazanavicius
Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo, Uggie, John Goodman, James Cromwell, Missi Pyle
3
The Artist
Michel Hazanavicius’ silent film about a ruined silent movie star in the age of talkies is a gimmick, and it is sentimental, and it is undoubtedly one of the best movies of the year. Watch it in a theater for the moment of total silence where the audience breathes the film in together, in complete awareness of their mass experience, enthralled by the images on screen. The Artist is a tour de force of rapturous performances, imaginative visuals, and a simple but utterly engaging story. It is not necessarily an argument for bringing movies down to their simplest essence, but it is an argument for the great effect of working every detail of a movie to perfection. Tomas Hachard
Meek’s Cutoff
Kelly Reichardt
Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Bruce Greenwood, Shirley Henderson, Neal Huff, Zoe Kazan, Tommy Nelson, Will Patton
2
Meek’s Cutoff
The “frontier western” equivalent of the 2007 meditative science-fiction delight The Man From Earth, Kelly Reichardt’s deeply moving and profoundly philosophical Meek’s Cutoff is a rich and deeply-rewarding slow-burn of a motion picture. Richly textured in story, characters and symbolism, as well as gifted with a truly unique and beautiful backdrop, Meek’s Cutoff may be set in the 1800s, but is one of the most socially and politically relevant films to be released this year. Reichardt’s deft, masterful direction and a career-best performance by the always fantastic and terribly underrated Bruce Greenwood are the needle and thread that sew the disparate elements of the piece together to make Meek’s Cutoff one of the best films of the year. Kevin Brettauer
1
Into the Abyss
Sending Werner Herzog into the woods of East Texas with his jabbing camera and querulous Germanic bark would seem like a recipe for unmitigated laugh-at-the-rednecks disaster. But Herzog’s documentary about a horrific murder and the execution scheduled to follow it turns out to be a stunningly impactful, open-minded, and humanistic investigation into the morality of and the industry of death. Taking in all sides of the issue while still hitting home a strong editorial viewpoint, director curtails the fuzzy amblings that critically wounded other recent efforts like Cave of Forgotten Dreams to deliver what should be the last film needed to be made about the state-sponsored barbarism that is the death penalty. Chris Barsanti
