MIKE D’ANGELO
1. My Kid Could Paint That What might have been just a conventional human-interest doc about a 4-year-old abstract-art prodigy instead becomes a profound, unsettling treatise on filmmaking ethics, as well as our desperate need to impose a clear-cut narrative upon every aspect of our lives. Stunning.
2. Time South Korean provocateur Kim Ki-duk’s bizarre tale of jaded lovers who undergo radical plastic surgery in an effort to recapture one another’s interest dares to address hard, unpleasant truths about the ephemeral nature of romantic love.
3. Joshua Unjustly dismissed in many quarters as a generic evil-kid flick, this dry urban horror tale, directed with unnerving disjunctive panache by George Ratliff, suggests that there’s nothing more frightening than raising a child who resembles you in no way whatsoever.
4. Grindhouse It’s a shame that Planet Terror and Death Proof have been released separately on DVD, as Quentin Tarantino’s brilliantly subversive auto-stalker saga works best as garrulous, discursive counterpoint to Robert Rodriguez’s goofy John Carpenter homage.
5. The Wayward Cloud I’m cheating a bit by including this obscure Taiwanese import, which to the best of my knowledge only played in a single New York theater. But anyone familiar with Tsai Ming-liang’s lovely 2001 film What Time Is It There? will want to seek out this much darker quasi-sequel, which finds our near-mute hero (Lee Kang-sheng) working as a porn actor during a severe nationwide drought. At the same time, those accustomed to Tsai’s gentle melancholy should brace themselves: This one builds to a genuinely shocking climax of bleak despair.
6. There Will Be Blood Paul Thomas Anderson had previously struck me as an immensely gifted but fundamentally immature show-off, overly beholden to Altman and Scorsese. But there’s no denying the singular ferocity of this epic American saga, with Daniel Day-Lewis at his scenery-chomping finest.
7. No Country for Old Men As amazing as you’ve heard, though I belong to the camp that believes Cormac McCarthy’s inconclusively elegiac denouement simply doesn’t translate well to the big screen. Up to that point, however, and moment for moment, this is the most exciting filmmaking of the year.
8. The Host Yes, another Korean movie—but this one is the country’s all-time box-office champ, and it involves a giant mutant tadpole (or something) terrorizing the populace in some of the most astonishing, kinetic action sequences ever produced outside of Hollywood.
9. Day Night Day Night As its title suggests, Julia Loktev’s hypnotic tale of a suicide bomber in training is neatly bisected: After a first half set entirely within the claustrophobic confines of a drab hotel room, the film moves onto the crowded sidewalks of Times Square. Confusion and doubt ensue.
10. Gone Baby Gone Ben Affleck redeems himself for years of lousy performances with his fine directorial debut, which gradually builds to the most agonizing moral crossroads in recent movie history. And if Amy Ryan doesn’t win the Supporting Actress Oscar—well, it’ll be the damn Oscars.
MARK HOLCOMB
1. No Country for Old Men A domestic companion piece of sorts to last year’s A History of Violence, this waking nightmare lays open America’s knee-jerk bloodlust and crumbling masculinity without the benefit of an outsider’s perspective. Consequently, no moral or narrative lifelines are thrown, and the ensuing dementia is all too familiar.
2. Zodiac Like No Country for Old Men in that it pivots on the capacity for evil to adapt to and outlast good, David Fincher’s best movie yet is also a virtual apology for his much-copied, more exploitative Seven. Zodiac gets under your skin in ways that movie couldn’t touch.
3. Year of the Dog A vindication of passion pursued regardless of how nutty it seems to the outside world (and what could seem nuttier than a 40-something-year-old woman with a houseful of dogs?), Mike White’s honest, precise comedy was the most unexpectedly moving film this year.
4. The Host This South Korean daikaiju has it all—sociopolitical outrage, a bow-slinging hottie, rueful slapstick and a scary/sad giant tadpole that’s a cross between the oddball critters from Jack Kirby’s 1950s monster comics and that flying sludge-chunk from Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster. Pure heaven.
5. Dedication Besides featuring Billy Crudup’s best performance ever (as a pathologically embittered romantic, no less), Justin Theroux’s directorial debut makes movie-movie hash of the boy meets/gets/loses/re-gets girl formula by returning it to the realm of life-affirming, grimly uncertain fairy tale.
6. Southland Tales By every objective measure a failure, Richard Kelly’s shambolic, overreaching follow-up to Donnie Darko is a fiercely individual wail against species suicide that somehow succeeds. Its industrial-strength political paranoia outdoes woo-woo cinematic touchstones like The Parallax View and JFK, but there’s also a level on which Kelly is picking at a personal psychic scab here; the visual tropes Southland shares with Darko seem disturbingly specific. Okay, maybe I’m the one who’s overreaching, but I hope he addresses whatever’s bugging him head-on soon, lest his movies become even more delusional—and less delightful—than this one.
7. Eastern Promises Career-wise, David Cronenberg has always been consistent in his use of the human body as a stand-in for terrainless, decultured modernity, and this is his most elegant expression yet. It also features the grisliest, most memorable movie fight scene since, well, Borat.
8. Manufactured Landscapes In this mind-bending tour of the globe’s industrial wastelands, director Jennifer Baichwal both pays homage to and strips the aesthetic glamour from photographer Edward Burtynsky’s work to reveal the ugly symbiosis of cash-poor nations and a consumer-crap-addicted West.
9. Two Wrenching Departures/The GoodTimes Kid Courtesy of father-and-son filmmakers Ken and Azazel Jacobs, this celluloid duo—dad’s sprocket-sprung commemoration of absent friends and his boy’s oblique, rigorously austere love-triangle comedy—makes for a poignant paean to purely visual moviemaking.
10. Light Is Waiting A short from avant-gardist Michael Robinson that’s worth tracking down, Light Is Waiting reimagines an already weird episode of ’80s sitcom mainstay Full House as a synapse-scorching fever-dream of impenetrable pop-culture rituals and prepubescent dread. With dancing.
JOSH BELL
1. Zodiac David Fincher’s fetishistic perfectionism is put to great use in a film about the futility of perfectionism and how easy it is to become lost in mountains of detail and data. The fruitless hunt for the Zodiac killer becomes a meditation on how we cope with a lack of resolution, both in life and in film.
2. No Country for Old Men The Coen brothers return to the blood-soaked noir of films like Miller’s Crossing and Blood Simple, throwing in mordant humor as dry as the Texas dust that fills this movie’s landscapes. Tense, bleak and despairing, it’s a movie about the way that when things change around us, almost always for the worse, there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.
3. The Lookout Screenwriter Scott Frank’s directorial debut is a quiet character study in the guise of a heist thriller, with another great performance from Joseph Gordon-Levitt. The elegant plot doesn’t skimp on the suspense, but it’s enacted by characters who feel like real people making genuine, often tragic, human decisions.
4. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford Slow, ponderous, methodical—that’s frontier life, that’s Jesse James, and that’s this movie, a beautiful, somber reflection on life in the public eye, whether how to ease out of it gracefully or how an obsession with it can become all-encompassing.
5. Margot at the Wedding Spend 90 minutes with the manipulative, passive-aggressive sisters in Noah Baumbach’s achingly uncomfortable film, and you’ll much better appreciate your own family—and the way the filmmaker gets to painful truths about how we’d least like to admit that we sometimes treat our loved ones.
6. Waitress Of all this year’s movies about the hilarity of unwanted pregnancy, this is the warmest and gentlest, and also possibly the funniest. Keri Russell finally breaks out of her TV past with a fabulous performance as a small-town pie-maker who finds herself unexpectedly in the family way.
7. Gone Baby Gone Ben Affleck redeems all his bad acting choices with his tough, cynical film about the disappearance of a young girl in a working-class Boston neighborhood. And Casey Affleck comes into his own as the strong leading man his brother never got to be.
8. Black Snake Moan Dirty, sexy, swampy and sweaty, the South of Craig Brewer’s film is dangerous but rejuvenating, and this totally weird fable about a young white nymphomaniac and the older black bluesman who helps her find salvation is equal parts sleazy exploitation and inspiring parable of redemption.
9. Bridge to Terabithia Marketed incorrectly as a Chronicles of Narnia-style fantasy, this is a wonderful and occasionally difficult movie about the hard, grown-up truths that kids sometimes have to face before they’re ready, as well as the simple joys of friendship and shared imagination. Its frank and unsentimental portrayal of (spoiler alert) the death of one of its child protagonists struck some as too dark, but I’d like to think that kids can handle movies in which bad things happen, especially since the ultimate message is about how to process and understand the senseless tragedies that all of us inevitably come up against.
10. Sunshine Dark, cerebral sci-fi that mixes suspense, horror and some out-there philosophical ideas into what should have been one of the biggest blockbuster hits of the year. Like Gattaca or Event Horizon, it seems destined to develop the cult following it deserves on DVD.