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The best films of 2. The end of the year traditionally brings a wealth of best- of candidates, as major studios and studio- affiliated arthouse labels unveil their most austere and decorously appointed films for awards consideration. Yet, a few stray winners aside, we in The A. V. Club film staff found ourselves looking further back in the year for list- makers, including a handful of uncommonly ambitious summer blockbusters, several festival holdovers, and the steady supply of indie and foreign films that slipped in and out of theaters, often woefully unnoticed. Fortunately, 2. 01. So here, for your consideration, are a bunch of films we really liked. The Top 1. 5 1. 5.
The Kids Are All Right. The great but maddeningly non- prolific Lisa Cholodenko (Laurel Canyon,High Art) delivered another smart, funny, and insightful character study about the angst and insecurities of middle- aged women in The Kids Are All Right. The perfectly matched Julianne Moore and Annette Bening play a comfortable lesbian couple whose lives change dramatically when their children (Josh Hutcherson and Mia Wasikowska) seek out the man who fathered them via sperm donation (Mark Ruffalo). The kids then form a strange bond with a man who only vaguely remembers selling his seed so long ago.
This year brought a slew of films about unconventional means of procreation (The Back- Up Plan,The Switch, Mother And Child), but The Kids Are All Right has the messy vitality of real life. It’s a thoughtful portrait of a relationship in crisis—and surprisingly sexy to boot, thanks to Ruffalo, who oozes simultaneously rugged and laid- back sex appeal as a stud who discovers that he can’t coast through life on the strength of his charm and attractiveness anymore.
Leave it to a lesbian filmmaker to create an exemplar of ripe, bohemian male heterosexual sexuality. Shutter Island. If this year’s best films share a theme, it’s the thin, possibly unknowable line between reality and illusion, a notion teased out in everything from Black Swan to Inception to Dogtooth to Exit Through The Gift Shop. Martin Scorsese’s purposefully lurid Shutter Island sends Leonardo Di. Caprio to an island of madmen and madwomen to solve a disappearance. As he discovers his own demons have followed him, his quest shifts and the movie starts to explore dark corridors informed in equal parts by Val Lewton and contemporary Asian horror films. The metaphysics may not ultimately work out, but Scorsese’s vertiginous filmmaking and the film’s gripping, outsized emotions make that feel like a petty concern.
It may not qualify for this film list, but it’s also worth remembering that Twin Peaks makes its return next year as well (and, if rumors are true, may see some. Cult Horror Movies The Unknown Girl (2017). Certified Fresh. Movies and TV shows are Certified Fresh with a steady Tomatometer of 75% or higher after a set amount of reviews (80 for.
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. Nearly everyone brings baggage to new relationships. In Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, Edgar Wright’s sugar- rush adaptation of Brian O’Malley’s beloved graphic novel, quirky Mary Elizabeth Winstead brings baggage of the terrifyingly brutal sort to her blossoming relationship with lovestruck indie- rock musician Michael Cera.
Cera isn’t just competing with the memories of Winstead’s former beaus; he must fight her seven evil exes to win his true love’s heart. In a directorial tour de force, Wright obliterates the lines between comic books, videogames, cartoons, and live- action by transforming Cera into a hero from some lost late- ’8. Nintendo game and pushing the film’s zippy, retro- futuristic stylization to comic extremes. Pilgrim is so dizzyingly inventive and loaded with ideas, primarily visual, that watching it can be exhausting and exhilarating in equal measure. Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World might be the greatest videogame movie of all time in part because it’s inspired less by any specific game than by the infinite possibilities and cartoonish conflicts of the entire medium.
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Dogtooth. Yorgos Lanthimos’ disturbing, dryly funny Greek drama considers what happens when a mother and father lock their now- grown kids into a gated estate for their entire lives, to keep the messy outside world from corrupting their discipline. Lanthimos doesn’t go the expected route with this premise; he introduces elements of creeping anarchy into the story right from the start, and makes the parents less overprotective fusspots and more deranged sociopaths who actively mess with their kids’ heads. Dogtooth is witty, smart, and shocking in equal measure, and while it can be read as a commentary on everything from fascism to helicopter parenting, it’s primarily a beguilingly puzzling experience, dropping viewers into a weird place and demanding we acclimate. Greenberg. Noah Baumbach’s comedies don’t aim broad: They’re plotless, self- consciously literary, and populated by characters who flat- out suck from the time they roll out of the bed until they angrily switch out the lights at night. But his films are still funny and true. In Greenberg, Ben Stiller stars as an idle crank who visits Los Angeles and has a stormy relationship with an insecure young woman played by Greta Gerwig.
Almost nothing significant happens, and Stiller stays committed to making the title character an unstable jerk. Yet Baumbach gets the details of these characters and their petty concerns so right that the movie is both bracing and—in its own odd way—hilarious. It’s also a pleasure to look at, with Harris Savides’ cinematography capturing the sunny haze of L. A. True Grit. It’s not easy slipping into one of the most iconic roles in the history of American Westerns, yet Jeff Bridges somehow escapes the outsized specter of John Wayne’s only Oscar- winning performance in Joel and Ethan Coen’s riveting adaptation of True Grit. The film plays almost like a Western version of Winter’s Bone. Both films concern a precocious teenage girl entering a terrifying man’s world for the sake of her family’s honor and security.
But the tones are wildly dissimilar: True Grit is as raucous and entertaining as Winter’s Bone is claustrophobic and grim. Yet despite its playful tone and dark comedy, True Grit earns a sneaky cumulative emotional power as Bridges’ irascible outlaw- turned- lawman learns, like James Franco in 1. Hours, that even the orneriest loners need other people. A Prophet. A 2. 00. Best Foreign Language Film nominee released here in 2. A Prophet reads a bit like a single long plot thread from Oz or The Wire, with all the gritty, unflinching detail and devotion to character that implies. Tahar Rahim stars as a teenager facing a six- year prison sentence and trying to hide his fear of his fellow inmates.
Over the course of two and a half hours of film and years of story, he finds protectors who double as enemies, and makes enemies whom he learns how to manipulate and turn into protectors. The politics of prison, drug cartels, and the up- and- coming criminals who step in to replace the older generation all get explored in pulpy detail, and with no sense of a morality tale in the making. It’s a familiar coming- of- age story, in a way, but it’s gripping, well- observed, and complicated, a sort of vivid, French mini- Godfather saga that comments on France’s treatment of immigrants as much as on its treatment of criminals. Carlos. From The Battle Of Algiers to The Day Of The Jackal to Munich, movies about the minute details of violent political action have practically become their own genre. Olivier Assayas’ three- part, five- and- a- half- hour historical epic Carlos is remarkable for the way Assayas and star .
Carlos The Jackal. This is a film about its times, using jittery post- punk and new- wave music and excerpts from TV news to capture the unsettled feel of international politics and culture in the 1. But it’s also an intimate sketch of one arrogant activist and how his people- power plans get complicated by money, mistakes, and bad associations.
Throughout the film, Assayas literally strips S. Mother. After putting his own politically charged spin on the giant monster movie with The Host, Bong Joon- ho returns to the world of urban crime he explored so memorably in 2. Memories Of Murder.