I guess the Oscars tonight put me in the mood to write about movies, and I realized I hadn’t actually made a Best of 2013 list yet. Normally I’d go with a Top 10, but frankly, that’s not enough, not nearly enough, to give any kind of tribute to how incredible 2013 was for great movies. I honestly feel bad about how many fantastic movies I left out, and how many I just haven’t gotten the chance to see yet. Who knows, maybe Philomena is a masterpiece. While somewhere thousands of miles away, American Hustle is probably stealing an award from actually good movies, I decided to whittle down all the wonderful things I’ve seen this year. So, if you disagree, if your favorite was left out, know that there’s a good chance I love it and that it pained me to cut it. Or I didn’t see it. Or it was HER and I was mostly indifferent. Anyway, in descending, but honestly kind of arbitrary order:
20. Magic Magic and The Conjuring (Tie)
This movie honestly struck a bigger chord with me than it probably even deserves, but man I was engrossed. Magic Magic, starring Juno Temple and Michael Cera, is about a girl’s descent into paranoia and insanity on a vacation in Chile. After Superbad in 2007, I was surprised to see Michael Cera typecast in the same sort of awkward roles while the broader and less subtle Jonah Hill went on to find range and become a two-time Oscar nominee. He’s fantastic in here, as a creepy, sadistic bully of a character, taking his usual quirks and tics and putting them towards something dark and sinister. The sense of isolation and helplessness disturbed me more than any of the year’s more strictly horror films.
Except The Conjuring. I know it’s cheating to have these two tie for a spot, but they’re really the only two unsettling, kinda-sorta horror movies to make my list. The Conjuring works as a mindless scare-house type of movie, where cheap jump-scares and easy tension are thrown at the audience with a constant, efficient glee. But it’s also weirdly effective as a period piece and has a better cast than these sorts of haunted house movies usually do, elevating things to a point where I actually liked this family, and actually cared whether or not they were murdered by ghosts. It’s also terrifying, which helps.
19. Gimme the Loot
Gimme the Loot is a small, low-stakes and surprisingly fun movie about graffiti artists in New York City. It’s rare to see a movie like this, one about working-class inner-city youth that isn’t depressing or message-y, but spirited and colorful and alive. Sometimes it feels like a longer, more edgy Hey, Arnold! episode, and that’s really a big part of its charm. It’s funny and charming, but in a way that never trivializes or condescends.
18. The Grandmaster
The version of The Grandmaster I saw was the U.S. theatrical release, which was unforgivably cut to shreds by stupid and greedy studio heads. A full half-hour was cut, and the remaining film feels unfinished and structurally messy. There are large sections of the plot that are just skipped over, briefly summarized by a post-production voiceover. This cut was incomplete and bastardized and disappointing, but it’s still here, because Wong Kar Wai is just that good. There’s been a glut of movies about Bruce Lee’s legendary trainer Ip Man over the last few years, but this version by the genius director of Chungking Express and Days of Being Wild is by far the best. The fights are infrequent, but when they come they’re visceral and imaginative and poetic. The climactic scene, where Zhang Ziyi faces off against the film’s villain at a snowy train station, is the most beautiful action sequence of the year.
17. Iron Man 3
It isn’t just that Shane Black’s Iron Man 3 is the best of the Marvel movies. It isn’t just that it’s funny in the very literate, mature way we’ve come to expect from Shane Black, the man behind the classic Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. It’s not just that the action scenes are the most fun, most exciting, and biggest of anything we’ve seen from this franchise or any superhero franchise. It’s not even just that this is the first time a movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been able to adopt its own distinct tone and visual style rather than the generic tv-movie quippiness that’s made even the better entries forgettable. What surprised me most about Iron Man 3 is that it’s a movie about ideas, one that takes its’ predecessors’ vague and muddled themes and wraps them in a strong, unexpected arc about the relationship between corporations and terrorism. It also has the year’s best and funniest plot twist, one that takes everything awful and outdated about Iron Man’s arch nemesis The Mandarin and makes it smart and relevant.
16. Stories We Tell
I don’t want to talk that much about Stories We Tell, because so much of its joy is about discovery. Sarah Polley is a director I knew almost nothing about, except that I saw her almost unbearably great and sensuous romance Take This Waltz a few years ago. Stories We Tell seems at first to be little more than home movies and family interviews, but slowly becomes a profound meditation on the nature of storytelling and of family secrets.
15. Computer Chess
I’m embarrassed to admit how far into Computer Chess I had watched before I realized it wasn’t an authentic documentary about an old computer chess tournament. This mumblecore mockumentary is shockingly dry and subtle, but the narrative that slowly builds just on the edge of what’s happening is surprising. There’s mild fun to be had with how proudly and often the tournament announces that it has it’s first-ever female programmer, and the drugged-out exploits of a pair of techno-phobic doomsday theorists. But the movie comes into its own in the second half, where the raw, realistic nature of what’s happening made the surprises seem both jarring and plausible. This movie was difficult to get into, but wouldn’t leave me for days after seeing it. It might just be the year’s funniest tragedy.
14. A Touch of Sin
A Touch of Sin is a movie about China. It seems weird to say a movie could be so encompassingly “about” a place as large and diverse as China, with so rich a history, but this movie is such a sprawling, pessimistic mosaic that it felt like an apology for the limited perspectives Chinese cinema has taken outside of Hong Kong. It’s like a Chinese Crash if Crash didn’t suck.
13 The Counselor
I don’t think there was a stranger, more aggressively unlikable movie this year than Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy’s team-up, a nihilistic story of faceless and nameless drug kingpins that seems interested in actively preventing the audience from getting invested. Between Javier Bardem’s pet cheetahs, many long philosophical conversations at the expense of any narrative momentum, the most nasty and creative murder weapon in years, and a performance from Cameron Diaz that fails in such an interesting and extreme way it loops all the way around right back into “works”. This recommendation comes with several truckfuls worth of grains of salt, But I think it’s pretty great.
12 Beyond the Hills
This spooky and quiet Romanian drama about young nuns at an Eastern Orthodox convent seems timeless. It’s very hard to discuss the plot without spoiling it, so rather than trap myself into just listing hyperbolic positive adjectives, (all of which apply), I’ll just say that it’s the follow-up to 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, which was ,depending on where you live, either one of the best movies of 2007 or the single best movie of 2008.
11. This is the End and The World’s End
It felt fair listing these together, since they’re both surprisingly profound goofy ensemble comedies about the end of the world. These are the two best comedies of the year, and I have trouble choosing a favorite. The World’s End is probably the better movie, with a stunning and brave final third that’s the best thing Edgar Wright has ever done. It’s touching and dark, elevating a movie about friends on a beer run into something closer to mythological. But This is the End is the funnier of the two, an in-joke filled movie where famous actors and comedians play themselves. They’re both masterpieces in unexpected escalation. They’re both about friendship. I know some people were disappointed that 2012’s Mayan apocalypse didn’t really happen, but these movies are the next best thing.
10. The Wolf of Wall Street
Some people have told me they hate this movie because it’s repetitive, because it glorifies its evil protagonists, and because Jordan Belfont gets off with barely any more than a slap on the wrist. I can see all of those arguments, but think they’re intentional and vital to what Marty Scorsese’s best movie in over a decade is trying to say about corruption and greed and the way we idolize people who trade in them, as long as they look cool doing it. The Wolf of Wall Street takes us along on a cartoonish rise to power and fortune, one that rewards the stupidity, recklessness and animalistic depravity of these shit-heads at every turn. And at the end of it, the only character we really see punished is the one honest and noble character, the agent investigating their corruption. This is the world we live in, and this is the Wall Street we allow. This movie isn’t interested in giving us the comfortable arc we want. We constantly reward the rich and the greedy and the grotesque excess, so this movie is exactly what we deserve. It’s supposed to be a bitter pill to swallow, helped down by how consistently hilarious it is. Decaprio and Hill are portrayed as such idiots and goons that I genuinely don’t understand how anyone thinks they’re being glorified.
9. The Past
I couldn’t find any photos from The Past, a beautiful French-Iranian domestic drama from the director of 2011’s masterful A Separation. But I assure you it’s great.
8. Before Midnight
If I’m being honest, there was no way Richard Linklater’s latest wasn’t going to appear on my list, even before I saw it. This final film in the “Before” Trilogy is every bit the equal of its’ predecessors, and even better than Before Sunrise. For those of you who don’t know, This is a series where, about once every decade, we get to spend a few hours watching Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy walk around in practically real-time, fall in love, and talk about ideas. It’s somehow gotten even more affecting, despite the fact that sometime in the last ten years Ethan Hawke started looking like Sebulba from The Phantom Menace. Where the first two were more about tumultuous youthful romance, Before Midnight is about the difficulties of love for a couple that has been together for years, with an uncertain future. It’s the most mature and assured of these movies, and the best romance of the year, despite people who would probably like it better if Julie Delpy played a cell phone.
7. Gravity
You know Gravity. This movie seems like it comes from an entirely new, or so old it’s been lost, philosophy of filmmaking. Alfonso Cuaron builds tension by placing three astronauts in the most fraught, isolated situation imaginable and refusing to cut away. No mission control. No flashbacks to their pasts on Earth. This movie is a technical marvel, an absolute masterpiece of keeping the dark void of space constantly threatening and visually dynamic. It’s a movie-length situation threatening to unfold, with the vague hints of a more in-depth plot and themes about motherhood just on the outside of what we’re seeing. Also it has Sandra Bullock’s only good performance ever, and damn, does she deserve the Oscar she’ll probably win in a few hours.
6. Fast and Furious 6
I love this movie. Fast and Furious 6 is a weird, dumb, and completely absurd action movie, the sixth in a franchise that started as a dumb Point Break ripoff about street-racing. In this entry, the same Toretto gang is trying to save the world from an evil shadowy version of themselves, who are being run partially by Vin Diesel’s amnesiac love interest, who died two movies ago. It’s insane to me that these movies have built up such an elaborate mythology, and even more insane how well it works. The gigantic, absolutely preposterous action sequences (The best in this movie involves the cars fighting a tank on a busy highway) are pretty expertly crafted where they don’t need to be. But what really sets this movie apart is the way the gang act like a family. The earnest affection these criminals feel for each other is palpable and gives this big, dumb piece of work a big, dumb heart to wear on its big, dumb sleeve. Also for some reason the characters can fly now. In the words of my older brother “That movie is great because the action scenes could only have been planned by a kid playing with lego figures.”
5. Inside Llewyn Davis
The Coen brothers are, collectively, the best filmmakers of their generation. Their latest movie, a sad, bitter ode to the 1960s folk scene, surprised me by being earnest and sentimental, instead of their trademark cold and funny cynicism. The result is something magical, an odyssey of mourning that refuses to come together in any traditional narrative way. The music is great and authentic. There’s a weird twenty-minute segment where the plot and character’s we’ve been following pretty much stop so Llewyn (Oscar Isaac, who is GREAT in this) can take a road trip to Chicago with an aggressive John Goodman and a mostly-silent angry guy named Johnny Five. This is a movie less interested in plot than atmosphere and iconography, and that makes it yet another Coens masterpiece.
4. Spring Breakers
God, I don’t even know how to describe Spring Breakers. It’s like if Terrance Malick were to direct a movie adaptation of a Hieronymus Bosch painting of an MTV Spring Break special. It’s a semi-narrative tonal masterpiece about the way four girls descend into a repetitive, surreal hell when their spring break is hijacked by a creepy-yet-sweet drug dealer and rapper played by James Franco in probably my single favorite performance of 2013. This nightmare rushes to some truly bizarre places tonally and narratively, culminating in maybe my favorite movie moment of the year, a montage of Franco and the girls in pink ski-masks, robbing people at gunpoint, set to James Franco on a piano playing and singing “Everytime” by Britney Spears. Like my #1 choice, this is a movie that’s fueled by eerie tone poetry rather than traditional storytelling. We get so wrapped up in this insane world and tone that when reality does kick in, when it becomes too much for one of the girls, the cold, mundane shot of her on a bus, on a long bridge back to the real world, is somehow gut-wrenching.
3. 12 Years a Slave
This fuckin’ movie. 12 Years a Slave is the greatest movie about slavery I’ve ever seen. It’s a powerful true story of Solomon Northup, a free black man from New York who is kidnapped and sold down south into slavery. What’s truly special about this movie, besides the brutal, unflinching portrayal of the evils and abuses of slavery, is the way it examines how that evil can taint the very fabric of logic and society. The evil of slavery is such an embedded part of this society that a man like Benedict Cumberbatch’s slaveowner can seem, in comparison, good, despite being a slaveowner. The movie reaches new Kafkaesque heights when he’s sold to Michael Fassbinder, a sadistic lunatic even by the standards of the time. It’s there Northup encounters Fassbinder’s twisted and abusive lust towards Patsey, who takes the bulk of the abuse from Fassbinder, his wife, and in a heartbreaking scene, from Northup himself. Patsey is in a way a more important character than Northup, as she represents the millions of slaves who weren’t rescued after twelve years. For her it was An Entire Life A Slave. 12 Years a Slave is about slavery as an unspeakably horrible institution where logic and truth are punished and forbidden at any turn. It is, by far, the most powerful and heartbreaking fictional film of the year.
2 The Act of Killing
Movies can be important. Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line is responsible for saving a man’s life. That’s the most famous example of a documentary transcending being just an informative, entertaining true story and becoming meaningful in a real world way. That is, until this year’s The Act of Killing. The Act of Killing has a pretty heady concept: In the 1960s, a military coup of gangsters overthrew the Indonesian government and committed mass murders against their political opponents, mostly communists or suspected communists. A leader of the death squads, Anwar Congo, personally murdered over a thousand of the 500,000 who were “purged”. These murders were never answered for, because the coup has kept in power, still running Indonesia today, and Anwar Congo is something of a celebrity among the gangs of youth working in the government’s thrall. In The Act of Killing, director Joshua Oppenheimer follows Anwar Congo and invites him to recreate his crimes in the manner of the American genre films he was influenced by, gangster films and musicals. The documentary follows an untried war criminal who is allowed to recreate his murders. He stages elaborate and surreal musical numbers as part of the story. History, it’s demonstrating, is written by the winner. In one memorable scene, a younger man recounts to Congo how his father was murdered in front of him as a child, during the purge, for communist sympathies. Congo thanks him for his contribution to Congo’s movie.
The key moment of the movie, and please note, I’m going to talk about the ending, so go watch it if you haven’t, comes after what seems like days of Anwar Congo making a big, propagandist production of his film, and having a wonderful time with it. He seems nostalgic as he discusses wrapping wire around a person’s neck and twisting until his head came off. After he decides to play a victim in one of these reenactments, though, he’s visibly shaken as he watches himself interrogated, tortured and murdered. “Did the people I killed.. did they feel this bad? As afraid and helpless?” Oppenheimer answers, in a rare moment of honesty: “No, they felt worse, because they knew it was real and you know it isn’t.” We can see the shell, the sick and evil denial he’s built up over decades in power, crack a little. It’s not nearly enough, obviously, but for the victims, and the family of the victims, of the half-million murdered by the regime in 1965-66, seeing Anwar Congo’s weary, shaken old face grow sick and broken is the closest to justice they’ve yet gotten.
1. Upstream Color
Wow. After those last two, it feels superficial to list any narrative film as #1, especially one that’s not about anything big and important like slavery. But Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color is one of the most beautiful movies I’ve ever seen, a weird, poetic, blurry rush of images and ideas all centered around a vague science-fiction conceit. I’ve seen this movie three times, and here’s the plot, as far as I can tell:
Kris (Amy Seimetz) is kidnapped and drugged. The drug isn’t chemicals, exactly, but an insect, a type of larva that lives near a plant by the river, covered in blue powder. This plant has a mostly unexplained, kinda supernatural property of putting Kris in kind of a trance, making her susceptible to hypnosis. In this state, she’s brainwashed by a thief who lives with her, making her repeat tasks, which include making chains out of paper and memorizing Walden. While she’s doing this, he takes everything she owns, physical assets, bank accounts, everything. When he leaves and she wakes up, she doesn’t remember any of it. She feels the insect growing and alive inside of her. An unnamed sound-mixer who lives on a pig farm draws her to him with a machine that pounds into the ground, where he surgically removes the worm from her and places it in one of his pigs. She leaves, and from now on he can listen to the pig’s heartbeat and get a look into her life, where she is, what she’s feeling.
That alone could be the premise for a brilliant Cronenberg body-horror, but it’s only the first twenty minutes of Upstream Color. It then transforms into a gentle, abstract romance movie where Kris meets Jeff (Shane Carruth) and they start to rebuild their broken lives together while trying to figure out what happened to her. This movie is so beautiful I get chills just thinking about certain scenes. It’s a better Terrence Malick movie than the actual movie Terrence Malick made in 2013, and it’s my favorite movie of the year.
I’d love to hear any thoughts or disagreements! Happy 2014, which is already off to a killer start with The Lego Movie
brendan writes about movies 