Best Movies of 2011

Stream of the Week: INCENDIES – lives created by violence

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Lubna Azabal in INCENDIES

This searing drama was my pick for 2010’s best film. Upon their mother’s death, a young man and woman learn for the first time of their father and their brother; they journey from Quebec to the Middle East to uncover family secrets. As they bumble around Lebanon, we see the mother’s experience in flashbacks. We learn before they do that their lives were created – literally – by the violence of the Lebanese civil war.

Because the film is anything but stagey, you can’t tell that Canadian director Denis Villaneuve adapted the screenplay from a play. Lubna Azabal, a Belgian actress of Moroccan and Spanish heritage, is brilliant as the mother.

It’s a tough film to watch, with graphic violence against women and children. But the violence is neither gratuitous nor exploitative – it is a civil war, after all, and the theme of the film is the cycle of retribution.

Incendies was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar, but lost out to a much inferior film on the same subject of violence, In a Better Life. You can stream it from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

DVD of the Week: The Descendants

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In director Alexander Payne’s first film since Sideways, George Clooney seeks to care for his daughters in Hawaii after his wife is hospitalized, but then learns that she has been cheating on him.  That news sends him on a quest that he defines along the way.  To complicate things, his daughters are cooperative to various degrees.  The heat is turned up even higher by a potential land deal that could make Clooney and his many entitled slacker cousins wildly rich, but the deal’s deadline looms and he is pressured by his VERY interested relations.

The situation is promising enough, but Payne takes the story in unanticipated directions.   And, as you would expect from Sideways, there are many funny moments in The Descendants.

Clooney’s performance is brilliant.  Here, he does not play The Coolest Man on the Planet.  Instead, Clooney is a grinding workaholic who is so clueless about his kids that he doesn’t realize how clueless he is.  He is stunned by news of the affair that he never suspected.  Perhaps for the first time in his life, he must work through his situation figuring it out as he goes along.

Shailene Woodley’s performance as the older daughter is even more essential to the success of The Descendants. It’s not just that she perfectly plays a bratty teenager, but that we can see that some of her brattiness is hormonal and some of it is entirely voluntary and manipulative. Woodley had to convincingly play a character who is at times self-centered and shallow, but who can rally and reach within herself to serve as the family glue and support her dad and little sister.

The Descendants approaches being a perfect movie but for two things: 1) the daughter’s stoner boyfriend is just too oblivious to be credible among the other colorful yet completely authentic characters; and 2)  the audience can never believe that there’s any chance that George Clooney is going to allow bulldozers on thousands of pristine Hawaiian acres.  Still, almost perfect is pretty good.

DVD of the Week: Take Shelter

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My DVD pick is Take Shelter, #2 on my list of  Best Movies of 2011 and probably the single most overlooked film of last year.

Michael Shannon (Shotgun Stories, Agent Van Alden in Boardwalk Empire) is perhaps our best creep actor. And what’s creepier than watching a solid parent and spouse enduring a full-fledged psychotic breakdown?

Shannon plays the most grounded guy in America until he starts having terrifying dreams and then hallucinations. One of his parents is mentally ill, and he is determined to resist a breakdown and protect his family. Unlike in a lesser screenplay, Shannon’s protagonist is very aware that he may be going crazy and is digging his fingernails into sanity.

Shannon gave a breakthrough performance in Shotgun Stories, by writer/director Jeff Nichols. (In the excellent Shotgun Stories, Nichols created a dysfunctional family with a father so dismissive of his offspring that he non-named them Son, Kid and Boy.) This time, Nichols has given Shannon the role of a lifetime, for which Shannon should have received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor.

This is also the performance that should have earned Jessica Chastain her Oscar nod as Shannon’s wife. Chastain must react to her husband’s behavior, which starts out quirky, becomes troublesome and spirals down to GET ME OUT OF HERE.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5U4TtYpKIc]

2011 in Movies: the year’s best movies

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INCENDIES

Here’s my list of the best films of 2011: 1)  Incendies, 2) Take Shelter, 3) The Artist, 4) The Descendants, 5) Poetry, 6) Midnight in Paris, 7) Beginners, 8) Source Code, 9) Young Adult, and 10) (tie) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Drive.

Continuing with my list of 2011’s best films, here are my honorable mentions: The Guard,  Project Nim, Buck, Tabloid, The Adjustment Bureau, Carancho, and Potiche.

(Note:  I’m saving room for some films that I haven’t yet seen, especially Roman Polanski’s Carnage and Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus.)

You can watch the trailers and see my comments on all these films at Best Movies of 2011.

According to Metacritic, all of my picks (except The Adjustment Bureau) were highly rated by prominent critics.  I did disdain some art films, most notably The Tree of Life, which made lots of critics’ end-of-year lists.  See 2011 in Movies: biggest disappointments, which I’m posting on Tuesday.

(Further Note:  Incendies was nominated for the 2010 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, but was widely released in the US in 2011.  A Separation, which I and most folks won’t be able to see until after January 27, will contend on my 2012 list.)

DVD of the Week: Midnight in Paris

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With Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen has made his best movie since 1986’s Hannah and Her Sisters. It’s a funny and wistful exploration of the nostalgia for living in another time and place – all set in the most sumptuously photographed contemporary Paris.

Successful but disenchanted screenwriter and would be novelist Owen Wilson accompanies his mismatched fiancée Rachel McAdams to Paris, where he fantasizes about living in the artistically fertile Paris of the 1920s. Indeed, at midnight, he happens upon a portal to that era, and finds himself hanging out with the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Stein. He meets Marion Cotillard, a 1920s gal who is herself nostalgic for the 1890s.

Midnight in Paris shines because of the perfectly crafted dialogue. McAdams’ every instinct is cringingly wrong for Wilson. She is enraptured by the pretentious blowhard Michael Sheen, who couldn’t be more insufferable.

As usual, Allen has attracted an excellent cast. Owen Wilson rises to the material and gives one of his best performances. Corey Stoll is hilarious as Hemingway and Adrien Brody even funnier as Salvador Dali. Cotillard is luminous.

It makes my list of Best Movies of 2011 – So Far.

Buck, Project Nim and Paradise Lost 3 make Oscar short list.

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The Academy’s short list of candidates for the Best Documentary Oscar includes two films on my Best Movies of 2011 – So Far:  Buck and Project Nim.  Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory from the HBO Paradise series also made the list.  All fifteen films on the short list are here.

DVD of the Week: Incendies

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This searing drama is the year’s best film so far.  Upon their mother’s death, a young man and woman learn for the first time of their father and their brother and journey from Quebec to the Middle East to uncover family secrets.  As they bumble around Lebanon, we see the mother’s experience in flashbacks.  We learn before they do that their lives were created – literally – by the violence of the Lebanese civil war.

Because the film is anything but stagey, you can’t tell that Canadian director Denis Villaneuve adapted the screenplay from a play.  Lubna Azabal, a Belgian actress of Moroccan and Spanish heritage, is brilliant as the mother.

It’s a tough film to watch, with graphic violence against women and  children.  But the violence is neither gratuitous nor exploitative – it is a civil war, after all, and the theme of the film is the cycle of retribution.

Incendies was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar, but lost out to a much inferior film on the same subject of violence, In a Better Life.

DVD of the Week: Carancho

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Here’s one of my Best Movies of 2011 – So Far.

Well, they have ambulance chasers in Argentina, too, and that seamy world is the setting for this dark and violent noirish thriller.  Ricardo Darin (The Secrets of Their Eyes, Nine Queens) stars as a suspended lawyer running insurance scams.    (I think of Darin as the Argentine Joe Mantegna.)  Set in the gloom of urban nighttime emergency rooms and funeral homes, it’s a love story between the lawyer and an equally troubled doctor (Martina Gusman), nestled into a crime thriller.

The story is as cynical and dark as it comes.  The handheld camera keeps it out of the noir category, but the story is as hard-bitten as Kiss Me Deadly or any of the really nasty noirs. The violence is realistic, and there’s lots of it – I had never seen anyone beaten to death with a file drawer before.  If you like dark and edgy (and I do), this is the film for you.

Midnight in Paris: Woody’s best in a long, long time

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With Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen has made his best movie since 1986’s Hannah and Her Sisters.  It’s a funny and wistful exploration of the nostalgia for living in another time and place – all set in the most sumptuously photographed contemporary Paris.

Successful but disenchanted screenwriter and would be novelist Owen Wilson accompanies his mismatched fiancée Rachel McAdams to Paris, where he fantasizes about living in the artistically fertile Paris of the 1920s.  Indeed, at midnight, he happens upon a portal to that era, and finds himself hanging out with the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Stein.  He meets Marion Cotillard, a 1920s gal who is herself nostalgic for the 1890s.

Midnight in Paris shines because of the perfectly crafted dialogue.  McAdams’ every instinct is cringingly wrong for Wilson.  She is enraptured by the pretentious blowhard Michael Sheen, who couldn’t be more insufferable.

As usual, Allen has attracted an excellent cast.  Owen Wilson rises to the material and gives one of his best performances.  Corey Stoll is hilarious as Hemingway and Adrien Brody even funnier as Salvador Dali.  Cotillard is luminous.

It makes my list of Best Movies of 2011 – So Far.

Incendies: best movie of the year so far

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This searing drama is the year’s best film so far.  Upon their mother’s death, a young man and woman learn for the first time of their father and their brother and journey from Quebec to the Middle East to uncover family secrets.  As they bumble around Lebanon, we see the mother’s experience in flashbacks.  We learn before they do that their lives were created – literally – by the violence of the Lebanese civil war.

Because the film is anything but stagey, you can’t tell that Canadian director Denis Villaneuve adapted the screenplay from a play.  Lubna Azabal, a Belgian actress of Moroccan and Spanish heritage, is brilliant as the mother.

It’s a tough film to watch, with graphic violence against women and  children.  But the violence is neither gratuitous nor exploitative – it is a civil war, after all, and the theme of the film is the cycle of retribution.

Incendies was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar, but lost out to a much inferior film on the same subject of violence, In a Better Life.