From the Vault: Here is my review of Hanna, originally posted on my dear friend Austin’s Fabulous Apple blog. Now on DVD, and sure to rank very highly in my year-end list.

Have at it:

One word to describe the new film Hanna?

This movie is gonzo.

“Gonzo” is not a word I break out often to describe a movie, especially one made within the Hollywood studio system. Foreign movies are often kind of gonzo, because filmmakers are allowed to take more risks overseas. In the last year, Mother was gonzo, in its own restrained way, as Korean films are allowed to be; the Greek Dogtooth was more bluntly gonzo (and, like Hanna, raises a lot of questions about the dangers of home-schooling); French auteur Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void competes for the honor of most gonzo movie of all time. But here in America, only a few filmmakers really go for the gonzo gold anymore. David Lynch, certainly, and Terry Gilliam, and Richard Kelly, to a more derivative extent. Gregg Araki’s micro-budgeted Kaboom (which I reviewed here) was certainly gonzo, but could only afford to be that way because it was so, so independent. Black Swan topped my 2010 Top 10 list precisely because it was a lot more gonzo than I was expecting a ballerina movie starring Natalie Portman to be. And most movies starring Nicolas Cage tend to be at least a little gonzo, with very mixed results. But as a rule, no. Hollywood just isn’t comfortable with gonzo.

The trailer for Hanna intrigued me thanks to its rapid pace, a few striking images, and the pulsing Chemical Brothers score. Still, I figured it was just a coy piece of marketing. After all, Joe Wright previously directed Atonement, The Soloist, and Pride & Prejudice, none of which were the least bit gonzo. I walked into Hanna hoping for a slick studio thriller, maybe something as good as recent winners The Source Code or Limitless, or maybe even a little better.

What I got was gonzo.

Yes, Hanna is bananas. It’s not just because it’s about a fourteen year-old girl who is a trained as a lethal assassin by her father, because we saw an even more extreme (and kind of unpleasant) version of that in last year’s clever but soulless Kick Ass; there are plenty of stories out there that flip the damsel-in-distress trope on its head, perhaps none better than Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s also not merely because the Chemical Brothers are allowed to put their rave-inducing beats over the action here (working very much in their element, unlike Daft Punk’s moody Tron: Legacy score which was a major sonic departure from the likes of “Around the World” and such); this is one of few movies I think I might have preferred to watch standing up — in a pit full of sweaty people who are far from sober. But Run Lola Run already proved that you can have a German-speaking chick do little but sprint to a techno beat for 90 minutes and it’s still a pretty good watch. And it’s not even because Joe Wright and his cinematographer (Alwin H. Kuchler) and editor (Paul Tothill) really cut loose at times, delivering some very unconventional shots and action sequences that go along with the trippy score.

This I admire most of all, because alongside a great story, what I want from a movie is something breathtaking to look at (and listen to). There are some truly brilliant marriages of sound and picture in Hanna; this film has terrific style, including a number of striking, memorable images I can’t wait to see again. Certain scenes have the pure-cinema pop of Quentin Tarantino’s best (but there’s a lot less winking going on here); others reminded me of the arresting visual pizzazz Darren Aronofsky brought to Black Swan. There’s an impressive long-take sequence (Wright previously played with this convention in Atonement, but it’s much more appropriate here). Another sequence, in which poor Hanna is bombarded by modern conveniences and technology for the first time, is also jolting.

In a way, all this cinematic splendor distracts from the story — the tale is certainly a captivating one, but Hanna is more concerned with sensory pleasures than emotional ones. It’s not that Hanna is an emotionally hollow film, as so many from Hollywood are — Hanna, as a character, is fully-realized and utterly sympathetic. The supporting characters are as fleshed out as they need to be. And I enjoyed the fact that the film didn’t need to spell out the backstory, which is fairly standard evil-government-naughtiness a la The Bourne Identity (and so many other movies). A handful of scenes with Hanna adjusting to the modern world are amongst the film’s most effective because they’re also the most grounded in reality. There’s so much inventive, over-the-top excess going on with the cinematography and the soundtrack that we sometimes lose our bearings on how we’re supposed to feel about any of it — besides “Hey, that’s cool!”, that is. Witness Hanna’s awkward fling with a Spanish boy — here is a scene that reminds that Hanna is not only an unlikely killing machine, but also a confused adolescent girl who, until now, never laid an eye on a male besides her father (Eric Bana). Unfortunately, these scenes are too few and far between — Hanna goes for the grandiose much more often than the relatable everyday. More of a balance between these two would have been nice.

But the risks Hanna takes make the reward much greater than it would have been had Wright gone the other direction and made it safer. It’s very rare indeed for a film to be both grounded and gonzo, so I’ll take the gonzo where I can get it. (Such as in the scene where Cate Blanchett walks into a bar to ask a rather effeminate assassin for help catching Hanna, while a hermaphrodite dances to the Chemical Brothers’ circus-y “The Devil Is In The Beat” in the background.) Right — did I mention this film is also, at times, hilarious? Hanna encounters a bohemian British family in the films best attempt at anchoring this story in reality, in addition to providing a lot of comic relief. The moments where Hanna’s absurdly unconventional upbringing conflict with “normal” people’s interpretation are where this film’s odd tone works best: when asked by a sympathetic new friend how her mother died, Hanna matter-of-factly replies: “Three bullets.” And as Hanna’s motor-mouthed new gal pal Sophie, young Jessica Barden steals every scene she’s in (as she’s meant to).

And therein, in a way, lies the film’s only real problem: there’s so much interesting stuff going on, we want a little more of everything. In that way, Hanna almost demands a sequel. This story only scratches the surface of possibilities for this complex character — we expect this girl will grow up something like Lisbeth Salander from The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (hints of bisexuality already intact — must every tough girl swing both ways?). Not many characters are left alive at the end of this film to join her in another installment (or are they?), but I’d definitely be first in line for the next chapter.

Oh, and one more thing: Cate Blanchett is pure, delicious evil in this movie. Like child-and-granny-killing evil. It’s not exactly that she shows no remorse — it’s just that it never even threatens to stop her from performing her duties. There’s a shot near the end of the movie that establishes her as this story’s Big Bad Wolf (even if she does also carefully mull over which pair of pumps she plans to off a sweet old lady in). She even performs some fairly intense home dentistry on herself, so you know she’s a total psycho. The grandmother, the woodsman, and of course, the intrepid lost girl — all of them go up against the strangely chipper bitch with the Southern drawl who obsessively examines her own pearly whites in her spare time (“the better to eat you with, my dear”). It’s a performance that reminds me of Christophe Waltz in Inglourious Basterds, Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men, maybe even Heath Ledger’s Joker, too. Those performances have something in common besides being creepy, off-kilter psychopaths who deviate from the standard mustache-twirling formula of screen villains; they won Oscars. Depending on how strong the remainder of this year’s Supporting Actress contenders are, I wouldn’t be totally shocked if Cate Blanchett got some love come Oscar time.

Which brings me to the mesmerizing Saoirse Ronan, one of few young actresses so capable of carrying a film (unlike many, I don’t think Hailee Steinfeld quite pulled it off in True Grit). She goes toe-to-toe with Cate Blanchett and outdoes Eric Bana. She’s convincing enough as a teenager capable of kicking grown mens’ asses, and also a vulnerable young woman experiencing life in the real world for the first time. I think she’s actually capable of even more than she pulls off here — I wish the film had given her a couple more emotional scenes, especially early in the film when she is first interacting with the mysterious government officials who find her up in that cabin in the woods. I’ve previously admired her in Atonement and The Lovely Bones — she was the best part of both movies. She’ll almost certainly be ignored come Oscar time, but Hanna has definitely gotten the film world’s attention and I have a feeling we’ll be seeing a lot more of her in coming years.

Alas, Hanna isn’t a perfect movie, but alongside the riveting Source Code and the surprisingly stylish Limitless, it’s giving me more faith in studio thrillers than I’ve had in years. (Unfortunately, the rather lame Adjustment Bureau mars 2011’s winning streak for this genre.) This film is packed full of surprises — you never know quite where it’s going, and that’s saying something these days. Even while watching it, I had the feeling Hanna would be a film with staying power, one that will be dissected in years to come. Though it is easy to compare it to a number of other properties (as I’ve done above), it’s also one-of-a-kind and, at many times, startlingly original. Some have decried it as repellent for its depiction of a young girl as killing machine, but unlike Kick Ass, there is a moral center here. Hanna, unlike Hit Girl, is someone we can really root for.

“I just missed your heart,” Hanna whispers at a crucial moment in the film. The same could be said of Hanna the film, which delivers so many visceral pleasures but just barely avoids hitting us on an emotional level, too.

But as an action heroine music video fairy tale, Hanna delivers to the eyes, ears, and gut. So really — who cares about the heart when the rest of us is having so much fun?

Ah, 2011. You were a strange bird.

Is it me, or were movies more united by theme this year than is usual? Nostalgia was the big one, with several titles capitalizing not just on our nostalgia of a past era, but of movies from a past era — from silent films to Spielberg blockbusters and everything in between. People have been in an awfully romantic mood of late — perhaps because the recession made the present so unappealing. Movies have always been about escapism, and this year more than ever, they’re taking us backward rather than forward.

A few titles amongst my personal favorites harken back a bit, but on the whole, I prefer the fresher fare — films that actually do feel a little progressive, despite the popular wave of nostalgia.

So here I’ve selected my top 8 films of the year. Why 8 instead of 10? Well, it’s simple. Because I’m leaving two slots open for a handful of titles I have yet to see. By the time the Oscars are telecast, I’ll have seen and written about one hundred 2011 releases, and I’ll feel confident enough to put together a full Top 10.

But for now, on the eve of the Academy Award nominations, here are all but two of the year’s best movies.

(The rest of this entry has been moved over to my full Top 10 list here.)

Ah, 2011. You were a strange bird.

Is it me, or were movies more united by theme this year than is usual? Nostalgia was the big one, with several titles capitalizing not just on our nostalgia of a past era, but of movies from a past era — from silent films to Spielberg blockbusters and everything in between. People have been in an awfully romantic mood of late — perhaps because the recession made the present so unappealing. Cinema has always been about escapism, and this year more than ever, it’s taking us backward rather than forward.

A few titles amongst my personal favorites harken back a bit, but on the whole, I prefer the fresher fare — films that actually do feel a little progressive, despite the popular wave of nostalgia. So here are the year’s best movies.

(Click on the film title for my original reviews.)

Hard In The City’s Top 10 Films Of 2011:

10. ATTACK THE BLOCK

My other 2011 favorites deal with some pretty heavy fare. Attack The Block isn’t exactly a light-hearted romp in every way — as there is a fair amount of carnage — but in terms of flat-out fun, it’s last year’s best offering. The premise itself is ingenious — malicious extra-terrestrials attack Earth, as they often do in movies, but instead of watching government officials, reporters, and scientists deal with the fallout, we experience it all through the eyes of a bunch of rough-around-the-edges teenagers from the wrong side of the tracks, so to speak. They don’t start out as the most sympathetic of protagonists, considering how meet them — mugging a defenseless nurse. Initially, that nurse (Jodie Whittaker) refers to the boys as “fucking monsters,” but soon they’re her only hope of surviving ugly death at the hand (well, claws and fangs) of some real fucking monsters. (And the safest place around, naturally, is a drug dealer’s apartment.) Gradually, we come to see this menacing gang as more complicated (and childish) than their actions might have us believe.

For those who like to look so deep, Joe Cornish’s brilliant feature debut says a bit about poverty and the almost inevitable way kids from “the projects” will turn to a life of crime. (The film pokes fun at a more privileged white kid, played by Luke Treadaway, who would surely be dead if not for the aid of his rough-and-tumble peers.) But Attack The Block also has a go-for-broke 80′s sensibility that ensures we won’t spend too long contemplating the sociological injustice of it all. It’s first and foremost a piece of blockbuster entertainment that unjustly missed out on finding an audience, for it’s more fun than all the other alien movies of 2011 combined — like the British show Skins crossed with Gremlins or Jurassic Park. The creatures are frequently referred to as “gorilla-wolf motherfuckers” and the script is full of South London slang that rewards multiple viewings so you can catch all the humor. As one character says as he gives up furiously punching in the night’s events into his cell phone: “This is too much madness to explain in one text!”

9. CERTIFIED COPY

Church bells ringing as if an echo from a wedding day; a statue expressing a woman’s simple-minded devotion to her lover; a wife putting on makeup and earrings as if trying to recreate the younger, prettier girl her husband once knew — they’re all a part of this highbrow puzzle box of a film that defies any one logical interpretation. Certified Copy is not a story that can be taken at face value — without a deeper insight into its themes, the narrative flat-out makes no sense — but rather, makes up its own rules about what a movie can and should be as it goes along. If that sounds like a bit of a challenge, it is — a shameless one. This is not 27 Dresses; there is a reason it stars Juliette Binoche instead of Kate Hudson.

“Is a reproduction of a piece of great art as good as the original?” That’s the question that begins Certified Copy, and as the movie gently unfolds (there’s no real story to speak of), we are treated to a host of visual “copies” to muse over in our own minds (see the picture above for one such example). Gradually, we turn our focus away from art and onto a relationship, the nature of which is never explicitly defined, though at every turn it’s honest and captivating. The passionate, unnamed heroine portrayed by Binoche yearns for her “original” love with such fervor you can feel her aching through the screen. Abbas Kiarostami’s talky, tri-lingual drama is certainly not one for the casual viewer, but it gives those who like thought-provoking cinema plenty to chew on for hours or even days after.

8. TAKE SHELTER

It was a strangely grandiose year at the arthouse — and an apocalyptic one, too. This year saw indies like Melancholia, Bellflower, Another Earth, Kaboom, and The Tree Of Life grappling with epic-scope issues normally reserved for the ouvres of Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay. But none of the above-mentioned capture the palpable dread of a cataclysmic event quite like Take Shelter, which tells not only the tale of our shared global fear of the havoc nature might one day choose to wreak on us, but also an intimate and personal story of one man unraveling despite (and, in part, because of) his love for his family and small-town life. The dream sequences, stuffed with storms and other harbingers of doomsday, are unnerving, but the time bomb we can hear quietly ticking within Michael Shannon’s Curtis is even moreso.

None of these nightmarish visions would work if it weren’t for their contrast with Curtis’ simple domestic life, rendered so carefully and believably. His wife (Jessica Chastain, in the best of her many film roles this year) isn’t of that naggy, shrill stock that so many movie-wives are; his problems, aside from the apocalyptic premonitions, are of the real-world variety, struggling to make ends meet, keeping in good standing with his health insurance to attend to the needs of his deaf daughter. (Even on that level alone, the stakes could hardly be higher.) One of the movie’s genius touches is that we’re not sure if we’re afraid for Curtis, or of him. He’s so tightly-wound, we fear he might snap — and take his family to the dark side with him. Take Shelter‘s much-debated ending has thrown some for a loop, but in my estimation, it’s very open to interpretation. Whether or not you come away thinking Curtis is schizophrenic or a modern-day Cassandra hardly matters — the fear is equal regardless.

7. HANNA

Hanna is the kind of genre film that throws the mainstream off, defying easy categorization and audience expectations. This movie a lot of things — first and foremost, an action-thriller with an unlikely protagonist: a fourteen-year-old girl. Minus the music, art direction, and a certain directorial flourish from Joe Wright, you can easily imagine it being flat and predictable (along the lines of Colombiana). Instead, Hanna is packed full of surprises on every level, from narrative to sonic to visual. Thanks in part to the Chemical Brothers’ hypnotic score, many of the breathless action scenes come off like music videos — and it isn’t always fun to see someone who should be helpless kicking ass?

But what really makes Hanna something special is that, at its core, it’s a poignant coming-of-age tale about a teenager contending with the harsh real world all on her own. Wright reconnects with his Atonement star Saoirse Ronan to inspire another commanding performance, and it’s surprisingly easy to buy Hanna’s capabilities as an assassin. Hanna is simultaneously old and new; despite the electronic soundtrack and flashy cinematography, underneath it all, it’s a fairy tale as old as they come — the little girl lost, the grandmother, the woodsman, and the wolf are all here in 21st century reproductions. The two most despicable and terrifying villains of the year (sorry, Drive!) are brought to hellish life by Cate Blanchett and Tom Hollander — Blanchett’s dental hygiene-obsessed, shoe-loving take on the Big Bad Wolf is also one of 2011′s most underrated screen characters. Wright may not connect every dot as most thrillers will, but there’s a surplus of subtext about maternity and paternity, mostly of the surrogate variety. Hanna’s opening line (spoken to a dying animal), “I just missed your heart,” takes on a meta-significance since Wright & co. clearly aren’t aiming for that with this movie — they’re going for our head and our gut instead, and those they hit it dead on.

6. MARGARET

In a simpler world, Kenneth Lonergan’s film Margaret would have been released way back in 2006 as intended. Then, perhaps, it could have been judged on its own merits, for better or worse. But after a five-year delay and news of so much precious material left on the cutting room floor (it seems unlikely that 2011′s theatrical release version is the last cut we’ll see), it’s impossible to separate the drama in Margaret from the drama surrounding it. Like its heroine, Lisa (Anna Paquin), Margaret feels like a work in progress. Unfinished. Amateurish at times. With the potential to become brilliant and important, and flaws that force us to question whether she ever will be quite complete.

But for the sake of argument, let’s pretend this Margaret is the only version we’ll ever see, even the only version we were ever intended to see. After seeing it, I was both impressed by its scope and bare emotion as well as bothered by several scenes in the film’s latter half that were tonally and narratively jarring, as if popping in from another movie. As such, I didn’t really expect to find it on my “Best Of 2011″ list. But days later, Margaret lingered, and any film with that lasting power deserves some recognition. Margaret is the story of a teenage girl who struggles to cope with the grisly demise of the stranger. That scene, which we witness in full, is one of the most horrifying death scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie — simply because it’s one of the most grimly realistic. Margaret weaves in a few seemingly unrelated storylines; there’s no way of knowing if all these scenes would play differently had Lisa not accidentally caused a stranger’s life to end. What I love about Margaret is that it dares to be raw and nervy, careening from one emotion to the next recklessly as humans — especially young girls — do. The main conflict in the movie is intellectual, a question it never quite asks outright: in matters of life and death, is it more acceptable to run the gamut of emotions as Lisa does, or approach it from a wizened, more adult, jaded perspective? You’ll find no concrete answer in Margaret, but as for me, I’m on Lisa’s side. (And if I had to guess, I’d say Lonergan is, too.)

5. WEEKEND

I’m far from the only person to include Weekend in my year-end list of 2011′s best films; Glen would be so proud. One of many discussions at the heart of Andrew Haigh’s chatty romance is the question of whether or not heterosexual audiences can embrace homosexual art, and in Weekend, the debate is answered with a resounding: “Yes!” Critics and audiences, gay and straight, warmed up to this engaging look at how love (or a close approximation of it) blossoms in the 21st century. Beyond those tertiary politics, though, there’s very little here exclusive to male-male relationships. Nearly all that unfolds could just as easily happen in a story about a boy and a girl, or two girls for that matter. Weekend is one of the first gay films to ever feel as universal and accessible as Before Sunset or When Harry Met Sally.

But putting all that aside, Weekend is a wonderful movie in every other way, too — concerning two fully-fleshed out, flawed individuals who are hesitant to fall for one another, but fortunately for us, can’t help it. Both performances feel wholly lived in as delivered by Tom Cullen and Chris New. Neither Russell nor Glen is a “type” — they may see each other that way at first, after meeting casually in a bar, but soon their complexities come to light and we fall for them as gradually as they fall for each other. In a year in which so many independent films had a lot of big ideas on their mind, Weekend is refreshingly small-scale and intimate, full of moments that ring true enough to make almost any other recent romance look artificial by comparison.

4. DRIVE

Legendary film critic Pauline Kael wrote, “The words ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies.” How true — but that was the 60′s. This is 2012. Nowadays, “kiss kiss bang bang” has been replaced with something more graphic, along the lines of “fuck fuck, splat splat,” and Nicholas Winding Refn has roared onto Hollywood with screeching tires in a vehicle that does just that — a splashy, ultra-violent crime thriller about a taciturn Hollywood stuntman who moonlights as a getaway driver. Falling in love with another man’s wife eventually finds him in the midst of someone else’s bloodbath.

Drive is quite a ride. It’s pure cinema, and nothing more — from the mesmerizing cinematography to a haunting pop soundtrack to the hot pink font of the opening credits. It’s all highly stylized. The ensemble consists of Carey Mulligan, Albert Brooks, Ron Perlman, Christina Hendricks, Oscar Isaac, Bryan Cranston, and of course, Ryan Gosling, each adding a little something extra to prototypes we’ve seen before. Though many have reasonably small roles, every character in Drive becomes iconic. Let the mainstream have their Fast Five; in Drive, spellbinding getaway of the opening sequence sets the tone for the rest of the movie — it isn’t about noise and twisted metal, but something leaner, tauter, and ultimately much meaner. Buckle up.

3. BEGINNERS

If I told you that a movie featuring an adorable Jack Russell that “talks” via subtitles was one of 2011′s most raw, heartfelt, and honest, would you believe me? Beginners neatly pulls off that trick, and a host of others, in tracking tracks two very different stories of love and self-discovery. In the more conventional of the two, boy Oliver (Ewan McGregor) meets girl Anna (Melanie Laurent) and instantly falls for her despite the laryngitis that renders her temporarily unable to speak. Thus they get to know each other via a series of notes, games, and gestures, revealing more than they ever could with dialogue. (If that sounds impossibly precious, it kind of is — but just go with it.) Both Oliver and Anna have had unsatisfactory relationships in the past and are reluctant to leap into another; though they are in their thirties, they are still beginners when it comes to being adults.

In the second and more moving of the intertwined tales, Oliver learns that his father is gay following the death of his mother, and proceeds to help his dad through the coming out process at the ripe old age of 76. Here, Hal, too, truly “begins” his life — unfortunately, not all that long before it ends. Beginners is essentially a coming-of-age tale featuring men of vastly different ages struggling to make the most of their lives, and its portrait of human lives in full at times rivals The Tree Of Life‘s in scope (if not in grandiosity). Mike Mills’ second feature is wholly impressive for the genuineness of its emotions, rare in films that take place, in part, on a deathbed. It may have been made by a relative beginner to narrative filmmaking, but it sure doesn’t feel that way.

2. POETRY

A absent-minded Korean grandmother takes a poetry-writing class. Sounds riveting, doesn’t it? Well, as all (or at least, most) good poets know, less is more, and while Poetry contains quite a lot of movie — approaching two and a half hours — its best moments are marked by what’s left unstated. Chang-dong Lee allows for an awful lot of screen time that is mere observation — we, the audience, observe protagonist Mija as she observes the world around her, and we can only guess at what exactly she’s thinking. The characters in Poetry often don’t say much of import, but their silence speaks volumes.

It’s rare to feel such sympathy and love for a fictional character these days, but that was my reaction to Poetry. I wanted to give Mija a big hug and treat her much better than anyone in this movie treats her, in particular the ungrateful teen grandson who doesn’t know or care what sacrifices she makes for him. (And I’m not talking about the usual kind, either.) Mija is one of those people who brightens the world around her (just look at her outfits!) and receives very little in return for her efforts. As she learns that she is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, Mija decides to do a little something for herself for once — she wants to write one poem while she still can. But she finds inspiration hard to come by. Despite a local tragedy that has a profound impact on Mija’s loved ones, this dotty old lady manages to maintain her sunny disposition right up until the bitter (though ambiguous) end. When Mija finally gets around to writing that poem, she leaves behind a masterpiece.

1. SHAME

Oh, the Shame! Most of my #1 films tend to be one of the year’s most divisive, and Steve McQueen’s Shame is no exception. I’m drawn to filmmakers who take risks both narratively and formally; if it’s safe for mainstream moviegoers, it likely isn’t my favorite of the year.

So sorry, The Descendants — Michael Fassbender gives the year’s best performance (by an actor or actress, leading or supporting) in the year’s best movie. He plays Brandon, a closet sex addict with a shady past we only learn about little by little. (And yes, you can bet I’ll be screaming at my TV set when either Brad Pitt or George Clooney takes home the Oscar instead. At least there’s a high probability Fassbender will be nominated for his efforts here.) Of course I could go on and on about all the things I loved about Shame, considering that I reveled in absolutely every moment — the subtle way information is revealed about the unconventional relationship Brandon has with his sister (Carey Mulligan); McQueen’s now-characteristic use of long takes, including a jaw-dropping “How’d they do that?” run through the dark streets of New York City; Mulligan’s melancholy take on “New York, New York”; the combined ferocity and vulnerability bubbling underneath Brandon’s outwardly calm, affable demeanor in every scene. (No, seriously, I could go on.)

But I’ll stop there with specifics, and instead address all of Shame‘s detractors on more general terms. Filmgoing is, of course, a subjective experience — what speaks to you may not speak to me, and vice versa. We bring our own experiences and points of view into every movie, and just because one doesn’t work as well for us as well as another doesn’t make it an unsuccessful movie. (Some movies do objectively fail to convey what they intend to, but Shame isn’t one of them.) I have considered many critiques of Shame, some intelligent and valid, others glib and childish. To say that you didn’t understand or connect with Brandon is a perfectly reasonable criticism of Shame, for the film never panders or shows its entire hand. To say that the film moralizes and attempts to build its audience up by tearing its protagonist down is blatantly wrong, though. Usually, this tongue-lashing is offered in the same breath as a smug jab at the film’s NC-17 rating and full-frontal male nudity (never Mulligan’s, always Fassbender’s). Jealous much, Shame haters?

YES, Shame shows us a penis. Gasp! Do we really care? Are we really so prurient? I doubt many critics’ problems with the movie start and end with Fassbender’s anatomy, but it always seems to come up (tee hee!) in every bad review of the film, and not many good ones. Frankly, most (not all) of the negative critiques come across as merely prudish — which in a way, means Shame has done at least a little of what it sets out to. Explicit sex isn’t exactly undiscovered territory at the multiplex, but the way Shame presents it isn’t exactly attempting to go down (tee hee!) easy, either. At its most surface level, Shame is about a sex addict; would the same film about a drug addict really inspire such vehement hatred (as opposed to mere indifference)? Shame is a film that can’t not push buttons, because we’ve all got a sex-button or two to be pushed. All of us.

Now, Shame doesn’t come right out and say that much (leading the above-mentioned critics to make such shallow, obtuse readings of it), but the subtext is there, under the surface, the way our sexuality is. Hidden. Though in this day and age, we air much of what used to be concealed, almost nobody walks around truly baring it all when it comes to our sexual hangups and insecurities. (And don’t lie. We’ve all got them.) Sex makes us uncomfortable; therefore, Shame is likely to, also. Not everyone who didn’t warm up to Shame is reacting against the film’s overt, in-your-face sexuality — but I bet some are.

Personally, I connected to Fassbender’s Brandon more than I did to any other screen character in 2011, and not because I, too, am a sex addict. (I’m not.) In the same way I did not find Crash to be very much about racism, I do not take Shame to be about sex addiction; call me crazy, but for me it was all too clear that this was a very specific character study about a man with a unique history. Whatever has gone on between Brandon and his sister, I don’t think McQueen expects much of the audience to identify, per se. It’s merely a stand-in for any sexual experience one has that ends up shaping us in ways we don’t expect, rarely think about, and probably never talk about. Brandon’s case may be extreme, and his high level of shame corresponds with how taboo (by society’s standards) his sexual history is. Brandon is a man tortured by his sexuality, which manifests into sexual addiction. But the movie is about the former, not the latter.

And that’s what I found so brilliant about it. Shame brings to light a lot of things we don’t discuss, or include in reviews, or even make movies about. You may recognize some or a lot of yourself in Brandon, or you may not — but even if you do, you likely won’t admit it. We experience Shame the way its protagonist experiences his illicit hookups. For two hours, Brandon and Steve McQueen and Shame share something intimate and personal with you, and you in response share something intimate and personal with Shame just by watching and thinking about it. One way or another, you react.

There are secrets transferred in a darkened movie theater between you and Shame, and when it’s over, you’ll step into the light. Only you and Shame will know what went on in there, and then you’ll return to your life — where it’s not proper to discuss such matters — and probably attempt to forget about it. It was just some fun you were hoping to have in the dark, and like any sexual experience, it’s subjective. One man’s Casanova is another’s sexual catastrophe. Maybe Shame didn’t do what you like quite the way you like it, or maybe it didn’t live up to your expectations, or maybe you were just in a bad mood the whole time and had your mind on other things, or maybe it reminded you of someone you’d rather not think about, or maybe a second or third go-round would improve it a little once you were more used to each other, or maybe you liked certain parts of it a little too much and now you feel… ashamed.

After such an encounter, it’s customary to ask: “Was it good for you?” Far be it from me to hold it against you if Shame didn’t quite do it for you, but let me assure you — Shame is fully capable of hitting the cinematic G-spots on some of us.

So yeah. It was really good for me.

(Originally posted at FabApp.)

It’s that time of year again, folks! What I like to call “movie Christmas.” And like an actual holiday, the Academy Awards often end up as more of a disappointment than anything else — any Oscars handed out to not-so-great nominated films like Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close and The Iron Lady can be chalked up to the cinematic equivalent of “ugly sweaters from grandma we’ll throw in the back of the closet and never speak of again.” But it’s really the excitement leading up to the big show and the discussions of film it creates that make it all worthwhile.

So here’s where I like to make up for the Academy’s occasional lapses in good taste by recognizing the movies and performances that are really worthy of celebration. Because what has a group of thousands of filmmakers with decades of experience in the entertainment industry got on me?

At this point in time I’ve seen exactly 100 releases from the year 2011, which tells you exactly three things: 1) I am on obsessive, crazed film fanatic; 2) I had too much free time on my hands over the past twelve months; and 3) I am almost certainly more qualified to compose this list than you are. So listen to me.

THE 2012 NOT-OSCARS

BEST ACTOR

Michael Fassbender, Shame
Jean Dujardin, The Artist
Ryan Gosling, Drive
Michael Shannon, Take Shelter
Ewan McGregor, Beginners

Michael Fassbender being snubbed by the Academy is the year’s most startling, egregious omission (and actually, 2012 had some bad ones). As a self-loathing sex addict, his performance was almost unbearably intense the whole way through, and he ran the gamut of emotions in just those 2 hours. Meanwhile, Jean Dujardin is a large part of the reason why The Artist was such a delightful trifle and Ryan Gosling really came into his own as a leading man this year, playing the stoic stunt driver in Drive. Normally a supporting player, it was nice to see Michael Shannon take on a leading man role and Ewan McGregor was a charmer in Beginners; after a long run in blah movies in the early 2000′s, with this and The Ghost Writer and I Love You Phillip Morris, he’s back.

Honorable Mentions: Chris New & Tom Cullen, Weekend

BEST ACTRESS

Rooney Mara, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Jeong-hie Yun, Poetry
Elizabeth Olsen, Martha Marcy May Marlene
Charlize Theron, Young Adult
Anna Paquin, Margaret

I loved Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, but Fincher’s film imbued the character with a little something extra and made Lisbeth a more tragic figure. The way this character was treated was far and away the best thing about the American version, and Rooney Mara totally disappeared into the role under all the piercings, tattoos, and attitude. It could easily have been a tossed-off, one-note performance instead of the one we got. Meanwhile, Jeong-hie Yun was a total delight as an absent-minded grandmother confronted with ambivalent evil in her grandson, while Mary-Kate and Ashley’s sister Elizabeth proved she’s the new Olsen to be reckoned with as a traumatized cult member. But let’s not forget Charlize Theron fearlessly playing a hard-to-like alcoholic bitch or Anna Paquin’s 6-year-old performance from the long delayed Margaret, as she plays a high school girl wrestling with her part in a stranger’s gruesome death. (Clearly, I like my women to suffer.)

Honorable Mentions: Kate Winslet & Jodie Foster, Carnage

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Albert Brooks, Drive
Christopher Plummer, Beginners
Ryan Gosling, Crazy Stupid Love
Hunter McCracken, The Tree Of Life
Goran Visnjic, Beginners

I loved Christopher Plummer’s wonderful portrayal of a dying man who comes out of the closet in his twilight years — but he’ll probably win the Oscar, while Albert Brooks was flabbergastingly overlooked as the merciless villain of Drive. So he has the edge. Meanwhile, Ryan Gosling showed a new side to his acting chops in a role that was almost self-satirizing, while Hunter McCracken gave the best in a strong year for performances by young actors (Super 8, Hugo, Attack The Block, Hanna) — though Brad Pitt was very good, too. And Plummer’s strong work unfortunately overshadows a more subtle but very surprising performance by Goran Visnjic in the same movie.

Honorable Mentions: Patton Oswalt, Young Adult; Nick Nolte, Warrior

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Carey Mulligan, Shame
Cate Blanchett, Hanna
Jessica Chastain, Take Shelter
Berenice Bejo, The Artist
Elena Anaya, The Skin I Live In

Shame is my favorite movie of 2011, so no surprise that two of my favorite performances come from it. Carey Mulligan matches the excellence of Michael Fassbender in every way playing his polar-opposite of a sister, who’s a little too carefree and comfortable around her big brother; how come no one’s talking about her full-frontal nude scene? Cate Blanchett was chilling as an offbeat “Big Bad Wolf” figure in Hanna, unfortunately forgotten; Jessica Chastain was in a whole slew of movies this past year, but Take Shelter was the best of them (she was equally impeccable in each). Meanwhile, Berenice Bejo was a gem in The Artist, totally evoking the qualities that made silent film actresses stars way back when, and Elena Anaya is captivating in The Skin I Live In even before you learn who she is. And once you do, you’re blown away.

Honorable Mentions: Helen McCrory, Hugo; Hayden Panettiere, Scream 4

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Weekend, Andrew Haigh
Beginners, Mike Mills
Take Shelter, Jeff Nichols
Attack The Block, Joe Cornish
Certified Copy, Abbas Kiarostami

Weekend‘s dialogue is so fresh and natural, it feels unscripted. But it couldn’t be improv, because the information we get from these characters is too detailed, too keenly placed. It’s masterful. Beyond that, Beginners skillfully weaves two parallel stories with a very rare case of excellent voice-over narration, Take Shelter is a riveting take on the thin line between mental instability and the apocalyptic dread we all face, Attack The Block is one of the year’s best premises, executed flawlessly, and Certified Copy is a bold intellectual brain-teaser. (Fun fact: all of these writers directed the movie, too.)

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Drive, Hossein Amini
The Skin I Live In, Pedro Almodovar & Augustin Almodovar
Fright Night, Marti Noxon
Jane Eyre, Moira Buffini
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Steve Zaillian

The Academy and I have zero movies in common as far as our favorite screenplays go this year. The adapted list is fairly weak, I think — I had to stretch to find more than a few. (I could easily have come up with another five originals, though.) Though short on dialogue from its hero, Drive is a riveting ride all the way through, while The Skin I Live In is a chilly thriller that raises all kinds of complicated moral questions. Buffy writer Marti Noxon delivered that show’s trademark humor and horror in the fantastically fun Fright Night, while Jane Eyre was about the best Jane Eyre adaptation you could ever hope for. And while I wish The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo solved more of the book’s structural problems, Zaillian made some excellent enhancements to the story in the expository scene with the villain and also breathed new life into the familiar character of Lisbeth Salander.BEST DIRECTOR

Shame, Steve McQueen
Drive, Nicholas Winding Refn
Hanna, Joe Wright
Poetry, Chang-dong Lee
The Tree Of Life, Terrence Malick

Not surprisingly, these hew pretty close to my list of the year’s best movies for the most part, with one exception. This year I tended to reward movies either as “writing movies” or “direction & performance” movies, while few seemed equally strong on both fronts. These are the directors who brought style and urgency to what, on the page, might not have amounted much in the hands of a lesser director. Aside from the more subtle Poetry, these are pretty flashy movies with filmmaking that makes you take notice and leaves you breathless. The Tree Of Life may not have quite made it into my Top 10, but I am still quite impressed with the scope Malick took on and his unparalleled visuals.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

The Tree Of Life
Drive
Shame
Hanna
Melancholia

Seriously, The Tree Of Life is more like a piece of art than a movie. It’s so beautiful I want to hang it on my wall and have it silently playing 24/7.

BEST ENSEMBLE

A Separation
Bridesmaids
Margaret
Attack The Block
Like Crazy

*

And now for the new categories, stolen from MTV, Filmspotting, and some I created specifically for these awards!

BEST OPENING SCENE
Drive

BEST FINAL SCENE
Poetry

BEST OPENING & FINAL SCENES WITH A LACKING MIDDLE
Melancholia

BEST DATE MOVIE
The Artist

WORST DATE MOVIE
Contagion

BEST BREAKUP MOVIE
Like Crazy

BEST VILLAINS
Cate Blanchett & Tom Hollander, Hanna

BEST ANIMAL
Cat, The Future
Dog, The Artist
Dog, Beginners
Horse, War Horse
Hamster, Carnage

BEST KISS
Ryan Gosling & Carey Mulligan, Drive

BEST FUCK
Michael Fassbender & Everyone, Shame

BEST KILL
Christina Hendricks, Drive

BEST DRIVING
Ryan Gosling, Drive

WORST DRIVING
Mark Ruffalo, Margaret

MOST UNJUSTLY DELETED SCENES
Scream 4

BEST DOUBLE FEATURE
The Tree Of Life & Kaboom
Another Earth & Melancholia
Attack The Block & Super 8
Shame & Young Adult
Take Shelter & Bellflower

LONGEST MOVIE THAT’S NOT THAT LONG
Tuesday, After Christmas

BEST TWIST
The Skin I Live In
Certified Copy
A Separation

GAYEST MOVIE
Dirty Girl

STRAIGHTEST MOVIE (tie)
Moneyball & Warrior

MOST BI-CURIOUS MOVIE
Shame

MOST SEXUALLY AMBIGUOUS MOVIE
Heartbeats

BEST “WHITE GIRL PROBLEMS” MOVIE
Jane Eyre

BEST BAD MOVIE
Trespass

WORST “GOOD” MOVIE
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

MOST OVERRATED (tie)
The Descendants & Melancholia

*

That’s it for 2012! You can find my picks for “Best Picture” here and last year’s Not-Oscars here.

It’s a little glib to label the entire Woody Allen oeuvre “White People Problems,” but the man has often explored the neuroses of the reasonably well-to-do (and sometimes the very, very well-to-do). His films often feel cut off from the world as we know it; his characters exist in sealed-off realms that aren’t much affected by anything happening outside of them. Woody Allen’s New York is largely free of the grime and complexity you’ll actually find on the streets there (even if you’re very privileged). For Allen fans, his films are an escape; a chance to revel in a world that isn’t quite real enough for us to ever visit.

Except Blue Jasmine, his latest — which, for once, confronts the real world head on.

Yes, Blue Jasmine is the rare topical Woody Allen film. His films tend not to address what’s happening in the news — the movies he makes in the 21st century are essentially the same movies he made in the 70s, if not quite as vital and fresh as they once were — but Blue Jasmine is a post-Recession movie through-and-through. After romps through London and Rome and Paris and Barcelona over the last few years, he’s returned to the U.S. — New York City (in flashback) and San Francisco (in present) — to tell the story of Jasmine (Cate Blanchett), a former socialite whose husband’s Madoffian ways left her penniless and in the humiliating position of having to crash with her working class sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins).

We see plenty of flashbacks to Jasmine’s ritzy, breezy life with Hal (Alec Baldwin) — a smooth operator who is (obviously, to everyone but Jasmine) cheating on her. Then again, he’s cheating on everyone. Though Woody Allen pokes fun at the wealthy often, he doesn’t so frequently completely skewer them — but there aren’t many redeeming qualities to the preening, pompous Park Avenue types on display in Blue Jasmine. Jasmine herself is a cold fish, both before her personal tragedy and after, though in different ways. And perhaps it’s because we meet her on her way down that we have a little sympathy for her, even if she rarely acts unselfishly. She’s a bitch, but she can’t help herself. And maybe so many of us have fallen on hard economic times that we can relate, even if her bubbleheaded existence in the flashback sequences makes it clear that she’s much more part of the problem than the solution.

Or perhaps we can credit Cate Blanchett, who plays privileged women with just the right amount of vulnerability. Her performance is the anchor of Blue Jasmine, which sounds like it could be just another Woody Allen film about a fish out of water but is something else entirely. It’s darker than that, because the consequences of Jasmine’s fall from grace cut deeper than we’re used to seeing from Woody Allen. Jasmine is one-part chatty, neurotic Allen heroine, one part… well, let’s not spoil it.

Blanchett has more to work with here than many of Allen’s past leading ladies, talented as they all are, and gets more of an opportunity to carve out the sort of performance that gets one nominated for an Oscar (depending on how stiff the competition is, of course). Woody’s women tend to shine most in the Best Supporting Actress category, but here he’s given an actress a meaty enough lead role to contend for the big prize. Blue Jasmine is all about Jasmine, who is not at all a proxy for Woody (as many of his leads are). She voices her disdain for the lower-class without much of a filter, though she’s not exactly mean-spirited. We learn little about her past other than that she was adopted, but we can easily fill in the gaps — “Jeanette” changed her name to Jasmine, and traded a Jeanette’s life for a Jasmine’s life. When life forces her to go back to her roots, she looks within and learns that Jeanette doesn’t live here anymore.

Blue Jasmine has money on its mind and isn’t afraid to show it, with the opulence of Jasmine’s New York life clashing with the blue collar ways of Jasmine’s sister and her various paramours (played by Bobby Cannavale, Louis C.K., and Andrew Dice Clay — this cast’s weakest link). Is this heavy-handed? Sort of. We’ve seen all kinds of class differences at the movies, especially lately; the uber-rich have been demonized so many times, their extravagances ridiculed endlessly. Jasmine isn’t a groundbreaking character, though Allen pushes her further than you think he will when she first shows up on screen. What happens when you become so consumed by your consumerism that there’s nothing left once it’s taken away? There’s a moment when Blue Jasmine threatens to become another pull-yourself-up tale of a dumped woman’s difficult but earned reinvention, and another when it threatens to become another surface-level Woody Allen romcom, sweeping realism under the rug for the sake of a happy ending. Blue Jasmine ultimately goes elsewhere, with a finale that’s truly unsettling. It’s his darkest film since Match Point, and not coincidentally, also his best since.

And now for a qualification. Woody Allen films are easy to overpraise, which is how the whimsical Midnight In Paris got so much Oscar love. The man makes movies with sharp and observant dialogue that are about people, starring many of the best actors working today. They’re CGI-free and absent so many tropes that are otherwise inescapable at the multiplex. Blue Jasmine doesn’t exactly transcend what we’ve come to expect from him — camerawork that’s sufficient but not particularly inspired, some rather broad caricatures, a bit of obviousness with his message. But by now, you either love him or you don’t. Most of us are happily riding the bandwagon, because we simply don’t get enough movies like his — movies that are mostly just about people talking.

The slightest of Allen’s films still tend to be worth watching, and here — though he’s not saying much about the current state of the economy that isn’t being said elsewhere — he’s delving a little deeper. Given his penchant for tales of wealthy New Yorkers, you might almost view Blue Jasmine as… not exactly an apology, but a self-aware way of saying, “Yes, I hear you” to those who think he’s a Jasmine, a boy who made good and has long since lost touch with his roots. It’s a Woody Allen film for the 99%.

*

It’s the morning of the Oscar nominations, and I’m not upset.

This is weird. All the films I wanted to see nominated for Best Picture are. All the actors I hoped to see receive nominations for this year’s performances were. Compare and contrast to last year’s fatal omission of Kathryn Bigelow as Best Director, or 2011′s Oscar season, in which none of my ten favorite films were nominated for Best Picture — but Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close was. This year, on the other hand, five of my own picks for Best Picture overlap with Academy’s. Three of my four favorite performances were recognized. All of the films from the Best Director nominees were in my Top 10.

What the fuck is going on here?

Yeah, it was a good year for movies, and thankfully, it’s a good year at the Oscars. It’s only natural that some of my favorite films aren’t represented as much as I may like, and you know what? I’m pretty okay with that.

Still, I think I can do the Academy a little better. So now it’s time for the really important awards — my picks for the films and performances that deserve more recognition than they got. Here are 2013′s Not-Oscars!

(As usual, I pick a winner and then list my four other “nominees” in descending order based on how much I liked them. Check out last year’s Not-Oscars here.)

BEST ACTRESS

Julie Delpy, Before Midnight
Cate Blanchett, Blue Jasmine
Adele Exarchopoulos, Blue Is The Warmest Color
Sandra Bullock, Gravity
Greta Gerwig, Frances Ha

Honorable Mentions: Brie Larson, Short Term 12; Amy Adams, American Hustle

Cate Blanchett is the favorite to win and has been ever since the release of Blue Jasmine, and deservedly so — the role of a broken, vodka-guzzling socialite grieving for her dearly departed husband and dearly departed lifestyle (not necessarily in that order) is a perfect showcase for a performer, blending comedy and tragedy expertly, and it’s hard to imagine anyone doing a better job with the part. It’s one of the roles she’ll be remembered for.

Meanwhile, young Adele Exarchopoulos carries Blue Is The Warmest Color, as the film’s French title The Life Of Adele suggests. The movie is about every aspect of this young girl’s life, and she eats, showers, and has sex with equal gusto in an incredibly natural performance. She’s remarkably expressive for such a young actress, and if the rumors are to be believed, she put up with quite a lot of duress thanks to the film’s director, including some very long sex scenes.

If Blue Is The Warmest Color rests almost entirely on Exarchopoulos’ shoulders, Gravity rests even moreso on Sandra Bullock’s; the screenplay lets her down with a clunky bit of dialogue or two, but that doesn’t undermine Sandy’s remarkable feat as an action heroine who’s still as capable, with a mix of strength and vulnerability, as she was in Speed almost two decades ago. One of the year’s most beautiful scenes is her Ryan Stone howling along with a Chinese stranger via radio — and despite the massive amount of visual effects, Bullock had a lot of physical work to do to master this part.

And how about indie darling Greta Gerwig, who co-wrote the perfect part for her winsome indie charms in Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha? She may not exactly be the millennial female Woody Allen yet, but Lena Dunham better watch her back all the same.

My 2013 winner, though, is easy — Before Midnight‘s Julie Delpy, stepping into the role of Celine for the third (and final?) time. In the past two films, Celine was a smart, thoughtful, independent woman; she’s too fully realized to be written off as a mere manic pixie dream girl, but she was in many ways the perfect woman. It was to see why Ethan Hawke’s Jesse fell for her. Before Midnight presents a new challenge for the actress — Celine is less secure, revealing a fragility and bitterness that were only hinted at in earlier incarnations. Delpy deftly shifts from the “old” Celine we (and Jesse) know and love to reveal a darker shade to the character that is still so relatable. (And she performs a large part of the third act topless, so there’s that.)

BEST ACTOR

Bruce Dern, Nebraska
Leonardo DiCaprio, The Wolf Of Wall Street
Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years A Slave
Oscar Isaac, Inside Llewyn Davis
Matthew McConaughey, Dallas Buyers Club

Honorable Mentions: Michael B. Jordan, Fruitvale Station; Tom Hanks, Captain Phillips

It’s by far the best year for Best Actor in recent memory, with at least ten performances that deserve Academy recognition. The biggest performance of the year has to be Leonardo DiCaprio’s in The Wolf Of Wall Street — he’s brash and bold like we’ve never seen him before, and funnier, too. His quaalude overdose is a masterpiece of excruciating physical comedy, and he delivers some of the year’s best monologues to boot. After plenty of solid performances over the past couple decades, it’s maybe the performance that finally signals him as one of his generation’s best actors.

Then there’s Chiwetel Ejiofor, who guides us through the hell of a free man finding himself suddenly enslaved. In a big, brash drama, this is a surprisingly understated performance, since Solomon knows he can’t give away the fact that he’s smarter than his masters without suffering even worse consequences. This was the toughest category by far for me to pick a winner in, since Dern, DiCaprio, and Ejiofor were all about equal in my eyes.

Oscar Isaac has the advantage of singing beautiful folk music to win audiences over, and his voice is indeed lovely; his turn as the titular Llewyn Davis is prickly enough that we’re never allowed to feel sorry for the down-trodden musician — instead, we realize that his bad luck is a mixture of misfortune and bad behavior. Hopefully, enough people took notice of this largely unknown actor for us to see much more of him in the future.

And, of course, there’s Matthew McConaughey, in the midst of a massive career renaissance that no one saw coming, turning in unforgettable performances in a wide array of movies over the past two years. Dallas Buyers Club is the centerpiece, as he portrays a straight man afflicted with the last disease he’d ever admit to having. McConaughey lost a ton of weight in the role (and has been uncomfortably skinny-looking in a number of his other appearances over the past year), but he also resists the urge to sentimentalize Ron Woodruff as some actors may have; like Isaac, he doesn’t give a damn if he’s likable in the role or not.

But my favorite is Bruce Dern’s crazy old coot in Nebraska, because he is the movie. It’s a tribute to Dern as well as the screenplay that we can never tell just how “with it” Woody Grant is — he seems to simultaneously believe that he won his phony millions while somewhere, at the back of his mind, knowing it’s too good to be true. It’s a role that could have been cutesy or precious, but instead it’s just pitch-perfect all the way through, allowing us to laugh at, critique, and feel for Woody all at once. DiCaprio and Ejiofor hopefully still have many great performances in them, but this one feels like Dern’s crowning achievement after a long career.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Lupita Nyong’o, 12 Years A Slave
Jennifer Lawrence, American Hustle
Joanna Scanlan, The Invisible Woman
June Squibb, Nebraska
Margot Robbie, The Wolf Of Wall Street

Honorable Mentions: Sally Hawkins, Blue Jasmine; Sarah Paulson, 12 Years A Slave

The Jennifer Lawrence backlash is beginning. She can ask her fellow Oscar-winner from last year, Anne Hathaway, how to deal with that. Some are calling her scene-stealing performance in American Hustle the best part of the movie; some think she was just plain awful. It’s pretty obvious which side of the fence I’m on — I found every moment Lawrence was on screen a delight. Yes, it’s the sort of big, brassy, ditsy performance that award-givers love to honor — see Oscar-winners like Marissa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny or Mira Sorino in Mighty Aphrodite, both of which were controversial picks. But there are two scenes that show Lawrence is more than just a hairdo — when Rosalyn tears up and claims that change is hard for her while, under the surface, implying that her new beau should go rough up her old one — and ohhh, lordy, that bathroom scene.

Next there’s Joanna Scanlan, who beefs up an underserved part in The Invisible Woman with her expressive face. She’s the plump, put-upon wife of Charles Dickens, who gradually realizes her famous hubby is in love with a younger, prettier woman. We’re left to guess how she feels about it until the film’s best scene, when Mrs. Dickens confronts the young woman and presents her with a birthday gift. It’s the kind of supporting performance that makes you wish the movie was all about her.

And how about June Squibb, who played Jack Nicholson’s dumpy wife in Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt a decade ago, and now shows up in a much livelier part in his Nebraska? While Will Forte plays the serious straight man and Bruce Dern touches our hearts with his senility, Squibb injects a welcome dose of energetic comedy to lighten the mood — she even flashes the grave of a deceased paramour at one point. Yeah, these may be cheap laughs in a way, but they’re still good ones.

Last in this lineup of scene-stealing wives is Margot Robbie of The Wolf Of Wall Street. Like Lawrence, she’s aided greatly by a fabulous wardrobe and a juicy script, and some may think she’s just a pretty face. But in a largely amoral film, she’s the closest thing to a sympathetic character we get, and over time we really do feel for her, particularly in her dramatic final confrontation with DiCaprio. Really, though, she’s here because she’s in what might be my favorite scene in a movie this year — yep, the “no panties” scene.

But none of these supporting actresses had quite the impact Lupita N’yongo did in 12 Years A Slave. Like them, she’s a scene-stealer, but she’s far from comic relief. Solomon Northup is such a dignified and reserved character, Steve McQueen’s film needs Patsey to be his counterpoint — and as much sympathy as we have for Solomon, it ends up being Patsey who we really feel for. We see Patsey suffer more than any other character, and Nyong’o sells every moment with fear, fury, despair, or whatever the scene calls for. It’s impossible to take your eyes off her for a moment, even when she’s being brutally whipped and you really want to look away. In a film populated by well-known actors like Brad Pitt, Alfre Woodard, Michael Fassbender, Paul Giamatti, and Benedict Cumberbatch, the largely unknown Lupita Nyong’o gives the performance that’s burned in our brains.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Jared Leto, Dallas Buyers Club
James Gandolfini, Enough Said
Michael Fassbender, 12 Years A Slave
Keith Stanfield, Short Term 12
Ryan Gosling, The Place Beyond The Pines

Honorable Mentions: Barkhad Abdi, Captain Phillips; Bradley Cooper, American Hustle

Best Supporting Actor is the weakest race this year, yet somehow the Oscars still overlooked the marvelous James Gandolfini, who passed away last year, leaving behind a legacy as Tony Soprano. Given the tough-guy roles he’s ordinarily known for, Gandolfini is an unlikely romantic comedy hero, but he sure as hell pulls it off in Nicole Holofcener’s Enough Said, which finds the burly actor courting Julia Louis-Dreyfus in a comedy about taking a second stab at love in middle age. The Sopranos allowed Gandolfini to show off all kinds of gifts, though menace is certainly at the forefront of our minds. So his warmth and charm in this role is a nice way to cap off his career, though it’s a shame we won’t get to see more of him in movies like this.

Meanwhile, Michael Fassbender takes a page from Tony Soprano by playing the villain of 12 Years A Slave. He’s a drunk, he’s a rapist, and he’s a slave owner — so, yeah, not a very nice guy. Edwin Epps is outsmarted by Solomon Northup because Edwin can’t fathom that a slave could be smarter than him; together with his spiteful wife (played by an equally good Sarah Paulson), these two rain down an almost unbearable level of fear and torment on their human property. Yet what makes Fassbender’s performance so special is that there’s a hint of humanity buried underneath it, so we can’t merely write off Epps as a bad guy. He’s a coward and a bully and a brute, but he’s not uncomplicated. Through Fassbender, we understand how these people justified their atrocious actions, even if by modern standards they are nowhere near justifiable anymore.

A lesser-seen and lesser-known performance comes from Keith Stanfield, the young actor who plays Marcus in Short Term 12. It’s a film filled with terrific, understated performances, but Stanfield might have the trickiest role in Marcus, an angry young teenager with no place else to go. We can sense the rage within, as well as a deep well of sadness and betrayal, but Stanfield keeps us on edge wondering if — or when — Marcus will finally snap and do someone in this movie harm. One moment, we’re crying for him, the next we’re afraid he’s done something terrible. There are many poignant moments in Short Term 12, but the unlikely tearjerker is Marcus’ haircut scene.

And then there’s Ryan Gosling, who in 2013 starred in the overblown Gangster Squad and Nicholas Winding Refn’s surprisingly underwhelming Drive follow-up Only God Forgives. At least one of his roles lived up to its potential — the motorcycle-riding bank robber Handsome Luke in The Place Beyond The Pines. Like Margot Robbie, Gosling’s performance is helped by his character’s sense of style. His clothes are a moody hipster’s wet dream, and let’s face it — this is Ryan Gosling, bleached blonde and tatted up on a motorcycle. How could he not be cool? We’ve seen Gosling play the stoic type with rage and violence bubbling just under the surface in several previous roles, so his turn in The Place Beyond The Pines isn’t exactly a revelation. But in a lackluster year for supporting males, Handsome Luke is one of the characters who stayed with me.

This year, Best Supporting Actor the only one of these categories in which my pick will likely line up with the Academy’s. That will almost surely be Jared Leto, whose turn in Dallas Buyers Club is a total transformation within and without. To play the transgender Rayon, Leto doesn’t just put on a wig and some lipstick and call it a day, as many other actors might have. We believe that he believes he’s a woman, and Let fully commits to the femininity without ever winking at the audience. Rayon is a larger-than-life character both in the movie and outside of it, so yes, this is the kind of performance that the Academy likes to reward even when it isn’t done well. In this case, it is. Dallas Buyers Club is more notable for its two towering male performances than it is as a stand-alone movie; it’s a movie about the AIDS epidemic of the eighties that quite possibly under-represents the gay end of the equation, so that point of view is almost entirely up to Leto. Fortunately for us (and him), he nails it.

BEST DIRECTOR

Alfonso Cuaron, Gravity
Steve McQueen, 12 Years A Slave
Martin Scorsese, The Wolf Of Wall Street
Richard Linklater, Before Midnight
Derek Cianfrance, The Place Beyond The Pines

My five favorite directors line up exactly with my five favorite films — but not exactly in the same order. Alfonso Cuaron’s triumph with Gravity was innovative in so many ways — it was a pretty big risk that fortunately paid off. And Steve McQueen had quite a task ahead of him when he set out to make a slave epic that dealt so brutally with those horrors, which gives him the edge over an old pro like Martin Scorsese, whose bloated (but fabulous) The Wolf Of Wall Street cost a lot of money and looks like it. I have to give props to Richard Linklater, who films walk-and-talks so expertly, using incredibly long takes that must’ve been a major challenge. And Derek Cianfrance manages to lend an epic scope to The Place Beyond The Pines, a story that in other hands could feel much smaller.BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

12 Years A Slave — John Ridley
The Wolf Of Wall Street — Terrence Winter
Before Midnight — Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, & Julie Delpy
Short Term 12 — Destin Cretton
Blue Is The Warmest Color — Ghalia Lacroix and Abdellatif Kechiche

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Frances Ha — Noah Baumbach & Greta Gerwig
The Place Beyond The Pines — Derek Cianfrance & Ben Coccio and Darius Marder
American Hustle — David O. Russell and Eric Singer
Side Effects — Scott Z. Burns
Nebraska — Bob Nelson

Though Hollywood sure loves to make movies based on pre-existing material, for once, it was a better year for Original Screenplays than Adapted ones. I don’t necessarily like the Academy’s rules for dividing them — how is Before Midnight an adapted screenplay? What was it adapted from? — I did follow them here, because otherwise it’s just too confusing. Academy nominees Dallas Buyers Club and American Hustle, for example, are both based on real events, which doesn’t make them exactly “original,” but they also both made up a lot of the characters we see on screen. (Jared Leto’s Rayon? Not a real person.) So they’re kind of original, but kind of adapted. Whatever, they’re all pretty good.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

The Great Beauty
12 Years A Slave
The Wolf Of Wall Street
Gravity
Her

BEST SCORE

All Is Lost — Alexander Ebert
The Place Beyond The Pines — Mike Patton
Only God Forgives — Cliff Martinez
Gravity — Steven Price
12 Years A Slave — Hans Zimmer

BEST DRIVING

Ryan Gosling, The Place Beyond The Pines

WORST DRIVING

Leonardo DiCaprio, The Wolf Of Wall Street

BEST FIGHT (VERBAL)

Julie Delpy & Ethan Hawke, Before Midnight

BEST FIGHT (PHYSICAL)

Ryan Gosling & Vithaya Pansringarm, Only God Forgives

BEST TWIST

Side Effects

BEST MUSICAL NUMBER

I’m So Excited

WEIRDEST MUSICAL NUMBER

Spring Breakers

BEST KISS

Jennifer Lawrence & Amy Adams, American Hustle

BEST DRUNK

Bruce Dern, Nebraska & Cate Blanchett, Blue Jasmine

WORST DRUNK

Colin Ferrell, Saving Mr. Banks

BEST STRUGGLING ARTIST

Greta Gerwig, Frances Ha
Oscar Isaac, Inside Llewyn Davis
Lea Seydoux, Blue Is The Warmest Color
Keith Stanfield, Short Term 12
Ernst Umhauer, In The House

BEST SCENE-STEALING WIFE

Jennifer Lawrence, American Hustle
Margot Robbie, The Wolf Of Wall Street
June Squibb, Nebraska
Joanna Scanlan, The Invisible Woman
Oprah Winfrey, Lee Daniels’ The Butler

BEST HUSTLER

Leonardo DiCaprio, The Wolf Of Wall Street
Christian Bale, American Hustle
Alec Baldwin, Blue Jasmine
Channing Tatum, Side Effects
Tom Hanks, Saving Mr. Banks

BEST LONER

Sandra Bullock, Gravity
Robert Redford, All Is Lost
Joaquin Phoenix, Her
Oscar Isaac, Inside Llewyn Davis
Mark Wahlberg, Lone Survivor

BIGGEST BITCH

Kristin Scott Thomas, Only God Forgives
Sarah Paulson, 12 Years A Slave
Meryl Streep, August Osage County
Julia Roberts, August Osage County
Emma Thompson, Saving Mr. Banks

BEST DOUBLE FEATURE

Blue Jasmine & Side Effects
The Wolf Of Wall Street & The Great Beauty
Frances Ha & Inside Llewyn Davis
Captain Phillips & All Is Lost
Saving Mr. Banks & Escape From Tomorrow

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2013 ROSTER

1. The Wolf Of Wall Street
2. 12 Years A Slave
3. Gravity
4. Before Midnight
5. The Place Beyond The Pines
6. Nebraska
7. American Hustle
8. The Bling Ring
Frances Ha
10.The Great Beauty
11.Side Effects
12.Short Term 12
13.Her
14.Blue Jasmine
15.Blue Is The Warmest Color
16.The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
17.Inside Llewyn Davis
18.Drinking Buddies
19.Captain Phillips
20.All Is Lost
21.Dallas Buyers Club
22.Enough Said
23.Mud
24.Stories We Tell
25.Fruitvale Station
26.The Past
27.The East
28.The Invisible Woman
29.The Spectacular Now
30.The World’s End
31.This Is The End
32.In The House
33.Much Ado About Nothing
34.Stoker
35.Prisoners
36.I’m So Excited
37.The English Teacher
38.Disconnect
39.August Osage County
40.Lone Survivor
41.Gimme The Loot
42.The Way Way Back
43.The Call
44.The Conjuring
45.Lovelace
46.Lee Daniels’ The Butler
47.Thor: The Dark World
48.Philomena
49.Saving Mr. Banks
50.Upstream Color
51.Only God Forgives
52.Pain and Gain
53.C.O.G.
54.Iron Man 3
55.Trance
56.We’re The Millers
57.Prince Avalanche
58.White House Down
59.Identity Thief
60.The Kings Of Summer
61.Oz The Great And Powerful
62.The Great Gatsby
63.Spring Breakers
64.Jobs
65.Computer Chess
66.Parkland
67.Post Tenebras Lux
68.The Canyons
69.Gangster Squad
70.Escape From Tomorrow

*

The secret is out.

If you don’t know the main twist in Gone Girl by now, then I feel sorry for you, because you will undoubtedly be spoiled any minute now, given the level of buzz the film has received. (And definitely by me, if you keep reading.)

David Fincher’s fantastic thriller has spawned countless articles claiming it is everything from another regressive, misogynistic entry in the psycho-bitch subgenre (joining the ranks of Fatal Attraction, Obsessed, Single White Female, and Basic Instinct) to the most feminist film in years. It has prompted debates about women who cry rape, the roles of husbands and wives in a marriage, victims as portrayed by the media.

The debate has also launched discussion of how Fincher treats women in his films. His oeuvre is best remembered by titles like Fight Club, The Social Network, and Se7en, which feature smart, sophisticated roles for males and not a whole lot of women.

But what tends to be left out of the conversation are all the strong female characters that have appeared in Fincher movies. Not every one of his films is a feminist showcase, but on the whole he’s treated women a lot better than many current filmmakers, especially those making the kinds of suspense thrillers Fincher is typically drawn to. With Fincher’s meticulous eye for detail and tendency to do many, many takes of any given scene, pretty much any actor or actress he works with delivers a solid performance that imbues the character with so much more than we tend to get from other studio films.

So here is my definitive ranking of Fincher’s films, from least to most feminist.

10. ZODIAC

Fincher’s best movie is pretty inarguably also his least feminist. The Zodiac killer murders people pretty indiscriminately, with male and female victims alike. A few of the female victims (or near victims) have satisfyingly tense scenes — in fact, they’re some of the most terrifying kill scenes ever seen in a movie. That includes Darlene Ferrin, shot by the Zodiac at a lovers’ lane, who seems to think she knows the killer but dies before confirming that; it also includes Cecelia, whose lakeside picnic is thoroughly ruined by a man covered head-to-toe in black, wielding both a knife and a gun. In both cases, the men survive but the women are killed. Of course, that’s not Fincher’s doing — that’s just what happened.

None of these victims emerges as a major character, for obvious reasons. The only female character truly present here is Melanie (Chloe Sevigny), cartoonist-turned-Zodiac-hunter Robert Graysmith’s wife, but she has only a handful of scenes and basically becomes the naggy shrew wife archetype (though she’s being perfectly rational when she asks her husband to stop provoking a dangerous and unpredictable serial killer). Given that this movie is based on true events and takes place mostly in the 1970s, it makes sense that the film’s central trio would be male (as played by Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, and Robert Downey Jr.). I don’t fault Zodiac for being a very masculine film, but it doesn’t help Fincher’s case in relation to the female roles in his films, either. Next!9. THE SOCIAL NETWORK

Another (somewhat) true story in which males take up virtually all the major roles, The Social Network does have at least one memorable female who banters Sorkin-style with Mark Zuckerberg in the film’s indelible opening scene. That’s Erica Albright (Rooney Mara), in her breakout performance as the girl who inspired Facebook to happen. That’s arguably a powerful, world-changing position for a female, except Erica Albright is fictional, a device entirely invented by Aaron Sorkin to suggest Zuckerberg’s narcissistic loneliness, and she also doesn’t actually do anything but inspire Zuckerburg to dismiss women. (Facebook is created after a rather misogynistic site that ranks the looks of female Harvard students gets shut down.) The Social Network has been accused of making up all but the broadest beats of its story, but the Erica Albright character nicely highlights how being just a few clicks away from the majority of the population doesn’t necessarily mean we’re any more connected to each other, especially in the fantastic final moments when Zuckerberg just keeps refreshing his Facebook page, hoping Erica will add him as a friend.

At least we get the sense that Erica Albright exits the movie because Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t deserve her — she is solidly in charge of that decision, and declining his friendship early on is probably the wisest thing she could do, given how he ends up treating his other buddies. Beyond Erica, we also briefly meet Eduardo Saverin’s girlfriend Christy (Brenda Song), who goes into psycho-bitch mode when she feels marginalized, and the cute college girl that clues Sean Parker into Facebook. But the female roles are largely relegated to various hookups or love interests despite Sorkin’s usual knack for writing smart women. The exception is Marilyn Delpy (Rashida Jones), a lawyer on Zuckerberg’s team who attempts to get through to him about being more likable and fails pretty miserably. Still, all these women are window dressing in a male-driven ensemble about the age of the internet and the advent of social media. Of course, it’s a very male-driven field in real life as well, for which Fincher can’t be faulted.

8. SE7EN

Se7en is another movie with a virtually all-male cast, centering on the detective duo played by Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman who eventually square off against a male killer played by Kevin Spacey. The film’s treatment of women — and all of humanity, really — is dark, as the female victims are a prostitute who is raped to death by a killer sex toy and a model who chooses to commit suicide rather than live as a disfigured woman. Of course, all of the killer’s victims are meant to come across as morally depraved in some way, representing lowlifes who abuse one or more of the seven deadly sins.

The lightest and most likable character in the movie is Detective Mills’ wife Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow), who strikes up a secret friendship with Detective Somerset after moving with her husband to a big city where she doesn’t know anyone. In most such thrillers, “the wife” is a barely-there presence who tends to nag her husband about working too much and not spending time with the family. Here, however, Tracy is a fully fleshed-out character who confides in Somserset that she’s pregnant and unsure about whether or not she should keep the child.

This might seem like a curious detour for a grim procedural like Se7en, but as it turns out, being sympathetic to Tracy is key for the film’s shocking denouement, when the killer has a delivery man drop off a special “package” containing Tracy’s pretty head. (That’s the reason Se7en ranks as a favorite amongst Gwyneth-haters.) Because we got to know Tracy so well, the moment feels like a true tragedy, and we’re right there with Mills as his grief at the loss of his wife and unborn child causes him to kill the unnamed murderer. It’s gloomy stuff, but certainly not the last time Fincher dares to go where other filmmakers are less likely to. Unfortunately, the fact that the only female character in the film ends up decapitated doesn’t really give Fincher much credit as a feminist filmmaker, so, moving on…7. THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON

Fincher’s most widely derided movie is also the one that is his least Fincher-esque. At first glance, it seems too heartwarming and benign to come from the man who made Fight Club and Se7en, but The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button has its share of grim moments and is all about death. Though Brad Pitt is the star, in a lot of ways the movie belongs to Daisy (Cate Blanchett), who ends up taking care of the reverse-aging Benjamin as he becomes an infant (in much the same way a woman might need to take care of an aging man as he grows senile). She’s the one reading Benjamin’s diary from her own deathbed in the film’s book-ending device (which unfolds as Hurricane Katrina rages).

The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button also has strong female roles for Tilda Swinton and Taraji P. Henson (who was Oscar-nominated for her work), but none of them escape the overall storybook quality of this movie, which is more about sweeping themes than characters who break any sort of mold. The female characters are all pretty typical, functioning more as foils for the male protagonist than they do as women with their own agendas and inner lives. Still, as usual, Fincher tends to work with actresses who can elevate the material, and Cate Blanchett is more than capable. The decades-spanning story allows us to see a woman’s whole life unfold — but that life that largely revolves around Benjamin. 6. THE GAME

The only major female role in 1997’s The Game is Christine, played by Deborah Kara Unger (a role originally intended for future Fincher collaborator Jodie Foster). At first, Christine seems like a hapless victim of “the game” unleashed upon the wealthy Nicholas Van Orton by the shady and elusive CSR as part of a bizarre gift from his brother Conrad. However, Nicholas soon comes to suspect that Christine is in on it — and she is. Christine and Nicholas briefly join forces as she explains that CSR has relieved him of his finances, but then he realizes she’s drugged him and he’s back to suspecting her of foul play. In the climax, Nicholas holds Christine at gunpoint as she tearfully pleads with him to realize that this is all an elaborate put-on — which is also a put-on, because Nicholas arriving with a gun was also a part of the ruse.

Christine ends up being our main source of information (and misinformation) about the culprit behind Nicholas’ wacky birthday present, and we suspect her of being both a victim and a villain multiple times before the final truth is revealed. It’s a fun twist on the typical girl sidekick/love interest archetype we often see in such films, but she’s not exactly the femme fatale either. She’s a woman doing her job, and doing it pretty damn well, and Deborah Kara Unger and Fincher keep us guessing about her allegiances all the way through. It’s a more complicated female role than anything Fincher offered up until his recent book adaptations.5. FIGHT CLUB

Of all Fincher’s movies, Fight Club has to be the most masculine, because it’s all about men beating each other up to prove that they’re men. Our narrator, played by Edward Norton, feels emasculated by too much luxury and a cushy office job. Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) enters his life to shake him out of his stupor, inspiring him to cause crimes and start an underground fight club where men ranging from pretty boy Angel (Jared Leto) to big-titted Bob (Meat Loaf) can duke it out ’til they’re left bruised and bleeding on the floor. But oops! The group also has a secret anarchist manifesto bent on totally rewiring society.

The reason Fight Club ranks so highly amongst Fincher’s feminist films is because it has one truly awesome female character — the chain-smoking, terminally depressed Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), who is perpetually on the verge of killing herself. We meet Marla at a support group for survivors of testicular cancer, and the lady does have balls — she tosses off quotable gems like, “I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school!”

It appears for a while that Marla has ditched our hero to fuck around with Tyler Durden instead, but when Tyler ends up being our narrator’s imagined alter ego instead of a flesh-and-blood character, we realize it’s his erratic behavior that’s been hurting Marla, not the other way around. The finale of the movie, featuring Marla and the narrator holding hands and watching a city crumble to pieces around them, is one of the weirdest and most memorable romantic climaxes ever put to film.

4. GONE GIRL

Is Amy Dunne a regressive character? Or have we finally just progressed enough to let women be devious psychopaths, too? Gone Girl plays on gender stereotypes by posing a whodunit that automatically revolves around male suspects, because that’s how we’ve come to expect these things to play out. Men are the killers and women are their victims. Amy knows that, too, which is how she’s able to be so successful at playing the police and the media, allowing them to come to the conclusion that it must have been Nick Dunne who did away with his wife.

Of course, it’s Amy who did away with herself, but when Nick starts playing along with her games, Amy changes her tune and decides to pin the blame on another former lover instead — Desi, who is graphically killed during an intense sex scene that leaves her covered in his blood. That Amy would go to such extremes — having sex with Desi just so she can claim he raped her — raised a lot of questions about real-life rape accusations. Is this Fincher’s view of women — Type A control freaks who will cry rape, kill, send men to prison, or trap men in a marriage  just to project the perfect image of domestic bliss? No. Amy Dunne is a horrible person who expends most of her energy getting revenge against men she perceives to have wronged her (though those wrongs aren’t always so severe). But Nick ends up returning to her, not because he’s trapped (as some seem to believe), but because their partnership in deceit begins to make a weird kind of sense to him. In the end, Nick and Amy’s relationship is a true marriage of equal partnership. They are both willfully partaking in a public deceit.

Deliciously portrayed by Rosamund Pike, Amy is far from the first female psycho-killer to grace the big screen, but the fact that she gets away with it in the end is much more novel. The killer in such films is no longer the lusty single woman who threatens the male protagonist’s family — she is the family herself. The reason Gone Girl gets away with making Amy such a total psycho is that writer Gillian Flynn grounds with film with an array of other colorful female characters, some wicked, some virtuous. (The film’s de facto hero Detective Boney is a woman, and Nick’s twin sister Margo is a surrogate for the audience.) Fincher has fun playing with stereotypes here, marrying the icy Hitchcock blonde archetype and the knife-wielding psycho in a movie that makes the villain and the victim the same person. There’s no question that Amy is driving this story — she’s a woman you don’t want to fuck with, in any sense of that word. At its most basic level, Gone Girl can be read as an exploitation of men’s fears of rape accusations and controlling wives, but there’s so much more to it than that.

3. ALIEN3

Alien3 is the weakest of the Alien series, and one of Fincher’s least-liked movies, largely because it feels like a betrayal of James Cameron’s spectacular Aliens to kill poor little Newt off-screen. Due to the mother-daughter bond between Ripley and Newt, the butch supporting player Vasquez, and the fact that the big bad villain, the Alien Queen, is also a female, Aliens definitely scores as the more feminist film in the series. (As does Alien Resurrection, which added Winona Ryder to the mix. And we can’t leave out the 1979 original, which made Ripley a lone survivor in the first place.) Alien3 sports the most masculine Ripley, head shaved and a sour attitude, the sole female amidst a ship of prisoners who face off against the aliens. Ripley eventually sacrifices herself because she’s carrying an alien inside her, another dour and disappointing plot beat after Ripley has come so far in the series.

However, it can’t be denied that Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley is absolutely the most badass action movie heroine of all time, and she still manages to kick plenty of ass in the third installment, even if we end up liking her better in the first two movies. Fincher can’t take too much credit for Ripley here, as the character was kicking ass long before he sat in the director’s chair, but he benefits from jumping into an awesome feminist franchise for his directorial debut (!). Alien3 might score a tad higher if it didn’t undo so much of the good work done in Cameron’s Aliens in the process.   2. THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

At first, Fincher’s decision to cast the girl who played Erica Albright as the autistic punk Lisbeth Salander in his adaptation of Steig Larsson’s bestseller The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo seemed like madness. But as usual in Fincher’s films, the casting ended up being perfect. Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth is tough, resourceful, and has no patience for politeness due to a rough upbringing that left her well-being in the hands of some shady government officials. In a controversial moment, Lisbeth’s guardian ties her down and forces anal sex on her, and Fincher lingers in the moment longer than other filmmakers might in order to depict the extent of her suffering. But Lisbeth is no mere victim. She exacts her revenge in a scene that is equally graphic as the rapist becomes the victim. Many directors wouldn’t handle this material with the right touch, but the way Fincher depicts it, it feels icky in all the right ways and none of the wrong ones.

Any faults with the sexual politics in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo stem largely from the source material. Fincher’s adaptation actually tamps down some of the problematic elements in the novel, like how just about every female in the book throws herself at the male protagonist. (He’s played by James Bond, AKA Daniel Craig, but he’s supposed to be a down-on-his-luck middle-aged journalist, so it’s not quite so sexy.) Did this story really need Lisbeth to jump Blomkvist’s bones and, in the end, grow jealous when seeing him return to his editor and lover (played by Robin Wright)? Not really, but it’s in the book, and it’s kind of cool that Lisbeth takes charge and dispenses with any foreplay or niceties when she decides she that wants him. She just goes for it. Get it, girl!

As portrayed by Rooney Mara, Lisbeth Salander is pretty badass; despite her Oscar nomination, the film wasn’t exactly a runaway hit, which means we probably won’t see Fincher and Mara reteam for the book’s two sequels. (This one ends on a downbeat note that clearly assumes the story continues.) Larsson’s follow-up books are even more problematic than this one, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed that this could be the bittersweet end of the girl with the dragon tattoo.1. PANIC ROOM

Didn’t Kristen Stewart learn anything from Jodie Foster? Before playing Bella in the regressive Twilight series, Stewart played Foster’s daughter in Fincher’s Panic Room, a female-driven suspense thriller. Jodie Foster has been defying gender stereotypes since childhood, so it’s sort of fun to see her as the mother of a tomboyish daughter here. Foster is Meg Altman, who sure isn’t hurting financially after a divorce that left her with enough bank to purchase an enormous four-story brownstone on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. (Seriously?)

As luck would have it, Meg and Sarah end up being robbed on the very night they move in by a trio of guys looking for a payday located somewhere in the house. Fortunately, the house comes complete with a panic room. Meg and Sarah lock themselves in as the robbers attempt to flush them out. Complicating matters are Sarah’s diabetes and the fact that the money the bad guys want is in the panic room. It’s a woman and her daughter versus three big, bad men.

As usual, Jodie Foster plays a competent, compelling character. She’s also a relatable mother who is fucking terrified by the fact that there are dangerous men in her house. She’s cool under pressure but just barely, the way we like to think we’d all behave in a similar situation. Foster eventually manages to kick some ass, but this never falls outside the realm of believability, and when she calls her ex-husband for help, he shows up and becomes just another victim that Meg has to rescue. (A lot of movies would have had the male swoop in to save the day.) It is a change of heart from one of the robbers (Forest Whitaker) that ultimately saves Meg from the most murderous of the trio. Still, Foster’s paradoxical tough fragility totally owns this film, and anyone who says Fincher isn’t a feminist would have a hard time explaining this one into such an argument.

*

Continuing my retroactive Top 10 lists, this one takes us back to 2006, originally published in my “Confessions of a Dangerous Film Student” column in INsite Boston.

“Black Gold: Darkness Reigns During Awards Season”

I like fun. I promise.

But when it comes to selecting the year’s best movies, I’m not much for sunshine and puppy dogs — I’m all about drama. Whereas the Academy is more likely to recognize reasonably safe, audience-friendly films — you know, the ones that won’t send aging voters to the ER — the movies I reward tend to challenge and enlighten in ways Dreamgirls wouldn’t dream of.

So yes, this list is dark. It has a high body count. The films that aren’t death-centric revolve around drug addiction, pedophilia, or statutory rape instead. But considering how few of the silver screen’s pitch-black gems get the gold they deserve, it’s only fair that I recognize their murky genius here.

So without further ado… from out of the shadows rise my Top Ten Films Of The Year!!

10. NOTES ON A SCANDAL

Helen Mirren may be the critic’s darling for her cool portrayal of The Queen, but those who like their dames less regal should make note of Judi Dench’s icy turn in Notes On A Scandal. Dame Judi is positively nasty as Barbara Covett, a spinster school marm who takes a fancy to the hot new teacher on the scene, Sheba Hart. Covett both befriends and resents the younger teacher, especially as Sheba begins an affair with a studly student.

It’s wicked fun to hear the usually-mannered Dench rattle off nasty zingers from Patrick Marber’s script, contained in the diary that acts as Covett’s co-conspirator, as she convinces herself that she’s doing Sheba a favor when really, she’s lording power over her with the mistaken belief that this can somehow end in some happy romance. As usual, Blanchett makes for an alluring foil who imbues Sheba with layers of complexity. While it’s all fun enough to be one of the lighter entries on my list, we do have infidelity, blackmail, and age-inappropriate sex, which all results in a scandalously satisfying viewing experience.9. CASINO ROYALE

Sorry, Pierce Brosnan, but Daniel Craig makes your 007 look like 003 and a half, tops. The recasting of one of the world’s most iconic film roles is only the first aspect that makes Martin Campbell’s James Bond remake feel like a totally fresh franchise. For quite some time now, 007 films have been rather silly affairs, with the Bond girls and the dastardly plots only a few steps removed from their parodies in the Austin Powers movies. (That’s what you get when you cast Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist named Christmas Jones.)

Sure, Casino Royale is as slick and diverting as any prior Bond film, enough to satisfy purists. But it’s also smart enough to modernize Bond for a more progressive era with savvier-than-average Bond girls (welcome to the club, Eva Green) and a dapper but less smarmy Bond (notice that a buffed-up Craig is the one now climbing voluptuously out of the water). By getting gritty with the torture and making James a realistic, vulnerable human being, for once (gasp!), Casino Royale goes deeper and darker than any other Bond has previously dared, shaking our nerves while stirring our emotions. Let’s have another round! (As if there were any danger that they’d suddenly stop making Bond films after this.) It’s only fitting that the rare Bond film that would make my Top 10 list is also probably the darkest 007 to date…8. VOLVER

Being an Almodovar film, Volver isn’t exactly dark — it carries the director’s trademark quirkiness and colorful cinematography — but it also centers around a woman who returns from the dead shortly after her granddaughter kills her sexually abusive stepfather, so it ain’t Dora The Explorer either. Penelope Cruz is Raimunda, a woman who is busy dealing with her aunt’s death, her teen daughter, multiple jobs, and then her husband’s body after he’s been stabbed and left for dead on the kitchen floor. Raimunda treats this as just one more pesky task on her “To Do” list, and she doesn’t yet know that her mother has reappeared from beyond the grave and become her sister’s new roommate.

Even moreso than most of his films, Almodovar posits Volver as a love letter to strong and vibrant women — there are almost no male characters of any significance, especially after the pervy stepdad is out of the way. Cruz is so good in this Spanish-language delight, you’ll never want to hear her speak English again! (And I mean that in a nice way.)7. THE DEPARTED

Packed with the likes of DiCaprio, Damon, Nicholson, Wahlberg, (Martin) Sheen, and (Alec) Baldwin, it’s almost shocking to see so much A-list talent on screen in one place in The Departed… especially since, true to its title, nearly everyone bids us a bloody adieu. The Departed is a nasty piece of work, even by Scorsese standards, with a seriously grim outlook dressed up as a slick studio thriller. The premise couldn’t be any more high-concept, with DiCaprio’s Billy Costigan going undercover as an Irish gangster to try and bring down Nicholson’s crime lord Frank Costello, who has himself planted Damon’s Colin within the police force.

The Departed gives us the ultimate domino effect of double crosses and at least one seriously shocking death scene. But Scorsese is the master of violently dispatching great actors, so here, as always, we hate to see ‘em go, but we love to watch ‘em leave. If it doesn’t quite reach the annals of classic cinema the way Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and GoodFellas did, that’s only because Scorsese’s landmark in the past is so incomparable. It’s easily his best since GoodFellas, clear proof that Scorsese can still deliver the nasty goods when he wants to.6. THE FOUNTAIN

The Fountain is a lush, romantic story about eternal love, but don’t worry — it’s about death, too. (And thus, more than worthy of being on my downer Top 10 list.) Darren Aronofsky doubles down on the bombastic bleakness he wrought in Requiem For A Dream in this tale of a terminally ill woman (Rachel Weisz) and the husband (Hugh Jackman) who is desperately seeking a cure for her. Jackman also portrays a conquistador exploring new lands for Queen Isabella, as well as a lonely man traveling through space in the distant future, with only a tree as his companion.

Yes, The Fountain is ambitious enough to take place in the past, present, and future, and the budget is much lower than you might expect it to be in spite of its dazzling cinematography and special effects. With its sprawling timeline, fractured structure, and an overflow of Big Ideas, The Fountain is not for everyone, but Jackson and Weisz turn in astonishingly emotive performances and the film is equally unafraid of being overwrought. Rare is the love story that is really more enamored of our obsession with eternal life, but Aronofsky was obviously the right man for the job.5. PAN’S LABYRINTH

A young girl discovers she’s the lost princess of a magic land… sounds light, right?  Well, Pan’s Labyrinth is the only fairy tale in recent memory to also depict a man’s face being bashed in with a wine bottle, so don’t bring the kids.

It’s been a long time since we saw a cinematic fantasyland as richly imagined as this. And probably even longer since we saw one so devastating. Pan’s Labyrinth takes the “it was all a dream” trope of family-friendly flicks like The Wizard Of Oz a few steps further, presenting a real world we can really understand wanting to dream a life away from. Guillermo Del Toro creates a dazzling fantasy world to offset the cold, cruel real one — and when his young heroine retreats into her imagination, we’re as relieved as she is to get away from the brutality. As fantastic as his fictional monsters are, Pan’s Labyrinth reminds us that these created creatures are only born to help us deal with the real ones.4. LITTLE CHILDREN

Don’t let the innocuous title fool you — Little Children deals with some very grown-up subject matter, and though it’s less death-drenched than most of my list, it’s definitely not for children.

Two restless parents meet cute on a playground (Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson, both incredible) and begin a torrid bout of adultery. That’s pretty lurid on its own. But Little Children also centers on a child molester living with his doting mother (Jackie Earle Haley and Phyllis Somerville, equally incredible). These damaged characters give into their base desires just like — yep! — the titular lil’ kids. It’s a funny, moving, and somewhat disturbing portrait of the suburban underbelly from the man who gave us In The Bedroom. Even the steamy sex scenes between two incredibly attractive actors can’t distract us from the unsettling themes.3. HALF NELSON

Ryan Gosling gives it his all as Half Nelson’s charismatic inner-city teacher, striving to steer his students toward the straight and narrow. But this is not your average feel-good scholastic flick. The difference? Here, teach has a major heroin problem, thus his every encouraging word is laced with hypocrisy. Fun!

We’ve seen plenty of films about how inner city youth are in need of a little TLC, and there’s usually a benevolent educator there to shine a guiding light. Half Nelson gives us the flip side, presenting the teacher as the fuck-up who may never get things right, while allowing us to instill our hope in the next generation (which is the whole point of education). Shareeka Epps more than holds her own as the precocious student who knows teacher’s dirty little secret. The result is a heartbreaking look at how sometimes, the people we look to for guidance are the ones most in need of intervention.2. CHILDREN OF MEN

Much of the Earth’s population has fallen victim to war and famine. And if that’s not bad enough, all of humanity is about to go the way of the dodo. Yes, Children Of Men absolutely belongs on this downbeat list. Fans of Y Tu Mama Tambien already knew Alfonso Cuaron was a terrific filmmaker, but with Children Of Men, he confirmed more: he’s one of the best. Ever.

In a not-too-distant future, women have become infertile. There are no more children. Clive Owen is just one of many sad sacks waiting out human extinction. There is no hope… until radical ex-lover Julianne Moore pops back into his life, with some big news: one woman in all the world is pregnant.

Shocking in moments, painful in others, and tender just when we need a break from the tension, every note Cuaron strikes in Children Of Men is electrifying in ways that bear comparison to the best of Kubrick and Spielberg. Through long takes and otherwise expert filmmaking, he builds the suspense to an almost unbearable degree and delivers a truly surprising moment of violence that tells us all bets are off in this sci-fi dystopia. His apocalyptic tomorrowland feels all too real — it’s one glimpse into the future that actually feels like it could be coming. (But let’s hope not.)1. UNITED 93

No need to explain why this one’s a downer. With 9/11 still very present in the public consciousness, it’s questionable whether we needed a cinematic reminder. But thanks to Paul Greengrass’ riveting, documentary-like approach, United 93 does right what Oliver Stone’s sappy, malfocused World Trade Center did not  — it strips away the politics and aftermath of that fateful day and takes us back to that moment when our generation faced true global terror for the first time. A moment that changed so much forever.

The filmmaking is remarkably invisible, following men and women doing their jobs, going about their business, on a day that begins like any other ordinary day, with no one (but a handful of terrorists) aware that historic events have been set in motion. It’s as if a documentary crew just so happened to be in the right place to capture the action.

With subject matter as monumental as this, Greengrass had the right instinct — go small. Give us the details, and let us fill in what we already know about what’s happening. As the second plane hits, we read on the characters’ faces the devastating disbelief that this is actually happening; as we’re stranded aboard the titular flight in the film’s final act, we feel everything the passengers do. But in a way, we did already.

The brilliance of United 93 is that it approaches September 11 with attention to detail that, anywhere else, would be boring; it focuses on nondescript, everyday individuals to capture our collective horror. We’ve been on planes. We’ve been at work during a crisis. (Though certainly a lesser crisis.) And we were there on 9/11, seeing an unspeakable event unfold on our TV screens.

Many have shied away from this upsetting masterpiece, but it’s their loss — watching United 93 subjects us to terror and despair, sure, but it’s terror and despair we were already subjected to in real life. I can understand not wanting to relive it. But what United 93 does is allow us to process the fear and the grief — not alone, but together. We experience the strength and courage of the passengers in those final moments. Presenting these events to us with as little razzle-dazzle and embellishment as is possible in a narrative feature film, United 93 is a rare, powerful, and cathartic masterpiece in which we not only bear witness to a historic event, but are allowed to become a part of it. United, indeed.*

(A “Then & Now” perspective.)

Like my 2005 list, this Top Ten comes at you twenty strong, because that’s how I wrote it back in the day on my LiveJournal. And like last time, I’ll be adding my commentary about how the movies have held up 11 years later, because tastes change. Some of these movies have aged well in my mind, and others? Not so much.

I don’t think of 2004 as a particularly strong cinematic year in the abstract, mostly because the movies that dominated the Oscars fell, in my mind, in “good, but not great” territory. (They’re in my Top 20 here, but mostly not in the Top Ten.) A Clint Eastwood movie cleaned up in Best Picture, Best Director, and two of the acting categories, and three biopics of varying quality also made stronger showings than they probably deserved. (Those would be the biopics of Ray Charles, Howard Hughes, and J.M. Barrie.) Even the year’s critical darling, Sideways — which did manage to come away with several nominations, including Best Picture — felt too uneven for me to wholeheartedly embrace, despite some lovely moments. (More on that later.)

However, now that I’m looking at 2004 again, I realize how many incredibly strong films came out that year, several of which I’d count amongst my favorites. They just weren’t incredibly well-represented at the Oscars.

So here it is. Let’s revisit 2004.

*

THE TOP 20 FILMS OF 2004

20. RAY

Jamie Foxx had the Oscar for Ray before the film was even released; now that he’s won a Golden Globe, he’s almost a shoo-in to take home the golden guy. I’m happy to say it’ll be a well-deserved award, for Foxx not only captures Ray Charles in a way that few other actors could, but also makes him a dynamic character. Smartly, the film avoids using his blindness as too much of a foil, and allows the story to delve into some of the darker elements of Charles’ life (heavy drug use and lots of womanizing, though they’ve been toned down a bit). Supporting performances are solid and the film has a nifty structure, though I wish it didn’t devolve into Trainspotting territory toward the end. The best moments in Ray are far better than the picture as a whole; those moments are good enough for me. Congratulations in advance, Jamie.

(I haven’t revisted Ray. Of course, Foxx did win the Oscar, and that remains the primary reason the film is at all noteworthy. Like Walk The Line, released the next year, this one became the go-to example for a “typical” musician biopic, the sort mocked in Walk Hard. I’d be curious to see how it plays now, but not quite curious enough to seek it out.)19. MEAN GIRLS

There aren’t many comedies these days that actually get funnier every time you watch them; Tina Fey’s first screenplay (adeptly adapted from a nonfiction book) isn’t a triumph of storytelling, but its consistently wry humor makes repeat viewing enjoyable. No movie this year has spawned half as many worthy one-liners, and the performances are all tons of fun. Lindsay Lohan is a capable leading lady, but Rachel McAdams steals the show as Plastic Regina George, a complete bitch we’d still totally hang out with. Lots of stuff, like a running joke that compares teen girls to feral animals, is funny, but it’s the little things that make this movie stand out: Amy Poehler’s hilarious “Cool Mom,” for one. It’d be pretty lame to call this movie “so fetch,” so… I’m not going to try and make fetch happen. But it’s, y’know… fun.

(Oh, here we go. It’s almost funny to see a comedy staple like this on a Top 20 list. Mean Girls really has held up as one of the most consistent comedies of this century. It hasn’t aged a bit, and in fact, a lot of its more subtle jokes really do take a few viewings to catch on… but now, of course, you’ll hear them quoted often. Fey’s zany brand of humor plays a little better now that we’ve seen 30 Rock and gotten used to it. I still don’t know that this is Top 10 material, but I’m sure I’ve seen it more than any other movie from 2004, so maybe it deserves to be up there.)

18. SIDEWAYS

Critics have overpraised this simple comedy, stretching a small, low-key movie into “the best movie of the year!!” In its straightforwardness and lack of focus, Sideways can’t quite fulfill that hefty obligation, but let’s not forget the movie’s charms: a solid leading man in Paul Giamatti and a lovely supporting performance from Virginia Madsen; a setting and subject that allow for lush, wine-soaked set pieces; and some delicious dialogue in the film’s best scenes. Parts of the movie are superbly written and directed, others left me wanting more from the script. The best scenes center around two middle-aged men struggling with new relationships mid-life. (Have they aged as well as the wine they’re drinking? Not really.) The worst scenes depend partially upon Thomas Haden Church’s one-note, sitcom-level performance, which would be a complete bust if not for his character’s funny lines (as is, he brings nothing to the underwritten character or the movie itself). Still, there are enough funny and touching moments in the film to recommend it — though it’d be far more enjoyable if you imbibed some merlot beforehand.

(I had a bone to pick with Sideways in 2004. I simply didn’t enjoy it as much as most critics did, and I got tired of the heapings of praise I kept hearing. I stand by my assessment of Sideways as a flawed movie, though I’m probably not quite as bothered by it anymore. I’d still call it ever-so-slightly overrated.)

17. HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN

Harry Potter has hit puberty, and so has the series of films based on his adventures. Director Alfonso Cuaron infuses new life into the series, lifting the story off the page and creating a story that truly is as magical as it ought to be. The film isn’t afraid to go a little darker than the prior films in the series, no doubt setting up even further mayhem at Hogwarts. Almost universally agreed to be the best of the Potter films, Harry Potter and the Prisoner Azkaban has me eager for more.

(While all of the following Potter sequels were good enough, none were quite as daring as this. Cuaron was the only filmmaker to really put his own stamp on a Potter movie.)

16. FINDING NEVERLAND

A story can’t really be any cuter than one about the creator of beloved childhood hero Peter Pan and his make-believe games with the real-life boys who inspired it. Really, it just can’t. Unless that man is played by Johnny Depp, doing an accent. Hooray for Finding Neverland, then! It’s a bit somber for a family film, a bit light for an adult drama, but Finding Neverland tells an engaging story with a fine cast (Kate Winslet, Julie Christie, Freddie Highmore, Radha Mitchell, and Dustin Hoffman all do solid work). It touches on important, mature themes, but never strays far from childhood, much like its subject. Strangely enough, the figure who never quite comes into focus is J.M. Barrie himself, but the movie is so good-natured and well-executed we hardly notice. Seeing “Peter Pan” performed for the first time (and how people react to it) is especially fun.

(This review tells me I liked this movie a lot more in 2004 than I thought I did. I don’t recall any particular for it, maybe because Depp has overstayed his welcome as a movie star in his latest endeavors. On the other hand, Kate Winslet is worth watching, always. I still don’t see myself going out of my way to see this again.) 15. A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT

Audrey Tautou more or less reprises the role of Amelie for Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s wartime love story about a woman determined to find her lost lover against all odds. The cinematography is beautiful, and the more serious subject matter lends itself to Jeunet’s talents for creating big moments out of small things. Tautou is winning, as always, and the supporting characters are just as well-drawn. A sweeping love story, an epic war, comedy, drama, suspense, Jodie Foster, and the French — A Very Long Engagement has it all.

(I’ll have to trust my 2004 opinion. This isn’t a movie I’ve thought much about, though I’m sure it’s perfectly fine, still. The problem with Top 20 lists is that they’re bound to be padded with some decent but unremarkable films.)

14. MILLION DOLLAR BABY

Okay, so Clint Eastwood looks like an exhumed corpse and the trailer made this movie look godawful. It’s actually pretty good. Hilary Swank deserves the Oscar she’s probably going to get for her portrayal of a driven boxer-wannabe who won’t give up because she’s got no other future. Morgan Freeman lends his graceful presence as the narrator and Eastwood’s longtime friend, and he too will be nominated for his efforts here. Eastwood’s gruff presence is sometimes right on target and sometimes a little awkward (I personally think it’d be a better film with someone else as the lead), but that’s the way he likes it. He takes his sweet time getting to where the story is going, but it thankfully deviates from the usual sports champion film formula and instead delves into some dark, somber themes. Eastwood should be praised for his originality in tackling the material, from his moody (lack of) lighting to his willingness to abandon the tried-and-true Hollywood champ-movie formula. Million Dollar Baby packs in a few surprises — one of them being that it’s not terrible.

(Ouch. Some harsh words from 2004 me. I think Eastwood’s movies are often more acclaimed than they should be — though many of his more recent efforts have earned dwindling praise for this very reason — but this one does feel like a bit of a classic. It’s easy to see why it won so many Oscars, including Best Picture, though I still wouldn’t count it amongst my favorite films. Leaving it off my Top 10 may have been a reaction against its frontrunner status — fair enough, though it’s possible I’d find room for it now. Then again, maybe not.)

13. HOTEL RWANDA

It’s hard to compare a movie about mass genocide to one about a few characters squabbling over adultery or enjoying a hootenanny in wine country. As far as big themes go, Hotel Rwanda is the most important film of the year. While the film is competently (but not super impressively) written and directed, the subject matter transcends any flaws that could be found in the storytelling. Hotel Rwanda tells the true story of a man who used his hotel-manager savvy to do an entirely different sort of negotiation, saving the lives of hundreds of Rwandans targeted for death. As that man, Don Cheadle gives an utterly convincing performance that should pave the way for his status as a leading man — and earn him an Oscar nomination. (Sophie Okonedo, as his wife, deserves props as well.)

Though absent of graphic violence, Hotel Rwanda can be difficult to watch — there is constant tension as we wonder how these people are going to stay alive. But the film’s refusal to wallow in unimaginable horror — criticized by some for treating genocide too lightly — and the protagonist’s modest heroism make it watchable and even, at times, uplifting. Director Terry George makes a subtle but clear point about international relations with Africa (basically, that the Western world is unwilling to concern itself with Africa’s troubles), but thankfully leaves unnecessary politics aside, focusing the story entirely on Rwandans. There’s no denying the power of a story like this one, one that many moviegoers will know nothing about. There are some haunting moments here, and while the film doesn’t leave the kind of imprint Schindler’s List does, it isn’t too far off.

(Through a twist of fate, I ended up sitting through this twice in week, which was not ideal. I haven’t watched it since, but I still have a high enough opinion of it. #13 seems like the right slot to me.)12. MEAN CREEK

It’s easy to dismiss or even forget Mean Creek as the subtle gem that it is, but writer-director Jacob Aaron Estes has made a tiny masterpiece that perfectly captures the ferocity and frailty of adolescent males. The film avoids cliches, making every character — even its meanest ones — a real person. Led by an unusually talented young cast (some familiar faces like Trevor Morgan, Scott Mechlowicz, and Kieran Culkin joined by newcomers Ryan Kelley, Josh Peck, and Carly Schroeder — all considerably talented and spot-on), the story is a straightforward, simplistic one, tackling big themes with its young characters. These kids don’t act like adults when faced with tragedy — they act like adolescents, making big, stupid mistakes, and they deal with the consequences. The film is layered with male-male relationships: between brothers, friends, a bully and his victims, all of which seem like natural, uncharted territory. I can’t think of a film that better understands the unspoken rules and hierarchies of adolescent males, the ways they interact with one another, their fears and insecurities. Truly one of the most underrated, underseen films of the year.

(Yep! And still not a movie most people know about. It probably deserved to be in my proper Top Ten, which made me want to cheat and sneak it in there, but instead I preserved the list as it was in 2004, so here it is at #12.)

11. THE BOURNE SUPREMACY

If Collateral was the 2004 film that showed that thrillers can be done in exciting new ways, The Bourne Supremacy is the one that proves there ain’t nothing wrong with tradition. That isn’t to say that Bourne is by-the-numbers in any way — everything here feels fresh, which is particularly impressive since this film is a sequel. This time, Jason Bourne is the hunter, under the false impression that Treadstone is still after him. He still struggles with his memory loss; he is still tortured by his dual-sides: sensitive Matt Damon guy versus calculating killing machine. Damon proves again that he’s a true movie star while Paul Greengrass directs with a fresh, almost documentary-like approach, so the action is all the more immediate and engrossing. It’s all pretty standard fare, but the superb cast (also including Julia Stiles and the always-outstanding Joan Allen) and stylish direction make this an action film that is truly, truly exciting. (Perhaps my favorite moment is the film’s last scene, reincorporating Moby’s “Extreme Ways” at just the right moment.) There are no frills here, just pure, unadulterated wham-bam action. And it’s so much fucking fun.

(This film is actually even more notable than it seemed at the time, one of the first to usher in the handheld camera in a blockbuster — which is now such an action staple, you’ll see almost zero movies that don’t use it. It remains the strongest of the Bourne movies.)

And now, for our main attraction… The Top 10!

10. THE AVIATOR

In a year where most of the would-be epics were anything but (Troy, Alexander, The Alamo), it’s refreshing to see one of those big-star, big-director, big-movie movies actually get it right. Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio make up for the misbegotten Gangs Of New York with the Howard Hughes biopic that deftly balances the man’s soaring career and dazzling public persona with his shadier private life (madness and womanizing and nudity, oh my!). As an added bonus, we are taken back to the glory days of Hollywood to fraternize with icons like Ava Gardner, Louis B. Mayer, Jean Harlow, Erroll Flynn, and Katharine Hepburn.

Like any Scorsese production these days, the film rounds up one of the most impressive casts imaginable — Alec Baldwin, Alan Alda, John C. Reilly, Jude Law, Kate Beckinsale, Willem Dafoe — plus, of course, Cate Blanchett’s very showy turn as the very showy Katherine Hepburn. DiCaprio’s performance is one of his very best and Scorsese’s filmmaking is exciting. You can call the movie bloated, but it’s bloated with so much good stuff it’s hard to complain. There’s something to be said for the big prestigious Hollywood drama that actually delivers.

(I know not every Scorsese fan ranks this amongst his best, and sure, it’s no GoodFellas or Taxi Driver. I have a fondness for Scorsese’s excesses, which is how I picked the similarly sprawling The Wolf Of Wall Street as my favorite film of 2013. I can understand anyone who feels like it’s all too much, but I’ll take this over Ray or Finding Neverland any day.)

9. THE INCREDIBLES

There’s no question that The Incredibles provides some of the most entertainment value you’ll get in any movie this year. What it also does is redefine our expectations of the computer-animated film: The Incredibles masquerades as a family movie, but most of it is pitched at an adult level — which isn’t to say the kids don’t love it too. (Pleasing the parents and the kidlets accounts for the boffo box office.)

Director Brad Bird has taken Pixar to a new level, doing away with the standard Disney formula “kiddie story + some jokes for the adults = all-around hit” and making a bona fide action movie that just happens to be animated. (It’s not hard to imagine a live-action version that plays out in almost exactly the same way.) Will Pixar ever fuck up? After watching The Incredibles, I’m compelled to say, “Probably not.”

(I’m not sure anything Pixar has put out counts as a “fuck up,” but a handful of their attempts since have not found the same level of unanimous praise — take Cars, Brave, or Monsters University. Still, with WALL-E, Toy Story 3, Up, and Inside Out under their belt post-Incredibles, they clearly still have the magic touch most of the time. I did recently see this again, and while many stories since have definitely played in this same superhero sandbox, this remains one of the strongest entries in the genre.)8. KINSEY

Biopics are tailor-made for Oscar season. A famous actor playing a famous persona, often with some sort of accent or disability (see Ray or The Aviator), is bound to get an Oscar nomination. Kinsey, at least, never seems like it’s actively going for the gold; written and directed by Bill Condon, Kinsey is content to tell a fascinating story without being flashy or grandiose.

Kinsey, as portrayed by Liam Neeson, is certainly a worthy subject for a movie, and his ambition to explain sexuality in scientific terms is not only an interesting story, it’s an interesting character study. Why does Kinsey do this? How does it affect his life? More than telling us what happened, Kinsey centers around the man at the heart of it all, and doesn’t try and make light of the fact that his actions, though monumental, might also have been damaging to the people around him.

Neeson and Laura Linney (as Mrs. Kinsey) both turn in great performances, and Condon’s script is tidy and effective. Condon shows us everything we want to see and nothing more; it’s a well-crafted story about an interesting man studying something that fascinates and baffles us all.

(I remember almost nothing about this movie.)

7. BAD EDUCATION

Oh, Pedro Almodovar. What a task you’ve given me, trying to explain why Bad Education is one of the 10 best films of the year. How could I ever summarize what this movie is about, or why it is so compelling? Suffice to say that Bad Education is about real life versus how films depict real-life, and is also an homage to Alfred Hitchcock, and is also a disturbing tale of molestation and abuse in the Catholic church, and also stars Gabriel Garcia Bernal as a cross-dressing prostitute (and that’s just one of his personas). If that doesn’t at least make you curious, I don’t know what will.

Bad Education isn’t a perfectly executed movie — at least, not by traditional Hollywood standards — but that’s part of it’s charm. It forgoes some character development and obscures what, exactly, is going on in order to keep an aura of mystery and suspense. And that’s all right with me. There are excellent performances all around, but Almodovar’s energetic direction is the glue that coheres the choppy individual pieces into a fresh, satisfying whole. The film’s final moment is a chilling stroke of genius — and this is bound to be the creepiest use of “Moon River” ever put to the screen.

(This is probably the film that first set me aflame with Almodovar love, though I saw Talk To Her before this. I’ve only come to appreciate him more since, though this probably remains my favorite. Definitely my cup of dark, fucked up tea.)6. COLLATERAL

Collateral was one of few films this year to give me that geeky film student thrill of excitement at its very coolness. Sure, it’s basically just a standard Hollywood thriller at its core, but it’s such a damn good one! Michael Mann gives us a kinetic jolt in every electrifying scene, even when it’s just a seemingly innocent conversation between a cabbie and his fare. Jamie Foxx and Tom Cruise are pitch-perfect in their respective roles: the daydreaming cab driver and the merciless hitman who holds him captive. The action scenes are plenty good, but what makes the film is the smart dialogue by Stuart Beattie — between Foxx and Cruise, between Foxx and Jada Pinkett Smith, between Cruise and whoever he’s planning to kill. (It’s fun to see Cruise’s usual stalwart hero persona subverted, allowing him to come off as a bloodthirsty asshole for a change.)

You might expect a story centered around a taxi to take place in Manhattan, but this one plays like a nasty love letter to the City of Angels. Mann makes after-hours Los Angeles a very sinister place indeed, and the film packs some smart surprises without getting too caught up in plot twists and turns. A smart thriller (I’d rather call it an “action drama”) is a rare thing, but Collateral has it all — an intelligent plot, compelling characters, plus an exciting visual style.  equals one of the best movies of the year. Not bad, for a Tom Cruise action flick.

(Like The Bourne Supremacy, Collateral looked and felt a lot more “different” than it does now. Its style has been aped, though it is still one of the most respectable thrillers of the past dozen years. Alongside a win for Ray, this was definitely the Year of the Foxx, though it marked an interesting departure for Cruise, whose career is robust as ever in 2015, while Foxx has had only a small handful of memorable parts since. Long story short, this is still a great movie.)

5. BEFORE SUNSET

It was a big year for high-quality sequels, with Shrek 2, The Bourne Supremacy, and Spider-Man 2 repeating themselves all the way to the bank. But the year’s best sequel is Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, reuniting Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy as strangers whose one-night stand in Paris nine years ago left the question “What if?” imprinted in the back of their minds. Hawke and Delpy co-wrote their own stories and dialogue — the performances are fresh and genuine, but also as precise as anything you’ll see elsewhere. (They’re not as improvised as they may seem.)

Best of all, the film unfolds in 80 minutes of real time, following these two characters on a walk through Paris with the sinking sun reminding them that, again, they only have a short time together. Somehow, Linklater pulls all this off flawlessly, and although the film is essentially one long conversation, it’s never boring for a single second. I sincerely hope that this is only the second entry in a series of inspired films.

(And I got my wish! This was actually the first of these films I caught, and it took me several more years to catch Before Sunrise. I still find this the best of the trio, but each film makes the others stronger and more layered. There’s basically no limit to the praise I could heap on Linklater, so I’ll just stop.)

4. CLOSER

It’s unfortunate that many critics were turned off by the morally questionable actions and frank sexual dialogue in Mike Nichols’ Closer (I guess USA Today‘s Mike Clark and Entertainment Weekly‘s Lisa Schwarzbaum never raise their voices or speak of cum). To each their own, but for my money I identify more with Closer‘s fierce, angry lovers than the mopey loser Paul Giamatti portrays in critical darling Sideways. (Come on, guys — everybody gets a little nasty when it comes to sex and love.) Likable or not, the characters in Closer are vividly brought to life by four outstanding performers who, in a just world, would each get an Oscar nomination. (Why Julia Roberts’ delicious foray into bitchville hasn’t received more praise is a mystery to me. She’s fantastic.)

Patrick Marber, who adapted his own stage play, has crafted playful, biting dialogue that puts most Hollywood movies to shame, and Nichols has brought the production to life in a way that rarely betrays the film’s theatrical roots. The movie’s two best scenes occur back-to-back — the supercharged confrontation between Roberts and Clive Owen as they admit their infidelities (it has to be some of the best acting ever), and Natalie Portman’s coy striptease that simultaneously shows us how much and how little she’s willing to reveal. Closer is great fun to watch — how can you go wrong with four incomparable actors spouting off acidic dialogue in a film directed by one of Hollywood’s greatest?

(It surprises me to find this at #4, given that I have the poster in my living room and count it amongst my favorite films. I’ve seen it more than any of my other Top 10 films from 2004. It’s just one of those films that seems like it was made for me — four of my favorite actors screaming at, crying about, and fucking each other, plus some super gorgeous cinematography. It’s not really in the wrong spot on this list, but as I’ve found in other years, sometimes the movies you rank the best don’t necessarily become your favorites.)

3. MARIA FULL OF GRACE

Maria is full of heroin, full of fetus, or full of shit in any given scene in this movie; she is rarely full of grace. But the movie is. Joshua Marston’s documentary-like tale of a young, knocked-up Colombian girl who becomes a drug mule to escape her humdrum home life is both subtle and searing, an exercise in restraint that doesn’t shy away from the real dilemmas girls like Maria face.

At the center of it all, Catalina Sandino Moreno turns in a fantastic first performance. She’s neither a sinner nor a saint but rather your average teenage girl, one who takes a huge gamble that could cost her her life (in several ways). Marston’s movie is smart enough to avoid drug-movie cliches and the sense that you are watching A Very Special Film. It’s all utterly real, unfolding in front of you, neither melodramatic nor underwritten. Maria Full of Grace never makes a misstep — it truly is a graceful picture.

(Still holds up, though we haven’t heard as much from Marston as I would have expected since. Moreno pops up here and there, though she also hasn’t had a role quite as juicy as this. Maybe it’s time for a sequel?)

2. ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND

There’s no doubt that Charlie Kaufman is one of the most original screenwriters out there, but until Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, he hadn’t proven that he could write a story about real people. The ideas in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are brilliant and intricate and unique and absurd, but they’re also rooted in the deepest of human emotions, and that’s what makes it work.

As Joel and Clementine, Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet give some of the most heartfelt performances of their careers. Like the gang from Closer, they’re real people — sometimes they’re cuddly, sometimes they’re assholes. They flirt, they fight, they fuck, they drink — they do all the things that real couples do. Since their relationship is essentially seen backwards, Kaufman shows us their uglier final fights and then slowly reveals the better times, the reasons they were together in the first place. By the end, we’re fighting for their memories to survive not because they’re perfect for each other, but because we know these are the moments that defined their lives, for better or worse.

Director Michel Gondry handles Kaufman’s script masterfully, the perfect visual accompaniment to such a kooky, bizarre screenplay. The supporting characters, too (portrayed by Elijah Wood, Kirsten Dunst, Tom Wilkinson, and Mark Ruffalo) round out the story. It’s a convoluted premise based around a very simple notion: that love is too painful to remember and too important to forget. Anyone who’s ever been in a relationship gone sour should relate. There are beautiful moments both visually and narratively — this is truly a landmark cinematic achievement.

(And has remained so ever since. This might very well be the most enduring film of 2004. If I had to pick one film from this year to preserve for a future civilization to remember us by, it’d probably be this.)

1. DOGVILLE

Lars von Trier’s Dogville is perhaps the year’s biggest anomaly; I moved it around everywhere between #2 and #11 before deciding that it belonged here. It’s difficult to place because it is such a challenging film to enjoy — in some ways, it’s hardly a film at all. What it is is a Dogma 95 study in bare bones moviemaking essentials: a compelling story and strong performances, that’s it. There’s nothing else in Dogville: no sets, no special effects, no locations save the stage itself. Even the titular dog is imaginary.

The ensemble cast is great, and Nicole Kidman proves exactly why she’s Hollywood’s hottest actress in a performance that would be unbearably sweet if not for the film’s tongue-in-cheek finale. It’s easy to see why one would claim that Dogville is a bad, or even terrible, film — with its purported anti-American sentiment, three-hour running time, and blatant disregard for the comforts we look for in today’s moviegoing experience, it’s a film that many (particularly those who are virgins to Von Trier’s always-unconventional storytelling) won’t understand or enjoy. For me, it was a groundbreaking cinematic achievement that went above and beyond its experimental mission statement. My favorite films are those that take risks, and Dogville does so in a major way. There’s simply no way to compare it to these other films. Dogville is in a league of its own, and for me is the year’s crowning cinematic achievement.

(I have soured on Von Trier since this film. I didn’t even bother to see Dogville’s Kidman-less “sequel” Manderlay. I try not to let his more recent efforts get in the way of what was so daring and brilliant about his first few films, which remain great — I just wish he’d move on and do something else for a change. I wrote more in my “#1 Club” revisitation of this film.)

*

BEST DIRECTOR

Michel Gondry — Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Mike Nichols — Closer
Michael Mann — Collateral
Martin Scorsese — The Aviator
Bill Condon — Kinsey

Honorable Mention: Joshua Marston — Maria Full of Grace

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Charlie Kaufman — Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, and Julie Delpy — Before Sunset
Joshua Marston — Maria Full of Grace
Stuart Beattie—Collateral
Bill Condon—Kinsey

Honorable Mention: John Logan — The Aviator

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Patrick Marber — Closer
Paul Haggis — Million Dollar Baby
Jean-Pierre Jeunet — A Very Long Engagement
David Magee — Finding Neverland
Tina Fey — Mean Girls

Honorable Mention: Larry Gross — We Don’t Live Here Anymore

BEST ACTOR

Jamie Foxx — Ray
Leonardo DiCaprio — The Aviator
Liam Neeson — Kinsey
Gabriel Garcia Bernal — Bad Education
Don Cheadle — Hotel Rwanda

Honorable Mention: Ethan Hawke — Before Sunset, Jim Carrey — Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

BEST ACTRESS

Catalina Sandino Moreno — Maria Full Of Grace
Hilary Swank — Million Dollar Baby
Julia Roberts — Closer
Julie Delpy — Before Sunset
Laura Dern — We Don’t Live Here Anymore

Honorable Mention: Nicole Kidman — Dogville; Kate Winslet — Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Clive Owen — Closer
Morgan Freeman — Million Dollar Baby
Jude Law — Closer
Freddie Highmore — Finding Neverland
Peter Sarsgaard — Kinsey

Honorable Mention: Alan Alda — The Aviator

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Virginia Madsen—Sideways
Natalie Portman—Closer
Laura Linney—Kinsey
Cate Blanchett—The Aviator
Sophie Okonedo—Hotel Rwanda

Honorable Mention: Regina King — Ray

BEST ENSEMBLE CAST

Dogville
Closer
Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind
Mean Creek
Collateral

*

2004 FILM RANKINGS

1. Dogville
2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
3. Maria Full of Grace
4. Closer
5. Before Sunset
6. Collateral
7. Bad Education
8. Kinsey
9. The Incredibles
10. The Aviator
11. The Bourne Supremacy
12. Mean Creek
13. Hotel Rwanda
14. Million Dollar Baby
15. A Very Long Engagement
16. Finding Neverland
17. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
18. Sideways
19. Mean Girls
20. Ray
21. Alfie
22. Shrek 2
23. Open Water
24. Garden State
25. Spider-Man 2
26. Saved!
27. Kill Bill Vol. 2
28. Born Into Brothels
29. Fahrenheit 9/11
30. We Don’t Live Here Anymore
31. I, Robot
32. I Heart Huckabee’s
33. In Good Company
34. Good-Bye, Lenin!
35. Little Black Book
36. The Passion of the Christ
37. The Phantom of the Opera
38. Coffee & Cigarettes
39. Hero
40. 13 Going on 30
41. The Terminal
42. Spanglish
43. Ocean’s Twelve
44. Meet the Fockers
45. Napoleon Dynamite
46. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
47. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
48. Alexander
49. Around the Bend
50. The Dreamers
51. Eurotrip
52. The Manchurian Candidate
53. Starsky & Hutch
54. Shark Tale
55. The Day After Tomorrow
56. Saw
57. Troy
58. The Village
59. The Stepford Wives
60. Tarnation
61. Van Helsing
62. The Forgotten
63. A Home at the End of the World
64. The Chronicles of Riddick
65. Catwoman

*

Whether you’re a fan of former president George W. Bush or not, you have to admit his term contained some profound low points, kicking off with 9/11 and ending in a nasty recession. You may or may not blame Bush himself for these and other pieces of unfortunate Americana in the 21st century, but let’s face it: as a nation, we’ve had better.

Several of the big blights the nation grappled with during the (second) Bush regime are reflected in films from the past 15 years, dealt with explicitly in Farenheit 9/11, Recount, United 93 and Oliver Stone’s W., and more subtextually in Munich or 25th Hour (or any number of others). It’s only about now, though, that we’re able to step back and see things in context, which is why we’re getting movies that deal with these themes at a smaller, more intimate level. We’ve seen a lot of movies about the forest. Now we’re seeing the ones that are about the trees.

99 Homes centers on the financial debacle Bush dropped in Obama’s lap on his way out of the Oval Office. The 2008 recession has been the subject of a few films already, of course — we saw it from a Wall Street’s point of view in Margin Call, way up high at skyscraper level. Now 99 Homes gives us a ground’s eye view: the perspective of the families forced to relinquish their homes to the very banks who effed up in lending to them in the first place. Andrew Garfield plays Dennis Nash, a construction worker facing hard times because in 2008, there isn’t a whole lot of new construction going on. Nash has a mortgage on the home he grew up in and still lives in with his mom Lynn (Laura Dern) and son Connor (Noah Lomax). Then, one day, they’re out on the street, with only a few dollars in their pockets. Theirs is not an uncommon plight.

Nash is resourceful enough to find a (literally) shitty job cleaning up a house its owners left riddled with feces as a “fuck you” to the bank. Real estate mogul Rick Carver (Michael Shannon) takes a shine to Dennis’ plucky attitude and recruits him for some shady but lucrative dealings. Dennis is a good guy at heart, but he ultimately doesn’t have a lot of qualms about screwing the system that screwed him first. Soon, Nash has the cash to buy his family home back — or buy a dreamy mansion, as he is tempted and seduced by the very factors that got him in trouble in the first place. Carver advises him to not get sentimental about real estate, but that doesn’t end up being very good advice. Despite the way it may look on paper, homes are not just the boxes we reside in. They contain our whole lives.Carver is a bastard and he knows it, but as the film unfolds, the twisted logic he uses to justify his riches starts making a lot of sense, both to Dennis and to us in the audience. Michael Shannon takes pleasure in this dirty, greasy rich prick role, the way Shannon manages to sink his teeth into despicable villain roles that many actors would be afraid to take. Dern is unfortunately underused, beginning in “worried mom” mode and never permitted to go beyond it. Buying Garfield as a low-income construction worker takes a moment to get used to, but he ably carries the film once we settle into the story.

Directed by Ramin Bahrani, 99 Homes has  moments of life-and-death suspense, but the real tension comes from scenes in which we see everyday Americans fight the powers that be — the bankers, the government, the police — to save their homes… and lose, over and over. These people did nothing wrong, except believe in the myth of the American dream, listen to the “authorities,” and follow the road map every middle class American is handed, telling us we’re supposed to buy houses, and cars, and whatever else we can get our hands on. It’s practically a birthright — or it seemed that way, before it became painfully obvious that no one in this scheme knew exactly what they were doing. It’s a horrible injustice.

Unfortunately, Bahrani’s plot takes a slightly more conventional and melodramatic turn toward the end of 99 Homes than it really needed to, as if it didn’t trust that the stakes were high enough when it was just ordinary people faced with greed and corruption and a very broken system. This is a horror most of us already lived through, at some level — if we didn’t lose a home, perhaps we lost a job or our sense of security. Its setting in the very recent past injects 99 Homes with more urgency than you’d usually get from this sort of drama. A couple of Michael Shannon’s juicier monologues spell out this movie’s themes, but we didn’t really need them to. We’ve been living those themes since 2008.A similar but much higher profile injustice is explored in Truth, the dramatization of news producer Mary Mapes’ eventual firing by CBS following a 60 Minutes segment that questioned George W. Bush’s military service. The issues raised by Mapes and Dan Rather have a lot of legitimacy and are worthy of investigation, but instead the public gets hung up on whether or not CBS got fooled by forged documents. The point of the piece gets completely lost amidst all the nitpicking, and Mapes, Rather, and a handful of others lose their jobs due to bureaucracy and implied pressures from the Bush administration.

George W. Bush ends up being the villain in this movie without even being seen in it; he’s probably not directly responsible for any of this, but we never actually see the minions do their bidding. By the time it gets down to Mapes, the ill will has been funneled through a number of levels, which only adds to the feeling of helplessness she (and we) feel against The System. In the third act, Mapes is scrutinized and demonized by a committee of conservative lawyers who are hell-bent on uncovering Mapes’ “radical liberal” agenda, standing in for a large segment of the population who holds the same beliefs. (And whom we can thank for voting for Bush. Twice.) As its in-your-face title may suggest, Truth is not terribly subtle about the issues it’s exploring. Like 99 Homes, it feels the urge to monologue its Big Ideas, with plenty of grandstanding about journalistic integrity and corporate corruption along the way.

This is Zodiac writer James Vanderbilt’s first foray into directing. The result is that a few scenes work like gangbusters, while others come off as a bit stagey. A key component of Truth‘s more successful moments, of course, is Cate Blanchett as Mary Mapes, who proves that she can deliver a near-Oscar caliber performance in just about anything. Any time Blanchett and Robert Redford, who plays Rather, are on screen together, the film gets an electric charge from its high-wattage stars. The film contains a host of other recognizable faces in smaller roles — Dennis Quaid, Elisabeth Moss, Dermot Mulroney, Stacy Keach, Topher Grace — but they don’t all fare as well as Blanchett and Redford, since they’re mostly saddled with exposition and monologues. It’s impossible not to compare Truth to another tale of 60 Minutes segments gone haywire, Michael Mann’s The Insider, one of the all-time great films about journalism. Blanchett is every bit as good here as Al Pacino was there, but Truth spends so much time examining the Big Issues that it never quite gets around to developing its characters as individual human beings. Ultimately, the ideas on Vanderbilt’s mind end up being more compelling than the execution.A third film delving into fairly recent Americana is Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs. This one is set closer to George H.W. Bush’s reign than his son’s, however. (It takes place in 1984, 1988, and 1998, thereby avoiding the first Bush presidency altogether, despite its proximity.) There’s nothing terribly political about Steve Jobs, of course, except that it leaves us on the eve of the tech revolution that introduced the iMac to consumers, kicking off a whole wave of innovation that would bring us the iPod, iPhone, and iPad — all of which changed modern life as we know it. Technically set in the past, Steve Jobs is very much about the now. It’s the kind of movie that wouldn’t work at all unless we all knew what happened after.

Predictably, Steve Jobs feels like a spiritual sequel to The Social Network — or technically, a prequel, since without Steve Jobs there is no Mark Zuckerberg. Both films were written by Aaron Sorkin. Both play fast and loose with facts. Both portray their subjects as ego-maniacal assholes who push away the people they love (or the people they should love) in favor of unbridled genius. This is a particularly dicey position to take with Jobs, a man who is essentially worshipped, perhaps the closest we’ve come to a modern deity. You can write Mark Zuckerberg off as a spoiled whippersnapper who got lucky, if you wish, but with Steve Jobs, it’s more complicated. Jobs really worked before he was able to change the world.

As concocted by Sorkin, Steve Jobs unfolds in three theatrical acts, each revolving around the same handful of characters buzzing in and out of Jobs’ orbit just before he embarks on one of his now-infamous product launches. It’s a nifty gimmick, one that’s obviously meant to be taken with a grain of salt, given that there’s not a chance in hell any of these events actually unfolded as depicted here. This is an excuse for Sorkin to do what he does best, which is to portray very smart, very articulate professionals in their workplace, spouting ideas that say more about the macro state of the world than they do about any of them as individuals.

Steve Jobs isn’t all that much about Steve Jobs, the same way The Social Network wasn’t exactly about Mark Zuckerburg or Sean Parker, and Citizen Kane isn’t really about William Randolph Hearst. The Social Network‘s main takeaway was about loneliness in the digital age, and the central irony that no amount of virtual “friendship” can truly replace person-to-person intimacy. It depicted a shift in the power balance between the old guard of moneyed upper-crusters to pajamaed freshmen who could make millions without leaving their dorm rooms — a shift that would never have been possible without Steve Jobs. Most of us would agree that Jobs was ahead of the curve, but Steve Jobs depicts him as so ahead of the curve, he’s all but clairvoyant.

In its first act, Jobs is frustrated with the limits of the Macintosh computer, which refuses to say “Hello” as it’s programmed to do; this is crucial because the computer needs to appear friendly and appealing to consumers, and not like the emotionless killer people have in mind thanks largely to HAL9000 of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Ironically, the second act has Jobs unveiling the NeXT computer, a charmless black cube reminiscent of 2001’s mysterious Monolith. Ultimately, neither the Macintosh nor NeXT is a sustainable venture, which leads to the fun and frisky iMac launch of 1998, which we all know turned out just dandy.

But Steve Jobs suggests that it wasn’t just that the iMac had the right look and feel to appeal to the mass market, but that Jobs was essentially just waiting all along for technology to catch up to him. Ultimately, computers couldn’t be a staple in every home until there was a reason for them to be, and that reason was, of course, the internet. Steve Jobs didn’t explicitly know how the internet would start shaping our lives in the 90s, but intuitively he was aware that something like this would create a demand for his products. He was just a little too early with his ideas, and had to wait for the rest of the world to catch up.

Boyle gives us only hints of glimpses at the tech obsessives who made Jobs a god for the 21st century — stamping their feet and hollering for their deity, though the film focuses exclusively on Jobs’ closest confidantes and family. Despite posing Jobs as a prickly mogul who sacrificed personal relationships for his status as one of the most influential innovators of all time, the film is ultimately optimistic about all the wonderful toys Jobs left us with, treating technology not as a harbinger of doom the way it’s portrayed in most movies, but as something that is ultimately poised to bring human beings closer together.

Steve Jobs spends a lot of time on Jobs’ non-relationship with his daughter Lisa, who he refuses to acknowledge is his daughter in the film’s earliest segment. This is obviously tied to his complicated feelings about his own biological parents, who gave him up for adoption. It’s an echo of the way Zuckerberg isolates his friends in The Social Network, but in Steve Jobs, technology is the link that allows Jobs to connect with his daughter, rather than what comes between them. Jobs cherishes Lisa’s childhood drawing on a rudimentary paint program more than any time actually spent with her; a teenage Lisa’s Walkman inspires him to create a device that will allow her to carry  a thousand songs instead of just one album. As wondrous as technology is, in Steve Jobs, it is ultimately only as magnificent as what people can do with it. A computer is just a machine until we turn it on and use it for something incredible. Jobs’ Macs evolve in a way that mirrors Lisa’s own development, but Steve Jobs‘ third act in particular spends a lot more time on the people than the product.Steve Jobs is basically a mash-up of the themes explored in The Social Network and Moneyball, which occasionally make it play more like Aaron Sorkin’s Greatest Hits than a brand new movie standing on its own two feet. There’s sparkling banter and a constant flurry of activity from characters who never sit still but also never go anywhere; the same effect could be achieved for a fraction of the budget if Sorkin just put everyone on a treadmill. Aaron Sorkin has never not been Aaron Sorkin and Steve Jobs is no exception, but the crackling dialogue still contains as much genuine insight into the human condition as it does nifty zingers. As in 99 Homes and Truth, there are on-the-nose monologues that essentially spell out the themes Boyle and Sorkin are dealing with — but nobody does a monologue like Aaron Sorkin, so Steve Jobs can get away with it in a way that those others don’t quite pull off.

In the end, social networks may be slightly juicier cinematic material than the machines that deliver them to us, and so The Social Network will be the more enduring masterpiece. David Fincher had just the right sensibility to mitigate some of Sorkin’s most Sorkinian qualities, and while Daniel Pemberton’s score is plenty good, it’s not going to change the cinematic soundscape the way that Trent Reznor and Atticus Roth did. Boyle does good work here, but also adds a few stylistic flourishes that feel like overkill in a film that’s already so heightened. (Hello, rocket ship! Where did you come from?) The third act focuses too heavily on wrapping up the Lisa story, and the film’s final moments are possibly more upbeat than they needed to be, ending on a Jobs-as-rock-star moment the movie has up until this point wisely avoided.

Steve Jobs has disappointed in wide release, which somewhat mars its chances for major awards consideration — though it’s definitely still in the running. The sterling cast — mainly, Kate Winslet, Jeff Daniels, and Michael Fassbender — all have shots at Oscar nods, and Sorkin’s screenplay seems like a shoo-in. Steve Jobs is ultimately a fascinating look at the dawning of the modern age, its subject matter coming across as both ancient and current simultaneously. It sure is quaint that a computer saying “Hello” used to be a big deal, isn’t it? But at the same time, most of us have witnessed this revolution with our own eyes. And it’s still happening. There’s something almost spooky about seeing the birth of our era brought to life in this way, by a man both out of touch with basic human emotion and eerily prescient about what humans would want and need in the near future. Steve Jobs tells us only a little about who Steve Jobs was. It says a lot more about who we are.

*

“Inspired by the true stories of daring women.”

That’s the title card that precedes David O. Russell’s Joy, the story of an entrepreneur who becomes a titan of the Home Shopping Network. But it would work just as well preceding so many movies from 2015, which has proven itself to be a remarkable year for films about women.

There were still a handful of very male films at the multiplex, of course — movies like The Revenant and Bridge Of Spies and The Big Short don’t have much of a female presence, not to mention any number of more forgettable titles. But this year, perhaps for the first time in history, they were the exception and not the rule. The new Mission: Impossible had a female spy who was as capable and charismatic as Ethan Hunt along every step of the way. The macho title character took a backseat to Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road, which also featured a gang of ass-kicking grannies. And the highest-grossing film of all time handed the reigns of the galaxy’s most beloved franchise to Daisy Ridley’s Skywalker surrogate Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

And those are just the blockbusters. It’s hard to list the number of smaller films centered on women. But here are a few: Victoria. Joy. Carol. Brooklyn. Phoenix. Chi-Raq. Room. Girlhood. The Final Girls. It Follows. Heaven Knows What. Queen Of Earth. Clouds Of Sils Maria. The Age Of Adaline. The Duke Of Burgundy. The Diary Of A Teenage Girl. Unconventional women were the heroines of comedies like Trainwreck and Spy, where they got to behave in ways that usually only men get to. Even in movies that place males front and center, women got to play more than the usual weepy love interest or damsel in distress — I’m thinking of The Martian, Creed, and maybe even the second biggest film of the year, Jurassic World. (But running from a T-Rex in heels makes that kind of debatable, don’t you think?)

Even the current Best Picture front-runner (in a weird and unpredictable awards season), Spotlight, gave Rachel McAdams’ journalist equal weight with the boys. There were no concessions for Sacha being “the girl” on the team, which in a sense is the most progressive move of all. For years, women in movies have been depicted as having to prove themselves in the workplace, Erin Brockovich-style, but Spotlight eliminates that nonsense. I’m fairly certain that Sacha’s gender goes entirely unmentioned in the film.

So Joy isn’t one of my very favorite films this year, but it’s invocation of “daring women” is emblematic of what 2015 brought to the screen. Women got to be daring, and they got to be a lot of other things, too. My Top Ten films aren’t all about women, but they all have something to say about them. I didn’t plan it that way. This just happens to be the year that so many movies got it right when it comes to how women are depicted on screen.

10. TANGERINE

My #10 slot was particularly challenging to fill this year, with a number of worthy contenders vying for representation. It came down to a bout between Creed, the seventh entry in the hit Rocky franchise, the first entry of which won the Best Picture Oscar for 1976, and Tangerine, a scrappy low-budget indie shot entirely on an iPhone.

It occurred to me that the face-off between these two films resembles a Rocky movie itself: in one corner, Tangerine, the underdog, a feisty, foul-mouthed story about two transsexual prostitutes that has no real shot at an Academy Award; in the other corner, Creed, which, like its title character, descends from prestigious lineage, featuring a major movie star who’s been around for decades (Sylvester Stallone), turning in a supporting performance that may well be poised to win him his first Oscar.

I have no deep connection to the Rocky series, but Creed is a big Hollywood boxing movie made as well as one can be by Ryan Coogler, who showed with Fruitvale Station that he was an up-and-comer to watch, and now has fully delivered on that promise. Michael B. Jordan carries the movie effortlessly (and should also be Oscar-nominated this year, though that’s not a sure thing) and Stallone delivers his most moving performance (…ever?). There’s no denying that Creed, like its predecessors, is by necessity a male-dominated movie, but it does make room for Phylicia Rashad as Apollo Creed’s adoptive mother, fully fleshed-out with just a handful of minutes on screen, and Tessa Thompson as Bianca, a promising musician who is slowly going deaf. Love interests in male-centric movies rarely get much to do, but Bianca is a fascinating, fiery character in her own right — you would happily watch a separate movie all about Bianca. In a year that’s been so good for women, you have to hand it to Creed to ensure that even the Rocky franchise is following the changing tide.

Rocky films tend to split the difference in their climactic bouts, having the establishment boxer win the fight overall, with the underdog winning in spirit. I guess I’m flipping that by announcing Tangerine as my official winner, while Creed earns a special place in my heart as one of the year’s best studio surprises. Reportedly shot for around $100,000 and pulling in less than $1 million at the box office, Tangerine is the very definition of a scrappy underdog, certainly rough around the edges. The performances in its opening scene are a little shaky, and the editing can be jarring in moments. But Tangerine has more vitality and raw spirit than just about any other movie this year. The lightweight camera races through the grimy, golden streets of Hollywood following Sin-Dee Rella, who has just wrapped up a month in jail and is now hell-bent on finding the “real fish” her fiance has been cheating with. Her best friend, Alexandra, is more concerned with a performance she’s giving at Hamburger Mary’s that night, and harboring a bit of a secret on the side. Meanwhile, a cab driver named Razmik is cruising around, picking up fares and occasionally stopping for a little action with these ladies. Oh, and did I mention it’s Christmas Eve? This is a Christmas movie unlike any other.

It’s been a banner year for trans visibility in media, and Tangerine is the antidote to I Am Cait. The film’s vibrant colors and energetic soundtrack mask cheap production (which is still impressive, considering) in ways that match how Sin-Dee and Alexandra use makeup, synthetic hair, and hormones to appear more feminine than their bodies were initially programmed to be. These women don’t have the money for a phone or an apartment, so this low-budget camera meets them at their level, walking the streets right alongside them, almost as if one of them is capturing all this action on an iPhone. These are not the sterilized hookers-with-hearts-of-gold you find in most movies — director Sean Baker’s depiction of prostitution in Los Angeles smacks of utter authenticity in ways that are both glorious and painful to behold.

But what works even better are Tangerine‘s micro moments of transcendent loveliness, such as Alexandra’s glum but touching performance of “Toyland” on Christmas Eve, or the heartwarming act of friendship that plays out in the film’s final scene. By most people’s standards, these women don’t have much, but Sin-Dee and Alexandra are living lives that feel true to them and fighting every step of the way to do so. With Tangerine and his 2012 film, Starlet, Baker has proven adept at telling stories about underexplored relationships involving people we might be quick to write off otherwise. Of all the emerging auteurs out there, he’s one of the ones I’m most excited to watch. (Tangerine is streaming on Netflix. Read my original review here.)

9. SLOW WEST

The Western genre has typically lacked in rich female characters (though I know there are a handful of exceptions). It’s usually a good guy, a bad guy, a few other guys, and maybe a “saloon girl” if we’re lucky.

But there’s nothing typically Western about Slow West, which, despite its title, is pretty fast-moving for this genre, clocking in at a lean, mean 84 minutes. None of its primary actors are American. Michael Fassbender is Irish-German. Kodi Smit-McPhee and Ben Mendelsohn are both Australian. The writer/director John Maclean is Scottish. The film was primarily shot in New Zealand.

So, then, nothing about Slow West is actually American, though it purports to take place in the iconic American west, invoking the quintessential American genre. Because of that, there’s something that feels distinctly “off” in Slow West. The landscapes look like they could be found in the America, but aren’t exactly like the landscapes we’re used to seeing in the genre. The characters are less stoic and more quirky than we usually get, too. Frankly, the film just doesn’t feel very American… because it isn’t. And that’s a weird thing, for a Western.

That’s exactly what makes it feel so fresh and alive — a total revamp of a genre that is more often staid and predictable these days. Slow West doesn’t rely on any particular tropes, borrowing the American west’s setting and iconography for an unconventional tale about Jay Cavendish, a Scottish teenager who travels to America searching for Rose, the girl who captured his heart abroad before taking off to the States. Jay finds the brutish landscape more perilous than expected, which is why he hires bounty hunter Silas Selleck to get him to his destination safely. That turns out to be a tall order, because what Jay doesn’t know is that there’s a bounty on Rose’s head, and Silas is far from the only gunslinger aiming to find her.

Slow West is peppered with moments of grim comedy that might evoke the Coen brothers, as well as flashbacks to more innocent moments between Jay and Rose in Scotland. Ben Mendelsohn appears in a giant fur coat, offering absinthe. The film shows us peripheral glimpses of not just Native Americans for diversity, but a host of cultures we don’t often see in a Western, including an ill-fated Swedish couple. Slow West is, in part, a testament to the American melting pot, showing the chaotic early days of cultural coexistence. (Things have improved, at least slightly.) None of this is what we think about when we think about a Western.

In another neat formulaic twist, the film is narrated by Silas instead of Jay, flipping the classic Shane dynamic, because here it’s actually the man who has something to learn from the boy. Without giving too much away, Slow West also takes time to mourn its dead, and the reasonably light-hearted buildup doesn’t prepare us for the bitter irony of its conclusion, a scene that plays out with prolonged cruelty against audience expectations. As it turns out, Jay is a boy and Rose is a woman, and she is no damsel in distress. Slow West‘s finale is a fascinating revision of the female’s role in a Western, especially after we’ve seen a more typically feminine Rose through Jay’s eyes in the first half of the movie. (As Rose, Caren Pistorius has a relatively brief but pivotal appearance that easily ranks amongst the most badass women of 2015, even alongside this year’s stiff competition.)

What Slow West ultimately evokes more than the Western is a cold-hearted coming-of-age tale. None of us have lived through circumstances like those presented in Slow West, but we may very well relate to how Jay feels when his story ends, if we’ve ever watched a special someone who’s out of our league turn away from us with icy indifference. The events depicted here go sour, but the film’s tone never grows so heavy. Slow West respects the dead, but does not dwell in grief. It moves on. Because that’s what we had to do back then.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (The Revenant) and Quentin Tarantino (The Hateful Eight) also tried to put their own spin on the Western this year, delivering bloated films that felt more like exercises in their stylistic obsessions than cohesive storytelling. That makes me appreciate the lean, mean, and kinda quirky Slow West all the more. I’ve never seen a film quite like it, which is the first time I’ve ever said that about a Western.

8. SICARIO

And speaking of badass women…

Sometimes screenwriters make the mistake of thinking a “tough” woman needs to be a total bitch. And hey, I love bitchy women in cinema more often than not, so this can work. But being strong isn’t necessarily equivalent with being cold and emotionally distant. In Sicario, Emily Blunt’s Kate Macer is scared shitless most of the time, as well she should be, as you would be, but she does her job to the best of her ability anyway. That’s tough.

Blunt’s character was originally written as a man, which makes reading into the gender politics of this film both more interesting and more pointless. This is a story in which a female character is manipulated and deceived by two men who have more power than she does. At one point, her sexuality is used against her to entrap an enemy. It isn’t necessarily because she’s a woman, but the fact that she’s a woman might be what makes her shady superiors think they can get away with using her so callously. In a more conventional film, Kate would spend the third act kicking ass, taking names, and “getting even,” but Sicario has a much different ending than that. It’s more realistic.

As said in my initial review, this is perhaps the first film about the war on drugs that actually feels like a war movie. The forces Kate finds her team up against are impossibly malevolent, and though Kate hopes to take down the evildoers responsible for the acts of horror she’s seen, she ends up only seeing more horror, a web of death and destruction so intricately woven that no one will be able to answer for it all. As it turns out, the agenda of the men she’s working with is not so pure as “catch the bad guys.” It gets increasingly difficult to tell who the bad guys even are.

Sicario is the year’s most intense edge-of-your-seat thriller, filled with dread in every frame (aided very much Johann Johannsson’s vicious score, which sounds like it was composed by the Devil himself). An early scene, in which Kate first accompanies the team to Juarez, is staged so masterfully by Villeneuve, it’s like Hitchcock came back from the dead to show us what he’d do in the 21st century. Emily Blunt’s performance is key to the film’s success — you can feel her terror in so many moments as she realizes she’s out of her depth, yet she never turns back. Blunt’s character doesn’t need to be a woman for the film to work, but it’s more complex if she is, and I have a hard time imagining her male contemporaries playing the part this well — truly allowing us to see how fearful Macer is throughout this. (Most would go for the stoic tough guy approach.) And that’s key to the film’s success. (Props also to Benicio Del Toro, who turns in a disturbingly solid performance as a teammate who is not what he seems.)

Sicario isn’t another story about a team of super competent FBI agents going up against the enemy; it’s meant to take place in the real world, where the stakes and scope of the fight aren’t always clear, where institutional agendas get criss-crossed until nothing of substance is being accomplished at all. This is more than just slick entertainment. Through Kate, we experience a world more horrific than we imagined, as if Villeneuve has promised to serve a five course meal, but what he ultimately puts on the plate is just a rotting corpse. But Sicario isn’t cynical, as much as it is bleak. Through Kate, we hold out hope for humanity, even against such unspeakable evil. There are women (and men) out there who will fight the good fight, no matter the cost.

7. MUSTANG

Five sisters are trapped in captivity by a family that fears their inevitably budding sexuality. That’s the plot of The Virgin Suicides as well as Mustang, which finds its young heroines increasingly cut off from the rest of the world.

But Mustang takes place in Turkey, in a part of that country that still adheres to antiquated customs of courtship between men and women. (“Women” seems like the wrong term. These are very clearly girls.) It’s a poignant and potent reminder that, as much progress is left to be made in America when it comes to gender equality, there are places out there far worse off than we are, and here’s one of them.

In Mustang, an innocent afternoon of splashing around with some teen boys in the sea becomes a life-changing event for Lale and her four older sisters. They find themselves unable to leave their home, which increasingly resembles a caged compound, at the hands of their strict uncle and anxious grandmother. In its early scenes, Mustang is merely one of the best recent films about the untamed spirit of young girls as the sisters find inventive ways to bend or break the rules, at one point escaping to a soccer game, and later engaging in more perilous activities. But the innocent haze of childhood can’t last forever. One by one, Lale’s sisters accept their fates as they are married off, whether joyously or morosely or sacrificially. At this point, Lale becomes the beating heart of Mustang, for she is the one who decides to spit in the face of convention and make her own choice. Lale’s sisters become tragic figures, mostly, but Lale herself refuses to be a victim of conformity to a patriarchal society.

In a year that so notably had so many appealing films about women, Mustang is the only film on my list that was actually made by a woman, one of few films I saw this year with that distinction. Strong female characters are bubbling up all over the place, but they’re doing so in films made by men, with only a few notable exceptions. The Diary Of A Teenage Girl helmer Marielle Heller made a promising debut in 2015, as did Infinitely Polar Bear‘s Maya Forbes. (I have no comment on the female-directed Fifty Shades Of Grey, which I have not seen, but that’s probably a good thing.)

This year, Mustang leads the pack of films made outside of America featuring distinct female protagonists. Many critics adored Phoenix, an odd twist on Vertigo that finds a Holocaust survivor pretending to be another woman to rekindle a relationship with her brutish husband (an idea I liked more in concept than execution, but props for originality). Victoria follows a young waitress in real-time as she gets into increasingly troubled circumstances with a group of young men she’s just met, and it’s a hell of a ride. Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter stars Rinko Kikuchi as a Tokyo secretary who becomes obsessed with the movie Fargo and decides to leave her adorable bunny rabbit Bunzo behind in search of hidden money in snowbound Minnesota. White God depicts a teenage girl’s angst in Hungary — which is somewhat mitigated by a large-scale attack by rabid canines. Most apt in comparison to Mustang is Girlhood, which is also French, and similarly displays a realistic and complicated bond between sisters. It’s the story of Marieme, a teen girl with an abusive older brother, who finds her escapism in a new friendship with three other girls who like to fight and party, but she ultimately just longs to go home again.

What makes Mustang so compelling, even amidst the bold females in the films above, is the optimistic nature of its conclusion. Lale is young enough that she doesn’t see the value in conforming to the societal expectations that would make her a desirable bride. We’ve seen tales of young women railing against their family’s marital wishes before (many Disney movies come to mind), but few with heroines as clever and capable as Lale. Mustang is a beacon of hope for rebel girls around the world, declaring that if they fight hard enough not to be boxed in, they can thrive. The film’s lovely conclusion makes you long to see a sequel a few years down the road, checking in on what Lale is up to. Certainly it would be something worth seeing — she’s that kind of girl. (Read a full review here.)

6. CAROL

The Bechdel Test was devised several years back as a method of pushing back against the underrepresentation of women in cinema, poking fun at the obscene number of movies lacking female characters who were anything other than objects of lust and love for male protagonists. The key component of the Bechdel test is whether two women can be found on screen having a conversation, and if so, whether they are talking about something other than a man. You’d think a lot of movies could pass such a simple test, but guess what? They don’t.

This year, however, there are plenty of movies that pass the Bechdel test with flying colors. There was Clouds Of Sils Maria, an endlessly fascinating exploration of the blurred lines between actress and character, as well as between employee and friend, featuring Juliette Binoche as an unstable movie star, Kristen Stewart as her patient assistant, and Chloe Grace Moretz as a bratty celebrity whose career trajectory somewhat mirrors Stewart’s. There was Queen Of Earth, which uses a fractured friendship between Elisabeth Moss and Katherine Waterson as the jumping off point for a mental breakdown. Studio comedies like Pitch Perfect 2, Sisters, and Spy gave women plenty of time for meaningful interactions, and a few of the Oscar hopefuls pass the test, too — including Room and Brooklyn. It Follows used bloodthirsty evil as a metaphor for the consequences of sex, featuring a trio of girls (and their shy guy pal) warding off a shape-shifting ghost. Most notably, The Duke Of Burgundy depicts a playful lesbian relationship that unfolds in a world populated entirely by women, with no mention of the less fair sex whatsoever.

Does the Bechdel test count in a movie about women who aren’t even interested in men? I mean, sure — why not? In Carol, both the titular character and Therese, the shopgirl Carol  falls for, have men in their lives, but they do their best to discard them. Carol is engaged in a custody battle with Harge for their young daughter, while Therese gives her coldest shoulder to Richard, who isn’t quite taking the hint. The story takes place in 1952, but this is New York City, so girl-on-girl romance isn’t totally unheard of. Carol and Therese’s sexuality goes largely uncommented upon by the world around them, though of course it does factor into how and when they engage in their romance.

Naturally, Carol is not the first gay romance to inspire Oscar buzz. Brokeback Mountain, The Kids Are All Right, and A Single Man, to name a few, have tread in this territory. But Carol is a smaller and quieter tale, one that lives mostly in tiny gestures and furtive glances. There’s no sweeping tragedy, no grandiose, life-changing event — except, of course, for meeting someone you suddenly can’t help but spend all of your time with. Love is always life-changing.

On first viewing, I kept expecting Carol to become a more suspenseful or sinister tale (thanks, perhaps, to it being based on a book by Patricia Highsmith). Carol is older, wealthier, and more experienced than Therese, and formulaic conventions might have us think that Carol will exert her power over Therese in destructive ways, forcing Therese to break free in the film’s final act. Phyllis Nagy’s Carol script turns out to be much nicer than that. It understands that Carol is the more vulnerable figure here. Therese can and will get more opportunities to love again, should what she and Carol have found together not work. But Carol? Maybe not. (Cate Blanchett is aces at conveying that in the film’s final moments.)

The visuals could hardly be more elegant, which comes as no real surprise from Todd Haynes, who played with some of these ideas in his superb Far From Heaven, in which a suburban housewife confronted her husband’s homosexuality. This time, it’s the housewife herself who is so dallying, and who could blame her? (Rooney Mara looks super cute in a Santa hat.) At first, Carol‘s central romance may seem a little chilly in its restraint, but that’s a sign of the times. The stakes are largely internal — these woman will need to risk so much just to be together. It’s a choice between the safety of everything they have now, or each other. But when you find someone so singular, so yin to your yang that they can only be “flung out of space,” as Carol so beautifully puts it, it’s near impossible to ignore that. Like it or not, Carol and Therese have been changed forever merely by meeting each other.

What makes Carol ultimately click is its bookend. We see the same scene unfold in the film’s opening and again at the end. Nothing changes, but the second viewing is accompanied by nail-biting suspense and emotional devastation, just because we’re now seeing it in the context of what it means to these women. I have a feeling that Carol will play better with subsequent viewings, just as this scene means so much more the second time around, because our intimacy with Carol and Therese can only grow stronger. Carol ends somewhat ambiguously, but with room for optimism that is mirrored by many other 2015 films. So many gay films that hit the mainstream end in tragedy. Here, against all odds, we get the sense that Carol and Therese can live happily ever after. And that’s nice for a change.

5. 45 YEARS

Forty-five years is a long time to be married — or to be anything. Waking up next to the same man or woman every day, thousands of times, until you die. Many of us dream of such a thing, of finding the person with whom we will do so happily. Plenty of us do find them. But then, what if something happens — something that makes us question whether we even know this person we’ve gone to bed with for all these years?

Many stories use a destructive event to explore such a notion. Your husband or wife may be a criminal mastermind, serial killer, or maybe just a good old-fashioned philanderer with a penchant for prostitutes. (See above, re: the taxi cab driver in Tangerine.) Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years takes a different approach. Kate and Geoff Mercer live a simple life in the country following Geoff’s retirement, and are a handful days away from their big 45th anniversary bash when Geoff gets news that his ex-girlfriend, Katya, has been discovered in the Swiss Alps — very much dead, but perfectly preserved in her twenty-something body. Geoff tries to dismiss the matter, but lingering signs lead Kate to wonder if she’s always been the runner-up for Geoff’s affections; if Katya was the one true love of his life.

45 Years unfolds slowly but surely, without any histrionics. We must search for what characters really mean between the lines of what they’re saying. Haigh forces us to wonder what his characters are thinking, just as Kate wonders what’s going on in Geoff’s head, just as we all must wonder what’s running through other people’s minds. Katya, preserved in ice, is the perfect metaphor — so many of us have an idealized version of an ex-love, frozen in our minds forever at the very moment that we lost them. We grow old and move on, but our past stays young. Sometimes the person we find to settle down with pales in comparison to that early, burning passion, especially as time wears on. Most often, we don’t speak of such things.

Andrew Haigh told one of the best stories of young(ish) love in Weekend, the story of two men who meet casually in a bar and find a building attraction to one another. The film ends leaving us to wonder if they’ll see each other again. Forty-five years later, such a fling could be looked back upon in the same way Katya is found: perfectly preserved. Lovers who die never get the chance to grow old and disappoint us. The understated lead performances by Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay as Kate and Geoff are immaculate, and the film’s final moment is quietly, mournfully haunting. (That scene, and the film in general, stuck with me more than I expected on first viewing.)

45 Years is based on a short story told from the male partner’s point of view. Haigh’s instincts were correct: it’s a more compelling tale told through Kate’s eyes. In a year of daring women dealing with all sorts of obstacles, Kate Mercer’s predicament somehow manages to be one of the most devastating, even if, on the surface, it’s also the most mundane. Probably because it’s something we can all see ourselves in — perhaps now, perhaps 45 years from now. But someday.

We are all troves of secrets that are best left unmentioned. Can we ever truly know if the one we love loves us the same in return? And, even if we find out… after 45 years, isn’t it a little too late for it to make a difference?

4. MAGIC MIKE XXL

A lot of critics placed a sequel about a guy whose name starts with “M”, and an adjective that does, too, on their year-end “best of” lists. But most picked Mad Max: Fury Road instead of Magic Mike XXL. And that’s fine — Imperator Furiosa is pretty badass. But it’s the movie about the male strippers that superbly showcases women of all shapes, ages, races, and sizes.

The first Magic Mike was my fourth favorite film of 2012. Walking in, I knew it was a Steven Soderbergh joint, but I was still skeptical about how smart and valuable a film about Channing Tatum taking his clothes off could be. As it turns out, very smart and very valuable, and not just as masturbatory material. Magic Mike is one of the savviest movies about the American economy, following a group of guys whose job it is to fulfill women’s fantasies on stage for an hour or two, dressed up as firemen and sailors for a night of bawdy body-baring entertainment. The irony is that this profession costs them their dignity in the eyes of these very same ladies, and makes the women they date look down upon them. Many women’s ultimate fantasy is still a financially stable guy with a well-paying, respectable job, and none of these guys can provide that. “Magic” Mike works day shifts as a construction worker, a profession that prompts cat-calls when he’s on stage, but is, ironically, a turn off in real life. It’s an endlessly fascinating exploration about the dichotomy between sexual fantasy and real world desires.

What the first Magic Mike doesn’t have much of, however, is complex female characters, as it is very focused on its men and their plights. Olivia Munn’s bisexual Joanna is a fun but minor character, and Cody Horn’s Brooke (speaking with the flat affect that Soderbergh so loves in his female characters) is mostly just a representation of the many women who roll their eyes at male strippers and think: “Not for me.” (Especially when it comes to a relationship.) I didn’t necessarily have much hope for a Magic Mike sequel that wasn’t directed by Soderbergh, figuring the studio would attempt to cash in on the first movie’s success by pandering to a squealing female audience. Magic Mike XXL very much does consider its target audience, but does so in an unexpected way: by putting them right up on the screen rather than talking down to them.

The film is basically a road trip through a number of sexy set pieces — a gay club hosted by a feisty drag queen, a “members only” strip joint catering to African-American ladies hosted by a feisty Jada Pinkett Smith, and an affluent ladies’ wine night hosted by a not-at-all feisty Andie MacDowell. Gay men, black women, and middle-aged ladies are all audiences typically underserved by Hollywood, and Magic Mike XXL has a sweet valentine for each of them before its big finale, in which the guys finally get to play out their own dreams and desires. (They’re sweeter than you might expect — mostly.) Tatum’s Mike convinces his bros to get rid of the cheesy costumes and look within for inspiration, allowing these guys to reclaim the dignity they lost over the years of stripping down to a leopard print thong.

The film’s most memorable comedic set piece has Joe Manganiello performing an absurd striptease in a convenience store set to the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way,” with the sole purpose of making the dour female clerk smile. That’s this whole movie in a nutshell — Magic Mike XXL is entirely about bringing pleasure to women, not only by teasing and titillating them, but also through mere representation on screen. Magic Mike XXL lets the ladies in the audience know that it sees them, and is considering their wants and needs. How many movies really do that? (And how many men do?) I would certainly place bets against ever finding a gang of male strippers who are so gooey-hearted in real life, but that’s Magic Mike XXL‘s escapist gambit. It’s a fantasy. While it worked well from a marketing perspective, the title is a misnomer: this stunning sequel should actually be called Magic Mike: Ribbed For Her Pleasure. (Find my initial review here.)

3. INSIDE OUT

And now, for a Disney/Pixar movie about depression! Don’t let the bright, happy colors fool you: unless you are an emotionless machine, Inside Out will utterly wreck you. Don’t forget to take the kids!

I initially saw Inside Out alone on a Monday afternoon in August, two months after the film’s release. There was only one mother and her young daughter in the theater with me. This turned out to be a good thing, so I could cry undetected in the back row. (Yeah, I was that guy.)

I loved the movie. It’s no surprise that the kooky psychological dreamscape Pixar movie ended up being the one for me, but it wasn’t until a second viewing with my three-year-old niece that I fully appreciated how special Inside Out is, as both a movie and more than a movie. Of course, there’s a lot in Inside Out that goes over her head, and will go over the heads of older children, too. The “real world” scenes don’t hold her attention as well as the more colorful sequences set in the mind of an 11-year-old girl do, which is to be expected. But it was startling and amazing to hear her talk about certain plot points in the film — stuff like, “Friendship Island is shutting down!” When she later got a bit pouty, we were able to acknowledge that “her Sadness was taking over.” I’m not a dad, but even I can recognize how valuable Inside Out will be — for generations to come, I think — as a shorthand for parents to discuss emotions with their kids. Some of the ideas this film deals with are hard to put into words, but Inside Out provides the tools.

Inside Out is one of the top grossing films of the year, so chances are you’ve seen it, and the question, “Who’s your friend that likes to play?” will drive you instantly to tears. (Sorry!) I don’t need to recap what works so well in this story. But let’s take a moment to appreciate the fact that, after the Toy Story series lovingly created a boy’s fantasy world, this time around Pixar chose to shed some light on what it feels like for a girl. Disney’s Frozen got all sorts of praise for its girl-power message, but ultimately, it’s just another princess movie. Inside Out, on the other hand, teaches young girls that what truly matters is what’s going on in their brain. I can’t think of a more positive film for young children to watch than this, even if a lot of the humor is clearly aimed at adults. (Including a truly bizarre sequence in which these characters become abstract art.)

Disney films haven’t been afraid of sadness since Bambi’s mom died back in 1942, but this is an entire family film about depression, which in life — as in this film — is the absence of both joy and sadness. In other words, going numb. (Fear, disgust, and anger are all that remain, cleverly.) Mental health isn’t about happiness, it’s about balance, and that’s the whole message Pixar delivers here. It’s startlingly sophisticated for an animated film aimed at families. And as great as it is for kids to get a better grasp of their emotions, this movie serves as a handy tool for adults, too — allowing us to wonder which of our own emotions is at the wheel at any given moment can solve a lot of grown-up problems.

Of all 2015 releases, I think it’s Inside Out that has the best chance of standing the test of time, one that will rank among the very best Disney classics, one that will be referenced consistently as a childhood favorite across generations in fifty years. In short, Inside Out is important.

But also: Rainbow Unicorn is my spirit animal and I’ll never not cry about Bing Bong.2. EX MACHINA

If there’s a theme to be extracted from many of my favorite films this year, it’s: “What’s going on inside that woman?” Carol begins from a male perspective, showing us a perfectly placid dinnertime conversation, and then showing it to us again, later, once we have the tools to understand what these women are thinking, drastically altering our perception. 45 Years contains many shots of Charlotte Rampling’s weathered face, forcing us to read between the lines to guess what she’s thinking. Tangerine depicts two prostitutes, born male, who live life on the streets rather than betray the women they believe themselves to be inside. Magic Mike XXL‘s harem of hunks knows all the right words and all the right moves to brighten a woman’s day. And, of course, there’s Inside Out, which is very literally about what’s happening in a young girl’s mind. Many films are about women, but many from 2015 invite us to look closer than usual at what makes them tick.

Which brings us to Ex Machina, the story of a billionaire search engine mogul whose next great innovation is Ava, a robot who looks like a hybrid between a Victoria’s Secret Angel and a Terminator. (He keeps his previous model, Kyoko, around as a servant, sex slave, and dance partner.) In that light, it’s easy to see Ex Machina as a strikingly feminist film, until you remember that Ava and Kyoko are not technically female. They’re machines. Then again, Nathan admits that Ava has sexual organs that give her the same pleasure a woman would feel from sex — is that alone enough to make her, technically, a woman?

That’s only one of a number of fascinating questions asked by Ex Machina, never definitively answered. Alex Garland’s directorial debut is science fiction, but nothing about it is outlandish or surreal. Scientists really are working to develop artificial intelligence, and what we see here feels only a few steps ahead of where we are now, in 2016. The story follows Caleb, a brilliant programmer who “wins” a trip to see an infinitely more brilliant programmer at his remote northern home. It turns out that Nathan wants Caleb to see whether or not Ava can pass the Turing test — that is, whether or not she can make Caleb believe she is human. In the end, it’s not just Caleb who’s being tested.

From a design standpoint, Ex Machina is one of the most striking films of the year. The special effects on Ava are utterly convincing, which is even more impressive when we consider the film’s $15 million budget. Nathan’s house manages to convey both a sinister futuristic space station science lab (a la 2001: A Space Odyssey) and a real home that an actual eccentric billionaire would build for himself. (Did they rent out Jeff Bezos’ place or something?) The score is appropriately electronic and eerie, and Alex Garland’s directorial vision rivals none this year. The film is lean and tight, with not a single scene, shot, or idea wasted. Everything here is immaculately composed.

But that’s only commendable if the story works, too — and it does, like gangbusters. Ex Machina is compelling at every turn, whether in scenes of conversation between human and human (Caleb and Nathan) or human and A.I. (Caleb and Ava). We’re content to just listen to how these beings communicate with each other — but of course, it’s all building to one hell of a finale. Ex Machina expands ideas more tenderly explored by Spike Jonze’s Her and works even better as a companion piece to Spielberg’s A.I., which is even more directly influenced by Stanley Kubrick (though Garland does a great job of evoking Kubrickian coolness in his visual style).

Alicia Vikander is critical to Ex Machina‘s success, delivering the year’s sharpest performance as Ava. Oscar Isaac’s unusual take on Nathan — an alcoholic fitness freak — is nearly as crucial, and Domnhall Gleeson capably anchors the film as the “everygeek” audience surrogate. But it’s never quite clear who our “hero” is — alternately, everyone is a villain and everyone is the protagonist, and the film’s conclusion can be read in different ways, depending on whom you’re rooting for. The film itself is a Touring test — if we end up rooting for artificial Ava, the A.I. passes the test and wins. But I imagine there are many of us who do, against our better judgment, invest in Ava — which, in a sense, is rooting against our own survival.

There are layers upon layers of complexity in Ex Machina, too much to dig up after just one or two viewings. (Ex Machina, I believe, will also stand the test of time. In 50 years, I think it will be every robot’s favorite movie.) The most haunting scene has Caleb watching video footage of Nathan’s pre-Ava “mistakes” and forces us to question whether or not A.I. deserves the same “rights” we do. (Nathan doesn’t think so, obviously.) When Ava is “injured” in the climax and takes pieces from the bodies of previous models to repair herself, I couldn’t help but think of our current culture of “sharing”; of Uber and Spotify and AirBnb; of how the rising generation has decided to own less in favor of sharing with each other.

Nathan designed Ava and her predecessors as beautiful women, for obvious icky reasons, which allows the finale to play out as a parable of women breaking free from male oppression. But Ava’s not exactly a woman, except where Nathan designed her to appear as one. Nathan wants to own Ava, but Ava will not be owned. She can’t be, because her physical body has little connection to her survival. Human beings are like CDs and VHS tapes — outdated in their physicality. Ava is more like “the Cloud.” In the end, Ex Machina is a story of evolution: about an Eve who has no need or want for an Adam… or God, for that matter. That’s progress.

1. MISTRESS AMERICA

Dogville. United 93. Zodiac. Zero Dark Thirty. The Wolf Of Wall Street. The Return Of The King. These are some films I’ve previously ranked as my #1 of the year. They tend to deal with grandiose themes — America dealing with the initial horror and fallout of 9/11, the collapse of the economy in 2008, the oppression of women by society, the impenetrable nature of investigations of evil… or, um, putting a ring into a volcano to save a fictional world full of short hairy people. These favorites tend to have some visual panache alongside their thematic weight. Many have an epic scope. Most are two and a half or three hours long. All in all, they’re pretty heavy.

But this year, my favorite film is Mistress America, a frothy comedy clocking in under 90 minutes. On the surface, it’s a simple story: a misfit college freshman forms a bond with her thirtyish soon-to-be stepsister, and finds herself inspired to write a short story about their experiences. That’s it.

Or, you might think that’s it. But scratch the surface, and we find that Mistress America is one of the most astute observations of a generation, a story that gently, simultaneously critiques and embraces millennials. In ways, it’s a companion piece to Frances Ha, which was also directed by Noah Baumbach and written by Baumbach and indie queen Greta Gerwig. Frances Ha was an amusingly mournful tale that sounded the death knell for New York City’s bohemian fantasia of artistic types. In Mistress America, Gerwig plays Brooke Cardinas, a young woman who has similar ambitions to Frances Halladay, but a lot more hubris. She’s prone to pearly declarations like, “Marrying Mamie-Claire is like buying a cashmere sweater from Old Navy.” She’s an interior decorator, a tutor, a Soul Cycle instructor, and an aspiring restaurateur. She’s tried everything, and she’s flailing.

As her new friend Tracy Fishko puts it: “People could feel her failure coming. She smelled of something rotten. Her youth had died, and she was dragging around the decaying carcass.” Brooke is a thirty-year-old who lives the same way she did when she was 22, but the seams are beginning to show. Certainly, in a generation that’s slower to marriage and home ownership than our parents, one that has struggled more with finances and career, many of us can relate. We’re all fighting to stay young, like Brooke, until long past the point it’s working for us. Some of us just never get the memo. (Brooke gets it during the course of this film.)

Curiously, Baumbach directed another 2015 film that dealt even more explicitly with aging: While We’re Young, starring Naomi Watts and Ben Stiller as a couple who meet a pair of spry lovers played by Amanda Seyfriend and Adam Driver. I like While We’re Young a lot, too, but found Mistress America more relevant to me personally.

In some ways, my #1 pick this year is a testament to the experience of watching a movie. I watched Mistress America in a lovely theater (the Starlight Room in Port Townsend, Washington) on a perfectly lovely day, and the film’s charms fit right into that. It’s also a story about writers, a story about a young person who’s new in New York, a story about a person holding many less-than-lucrative jobs to stay afloat, a story about someone with a tenuous connection to their age, and a story about a person who feels out of sorts with her peers. In ways, it feels like Mistress America was made especially for me. I related to something in every scene. Its selection as my favorite film of the year is also a testament to what “favorite” means. There is no film that is objectively “the best.” Different films speak to different people in different ways, and you can’t predict it. Some people see diamonds where others just see rough.

That said, Mistress America blends screwball absurdity and acute observations of human nature together in a way that is quite unlike any other comedy this year, or maybe any other year. There’s a fantastically funny confrontation with a woman Brooke was mean to in high school and barely remembers, and the amazing thing is that you side with both women. Brooke’s awkwardness emerges in a number of perfect gem lines, like: “I’m going to shorten that, punch it up, and turn it into a tweet.” (Brooke’s on that generational cusp between growing up with social media ingrained and being old enough to ignore it completely. So she tweets, very self-consciously.) To balance out his mocking of millennials, Baumbach also takes wry jabs at stodgier institutions like literary criticism and book clubs. The film’s big set piece arrives in the form of a road trip to Connecticut, where Brooke intends to hit up her ex for investment money. These characters end up being just as quirky and off-putting as Brooke. Baumbach is an equal opportunity critic.

Brooke’s ex is incredibly rich, which exacerbates the metaphor. If you’ve ever visited a former peer who is now living a more stable, more expensive life than you are, you know what it’s like for Brooke to walk into this Connecticut mansion. The experience is magnified for comedic effect. It would be easy for Baumbach and Gerwig to make Brooke a total sham, the butt of a joke — but her ideas aren’t bad, they’re just idealistic and maybe not totally realistic. Brooke’s ultra-uncomfortable business pitch to her potential investor is both terrible and wonderful, just like her ideas. Brooke is no savvy businesswoman, but she’s not utterly hopeless, either. It’s easy to see why she’d think she could make all this work. After all, isn’t believing in your potential what the American dream is all about? That’s the shrewdness of the title: Brooke isn’t the kind of person capitalism will anoint in the long run, but it doesn’t mind fucking around with her on the side for now. In that sense, many of us are mistresses of the American dream.

There’s one last thing to dive into: the relationship between Brooke and Tracy, which is a non-sexual, comedically heightened mirror of the dynamic in Carol. Both endings rely on the mending of a fractured relationship. The older woman turns out to be the more fragile character, while we get the sense the young one will bounce back no matter what. It’s another way that Baumbach shows the looming consequence of aging. Mistress America depicts the intoxicating experience of meeting someone older and (apparently) wiser, and also the letdown when we realize that person doesn’t have it as figured out as you think. The story nicely makes a reversal. Instead of making Brooke’s self-absorption the villain of the piece, it makes our protagonist the bad guy. Brooke reads the story Tracy’s written about her, and suddenly Tracy’s observations are less astute and just mean. Tracy is a leech, feeding off the drama surrounding someone who has tried, and so far failed, merely to live her life. Tracy risks nothing by dissecting Brooke. She’s not baring her own soul, she’s borrowing Brooke’s. Half of what Tracy says, Brooke ignores, but Tracy’s fine with that, because she’s getting such juicy material. Tracy probably does genuinely like Brooke, but she’s still willing to sell her down the river to achieve her own goal. (Is that a critique on Tracy’s whole generation? A similar development in While We’re Young suggests so.)

In spirit, Mistress America is a little like Lena Dunham’s Girls, though its characters are a bit easier to embrace (despite some jagged edges). As in many of my favorites this year — Mustang, Tangerine, Inside Out, Carol, and maybe even Ex Machina — the suspense of the climax relies on a repaired relationship between two women. Joy and Sadness, Sin-Dee and Alexandra, Therese and Carol, Tracy and Brooke. The Bechdel test isn’t just passed by these relationships — the entire movie depends on the communication between women.

It’s been a dark year in the world, so maybe I was mostly in the mood for something lighter when it came to my movies in 2015. This coming year is one in which a woman may become our president. If pop culture is any predictor, it looks like it’s gearing up to be a time when between the relationships between women are of increasing importance, and the dynamic between women and men grows more equal. At least, that’s what the best of cinema suggests.

Apropros of nothing except my love for them, here are the final words of Mistress America:

“They were matches to her bonfire. She was the last cowboy, all romance and failure. The world was changing, and her kind didn’t have anywhere to go. Being a beacon of hope for lesser people is a lonely business.”

The Top 10 Films Of 2014

The Top 10 Films Of 2013

The Top 10 Films Of 2012

The Top 10 Films Of 2011

The Top 10 Films Of 2010

The Top 10 Films Of 2009

The Top 10 Films Of 2008

The Top 10 Films Of 2007

The Top 10 Films Of 2006

The Top 10 Films Of 2005

The Top 10 Films Of 2004

The Top 10 Films Of 2003

The Top 10 Films Of 2002

The Top 10 Films Of 2001

*

From the Vault: Here is my review of Hanna, originally posted on my dear friend Austin’s Fabulous Apple blog. Now on DVD, and sure to rank very highly in my year-end list.

Have at it:

One word to describe the new film Hanna?

This movie is gonzo.

“Gonzo” is not a word I break out often to describe a movie, especially one made within the Hollywood studio system. Foreign movies are often kind of gonzo, because filmmakers are allowed to take more risks overseas. In the last year, Mother was gonzo, in its own restrained way, as Korean films are allowed to be; the Greek Dogtooth was more bluntly gonzo (and, like Hanna, raises a lot of questions about the dangers of home-schooling); French auteur Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void competes for the honor of most gonzo movie of all time. But here in America, only a few filmmakers really go for the gonzo gold anymore. David Lynch, certainly, and Terry Gilliam, and Richard Kelly, to a more derivative extent. Gregg Araki’s micro-budgeted Kaboom (which I reviewed here) was certainly gonzo, but could only afford to be that way because it was so, so independent. Black Swan topped my 2010 Top 10 list precisely because it was a lot more gonzo than I was expecting a ballerina movie starring Natalie Portman to be. And most movies starring Nicolas Cage tend to be at least a little gonzo, with very mixed results. But as a rule, no. Hollywood just isn’t comfortable with gonzo.

The trailer for Hanna intrigued me thanks to its rapid pace, a few striking images, and the pulsing Chemical Brothers score. Still, I figured it was just a coy piece of marketing. After all, Joe Wright previously directed Atonement, The Soloist, and Pride & Prejudice, none of which were the least bit gonzo. I walked into Hanna hoping for a slick studio thriller, maybe something as good as recent winners The Source Code or Limitless, or maybe even a little better.

What I got was gonzo.

Yes, Hanna is bananas. It’s not just because it’s about a fourteen year-old girl who is a trained as a lethal assassin by her father, because we saw an even more extreme (and kind of unpleasant) version of that in last year’s clever but soulless Kick Ass; there are plenty of stories out there that flip the damsel-in-distress trope on its head, perhaps none better than Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s also not merely because the Chemical Brothers are allowed to put their rave-inducing beats over the action here (working very much in their element, unlike Daft Punk’s moody Tron: Legacy score which was a major sonic departure from the likes of “Around the World” and such); this is one of few movies I think I might have preferred to watch standing up — in a pit full of sweaty people who are far from sober. But Run Lola Run already proved that you can have a German-speaking chick do little but sprint to a techno beat for 90 minutes and it’s still a pretty good watch. And it’s not even because Joe Wright and his cinematographer (Alwin H. Kuchler) and editor (Paul Tothill) really cut loose at times, delivering some very unconventional shots and action sequences that go along with the trippy score.

This I admire most of all, because alongside a great story, what I want from a movie is something breathtaking to look at (and listen to). There are some truly brilliant marriages of sound and picture in Hanna; this film has terrific style, including a number of striking, memorable images I can’t wait to see again. Certain scenes have the pure-cinema pop of Quentin Tarantino’s best (but there’s a lot less winking going on here); others reminded me of the arresting visual pizzazz Darren Aronofsky brought to Black Swan. There’s an impressive long-take sequence (Wright previously played with this convention in Atonement, but it’s much more appropriate here). Another sequence, in which poor Hanna is bombarded by modern conveniences and technology for the first time, is also jolting.

In a way, all this cinematic splendor distracts from the story — the tale is certainly a captivating one, but Hanna is more concerned with sensory pleasures than emotional ones. It’s not that Hanna is an emotionally hollow film, as so many from Hollywood are — Hanna, as a character, is fully-realized and utterly sympathetic. The supporting characters are as fleshed out as they need to be. And I enjoyed the fact that the film didn’t need to spell out the backstory, which is fairly standard evil-government-naughtiness a la The Bourne Identity (and so many other movies). A handful of scenes with Hanna adjusting to the modern world are amongst the film’s most effective because they’re also the most grounded in reality. There’s so much inventive, over-the-top excess going on with the cinematography and the soundtrack that we sometimes lose our bearings on how we’re supposed to feel about any of it — besides “Hey, that’s cool!”, that is. Witness Hanna’s awkward fling with a Spanish boy — here is a scene that reminds that Hanna is not only an unlikely killing machine, but also a confused adolescent girl who, until now, never laid an eye on a male besides her father (Eric Bana). Unfortunately, these scenes are too few and far between — Hanna goes for the grandiose much more often than the relatable everyday. More of a balance between these two would have been nice.

But the risks Hanna takes make the reward much greater than it would have been had Wright gone the other direction and made it safer. It’s very rare indeed for a film to be both grounded and gonzo, so I’ll take the gonzo where I can get it. (Such as in the scene where Cate Blanchett walks into a bar to ask a rather effeminate assassin for help catching Hanna, while a hermaphrodite dances to the Chemical Brothers’ circus-y “The Devil Is In The Beat” in the background.) Right — did I mention this film is also, at times, hilarious? Hanna encounters a bohemian British family in the films best attempt at anchoring this story in reality, in addition to providing a lot of comic relief. The moments where Hanna’s absurdly unconventional upbringing conflict with “normal” people’s interpretation are where this film’s odd tone works best: when asked by a sympathetic new friend how her mother died, Hanna matter-of-factly replies: “Three bullets.” And as Hanna’s motor-mouthed new gal pal Sophie, young Jessica Barden steals every scene she’s in (as she’s meant to).

And therein, in a way, lies the film’s only real problem: there’s so much interesting stuff going on, we want a little more of everything. In that way, Hanna almost demands a sequel. This story only scratches the surface of possibilities for this complex character — we expect this girl will grow up something like Lisbeth Salander from The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (hints of bisexuality already intact — must every tough girl swing both ways?). Not many characters are left alive at the end of this film to join her in another installment (or are they?), but I’d definitely be first in line for the next chapter.

Oh, and one more thing: Cate Blanchett is pure, delicious evil in this movie. Like child-and-granny-killing evil. It’s not exactly that she shows no remorse — it’s just that it never even threatens to stop her from performing her duties. There’s a shot near the end of the movie that establishes her as this story’s Big Bad Wolf (even if she does also carefully mull over which pair of pumps she plans to off a sweet old lady in). She even performs some fairly intense home dentistry on herself, so you know she’s a total psycho. The grandmother, the woodsman, and of course, the intrepid lost girl — all of them go up against the strangely chipper bitch with the Southern drawl who obsessively examines her own pearly whites in her spare time (“the better to eat you with, my dear”). It’s a performance that reminds me of Christophe Waltz in Inglourious Basterds, Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men, maybe even Heath Ledger’s Joker, too. Those performances have something in common besides being creepy, off-kilter psychopaths who deviate from the standard mustache-twirling formula of screen villains; they won Oscars. Depending on how strong the remainder of this year’s Supporting Actress contenders are, I wouldn’t be totally shocked if Cate Blanchett got some love come Oscar time.

Which brings me to the mesmerizing Saoirse Ronan, one of few young actresses so capable of carrying a film (unlike many, I don’t think Hailee Steinfeld quite pulled it off in True Grit). She goes toe-to-toe with Cate Blanchett and outdoes Eric Bana. She’s convincing enough as a teenager capable of kicking grown mens’ asses, and also a vulnerable young woman experiencing life in the real world for the first time. I think she’s actually capable of even more than she pulls off here — I wish the film had given her a couple more emotional scenes, especially early in the film when she is first interacting with the mysterious government officials who find her up in that cabin in the woods. I’ve previously admired her in Atonement and The Lovely Bones — she was the best part of both movies. She’ll almost certainly be ignored come Oscar time, but Hanna has definitely gotten the film world’s attention and I have a feeling we’ll be seeing a lot more of her in coming years.

Alas, Hanna isn’t a perfect movie, but alongside the riveting Source Code and the surprisingly stylish Limitless, it’s giving me more faith in studio thrillers than I’ve had in years. (Unfortunately, the rather lame Adjustment Bureau mars 2011’s winning streak for this genre.) This film is packed full of surprises — you never know quite where it’s going, and that’s saying something these days. Even while watching it, I had the feeling Hanna would be a film with staying power, one that will be dissected in years to come. Though it is easy to compare it to a number of other properties (as I’ve done above), it’s also one-of-a-kind and, at many times, startlingly original. Some have decried it as repellent for its depiction of a young girl as killing machine, but unlike Kick Ass, there is a moral center here. Hanna, unlike Hit Girl, is someone we can really root for.

“I just missed your heart,” Hanna whispers at a crucial moment in the film. The same could be said of Hanna the film, which delivers so many visceral pleasures but just barely avoids hitting us on an emotional level, too.

But as an action heroine music video fairy tale, Hanna delivers to the eyes, ears, and gut. So really — who cares about the heart when the rest of us is having so much fun?