10. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Warner Bros.
Who could guess, after the meandering first feature in a seemingly
unnecessary eight-hour trilogy of films based on a novel of less than
300 pages, that Peter Jackson had such a vigorous and thrilling middle
episode in store? With Bilbo (Martin Freeman), Gandalf (Ian McKellen)
and the dwarves finally done with introductory dawdling, they dive into a
nonstop adventure among the noble Elves, the rough-hewn humans of
Laketown and the ferocious dragon Smaug (voiced by
Benedict Cumberbatch).
This time, Andy Serkis has not lent his presence to Gollum, but his
work as second-unit director is spectacular. Each complex encounter,
especially a flume-ride escape of the dwarves, boasts a teeming
ingenuity of action and character. A bonus: the budding romance of the
warrior Elf Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly) and the dwarf hunk Kili (Aidan
Turner). In all, this is a splendid achievement, close to the grandeur
of Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films.
9. 12 Years a Slave
Francois Duhamel / Fox Searchlight
Southern whites of the pre-Civil War plantation aristocracy believed
themselves God’s chosen, and their slaves inhuman. As shown in this
searing film document — an anti-
Gone With the Wind — the
masters were the madmen, inferior but in charge. The first two feature
films of Anglo-African director Steve McQueen, whose first two features,
Hunger and Shame, proved him a picture poet of physical degradation.
Here, working from John Ridley’s script based on the 1853 memoir of
Solomon Northup, a free black New Yorker abducted into servitude,
McQueen immerses viewers in the magnolia-scented hell to which Northup
(Chiwetel Ejiofor) was exiled. You will recoil at every punishment, feel
each slur, with an immediacy that makes the long-ago, “peculiar
institution” of slavery sting like a whiplash. To this hot content,
McQueen applies cool imagery. The movie has the eerie impact of a museum
exhibit; it is a diorama of atrocity, populated by varying forms of
monstrosity (Michael Fassbender and Benedict Cumberbatch as the main
slave-owners) and benevolence (
Brad Pitt as a Canadian abolitionist), and humanized by the smoldering restraint of Ejiofor’s performance.
8. The Act of Killing
Drafthouse Films
In 1965, the thug Anwar
Congo
was hired by the Indonesian government to stamp out the threat of
Communism; he and his fellow gangsters formed paramilitary squads that
tortured and killed thousands of innocents. Nearly a half-century later,
Anwar and many of his colleagues are still around, still protected by
the politicians in charge, and ready to reenact their atrocities. Joshua
Oppenheimer’s amazing documentary gives that opportunity to men who
grew up idolizing Brando and Pacino and are pleased to star in their own
crude biopics. To more closely resemble his young self, Anwar dyes his
hair and gets new teeth. He rehearses garroting a man with a wire, to
the laughter and applause of the women watching. Making the movies,
which vault from film noir to bizarre musical, eventually gets under
Anwar’s skin and into his dreams; the pearly killer is finally afflicted
with nightmares. For any viewer, the effect is no less haunting.
7. Frozen
Disney
Princess Elsa has powers of sorcery beyond her control: she can and
does cast a nuclear winter on her northern kingdom. Her sister Anna is
the normal one, falling in love at the first sight of any eligible male,
yet bound to confront her sister and save their realm. The first
animated feature in the Walt Disney studio’s glorious history to offer
two princess heroines, Frozen transforms Hans Christian Andersen’s “The
Snow Queen” into a fable of modern, timeless sisterhood. For this
full-musical enchantment, Writer Jennifer Lee and co-director Chris Buck
tapped some of the Broadway musical’s brightest lights — composers
Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez and actor-singers Idina Menzel
(Elsa), Kristen Bell (Anna) and Jonathan Groff (as the gruff mountain
man Kristoff) — and poured all comic inspiration into the snowman
character Olaf (voiced with irrepressible enthusi-woozy-asm by The Book
of Mormon’s Josh Gad). His show-stopping set piece “In Summer” provides
the finest two minutes of cinema you’ll seer this year.
6. Furious 6
Giles Keyte / Universal Pictures
Planes, trains and automobiles
collide spectacularly in the
fourth Fast & Furious movie to be directed by Justin Lin and written
by Chris Morgan. In a reunion of Vin Diesel, the late Paul Walker,
their gang and girlfriends and DEA agent Dwayne Johnson, Furious 6
vrooms from Tenerife to Moscow to London, with astounding stunts in each
location, and hitches a ride on a military cargo plane for the final
brawl. Where Fast Five heralded the New Hollywood’s exaltation of
sensational action over subtle character,
Furious 6 revs
everything up, purifies and improves it to a level even cooler and more
aerodynamically delirious than its predecessor, if such a thing is even
mathematically possible. This adrenaline-stoking series is addictive,
for its chases, crashes, crushes — and for its poetic limning of the
closest camaraderie many men can ever know: with their cars. Owning one,
some auto-holic says, is like a marriage. “Yeah,” another guy replies,
“but when you break up they don’t take half your shit.”
5. The Grandmaster
The Weinstein Company
Running at 2 hours and 10 minutes in its world premiere at the Berlin
Film Festival, Wong Kaw-wai’s dreamy biopic of martial arts master Ip
Man was cut by 22 minutes — one-fifth of its running time — by U.S.
distributor The Weinstein Company. That’s a crime akin to cutting random
holes in a Bosch or Breughel painting; but what’s left is choice. The
Hong Kong director makes superb movies (
Chungking Express,
In the Mood for Love,
2046)
that ignore narrative drive for tales of romance and regret in a
rapturous visual style of slo-mo imagery and hazy closeups of wistful
stars. Tony Leung Chiu-wai, who looks like a more beautiful Obama, plays
Ip Man as a poet of gestural precision, in combat scenes choreographed
by the great Yuen Wo-ping (
The Matrix,
Kill Bill). Leung’s partner in reverie is a female doctor, daughter and martial artist played by Zhang Ziyi (
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon);
she exudes a goddess’s solemn grandeur and is given a diva’s final aria
— a fittingly elegiac climax for a world-class filmmaker who’s always
in the mood for lost love.
4. her
Warner Bros.
In a future Los Angeles so near-Utopian that no scene takes place in a
car, Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) has a job composing love
letters for other people. Profligately romantic, bruised by the failure
of his marriage to Catherine (Rooney Mara), he has enough sentiment left
over to fall truly, madly, deeply in love with a computer operating
system who calls herself Samantha (Scarlett Johansson). Their virtual
affair might be the springboard to satire, but writer-director Spike
Jonze instead creates a splendid anachronism: a modern rom-com that is
laugh-and-cry and warm all over, totally sweet and utterly serious. Or,
if you will, utterly Siri. Phoenix corrals the dulcet melancholy of a
man whose emotional pain finds refuge in Samantha’s embrace, in a love
that, to misquote Phillip K. Dick, is “more human than human.” Phoenix
and Jonze show what it’s like when a mourning heart comes alive —
because he, Theodore, loves Her. And I, Richard, loved her.
3. American Hustle
Francois Duhamel / Annapurna Productions / Columbia Pictures
History remade as sparkling farce: the FBI’s late-70’s Abscam
investigation of political corruption, which led to the conviction of a
U.S. Senator and seven Congressmen, becomes this headlong tale of
romance and recklessness. In director David O. Russell’s third
consecutive movie about mismatched couples and their crazy families,
after
The Fighter and
Silver Linings Playbook, A New York
con artist (Christian Bale) juggles a mouthy wife (Jennifer Lawrence)
and a cunning girl friend (Amy Adams) while reluctantly cooperating with
the sting — supervised by a federal agent (Bradley Cooper) — of a New
Jersey mayor (Jeremy Renner). “Some of this actually happened,” reads
the movie’s opening text; but Russell and cowriter Eric Warren Singer
aren’t going for verisimilitude. This portrait of the ’70s revels in the
decade’s gaudiness — its disco dancing and casino dreams, its ugly
coiffures and facial hair — and in the eternal abrasion of sexy women
and covetous men. The five stars form a fabulous ensemble cast, in the
year’s most knowing explosion of flat-out fun.
2. The Great Beauty / La grande bellezza
Gianni Fiorito / Janus Films
“What’s the matter with nostalgia?” asks an aging poet in this
masterpiece of divine decadence. “It’s the only thing left for those of
us who have no faith in the future.” Writer-director Paolo Sorrentino,
whose
Il Divo blended political bio-pic and Ovidian satire,
views modern Rome in all its excess through the jaded eyes of “the king
of the socialites,” journalist Jep Gambardella (
Il Divo’s Toni Servillo) — and, further back, more than a half-century, to the Eternal City as seen by Federico Fellini in
La Dolce Vita.
This profligately cinematic achievement shows an affection for nearly
all of its outsize characters, and a melancholy that the flaming
creatures of Jep’s acquaintance will soon burn out. Giving even the
cynics a faith in the vibrancy of movies,
The Great Beauty is the year’s grandest, most exhilarating film that takes place on Earth.
1. Gravity
Warner Bros.
When NASA travellers Sandra Bullock and George Clooney get lost in
space, all awe breaks loose. Losing contact with Mission Control, as
well as access to their oxygen supply, they are alone together, with
time and options running out. An epic of desperate peril and profound
wonder, Alfonso Cuarón’s thrilling 3-D drama is a testament to human
grit and groundbreaking technical ingenuity. It deserves to be seen once
for the wow factor and a second time to try to figure out how Cuarón
and his digital savants managed to make the impossible seem so
cinematically plausible. No one had dared even to imagine this stuff —
like the astounding 13-minute take that opens the movie — yet here it
all is, vividly and sumptuously realized. In depicting the fearful,
beautiful reality of the space world above our world,
Gravity
reveals the glory of cinema’s future; it thrills on so many levels. And
because Cuarón is a movie visionary of the highest order, you truly
can’t beat the view.
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