Holy terror, holy fool, holy shit! Holy Motors

He rises from bed in the night, steps over a dog, and carefully feels his way along an expanse of wallpaper—like May in her membranous motel room in Sam Shepard’s Fool For Love. He’s seeking a portal, perhaps to another dimension, perhaps just to a movie theatre, this man who, we’ll soon realize, can become anyone. (He’s played by who else but the inimitable, intensely physical actor Denis Lavant.) We call this man Monsieur Oscar, and once he finds his way through that papered wall and, it would seem, down some sort of rabbit hole, we then cut to the start of his workday, though surely Oscar’s strange activities, each of them supernatural feats of role-play for clients never identified and for purposes left obscure, should best be considered a vocation, or even a cosmic obligation.

In suit and tie, Oscar leaves his compound, cheerfully waves adieu to the kids, passes by his ample security staff, and enters his stretch limo, which is piloted by Oscar’s Girl Friday, a slim, ivory-haired, ravishingly beautiful septuagenarian (Edith Scob, most famous as the titular non-visage in the horror classic Eyes Without a Face). She alerts him to the day’s itinerary. Oscar prepares for each of his  gigs from his mobile office, which is equipped with a bulb-framed mirror, costumes and make-up. (Only Cosmopolis displays a car with more vital amenities.) First stop: Oscar disguises himself as a hunched-over old lady muttering to herself on a busy bridge. Soon after he’s donning a black full-body jumpsuit adorned with little white balls and entering a Tronosphere, where he meets a similar female creature in similar garb with whom he play-fights and faux-sexes with acrobatic panache. Is this already sounding weird? People, you all don’t know the half of it.

Maybe Monsieur Oscar is simply the world’s hardest working actor. Maybe, like the hapless hero of Ursula K. LeGuin’s novel The Lathe of Heaven, he’s simply trapped in an existence that morphs every time he turns around, and all he can do is adapt. Maybe Leos Carax, the compulsively inventive writer/director of Holy Motors, just wants to send Levant—his ferociously talented muse, Harpo Marx, Jacques Tati, Jackie Chan and Lon Chaney all rolled into one wiry, putty-faced Frenchman—on a paid holiday to an ever-unfurling dreamscape, made of one-part reality, one-part unconscious roaming, one-part cinephilia. There’s no road map for Holy Motors, so best do away with your search for clear answers from the get-go. You’ll have more fun that way.

For those who saw the recent anthology film Tokyo!, you’ll be pleased to discover that Carax has resurrected Levant’s milky-eyed, mayhem-making leprechaun, who this time around surfaces from a Paris sewer, gobbles cemetery flowers, bites the fingers off a fashion photographer’s assistant and abducts a zombified Eva Mendes from a glamour shoot. Later Oscar will enter an abandoned warehouse full of mannequin parts and meet up with Kylie Minogue, a fellow career changeling, or maybe a secret agent, from somewhere in his past, and she’ll sing a sad and powerful song that asks ‘Who Are We?’ The unbearable truth is that the answer just keeps changing, scene by scene, moment by moment, as does this luxuriant, restless, ultra-bizarre and hugely enjoyable film. Identity is fluid: this is a fact that also makes for great fantasy, a fantasies at the heart of movie-love. This movie understands that fantasy like few others do.  

     

Close encounters of the charitable kind

Rural landscapes and dust-clouded roads; cocks, dogs and donkeys; horses dragging carts and kids on bikes: the emphasis is clearly on nurturing a sense of place in the tranquil, rather idyllic opening scenes of Argentine-Canadian director Andrés Livov-Macklin’s A Place Called Los Pereyra. The film tracks an encounter between Los Pereyra, a remote village without phones or electricity in the heavily forested region of Cacho, Argentina, and a group of teenage girls dubbed las Madrinas or “the Godmothers,” who until recently made annual trips to Pereyra from Buenos Aires, some 1,450 kilometers away, with the ostensible goal of helping Pereyra’s children to better appreciate education—the village only has one school, which ends at grade six.

The well-intentioned madrinas do what teenage girls from big cities do: they try to have fun, play games with the kids, flirt with a local teenage boy or two, and then leave. It's not unlike being a councillor at summer camp, and constitutes what is no doubt a formative experience for the girls. But how effective is this interaction? Is it all that educational (in the conventional sense)? What is the lasting impact of their visit on the village? Lyrical and attentive, the film neither commends nor condemns las madrinas, but by simply observing the encounter, and spending time in Pereyra before and after, A Place Called Los Pereyra prompts intriguing questions about the efficiency and aftereffects of such altruistic programs, while offering a portrait of a place, seemingly populated almost entirely by children and the elderly (people of working age have presumably gone elsewhere), that feels very much apart from much of 21^st century society.

I spoke with Los Pereyra’s co-producer Hugh Gibson over breakfast earlier this week. Gibson is also a writer and director; his 2004 film ‘Hogtown Blues’ won the Audience Award at the Bilbao International Film Festival, and he’s since worked on a series of videos designed to promote Toronto’s Regent Park’s harm reduction program for drug users. Gibson’s story of making Los Pereyra is one of hard work and happy accidents. It’s also about the elusiveness of closure.

        

Producer Hugh Gibson    

JB: You and Andrés studied film at York University together, right? Is that where this project started?

HG: We knew each other a little through school, but we only got to know each other really well later, when we both had our thesis movies playing at the Montreal film festival. That was back n 2004.

JB: Was Andrés’ thesis film a documentary?

HG: Yes. Mostly about his grandfather. He shot it in Buenos Aires. You could see from that film that he had a particular eye. A poetic sensibility to his storytelling. After school he went back to Argentina and started developing this idea he got from friends who’d taken these charitable trips to distant villages when they were in high school. This sort of thing is practiced widely down there. Andrés always wondered what happens when people from privileged backgrounds go to these places—places that are the opposite of privileged—and then leave. These visitors descend as though from a UFO almost. What must the villagers think when they’re gone? What’s village life like when the visitors aren’t there? Andrés workshopped this idea at the Berlin Film Festival’s Talent Campus where, once more, we both happened to wind up at the same time, staying in the same dorm. I loved his idea. I was very interested in Argentine cinema, specifically after seeing Los Muertos and The Holy Girl. I really wanted this movie to be made. We met the guy who would compose music for the movie in Berlin too. Gary Marlowe. A German guy. It was a fortuitous trip.

JB: You compared these groups to UFOs. One of the film’s most interesting scenes is the one where the grandfather with the giant white face-spanning moustache is sitting on the fence in his boxer shorts, telling his grandson about these people who are coming to visit. What he describes almost sounds like science-fiction, or myth. As though Buenos Aires was Valhalla.

HG: Yes. It becomes a magical place in the kids’ minds.

JB: You guys spent so long preparing; when you started to see the footage, did anything really surprise you?

HG: There were big surprises. The whole trip to the zoo, for instance. None of that was planned. In previous years they had never left Los Pereyra. But this bus came along and took the kids on this field trip and yielded some extremely interesting material.

JB: The idea of these city girls taking these children from the countryside, who are clearly accustomed to living amongst animals, and bringing them to a zoo—it lends itself to being used as a metaphor for the whole project at its most ineffective. But the film smartly resists that metaphor; it doesn’t push it too hard. It would be a facile reading of the relationship between las madrinas and Los Pereyra.

HG: Andrés’ approach was always about keeping distance. Fly on the wall. There were never going to be any formal interviews or voiceover to fill in the gaps. So it follows that you’re not going to beat the audience over the head with big metaphors. There are hints and suggestions to follow, if you’re so inclined.

JB: There is one sequence that feels like a more overt editorial statement, the one where we cut between las madrinas having a party, dancing and singing along to the Rent soundtrack—I guess they brought a generator—while this boy sits alone by a campfire, until he gets up and says he’s going home.

HG: I would say that throughout the movie we just tried to find opportunities to emphasize certain differences. The culture clash. There’s a lot of that in the previous scene where everyone visits that family farm and we learn that children there hunt pumas. The food, the skinning of the goat carcass—we wanted to make clear how different are these two ways of life.

JB: You mentioned that the question that prompted the film had to do with the aftereffects of these visits. I wonder how you felt about the idea that a film crew, however small and unobtrusive, might also have a similar effect. You come, turn a spotlight on these people, and then vanish.

HG: A very good question. One that we struggle with to this day.

JB: Have the people of Los Pereyra seen the film?

HG: No. It’s been an ongoing challenge to bring a screening to them. The fact that that still hasn’t happened is not something I’m happy about. Our main contacts in the village were the teachers you see in the movie. They’ve since retired and moved away. Those who live there don’t have phones or email. They don’t have any way to play a DVD. We’ve been in talks with this government agency called CineMóvil. They bring movies to remote places; just imagine something like what you see in Spirit of the Beehive. We’ve wanted to work with them, but there’s been a series of setbacks that would be comical if it wasn’t happening to us. The truck broke down, the funding suddenly got cut—just one thing after another. But I hope it’ll happen soon.

JB: I’ve seen you’re work with Regent Park. Is making films about neglected or at-risk or unknown communities part of a bigger plan for you?

HG: I hope that anything I work on can give a perspective on the world that hasn’t been seen before, that can deepen people’s empathy and understanding for others, whether those people are in trouble or simply living on the fringes of modern culture. That’s what attracted me to Los Pereyra in the first place. 

Sympathy for the sadist, and other dubious teenage readings of A Clockwork Orange

As a teenage boy I suppose I was impressed by the artful brutalism of it, the audacious juxtaposition of music and image, the home invasions, gang rapes and vicious beatings set to show tunes and classical favourites. When you’re young you need dystopias, and A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick’s controversial 1971 adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ novel, more than delivered, replete with its own jive talk, ugly furniture, outfits and wigs. It re-legitimized milk-drinking for the bad kids. It also fed juvenile homophobic suspicions that parents were zombies, authority figures were buffoons, and social workers just wanted to get down your pants. It wasn’t that hard to identify with Alex. Sure, he murdered the cat lady, but he didn’t mean it. Kubrick facilitated Alex’s palatability by excising the novel’s pedophilia and making all of Alex’s victims unbelievably irritating, cartoons practically waiting to be victims. Still, I find it interesting that the prison chaplain is the sole voice of reason: “When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.” (Burgess was a lapsed Catholic.)

Then there was Malcolm McDowell, a bold, intelligent actor, whose Alex is so memorable, so savage yet shamelessly sympathetic, that the role kind of haunted him, a bit like Norman Bates did for Anthony Perkins. In those early scenes of Alex and his droogs prowling city and country for the old ultraviolence, McDowell never blinks. It’s a way to assert his unflinching lust, this sadist with a soft spot for Beethoven. Which makes it that much more chilling when Alex goes to prison and gets plugged into the experimental fast-tracked rehabilitation program where they feed him drugs and force him to watch nasty movies all afternoon with his eyelids held open by metal insect legs. The result of this new crime-crushing tactic? A generation of ex-cons who get nauseous whenever confronted with bullies, young men incapable of intimate contact with the opposite sex. Once released from the pen Alex is anything but “ready for love.”

Which brings us to the third act and its chain of dramatic ironies, which possess a certain satisfying symmetry. Going back to A Clockwork Orange for the first time since my teens it was these final sequences that I realized I’d forgotten. I was pleasantly surprised to see how well they unfurl, despite the film’s stiff satire on disciplinary systems and wobbly warnings about the malleability of the mind and the persistence of aberrant urges. Whether any of this works as social commentary remains debatable. Kubrick was genuinely horrified by the copy-cat killings and avoided these themes in the future, leaving them to Michael Haneke—who would run into a whole other set of problems with his own Funny Games.

I scream, you scream, we're all screamed out: Scream 4

The cinema’s most annoying crank caller returns in this latest installment of Wes Craven’s franchise, as does original scripter Kevin Williamson, several original castmembers and that stupid ghost-face mask. After a decade spent licking her wounds, working on her martial arts technique and writing a memoir which apparently consists of nothing but self-help platitudes, final girl Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) finds herself back in old Woodsboro, overwhelmingly white and middle-class, with tastefully-tended gardens lining the boulevards, that blander-than-life, fantasy American no-place where killing’s just too much fun to keep those rascally, movie-obsessed kids away from.

Donning the old mask and wielding the old knife, the mayhem is rebooted and mostly shamelessly rehashed: to say that Scream 4 is more amusing than most youth-oriented contemporary horror is not much of a compliment. At once unlikely in its winky po-mo conceit and half-assed in its execution, the film’s immaculately cleansed and powdered zitless nubile babes discussing strategies for genre renovation reduces forward-thinking horror to nothing but infinite variations on “boo” moments, utterly removed from thornier challenges such as the consideration of what lies behind fear, anxiety, dangerous thrills, perverse humour or morbid curiosity. To note the film’s inherent preposterousness seems redundant, though the truth is that nothing in Scream 4 seems more improbable than a teenager who can’t remember where she left her mobile phone.

This time out there’s a geek who wears a camera on his ear so he can stream his POV on the internet, adding an ostensible layer to the film’s overall hall of mirrors thematic, which includes a sequels-within-sequels prelude. David Arquette drives around frowning as Sheriff Chipmunk while Courtney Cox’s journalist-mannequin tries to take the serial killer investigation into her own hands, invoking Sarah Palin in her declaration that she’s “going rogue.” Supposedly, these two are married. Campbell meanwhile seems at a complete loss, unable to do much besides wince angrily when confronted by yet another attack, yet another strangely listless scene of murder that at best recalls lesser bits of Roadrunner cartoons without the laughs. At least Marley Shelton is genuinely cute as a dutiful deputy, and the ending-ending, which is to say the ending that follows the predictably false false ending, is so loopy it’s actually rather winning.

Haunted by these images: The Film That Changed My Life

Something happens to us when we try to come to terms with formative experience. Some of us can articulate what constitutes the turning point in our lives. Some slip into reverie. Some are forced to acknowledge that there’s nothing more ineffable than the things that set fire to our imagination. Can something that blows your mind be analyzed? Does the fact that it blows your mind not preclude the inability to do just that? These questions haunt The Film That Changed My Life: 30 Directors on Their Epiphanies in the Dark (Chicago Review Press, $18.95). They give you some idea of what works and what doesn’t in this book of transcribed interviews conducted and edited by Robert K. Elder.

Alex Gibney

Some of the selections in The Film That Changed My Life are genuinely surprising, such as Boys Don’t Cry director Kimberly Pierce on The Godfather, or, most interestingly, documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney on Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel. Gibney tells a nice story about his brief correspondence with Buñuel, and goes some distance toward explaining how he was influenced by Buñuel’s cryptic surrealist techniques while commenting on the intermediary walking scenes in Buñuel’s Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie: “It’s like finding some random shot as a documentarian, and throwing it in there because it has some kind of power you can’t quite identify.” Elsewhere, The Last Seduction director John Dahl recalls seeing A Clockwork Orange at a drive-in in Billings, Montana. “It was the first time I paid attention to the sets,” he says, which probably tells us something about the cinema of Stanley Kubrick.

Danny Boyle

Many choices however, especially those from directors with a large and familiar body of work, are more predictable—and why wouldn’t they be? And who can blame Peter Bogdanovich if he doesn’t have anything especially fresh to say about Citizen Kane? 8 1/2 changed Henry Jaglom’s vocation from actor to director. Richard Kelly believes that “We get closer to Brazil with each passing week.” Danny Boyle declares Apocalypse Now “a celebration of the destruction as well as a condemnation of its subject matter.” Boyle laments the loss of the sort of quixotic ambitions that could drive a film during Francis Ford Coppola’s salad days. He also claims cinema is fundamentally a medium designed for young men, which I probably tells us something about the cinema of Danny Boyle.

I wondered soemtimes if The Film That Changed My Life mightn’t have been better as a series of magazine pieces. Some of Elder’s choices of interviewees might have seemed less puzzling in that context. (Bill Condon? Brian Hertzlinger?) It also might have forced him to be a more judicious editor. There are numerous repetitions that sound fine in conversation but in print read as mere redundancy. There’s also a lack of spontaneity in some pieces that I can only assume arises from Elder’s insistence on using same questions every time out, whether or not they go anywhere. The best interviews in here are the ones that seem to indulge tangents—that’s when Elder’s subjects, as well as Elder himself, really engage and come to life.

Guy Maddin

I’m happy to report that two of the very best interviews are with Canadians, and I take comfort in knowing that both directors in question discovered the movie that changed their life while channel-surfing late at night for glimpses of accidentally uncensored nudity (something I myself have experienced—is this a Canadian thing?). Had he never seen L’âge d’or, Guy Maddin, a man not adverse to hyperbole, claims that he would have never picked up a camera. “It’s just a love story,” Maddin says, “every bit as surreal as a love story deserves to be.” Atom Egoyan meanwhile is extremely sharp about Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, describing its sculptural qualities, how it emphasized the friction in language and the role of the listener. He also says one thing in particular that nearly sums up the entire book: “We are never more alive, I think, as when we are trying to ascertain our relationship to something which is completely mysterious to us.”

TIFF '10: Life after cinema

Over the course of the picture, Jorge Jellinek loses his job, gets a haircut, abandons his luggage, and impersonates a law professor—and that’s only in the movie’s second half. By the end a sort of transformation has taken place, a change has come over his face, and he seems lighter, like a new man, or at lest trying to be. It’s a wonderful performance, among the finest I’ve seen at the 35th Toronto International Film Festival, one that's unassuming yet rippling with comic grace. Jellinek is just a pleasure to watch. He walks as though trying not to move his torso. Before the haircut he seems to be wearing a wig. Without his nerd-to-the-marrow glasses he could perhaps be Alfred Molina. His character has spent 25 years working at a Montevideo cinematheque, which is now dying. Cracked vinyl covers the seats, each of which Jellinek personally inspects. The key to the vault of reels is secreted away in the DVD case for Ikiru. A donation campaign is underway yet it’s hard to imagine anyone’s pocketbooks being pried open from hearing a flamboyantly dull radio lecture on the finer points of developing one’s knowledge of cinema history—I wish they’d pitch in for no other reason than the promise of a Manoel de Oliveira retrospective. Shot in black and white, in 1.33 aspect ratio, with all it’s credits at the top, Federico Veiroj’s A Useful Life is nostalgically clothed and promises to be an homage to vanishing chambers of cherished cinematic discovery, something along the lines of Goodbye Dragon Inn. As far as that goes, it’s affectionate yet not all that sentimental. It’s actually about something else, and it’s very funny. At one point Jellinek is weeping on a bus when he spots someone looking at him, someone who looks suspiciously like a younger version of himself. That’s the turning point, I think. As Jellinek says in one of his recorded pleas for support, “You are both a witness and a participant…” That goes for life and the movies. I only hope that more people see this movie, in cinematheques, multiplexes, or otherwise. (Oddly enough I saw it at Jackman Hall, the theatre in the Art Gallery of Ontario, which the TIFF cinematheque called home until only a few weeks ago when they moved into their new digs.)

The Man Between: the Cinematheque Ontario celebrates 20 years with the films of James Mason

I’m thinking about that scene in Lolita (1962), the one where Clare Quilty meets Humbert Humbert on the veranda of the hotel where a police convention just happens to be underway. “You have a most interesting face,” Quilty tells Humbert in parting. Yet only minutes earlier he’d told him, “You have the most normal face I’ve ever seen.” That’s James Mason.

5 Fingers (1952)

The Cinematheque Ontario, recently—and, it must be said, lamentably—re-dubbed TIFF Cinematheque, turns 20 this year, and it strikes me at least as serendipitous that among the numerous exciting programmes being unveiled in their newly launched anniversary season, which include retrospectives of legendary directors such as Eric Rohmer, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Akira Kurosawa, they’ve made room for a 14-film retrospective of James Mason, the extraordinary actor whose larger body of work I only became exposed to, and only began to fully appreciate, after becoming a Cinematheque member five years ago when I first moved to Toronto.

Julius Caesar (53)

Laura and I arrived in June of 2005, right in the middle of a heat wave and right in the middle of the Cinematheque’s Ingmar Bergman retrospective. We’d just traveled across the country with our aging Mexican poodle, had been through car trouble and illnesses along the way, and had nearly exhausted our finances completely. Nonetheless, a Cinematheque double membership was the first thing we bought with our last bit of cash. It was one of the best investments we ever made. If you’re going to be broke for a summer in Toronto, you might as well spend it watching elegantly projected masterpieces with an enthusiastic and attentive crowd.

Bigger Than Life (56)

It was at the Cinematheque that I first saw Max Ophüls’ The Reckless Moment (49) and Caught (49). In the former Mason plays a blackmailer, in the latter a kindly pediatrician. It was at the Cinematheque where I first saw Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron (77), in which Mason plays a Nazi. And it was at the Cinematheque where I finally saw Bigger Than Life (56), Nicholas Ray’s melodrama about a middle-American schoolteacher and patriarch who’s saved from a death sentence by a wonder drug only to have it drive him off the rails. The material is fascinating and provocative, the mise en scène exacting and so tense as to make you grit your teeth, but its Mason who makes the film so enduringly troubling. With his mid-Atlantic accent, his slightly overwrought cheerfulness and contained superiority, Mason’s Ed Avery is that much more reflective a mirror of postwar American values by so obviously being an outsider, one quietly desperate to fit in, and when he’s gradually transformed from an amiable, humble, hard-working family man into a potentially murderous, ultra-conservative megalomaniac, you never quite buy that it was just the drugs that did it. It was something already there, inside the character and permeating his environment. I believe this sort of transformation, this rigorous persistence of ambiguity, even while working within the confines of the Hollywood studio system, is evidence of Mason’s genius.

North by Northwest (58)

The Cinematheque will be screening all of the above pictures minus the Peckinpah, as well as some well-known favourites such as North by Northwest (58), where we get to see Mason survey Cary Grant’s well-tailored wrong man like he’s sniffing leftovers and stroke Eva Marie Saint’s neck like he’s fitting it for a noose. And of course we get Lolita, which took Mason even farther out on a limb than Bigger Than Life. Mason’s Humbert is rather different from that of Vladimir Nabokov’s source novel, as are so many things, but Nabokov’s own adaptation, realized by Stanley Kubrick, manages to offer a slightly more palatable, if still inky-blackly comic variation on the novel’s pedophile’s confession. (As I get older and begin to re-asses Kubrick, Lolita is starting to look more or more like his best work.)

Lolita (62)

I cannot imagine another actor in this role, not even Jeremy Irons, who played Humbert in the later Adrian Lyne version (97), which corrected certain things while completely screwing up others. It’s the odd sincerity in Mason’s expression and vulnerability in his voice when he urges Quilty to understand he’s about to be killed. It’s his deliciously ridiculous attempt to cha cha cha with the very horny Charlotte Haze. It’s the hoity-toity way he enunciates words like “issue” and “toenails.” Mason’s Humbert, though afflicted with a perverse, crippling nostalgia, is indeed, as Mason’s characters usually are, urbane. He’s also bumbling. He’s nefariously manipulative, yet he’s also somehow innocent, even in the depths of his moral bankruptcy.

Odd Man Out (47)

Mason was born in 1909 in Yorkshire. He studied architecture. He co-authored a book about cats. He led several lives, it seems, before his death in 1984. He was self-effacing, yet his career, which thrived both in the UK and the US, was clearly driven by a tremendous ambition and belief in his particular talent. The Cinematheque’s programme gives a superb assessment of his singular career, and is not to be missed.

2000s: the decade in movies

top to bottom: numbers 2, 29, 28, 5, 10, 6

31 films to remember from the first decade of our 21st century. The number is arbitrary, but from such arbitrary elements we forge our lists, striving to bring some order to the recent past. If one thing is certain about the last decade in movies, it’s that no amount of industry tumult—the ungovernable internet; the vagaries of home video; the strikes; the ostensible death of cinema-going which thankfully never happened—hasn’t had the slightest effect on our capacity to make great movies. What has changed is our ability to get great movies seen. The studio juggernauts, with their advertising budgets equal to the gross national product of numerous small countries, have arguably never been worse, while the best independent and foreign releases became only more confined, not just to art houses but often only to festivals. Clearly, as we look to the future, those of us passionate about movies are placing our hopes that all these new delivery systems will somehow make great movies easier to discover, and that the digitization of theatres might make bringing small movies to big screens more economically feasible. In any event I'm voting to keep us all going out to the movies.

top to bottom: numbers 7, 9, 26, 19, 17, 22

But enough industry—let’s talk about the work. Frankly, the below list wasn’t so much finished as abandoned. Even as I build this post I keep thinking of titles that I can't believe I've forgotten. But after a while I simply couldn’t keep mulling over my hundred-strong short list any longer without going into a trance. A trail of masterpieces lies beyond these 31. I decided to allow only one movie per director, simply so as to cover more ground, which meant the decade’s best filmmakers—Almodóvar, David Cronenberg, Claire Denis, Michael Haneke, Werner Herzog, Lucrecia Martel—could have just as easily had another title on this list. Some wound up without a movie included at all, despite the fact that the last decade of movies from Gus Van Sant (see the previous post), the Dardenne Brothers, Aleksandr Sokurov, or the deliriously prolific Steven Soderbergh was sometimes revolutionary and in every case consistently impressive—it’s this very consistency that made it so hard to pick one film that stood out.

top to bottom: numbers 4, 16, 24, 15, 13, 31

Great movies can do so many things, from entertaining to beguiling us, from enlightening to devastating us, from blowing our minds to re-awakening our senses. Some of the movies on this list—see, for example, numbers 5, 7 and 10—do many of these things at once with exhilarating verve. Some of them, we might argue—see, for example, numbers 19 and 28—do only one or two of these things but do them so gloriously as to tower above other movies that merely do countless things deftly. There are plenty of critically lauded crowd-pleasers I could have put on my list that more of you would surely have recognized, just as there are plenty of ultra-severe, verging on alienating works I could’ve listed out of sheer admiration for their audacity and perverse rigour. I hope the titles you know provoke you to reconsider, and that the ones you don’t provoke you to track them down. In the end I chose the movies I chose because they usurped the choicest real estate in my imagination and still haven’t moved away; because they continue to fascinate me even after the initial dazzle faded away; because they continue to move me long after first catching me off guard; because they thrill me shamelessly; because they make me afraid of the world while still wanting to fight for it; because they make me in love with the world even when it seems to love no one; because they allow me to keep dreaming, even when I’m wide awake.

top to bottom: 11, 21, 23, 12, 3, 25

(Incidentally the ranking of these titles, a practice I don't usually subscribe to, is also arbitrary. I did it mainly because there's too many titles here not to organize. The first five or six definitely feel like they're in the right place, and the subsequent 11, say, feel like they're grouped accordingly. But really, what the hell is difference between 22 and 28?)

number 1

1. In the Mood for Love (Wong, 00)
2. Mulholland Dr. (Lynch, 01)
3. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong, 06)
4. Code Unknown (Haneke, 00)
5. The Holy Girl (Martel, 04)
6. The Intruder (Denis, 04)
7. Zodiac (Fincher, 07)
8. Summer Hours (Assayas, 08)
9. There Will Be Blood (PT Anderson, 07)
10. A History of Violence (Cronenberg, 05)
11. Silent Light (Reygadas, 07)
12. The New World (Malick, 05)
13. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry, 04)
14. Wendy and Lucy (Reichardt, 08)
15. Fat Girl (Breillat, 01)
16. No Country for Old Men (Coen, 07)
17. Volver (Almodóvar, 06)
18. Encounters at the End of the World (Herzog, 08)
19. Goodbye Dragon Inn (Tsai, 03)
20. George Washington (Green, 00)
21. Birth (Glazer, 04)
22. The Royal Tenenbaums (W Anderson, 01)
23. Brand Upon the Brain! (Maddin, 06)
24. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (Mungiu, 07)
25. Children of Men (Cuarón, 06)
26. Colossal Youth (Costa, 06)
27. I’m Not There (Haynes, 07)
28. The Limits of Control (Jarmusch, 09)
29. Three Times (Hou, 05)
30. Werckmeister Harmonies (Tarr, 00)
31. Before Sunset (Linklater, 04)