At last, the TOH! contributors list their top ten films of 2013. At the end of what was no doubt a banner year for cinema, it was certainly a bloodbath as we whittled our lists down to ten, struggling to make room for all of our favorite films. Check out our lists below.
Anne Thompson:
Beth Hanna:
The prevailing theme in my Top Ten list is connection. Two
lonely divorcés find a spark of romantic connection in Nicole Holofcener’s “Enough Said,” even if some dishonesty threatens to dash their love; in Richard
Linklater’s “Before Midnight,” a longtime couple teeters on the brink of
collapse, following an evening of too much
honesty. In the Coens’ “Inside Llewyn Davis” and Zachary Heinzerling’s
documentary “Cutie and the Boxer,” artists struggle to forge a connection with
their public — for cash, for recognition, and for a way of pushing down life’s
miseries. In Margarethe Von Trotta’s “Hannah Arendt,” one of the 20th century’s most radical intellectuals connects with the dark history of the
past, and in doing so alienates herself from society; in Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street,” a tycoon connects with quick success while disconnecting
from practically everything else (family, love, reality, sobriety); in
Sebastian Silva’s “Crystal Fairy,” twentysomething bohemian travelers in Chile
forge a bumpy friendship on the road to would-be bliss; in Wong Kar-wai’s “The
Grandmaster,” two martial arts experts are connected over space and time, even
if a romantic union proves impossible. Finally a duo of brilliant neo-noirs, Ridley
Scott’s “The Counselor” and Claire Denis’ “Bastards,” examines what noir is
best at: Connection is doomed to failure, and probably will be violently
severed.
1. “Before Midnight” (dir. Richard Linklater)
2. “Hannah Arendt” (dir. Margarethe Von Trotta)
3. “Inside Llewyn Davis” (dirs. Joel Coen, Ethan Coen)
4. “The Counselor” (dir. Ridley Scott)
5. “Bastards” (dir. Claire Denis)
6. “Crystal Fairy and the Magical Cactus” (dir. Sebastian
Silva)
7. “Cutie and the Boxer” (dir. Zachary Heinzerling)
8. “Enough Said” (dir. Nicole Holofcener)
9. “The Wolf of Wall Street” (dir. Martin Scorsese)
10. “The Grandmaster” (dir. Wong Kar-wai)
Best Female Performance: Barbara Sukowa (“Hannah Arendt”)
Best Male Performance: Ethan Hawke (“Before Midnight”)
Best Screenplay: “Before Midnight
“
Best Cinematography: “Inside Llewyn Davis
“
Best Film on the Festival Circuit Without US Distribution: “The
Fifth Season” (dirs. Peter Brosens, Jessica Woodworth)
Best Film on the Festival Circuit With US Distribution in
2014: “Stranger by the Lake” (dir. Alain Guiraudie)
Best Pleasant Surprises of 2013: “Dead Man Down” (dir. Neils
Arden Oplev), “World War Z” (dir. Marc Forster)
Ryan Lattanzio:
This year, I tended toward flawed films with ambition and chutzpah rather than note-perfect, polished masterpieces. “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” for example, is a big, sprawling novelistic mess of a picture, which really didn’t need those sex scenes to tell its beautiful story, but finally Abdellatif Kechiche’s modern romance is an act of bravery, a boon to gay cinema everywhere and a gift we should all be grateful for; Reygadas’ “Post Tenebras Lux” can be boring-as-hell, but it entrances and mystifies and essentially turns cinematic form on its head; and “Gravity” did not need all that spiritual bombast, but Cuaron’s cosmic poem gave us all a reason to fall in love with going to the theater again. Which we needed.
The very best film I saw in 2013 was Ari Folman’s brilliant and insane “The Congress,” a half-live-action, half-animated feat of madness in which Robin Wright (as Robin Wright) sells her soul to the Hollywood studio system and becomes trapped in a cartoon dystopia. Stateside audiences won’t see the film until next year, but had this film — a mixed bag for most critics — been distributed in 2013, it would have been my favorite film of the year yesterday, today and tomorrow. Drafthouse Films has tentatively set a summer 2014 theatrical release.
And for the record, anyone who knows me is well aware that I’m the biggest fan of Jesse and Celine there is. But I’m not ready to hail “Before Midnight” as perfect a masterpiece as “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset.” Time will tell.
1. TIE: “Inside Llewyn Davis” (dirs. Joel and Ethan Coen) and “Blue Is the Warmest Color” (dir. Abdellatif Kechiche)
2. “Post Tenebras Lux” (dir. Carlos Reygadas)
3. “The Bling Ring” (dir. Sofia Coppola)
4. “The Past” (dir. Asghar Farhadi)
5. “Gravity” (dir. Alfonso Cuaron)
6. “Laurence Anyways” (dir. Xavier Dolan)
7. “Her” (dir. Spike Jonze)
8. “Blue Jasmine” (dir. Woody Allen)
9. “Museum Hours” (dir. Jem Cohen)
10. “American Hustle” (dir. David O. Russell)
Honor Roll: “Stories We Tell,” “Only God Forgives,” “The Act of Killing,” “Upstream Color,” “To the Wonder,” “A Touch of Sin,” “You’re Next”
Festival Faves Awaiting US Release: “Stranger by the Lake,” “Tom at the Farm,” “The Selfish Giant”
Favorite performances: Adele Exarchopoulos (“Blue Is the Warmest Color”), Amy Adams (“Her” and “American Hustle”), Jonah Hill (“The Wolf of Wall Street”), Mads Mikkelsen (“The Hunt”)
Once more, with feeling: “The Congress” is the best film I saw in 2013.
Up next: Bill Desowitz and Matt Brennan
Bill Desowitz:
Top 10: The Year of Survival and Reinvention
1.
“Gravity”
2. “Her”
3. “Inside Llewyn Davis”
4. “12 Years a Slave”
5. “The Wolf of Wall Street”
6. “American Hustle”
7. “Nebraska”
8. “All Is Lost”
9. “Dallas Buyers Club”
10. “Frozen”
Honorable mentions: “Saving Mr. Banks,” “Captain Phillips,” “Philomena,” “Prisoners,” “Before Midnight“
Matt Brennan:
For me, 2013 was the year of the double feature. With the
exception of Steve McQueen’s historical drama — as clear a first choice as any
I’ve encountered in my years of making these lists — the movies that struck me
most forcefully did so in tandem. The four pairs and one trio that follow
“12 Years a Slave,” whether obvious or idiosyncratic, reveal the
diverse aesthetic gambits by which filmmakers tested the documentary form,
interpreted the high seas adventure, constructed complex stories as striking
miniatures, portrayed the romance of youth or the middle-aged romance. It was
these unexpected conversations that defined the films I loved, no matter the
order.
1. “12 Years a Slave”
In a somber graveside rendition of “Roll, Jordan,
Roll” as in a torture of unbearable brutality, “12 Years a
Slave” distilled the omnipresent violence of the Old South’s
“peculiar institution” and the innumerable avenues by which the
enslaved survived, or failed to survive, our history’s most indelible scar.
Those who consider the film “pornographic,” or prettified, seem to
have forgotten the complexities of the past. Enduring bondage meant resisting
an overseer’s play for power and finding the beauty in paper dolls, keeping
faith in the next life and sometimes trying, by suicide or escape, to enter it.
McQueen, aided by his outstanding cast, bore fuller witness than any director
before him to a world that resists understanding. In the process he created not
only the best film of the year, but also the finest film ever made about
American slavery.
“Visitors” and “Stories We Tell”
Godfrey Reggio’s immersive sensory experience, 70-odd frames
of faces, bayous, and an abandoned amusement park set to Philip Glass’
excellent score, rejects narrative entirely. Sarah Polley’s investigation of a
family mystery takes narrative (how we construct it, deploy it, change it,
secret it away) as its explicit subject. Yet both films force us to reconsider
the centrality of the ineffable, and at times the fictive, in the documentary’s
power — to respond as profoundly to the artful hand that shapes nonfiction as
to the form’s tacit promise of “truth.”
“Captain Phillips” and “All Is Lost”
One plunges us into a cacophony of directives, negotiations,
pleas, and cries; the other, nearly wordless, is a diving bell submerged in
nature’s fury. Paul Greengrass’ “Captain Phillips” and J.C. Chandor’s
“All Is Lost” share little but the mercilessness of the ocean —
stretching as far as the eye can see, and beyond what the mind can conceive —
and a hard-won understanding of what it means to be, in the figurative sense,
at sea. Indeed, on the strength of brilliant performances by aging lions Tom
Hanks and Robert Redford, both films plumb the depths of fear and despair that
accompany their protagonists’ courage: heroism in its most rough-edged, moving,
and indelibly human form.
“Laurence Anyways” and “Frances Ha”
“Laurence Anyways” screened at Cannes in 2012
before securing a U.S. theatrical release this summer, so its inclusion here
may be cheating. But I couldn’t omit Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan’s
exuberant romantic epic, exploring the vagaries of love, sex, and identity as
Fred (Suzanne Clement) and Laurence (Melvil Poupaud) work through the
challenges of their unconventional relationship. Much like Noah Baumbach and
Greta Gerwig’s warm, disarming “Frances Ha,” about the joys and
disappointments of a twenty-something dancer in present-day New York, Dolan’s
film fashions a remarkably precise portrait of the world it inhabits — French
Canada in the 1990s — but never loses its empathic grip on adulthood’s
lingering growing pains, no matter the time and place.
“Before Midnight” and “Enough Said”
If “Laurence Anyways” and “Frances Ha”
suggest the hurdles we face in making a life, “Before Midnight” and
“Enough Said” feature the troublesome work of living with the lives
we’ve made. In “Before Midnight,” Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, and
Julie Delpy complete their superb relationship trilogy by mapping the limits of
attraction; Nicole Holofcener’s “Enough Said,” starring James
Gandolfini (alongside Julia Louis-Dreyfus) in his last and most adroit film performance,
examines the anxiety of discovering attraction once more. Both chatter through
decades of baggage — former marriages and forgotten moments, annoying habits
and bad faith — to emerge, in their ambivalent conclusions, as fine-grained
depictions of people-in-progress, learning to be unfinished together.
“Street of Dreams,” “Like a Rolling
Stone,” and “Aningaaq”
Is Vine a cinema of attractions? Is YouTube a modern-day
nickelodeon? Where do GIFs, auteurist advertisements, interactive music videos,
and the ancillary materials of a major studio release fit in this puzzle we
call “the movies”? I chose Martin Scorsese’s dreamy, black-and-white
Dolce & Gabbana spot, Interlude’s multi-channel interpretation of Bob
Dylan, and Jonas Cuaron’s “Gravity” sidelight as representatives of
where cinema seems to be going — or returning — as we encounter new frontiers
of the digital age. The short has been around as long as pictures have been
moving, but one would be forgiven for thinking the Internet has given the form
greater visibility, and malleability, than it’s enjoyed in decades. Here’s to
2014: I can’t wait to see what’s next.
Next: John Anderson, Matt Mueller and Tom Brueggemann chime in.
John Anderson:
1. “A Touch of Sin”
2. “The Square”
3. “Blue Is the Warmest Color”
4. “American Hustle”
5. “The Armstrong Lie”
6. “Upstream Color”
7. “What Maisie Knew”
8. “Frances Ha”
9. “Mother of George”
10. “Inside Llewyn Davis”
Matt Mueller:
1. 12 Years A Slave
2. Gravity
3. Blue Is The Warmest Colour
4. All Is Lost
5. American Hustle
6. Frances Ha
7. Philomena
8. Blackfish
9. Stories We Tell
10. Wadjda
Tom Brueggemann:
a year of breathtaking visuals, Spike Jonze’ precious
man-loves-computer voice rom-com ranks with the best as an ethereal,
almost unrecognizable downtown Los Angeles almost becomes an equal
character as distinctive as the sets in the director’s earlier “Being
John Malkovich.” One view only scratched the surface of the mean of this
risky but rewarding work.
that top-tier Nazis had escaped prosecution and managed to recreate
their deeds with relish for the camera 40 years later – this is what
this horrifying film does with Indonesian military death squad veterans
now enjoying retirement and gleefully playing to the camera for
posterity. Both essential and very difficult to experience.
6) “The World’s End” (Edgar Wright/UK/Focus)
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