10 Years of Muriel: Best of the Best poll

In conjunction with the tenth year of the Muriels, I decided to poll our voters on their picks for the best Muriel Award winners in seven major categories, along with three other categories meant to encompass the period. It was a pretty quick’n’dirty affair – no ranked ballots, no written pieces – but there were some surprises, some blowouts, some competitive races. All in all, good fun. Here were our winners.

Best Film:

1. The Tree of Life (2011) [8 votes]
2 (tie). Inglourious Basterds (2009) [6 votes]
2 (tie). No Country For Old Men (2007) [6 votes]
Other Best Film winners: The Departed (2006), WALL*E (2008), The Social Network (2010), Holy Motors (2012), Before Midnight (2013), Boyhood (2014), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Best Lead Performance (Female):

1. Juliette Binoche, Certified Copy (2011) [15 votes]
2. Tilda Swinton, Julia (2009) [6 votes]
3. Adèle Exarchopoulos, Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013) [4 votes]
Other Best Female Lead winners: Helen Mirren, The Queen (2006); Carice van Houten, Black Book (2007); Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married (2008); Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit (2010); Rachel Weisz, The Deep Blue Sea (2013); Scarlett Johansson, Under the Skin (2014); Rooney Mara, Carol (2015)

Best Lead Performance (Male):

1. Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood (2007) [20 votes]
2. Denis Lavant, Holy Motors (2012) [7 votes]
3 (tie). Ralph Fiennes, The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) [3 votes]
3 (tie). Michael Shannon, Take Shelter (2011) [3 votes]
Other Best Male Lead winners: Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat (2006); Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler (2008); Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker (2009); Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network (2010); Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a Slave (2013); Michael B. Jordan, Creed (2015)

Best Direction:

1 (tie). Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood (2007) [8 votes]
1 (tie). Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life (2011) [8 votes]
3 (tie). Alfonso Cuaron, Children of Men (2006) [4 votes]
3 (tie). David Fincher, The Social Network (2010) [4 votes]
3 (tie). Martin Scorsese, The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) [4 votes]
Other Best Direction winners: Jonathan Demme, Rachel Getting Married (2008); Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds (2009); Léos Carax, Holy Motors (2012); Jonathan Glazer, Under the Skin (2014); George Miller, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Best Supporting Performance (Female):

1. Cate Blanchett, I’m Not There (2007) [9 votes]
2. Patricia Arquette, Boyhood (2014) [8 votes]
3. Rosemarie DeWitt, Rachel Getting Married (2008) [7 votes]
Other Best Female Supporting winners: Adriana Barraza, Babel (2006); Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air (2009); Greta Gerwig, Greenberg (2010); Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids (2011); Amy Adams, The Master (2012); Lupita Nyong’o, 12 Years a Slave (2013); Kristen Stewart, Clouds of Sils Maria (2015)

Best Supporting Performance (Male):

1 (tie). Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight (2008) [9 votes]
1 (tie). Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds (2008) [9 votes]
3 (tie). Javier Bardem, No Country For Old Men (2007) [5 votes]
3 (tie). Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master (2012) [5 votes]
Other Best Male Supporting winners: Mark Wahlberg, The Departed (2006); John Hawkes, Winter’s Bone (2010); Albert Brooks, Drive (2011); James Franco, Spring Breakers (2013); J.K. Simmons, Whiplash (2014); Sylvester Stallone, Creed (2015)

Best Cinematic Moment:

1 (tie). Final scene - There Will Be Blood (2007) [6 votes]
1 (tie). Creation (“Vltava”) - The Tree of Life (2011) [6 votes]
1 (tie). Lemmon 714s - The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) [6 votes]
Other Best Cinematic Moment winners: The Battle of Bexhill – Children of Men (2006); Space dancing – WALL*E (2008); Marriage montage – Up (2009); Staring into the furnace – Toy Story 3 (2010); Entr’acte/”Let My Baby Ride” – Holy Motors (2012); Double Vision Take 1 – Goodbye to Language 3D (2014); “Speak Low” – Phoenix (2015)

Best Body of Work (Directors):

1. Joel and Ethan Coen [7 votes] 2 (tie). Paul Thomas Anderson [5 votes]
2 (tie). David Fincher [5 votes]
2 (tie). Quentin Tarantino [5 votes]
Other nominees: Wes Anderson, Olivier Assayas, Richard Linklater, Steve McQueen, Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese

Best Body of Work (Female Performers):

1. Cate Blanchett [12 votes]
2. Jessica Chastain [9 votes]
3. Tilda Swinton [6 votes]
Other nominees: Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, Marion Cotillard, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Greta Gerwig, Anne Hathaway, Michelle Williams

Best Body of Work (Male Performers):

1. Philip Seymour Hoffman [13 votes]
2. Joaquin Phoenix [8 votes]
3. Michael Shannon [6 votes]
Other nominees: Christian Bale, Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Fassbender, James Franco, John Hawkes, Matthew McConaughey, Brad Pitt

Thanks for participating, everybody! See you this summer for the Muriels Hall of Fame inductions.

2015 Muriel Awards: Thanks, everybody!

So, that was fun, wasn’t it? Even if some of the winners were a tad predictable, I think most of them were still worthy. And it’s hard to deny that there was a slew of good writing this year from our voters (for example, reading Jim Emerson’s probing analysis of 45 Years, you’d think it placed wayyyyyyyyyy higher than 29th in the Best Film category). There will be one more Muriels-related post next weekend, but until then, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who’s been following us this year, and particularly all of this year’s voters:

Simon Abrams
Jason Alley (ten-year voter)
Danny Baldwin
Kent M. Beeson
Josh Bell
Andrew Bemis (ten-year voter)
Christianne Benedict
Scott W. Black
Danny Bowes
Sean Burns
Donald G. Carder
Steven Carlson
Kevin Cecil
Paul Clark (ten-year voter)
Dennis Cozzalio (ten-year voter)
Ari Dassa
Chris Devlin
Andrew Dignan
Kevin Dufresne
Phillip Dyess-Nugent
Jim Emerson
James Frazier (ten-year voter)
Kenji Fujishima
Daniel Getahun
Luke Gorham
Jaime Grijalba
Russell Hainline
Glenn Heath Jr.
Daniel Cook Johnson
Sam Juliano
Peter Labuza
Adam Lemke
Michael Lieberman
Benjamin Lim
Craig D. Lindsey
Matt Lynch
Sam C. Mac
Willow Maclay
Jeff McMahon
Patrick Miller
Marya Murphy
Matt Noller
Jason Overbeck
Mark Pfeiffer (ten-year voter)
Cole Roulain
Bill Ryan
Jason Shawhan
Justine Smith
Melissa Starker
Alice Stoehr
Hedwig van Driel
Vern
Scott Von Doviak
Clayton Walter
Bryan Whitefield
Bryce Wilson
George Wu

Thanks, everybody! See you this summer for Muriels Hall of Fame voting!

2015 Muriel Awards Countdown: Golden Muriel Award Winner for Best Film

And the Golden Shiny and Chrome Muriel Award for Best Film goes to…

Mad Max: Fury Road [491.5 points / 41 votes]

In previous years, I’ve included pieces by multiple writers with the announcement of the Best Film. But instead of asking for two separate pieces, our chosen writers have decided to join forces for a discussion of our winning movie. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Muriel voters Justine Smith and Andrew Bemis!

Justine: Why can’t all films be like Mad Max: Fury Road? Watching the trailers for Mad Max before it premiered, my blood pressure rose and my breath quickened. I didn’t want this to happen - experience had taught me the movie never lived up to the trailer: I was setting myself up for disappointment. But I was wrong. Mad Max delivered, and in doing so revealed that the blockbusters that I had given a pass to were not living up to their expectations, they were not delivering on their promises: we had been fooled for far too long to accept that our popular cinema was going to be mediocre at best. The straightforward way Mad Max tackles narrative and character, stripping it down to bare essentials and offering dynamic symbology was a distant memory in popular cinema. When was the last time a big budget movie wasn’t a bloated mess of fan service and convoluted story? I had forgotten it was possible for Hollywood cinema could be this good, this simple.

Mad Max: Fury Road represents a strong vision of a dark future. Without resorting to cheap cynicism, it offers a troubling vision of a not-so-distant dystopia where environmental abuses have stripped the earth of life. Humanity has hung on by a thread, embracing water and mechanics as their new God. In an epic chase for freedom, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) tries to set free the wives of a terrifying warlord, chasing towards a remembered greenland where women reign. With a constant forward momentum, the movie drifts left to right on screen with the epicness of a classical painting. The richness of detail and strength of desperation adding levels of nuance to the deceptively simple narrative trajectory.

Without question, Mad Max is a rare blockbuster that will pass the test of time removed from nostalgia. It is a great film that inspires tremendous emotion and doesn’t undervalue the power of great ideas.

Andrew: "The straightforward way Mad Max tackles narrative and character, stripping it down to bare essentials and offering dynamic symbology was a distant memory in popular cinema." I want to pass this on to everyone who dismisses Fury Road as a fun action movie with no real substance, when it's actually as much a triumph of sophisticated, economical storytelling as it is on a technical level. But George Miller's approach to advancing the narrative, the characters' arcs and the story's subtext (well, text, really) is so purely visual that it doesn't always register to viewers who are used to being told, rather than shown, what a movie is about. Not that there aren't plenty of wonderful dialogue-driven movies, but Miller's approach has more in common with silent cinema than other contemporary blockbusters. A simple image like a character who realizes that she's about to die protectively clutching a bag of seeds is more powerful than a lengthy monologue about the plight of our environment could have been. The movie works as brilliantly as it does because of Miller's extraordinary trust in images and gestures (big and small) to tell a story (it helps, of course, that he has impeccable taste).

Fury Road also makes most other blockbusters look puny on a purely aesthetic level. In a movie filled with exhilarating images, one of my favorites is towards the beginning, when Max is trying to escape his captors. It's a dark, chaotic sequence that suddenly gives way to blinding light and silence as we get our first look at Immortal Joe's Citadel. It's a moment that has the same kind of power as Dorothy opening her front door and stepping into Oz. Mad Max has many moments like this, reminding that, though blockbusters offer plenty of loud spectacle, few even bother with trying to manipulate scale, perspective, light, sound or any of the other basic tools at their disposal to create a genuine sense of awe. For a movie that uses every state-of-the-art filmmaking tool at its disposal, Fury Road is surprisingly classical in its approach to visual storytelling.

Justine: One of the blessings of people appreciating Fury Road is that it has really cast George Miller’s entire filmography into light, and the fact is, he has always been an economic and dynamic filmmaker. From Mad Max to Happy Feet, dialogue is sparse and used with a lot of intention. I agree, there is a lot of trust in how he treats the image. This shows not only a confidence in his own abilities, but a confidence in the audience’s abilities to understand what he’s trying to do. One of the problems with modern blockbusters is that they aim for such wide universality that they lose their personality and nuance. Films like The Avengers need to be understood in equal measure by a New Yorker and someone over in China. As a result the importance of following story and focusing on subtext gets left aside, it’s too much of a risk that the audience doesn’t understand.

I like your comparison to The Wizard of Oz, a personal favourite of mine. As a child I’d watch it almost daily, getting lost in that world. While Mad Max may not be a “children’s film”, the way it uses images and sounds to guide forward the story has a purity that could be easily understood by a child. This is why the oversimplification of Blockbusters is so frustrating, there is an easier route that doesn’t compromise story or character - Miller has proved that. Popular cinema has a way of bringing the audience on a journey. Movies like Star Wars, Jurassic Park and Mad Max have a way of inspiring the imagination and transporting us to a new and fantastic world. Mad Max has a darker bent, hidden beneath the thunderous music and fantastic universe is a dark story about oppression and personal responsibility. Mad Max was always a film about humanity’s ability to cast aside responsibility and watch the world fade to desert rather than try to fix it.

Andrew: I’m glad you brought up Happy Feet – those movies were in constant rotation on our TV when my kids were younger, and I thought I’d never want to see or think about them again. But about halfway through seeing Mad Max, I realized that it’d actually make a perfect double feature with Happy Feet Two. I don’t expect many of our readers to remember Happy Feet Two or have a strong opinion about it, but they’re basically the same movie. Also, I’m hoping Miller’s renewed popularity might inspire people to give The Witches of Eastwick, one of the first “grown up” movies I loved as a kid, another look. It’s not as personal as the rest of Miller’s movies, but its ridicule of toxic masculinity points the way towards Mad Max’s full-blown assault on the patriarchy.

As I write that, I can anticipate some readers rolling their eyes – after all, Mad Max is a car picture, not a nuanced dissection of gender roles. Its message is an all-caps cry that is literally written on a wall in the movie: “WHO KILLED THE WORLD?” Men have poisoned the earth and doomed humanity, and the promise of women taking over is our only hope. It’s definitely not subtle, but it shouldn’t be. As a person who, in his most anxious moments, Googles phrases like “global warming worst case scenario” late at night, Mad Max speaks to me and, oddly enough, it’s ultimately reassuring. As dark as it gets, it’s the rare post-apocalyptic movie that isn’t nihilistic. Though Miller’s vision of the future is one where much of what has been broken can’t be fixed, as long as there are people willing to work together, there’s still hope.

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2015 Muriel Awards Best Film Countdown: #2. Carol

“Their eyes meet across a crowded floor, and in an instant everything changes. That's about as cliché as cliché can get, but In Todd Haynes’ mid-century love story, Carol, the story is less about any ‘will they, or won’t they’ dramatic tension, and more a quiet, and persistent damnation of a world which two women are forced to sublimate their true selves beneath the overpowering weight of social expectations.

“The world in which Carol resides could have come straight from a fashion magazine. Interiors are, initially, *perfect* - the woods are warm, the surfaces shiny and unblemished, with a flattering light caressing clothing that always manages to hang just so. It is a vision of America all too familiar to those of a conservative mindset; an 8 x 10 glossy homage to a capitalist perfection that sure looks pretty from a few decades down the road, but only if you willfully choose to ignore the very uncomfortable realities that lay beneath.

“It is within this reality that we find our two heroines. Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), is a young woman on the cusp of self-discovery, a budding photographer with a disaffected love life. She is working at a department store when she first catches a glimpse of Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett), a vision in furs that moves through the store with an impeccable grace – ‘as swans in the evening move o’er the lake’ – slapping her empty gloves against her hands as if mildly irritated to be gracing the room with her very presence. Therese is instantly smitten, and a delicate dance of seduction begins.

“In these scenes of courtship, Haynes uses the art of cinema to fantastic effect. His camera catches the furtive glances, fleeting touches, and unspoken communication of lovers learning the boundaries of each other. Simultaneously, his camera guides us to the realization that much of these women’s lives are lived under the auspices of a subtle schizophrenia; that their everyday actions are performances for critics who may not have always been in the room, but whose merciless opinions were always deeply feared, and carried the power to destroy. Therese, by virtue of her youth and inexperience, may appear to be less bound by the societal pressures both women are acutely aware of, but nonetheless knows that certain observances must be made. Carol, on the other hand, has been playing her part for so long, that her immersion has become all but absolute. She has nearly lost herself in the role she’s been forced to play, and it is only when circumstances finally hit critical mass that the socially acceptable facade she’s so carefully constructed crumbles into dust.

“It is here that the real Carol, the heart and soul of Carol, emerges. The moment is devastating to behold (and a testament to the Blanchett’s emotional control), a cri de coeur of epic proportions almost impossible to bear in its emotional nakedness. It is a moment that will have a profound effect on the lives of our heroines, the beginning of an end for a way of life that never actually existed, and the dawn of an era in which the truth walks hand-in-hand with the present.” ~ Donald G. Carder

2015 Muriel Awards Best Film Countdown: #3. Sicario

“It’s an unfortunate development that saw Sicario released into American theaters amidst a surfeit of nonsensical campaign rhetoric from Donald Trump that sought to demonize our neighbor to the south. And while the real tragedy of this narrative is that a legitimate presidential candidate soft-balling cartoonish hate speech can find a sizable demographic clambering for it, the lower stakes misfortune is that a subset of moviegoers may misappropriate Sicario's narrative and miss out on the considerable technical craft and the slow-burn brilliance it has to offer.

“With Emily Blunt acting as cipher, the audience follows her down an increasingly-unsettling rabbit hole into a slantways world of corruption and moral inexactitude. Whereas a lesser film may have contented itself to wallow in the murkiness of ambiguous ethics, Sicario instead seems to suggest even that perspective is a an illusory luxury of the ignorant and that the only real code is one of subjective fluidity - the ends justify the means, uncompromisingly, ad infinitum. And while the film's opening salvo introduces the narrative trajectory of a well-meaning officer joining forces with government higher-ups in a desire to do real good, the filmmakers quickly eighty-six any possibility on an honorable reckoning and instead make each passing minute feel grimier and more debased, casting us as unwitting accomplices to the film's burgeoning malignancy.

“By the final third, it is clear that Sicario is functionally a horror film where every musical cue and otherwise unassuming establishing shot takes on increasing significance as the ratcheted tension impossibly continues to build. Sicario brazenly offers us the most abstract of boogeymen: the loss of ignorance - and so the film’s nominal though impotent heroine (Emily Blunt) comes to find out, sometimes the act of pulling back a curtain represents the only real villain, something Denis Villeneuve and company depict with terribly bleak beauty.” ~ Luke Gorham

2015 Muriel Awards Best Film Countdown: #4. Creed

“In this age of reboots, remakes and rebrands it's kind of amazing to have one that is not a cynical repackaging but in fact a personal passion project. No one was looking for a continuation of the Rocky series (which, against all odds, had a perfect ending ten years ago with Rocky Balboa) except for Fruitvale Station director Ryan Coogler. His idea and passion were strong enough to win over Sylvester Stallone to not only reprise his signature character in a supporting role, but to for the first time give control over to a different writer (all six previous Rocky movies were written by Stallone, four of them with him as director).


“I don't know what's more impressive: that Stallone was willing to take this chance on a relatively unproven director, or that it paid off so definitively. Coogler organically hits on all the important Rocky elements (triumphant music, Philly scenery, bonding between opponents, training montages, grey sweatshirts) and cleverly mines an event from the most ridiculous entry in the series for serious drama. The death of Apollo Creed in Rocky IV gives us Adonis's rough childhood and struggle for identity, Mary-Anne Creed's fear of her adopted son boxing, Rocky's debt to Apollo and Mary-Anne and his guilt for not throwing in the towel. Maybe most impressively, Coogler and cinematographer Maryse Alberti found thrilling ways to put us into the fights (and even the ring entrances) in ways we've never seen before, not even in the six previous Rocky movies.

“I'm not ashamed to say that Rocky always makes me cry at the end, and Creed comes close several times. For me it's not just the triumphant sports moments, the profound gift Adonis receives from Mary-Anne, or even Stallone's heartbreaking portrayal of our icon facing his mortality. Most of all it's the sincerity of Adonis, after growing up in group homes with no parents at all, calling Rocky and Bianca ‘my family.’ “ ~ Vern

2015 Muriel Awards Best Film Countdown: #5. The Hateful Eight

“There's a conversation about a dead horse early on in The Hateful Eight, and it's a doozy. I won't give you a blow-by-blow of that conversation since its mainly pleasurable thanks to the scene's blocking, pacing, and acting. The short-short version: a man's horse dies, and he consequently kills its murderer. The horse wasn't his favorite, but it's the principle of the thing, as Samuel L. Jackson's inconstant moral compass puts it: you don't mess with man's ‘beast friend’ and get away with it. This conversation is patently absurd, but it seems to hold water in the moment. This is, after all, the first half of the film, where Tarantino only gently probes his characters' elaborate cover stories. Those stories start to fall apart in the second half, but not all of them do. He wants you to savor the discomfort of not knowing what these amoral survivors will do next. All of them have committed crimes, but some of them are halfway humanized by circumstantial peril.”


“The Hateful Eight is, in that sense, about the absurdity--or perhaps just the impossibility--of believing that violence can solve problems, that prejudice can be overcome, and that the future is brighter than it really is. It's a fitting capper to his last two mytho-historical dramas, Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. Like those earlier films, The Hateful Eight is firmly grounded in the language and sensibility of exploitation cinema, particularly spaghetti westerns, and blaxploitation cinema. So, yes, Jennifer Jason Leigh's character is victimized, but she's also worshipped in equal measure since her empowerment is of the punk/riot grrl variety. And yes, racial prejudice is dealt with with a cavalier attitude that speaks to Tarantino's potent cynicism regarding post-Obama America. But the film's aggressive nastiness works, and it works you over thoroughly. This may not be the movie Tarantino's fans may have wanted him to make, but it is one of his very best.” ~ Simon Abrams

2015 Muriel Awards Best Film Countdown: #6. Anomalisa

“Michael, the lead character of Anomalisa, is an expert in customer service. He literally wrote the book on a practice that involves building brief, superficial relationships with a clear set of rules. And as the latest from genius Charlie Kaufman and animator Duke Johnson plays out, it’s clear that that’s the only kind of relationship for which Michael, voiced by David Thewlis, has any facility.

“He’s bored with his wife and young son. He bristles at the small talk of his cabbie as he’s taken to his hotel in Cincinnati, where he’ll speak at a conference. He cringes when he reads the accusing letter of a woman he loved briefly and then quickly left behind. He sees nothing but sameness all around him, and thanks to Johnson’s clone-like puppets and Kaufman’s choice to use Tom Noonan to voice practically every other character, we do too.

“Into this dour scenario speaks Lisa, a gentle soul who’s come to see Michael speak, and whose sweet, distinctive voice (provided by Jennifer Jason Leigh) gives him a reason to rejoice – at least temporarily. One brief, painfully intimate encounter and an awkward morning-after breakfast is enough to strip Lisa of the mystery that Michael finds so compelling.

“With Anomalisa, Kaufman delves again into favorite subjects such as the nature of identity and romantic love, and how individual perception can color our view of each. This time, the tale is told with puppets, which were left unaltered in post-production so that their seams are always showing, While some have read this as Kaufman’s commentary on the mechanical state of modern humanity, I prefer to think of it as the filmmaker’s tip of the hat to the basic human flaws that each of us carry and typically try to hide.

“The head rush it inspires can make it easy to underappreciate the visual artistry of Anomalisa, from the handcrafted intricacy of every set and character to the endearingly soft texture of the puppets’ flesh, to the warm, crystalline quality of the lighting. Within the bland Midwestern hotel setting there is bespoke beauty everywhere. One just has to be open to seeing it.” ~ Melissa Starker

2015 Muriel Awards Best Film Countdown: #7. Magic Mike XXL

“While it’s true that Magic Mike XXL offers an ebullient fantasy compared to the relative splash of cold water that was Steven Soderbergh’s original 2012 Magic Mike, it’s not quite so simple to say that they are polar opposites in vision. Both are essentially grounded in an inner acknowledgment of the harsh realities of life; it’s just that director Gregory Jacobs, star Channing Tatum, and the rest of the crew choose to look at things more buoyantly this second time around. As a result, instead of the anti-capitalist stance that occasionally tempered the choreographic pleasures of Magic Mike, the sequel is, simply put, a sustained blast of pure, unadulterated joy from start to finish.

“It’s the multilayered nature of that joy that deserves to be dissected, however. Sure, there’s the film’s unabashed celebration of female pleasure, with women allowed to be as sexually voracious as men, as perhaps most memorably illustrated by the seduction attempts of a group of middle-aged women, spearheaded by Nancy (Andie McDowell). And certainly, on a broader level, there’s much to be said about the film’s sexual and racial inclusiveness, with nary a thematic meal made out of, say, the African-American strip-club emcee Rome (Jada Pinkett Smith) basing her club in a former Southern plantation; or her apparent sexual history with Paris (Elizabeth Banks), an organizer of the stripping convention to which Mike (Tatum), Richie (Joe Manganiello), and the rest. Such details are treated as merely facts of life, parts of the grand fabric that is America.

“But, on a fundamental level, the appeal of Magic Mike XXL is more universal and timeless: as a metaphor for that constant artist’s struggle between balancing practicality and passion. Mike, Richie, & co. are hardly idealists: As with many artists, performing may be what they love to do, but they realize they won’t be able to do it forever, and thus need to find a back-up plan for the future. But why be depressed about that? Instead, for this band of strippers’ last hurrah, they decide to essentially turn their more mundane future into art, in the form of a blowout final routine that allows each dancer to express their hopes and dreams the best way they know how. Magic Mike XXL may present a democratic vision of America at its best, but at heart it also presents humanity at its most generous and optimistic. In an age when the politicians we are supposed to be able to trust to represent us seem to prefer divisiveness and fear-mongering, this is the kind of entertainment we need right now.” ~ Kenji Fujishima

2015 Muriel Awards Best Film Countdown: #8. The Duke of Burgundy

“With no men in sight and a strong culture of BDSM, the decorated world of The Duke of Burgundy draws on the films from the hey-day of European softcore cinema. The comic sensibilities of Peter Strickland add a touch of humanity to his sensuous utopia, bridging the gap from past to present through absurdity and atypical relationship woes. Reflective surfaces and doppelgangers inhabit this world, but unusually with very little paranoia. In a world where women reign, it seems the fears and preoccupations of women are less fatal and less immediate. The struggles of finding balance and happiness in a relationship are more than enough to add tension and conflict to the film.

“In one extravagant sequence, a sleepwalking incident drops the narrative for a moment to revel in experimental cinema. An homage to Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight overtakes the screen, the silence that Brakhage prefers replaced with buzzing, bouncing moths. A chaotic and almost apocalyptic vision, it seems to reflect the tumultuous inner lives of the women we’re watching: Their carefully groomed and orchestrated lives concealing the power of their desires and the aches of their anxieties.

“The Duke of Burgundy reaches into the lives of women and sheds light on fears and anxieties rarely afforded importance in the cinema. The films that Strickland was drawing on nearly always had the undercurrent of death and murder, the threat of violence was lurking around every corner and in the heart of every dream. The fact that in the portrayal of a sadomasochistic relationship, Strickland focuses on humiliation rather than pain. This distinction integrally divides this world from the one it draws inspiration from. It is why, in spite of its dark moments and passive-aggressive conflicts I refer to it as a Utopia. Violence will not rear its ugly head and dismantle this world, and whether or not you appreciate its tight collared manners, there is a liberation and a poetry in not having to fear for your life.” ~ Justine Smith

2015 Muriel Awards Best Film Countdown: #9. Inside Out

“Movies keep getting bigger and bigger. As blockbuster season bursts beyond the borders of its usual summertime kingdom, we get the chance nearly every week to see the end of the world narrowly avoided by the heroic actions of a ragtag group of misfits, usually in spandex. If the stakes aren’t at their absolute highest (i.e., the end of humanity), people won’t care. Or so the thinking in Hollywood seems to go. Luckily, there are those studios and filmmakers who buck the trend, and no film in recent memory has done so in as beautiful, original fashion as Pixar’s Inside Out.

“Pixar has received some flack lately for turning so much of its attention to churning out sequels to some of its most successful movies, but Inside Out is proof positive that the studio is not even close to running out of innovation and creativity. Brought to the screen by Pete Docter – whose previous directorial effort, Up, left audiences sopping wet from crying – Inside Out is perhaps the most singular vision the studio has yet produced.

“Docter, along with co-director Ronnie Del Carmen and co-writers Meg LeFauve and Josh Cooley, took on the herculean task of mapping out the human mind. That, in and of itself, is a more difficult mission than most filmmakers would dare to consider embarking on, but Inside Out is all the more impressive for honing in on the thoughts and emotions of Riley, a preteen girl whose life is uprooted when her family relocates from snowy Minnesota to the hip grunge of San Francisco. It’s hard to imagine a setting as emotionally rich, fraught with anxiety, fear, excitement, and sadness.

“Such emotions become the stars of the show, led by the boisterous Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler, ratcheting up Leslie Knope’s positivity to eleven) and the glum Sadness (a scene-stealing Phyllis Smith). Joy and Sadness battle in the high-tech Headquarters inside Riley’s mind. After a mishap involving Sadness accidentally infecting Riley’s happy core memories (which help define her personality), Joy and Sadness find themselves in the deep recesses of Riley’s labyrinthine long-term memory, tasked with returning said core memories to their place before Riley’s personality completely crumbles away.

“Inside Out has the action, humor, and pathos to match any action spectacle blasting away on your local IMAX screen, but its stakes resonate so much more. The film articulates emotional truths that I’ve never seen discussed in film: namely, the usefulness of sadness as an emotional compass, that blurry place where happiness becomes melancholy nostalgia, and the importance of honoring one’s current emotional state, however uncomfortable or confusing it might be. Kids love this movie, and as they grow, it will become more than colorful entertainment. It will help them investigate their place in the world, as well as the world within them. That’s a cause for Joy.” ~ Clayton Walter

2015 Muriel Awards Best Film Countdown: #10. Phoenix

“Trauma is no mere abstraction in Christian Petzold’s Phoenix. It’s not just a word to be spoken and left hanging in the air. It’s a face blotched with bruises in the aftermath of reconstructive surgery. It’s the timid posture and tentative footsteps of a woman named Nelly who was once a chanteuse and is now a Holocaust survivor. Nina Hoss, who plays Nelly, attires herself in the character’s trauma; it’s a physical fact of her performance, like the old red dress she’s coaxed into wearing. As Nelly unravels her own past, hoping it’ll lead to her future, Hoss keeps her gestures small and her disbelieving eyes wide. She moves and speaks with the reticence of a woman unsure about how to be herself. Luckily, she has an expert on hand to teach her.

“Her partner in this anti-romantic pas de deux is Johnny, her husband. (Or ex-husband? Widower? Identities grow slippery in this game of love.) He’s played by Ronald Zehrfeld as a mustachioed homme fatale: sleazy, scruffy, handsome. Believing Nelly dead, he conscripts this woman he doesn’t know is Nelly to play herself in an unconscionable scam for the sake of an inherited fortune. He trains her like a director giving pointers to an actress—a meta-cinematic parallel surely not lost on serial collaborators Petzold and Hoss.

“Nelly submits to Johnny’s tutelage, and Phoenix blooms into a pedagogical thriller. As he teaches her, so she too maneuvers him into spilling his secrets. Shot/reverse shot pairings, edited with stopwatch precision, chart the subtle shifts in power between them. The couple’s lessons build up tension until they reach a finale that’s like a pot boiling over. Nelly’s trauma may not heal, but she does assert an approximation of herself. Johnny, too, reaps some valuable wisdom, perhaps best put by the real-life tragic heroine from another of last year’s films: ‘And now the final frame / Love is a losing game’.” ~ Alice Stoehr

2015 Muriel Awards Best Film Countdown: #13. Spotlight

“Despite the fact that Spotlight was my #1 movie of 2015, I predicted that The Revenant would win Best Picture at the Oscars this year. Man, was I happy to be wrong. For while Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s work was well worthy of the award, Tom McCarthy’s true story ensemble drama about the power of journalism and teamwork had a far deeper appeal to me.


“McCarthy’s film, which he co-wrote with Josh Singer (The Fifth Estate, ‘The West Wing’) takes us through the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize winning ‘Spotlight’ team’s investigation of widespread, institutionalized sexual abuse within the Catholic Church with clean precision. Whereas The Revenant is an often chaotic depiction of survival in the savage wilderness of yesteryear, Spotlight, set in 2001, is seemingly, or deceptively, a much smaller, more formal film involving well groomed, professional men (and one woman) simply doing their jobs.

“Their jobs aren’t simple though, as the roads to expose over 200 priests as pedophiles involve a lot of digging, but the film never lost its hold on me through its interviewing of sexual abuse survivors, information heavy walks and talks, and endless note taking. It’s most likely the most talky movie to win Best Picture in ages (well, at least since Argo).

“The ‘Spotlight’ team, sharply played by Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, John Slattery, Brian d'Arcy James, and Liev Schreiber (my vote this year for Best Ensemble), all put in passionate performances (and bring their best Boston accents), but only Ruffalo and McAdams both scored Oscar nominations. It would’ve been nice to see Keaton get a nod after his loss for Birdman last year, but at least he got to stand on the stage two years in a row for Best Picture wins.

“Spotlight’s only other Oscar win was for Best Original Screenplay, so I was surprised that it won the biggest award of the 88th Academy Awards. I was so certain of a Revenant sweep that I discounted the sober, less flashy candidate – something I’ll think twice about in the future. Its win almost makes up for Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men being passed over 40 years ago.

“McCarthy’s film is certainly of the same journalism classic caliber as that impeccable Watergate scandal thriller, as it contains a similarly compelling uncovering of a vast conspiracy, and an equally impactful message. That message, concerning folks working together to bring evil out into the light, is as plain as when Patti Smith put it in song back in the ‘80s: ‘People Have the Power’.” ~ Daniel C. Johnson

2015 Muriel Awards Best Film Countdown: #16. It Follows

“I recall enjoying David Robert Mitchell’s first film, 2010’s The Myth of the American Sleepover, just fine. An ensemble comedy/drama centering on a group of Detroit teenagers, it was a pleasant, last-weekend-of-summer kind of movie. It showed that Mitchell already had a knack for capturing the suburbs with artful cinematography and for getting solid, naturalistic performances from a cast of young, novice actors, but I also recall thinking that it was missing a certain something that would make it a truly memorable piece of work. Turns out that missing something may have been an invigorating injection of genre storytelling, resulting in the instant-classic, thrillingly original horror film It Follows.

“Set in the flat, autumnal suburbs that are very much in the same neighborhood as Halloween’s Haddonfield and A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Springfield, during an indeterminate decade, It Follows has a story that has the ruthless simplicity of a scary urban legend. ‘It’ is a malevolent, mysterious creature (of completely unknown origin) that is passed from person to person following sexual intercourse, like (as my partner put it) a ‘demonic STD.’ (That’s a big oversimplification, but it admittedly works). It looks like a person, but it can look like any person it chooses to, at any time. And it simply…follows. It moves slowly, but it never stops coming, and if it catches up with you enough to get a hold on you, you’re dead. The only way to get rid of it is to pass it on through sex, and even then, you can never relax because if it gets the person you passed it onto, it’s coming back your way. The idea of never being able to rest again (‘Wherever you are, it’s somewhere headed straight for you”) is remarkably terrifying and bleak, if you think about it.

“It’s a borderline silly premise, but somehow It Follows wound up being not just one of the very best horror films in many years, but one of 2015’s very best films, irrespective of genre. A lot of that is due to the enormous amount of atmosphere and style the film has. Put simply, despite its many evident influences, I’ve never seen a film that looks, sounds, and feels quite like this one. Mike Gioulakis’ cinematography echoes that found in John Carpenter’s classics with its ultra-widescreen compositions and Steadicam use, complemented with motionless, interestingly disorienting overhead shots, and one terrifically eerie and effective revolving shot. And there aren’t enough positive adjectives in the dictionary for the excellent synthesizer score by Disasterpeace (the stage name of composer Rich Vreeland), which, again, partially recalls John Carpenter’s brilliantly scaled-down electronic scores, rich in both melody and menace. These stylistic elements, combined with Mitchell’s almost–entirely dead-serious treatment of the story and engaging performances by a talented young cast, make It Follows an uncommonly artful and intriguing horror film. It works particularly well on repeat viewings, as well. It’s the rare horror film that becomes scarier the more you watch it, as you are able to fully explore the chilling implications of its story, and the creepily ambiguous identity of ‘it,’ which stubbornly resists any attempts at analysis or understanding.” ~ Jason Alley

2015 Muriel Awards Best Film Countdown: #18. The Assassin

“At the core of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s cinema is a deep investment in the rift formed between an independent Taiwan and a possessive mainland China. Tender stories of unrequited romance (Three Times, Flowers of Shanghai) become bracingly political, and coming-of-age stories (The Boys from Feng Kuei, Millennium Mambo) gain added pathos in their exploration of uncertain national identities. Crucially, these subtexts never overwhelm Hou’s characters, many of whom have been informed by the director’s own youth spent in a rapidly changing Taiwan. In recent years, the same has been tue of the less explicitly autobiographical Hou surrogates played by actress Shu Qi, whose screen presence — gorgeous and haunted, graceful even when stone still — represents the perfect analogue for his painterly, meditative formalism.

“In The Assassin, Shu plays Nie Yinniang, a young woman cast out of her home and trained in the art of the kill in the waning years of the Tang dynasty. Her latest mark—per a chilly handler frustrated with the moral conscience that compromised her last job—is a man to whom Yinniang was once betrothed, her cousin Lord Tian Ji’an (Shu’s Three Times co-star Chang Chen). Yinniang’s reticence toward her role as contracted killer becomes a mirror gesture of Hou’s tentative adoption of the action tropes. But like his brutally efficient heroine, when action is deemed necessary, it’s executed with a high caliber: sharp, practical, fleeting bursts of movement that disturb the film’s serene compositions like ripples across a pond.

“This makes for a quantitatively different filmmaking form for Hou, but no greater departure than that of his last feature, the French-language Flight of the Red Balloon. While that film’s simple narrative — a harried single-mom balancing her passion for art with the obligations of raising an adolescent child — framed the study of a foreign culture’s representational cinema, The Assassin returns Hou to his own. Filtering in not only the wuxiagu zhuang dramas, Hou mounts a timeless critique of puppet governance, warring states, and the resulting human casualty.

“Shot in the contrast-heavy black-and-white chosen for the film’s economical prologue, The Assassin’s opening composition hints at the film’s themes. A camera slowly pans away from two donkeys tied to a tree, revealing their masters ,  Yinniang and her teacher , both  staring in the opposite direction of the animals. The image calls attention to the subservient first, and the ambivalence of the powerful second, a historical consideration that transcends period trappings—much like the etymological significance of the two jade amulets Yinniang and Tian Ji’an constantly brood over. Elsewhere, Hou and cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bin use the canvas of The Assassin’s colorful mis-en-scene and attentive sound design to externalize the philosophies of its characters: the low rumble of percussion that fills the Imperial court’s austere crimson and gold halls, the billowing fog and jutting landscapes that frame Yinniang’s duplicitous teacher, and most importantly, the tranquil stillness and soft-focus lensing of Weibo’s rural villages, striving to exist outside of provincial conflicts.” ~ Sam C. Mac

2015 Muriel Awards Best Film Countdown: #20. Tangerine

“Tangerine is the best Hollywood movie of the year. That may sound like a strange thing to say about a ragged, low-budget indie shot on iPhones, but I’m not talking about the Hollywood of the public imagination—that Tinseltown with the red carpet and all the glitzy stars in the firmament glimpsed last Sunday night on the Oscars. None of those people in the tuxes and designer gowns would be caught dead in the Hollywood of Tangerine, just a few blocks south of the Walk of Fame. This not a dream factory, but a real place where real people live and work, and no one has ever captured it quite like director and co-writer Sean Baker does here.

“Baker’s Hollywood is one I recognize, the one I lived in: block after block of corner strip malls, with more donut shops than one would guess any economy could sustain. With his iPhone cameras equipped with special wide-angle lenses, Baker is able to convey the particular magic-hour light of Los Angeles, the golden haze that settles in just before dusk. Setting Tangerine at Christmas is another savvy choice, with the Yuletide décor and lighting against an otherwise unchanging seasonal backdrop adding to the visual idiosyncrasy. No movie has ever looked quite like this one.

“But Tangerine’s technical innovations would mean little if not for its onscreen breakthroughs, notably in the realm of character and casting. The two lead characters are transgender sex workers of color played by newcomer trans actresses Mya Taylor and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez, who provided Baker and his co-writer Chris Bergoch plenty of material based on their past experiences. The thin plot involves Rodriguez’s Sin-Dee trying to track down her pimp boyfriend after being released from jail, but the story matters less than the interactions between Sin-Dee and best friend Alexandra (Taylor). At heart this is a buddy comedy, but it also finds room for a supporting cast that includes an Armenian cab driver and his family, James Ransone’s poser pimp, and a real-ish cross-section of sex workers and their customers. Baker never condescends to these characters, and though their interactions can be shrill at times, Tangerine builds to an unexpectedly moving conclusion. The lesson for the other Hollywood is obvious: everyone has a story, and some of the least-told but most interesting ones can be found on the fringes.” ~ Scott von Doviak

2015 Muriel Awards Best Film Countdown: #26. Room

“Are turtles real?”

“Perhaps an odd question for a movie without a conventionally fantastic bone in its body to pose, but the moment when five-year-old Jack (Jacob Tremblay), imprisoned in an 11x11 shed for his entire life, asks it of his Ma (Brie Larson), a young woman who spent two years alone in that same shack before bearing the child of the man who abducted her, Room takes a decided turn toward consideration of the vast expanse of the outside world. The only world Jack has ever known, the only one he really believes exists, is the one contained within the walls of that shed, accompanied only by his Ma and the objects he to an extent personifies in order to combat the reality of their aloneness—Lamp, Plant, Rug, Toilet, Sink and, of course, Wardrobe, where he hides when ‘Old Nick,’ their captor, comes to visit.

“When Jack asks that question about turtles, which he has only seen represented on TV, he signals his openness to the possibility that there might be something tangible outside Room, and Ma almost imperceptibly awakens to the opportunity his curiosity has presented to her as a means of facilitating escape. And up to this point director Lenny Abrahamson (Frank) has taken his cues from Tremblay. The wonderment with which Jack considers those personified objects that adorn his daily routine, or the raindrops and snowflakes that land on the skylight above, or the mysterious origins of a mouse that suddenly appears on their floor, these perceptions and seemingly hundreds more allow Abrahamson to create a movie fueled almost exclusively, through claustrophobic close-ups often shot through tufts of Jack’s long hair, or though the slats of the wardrobe door, or from beneath the safe cover of bed sheets, or eventually a rolled-up carpet, by Jack’s subjective viewpoint.

“One of the marvelous things about Room is how, even when the story moves beyond those walls and back into the world Jack has tried to believe in, one to which his Ma once belonged, the point of view of this young boy remains consistent, understandably tentative and alive. The fear, resistance, frustration and forgiveness in the way Jack processes this alien and seemingly infinite new environment is woven into the very fabric of the experience of the film, as conducted by Abrahamson from Emma Donoghue’s marvelously intuitive script. There isn’t a landscape, object, perspective or new room seen that we don’t at least initially approach with the same blend of curiosity and tension that has thoroughly upended Jack, who continues to wonder at what point they can go back to the comforts of Room. That process of forgiveness that the filmmakers sow extends not only to Jack and Joy (Ma’s given name) but also to the members of the immediate family—her mother, her father, and her mother’s new husband—who all have their own ways of responding to her return, of contemplating the awful reality of what she has endured and survived. (Some do better with it than others, but voices are rarely raised, and when they are it’s from frustration and fear more than anger.)

“But of course it’s the bond between Joy and Jack that is the movie’s most singular point of reference. Their once horrific circumstances have been replaced by certainly less awful, yet more emotionally complex ones on the outside, all of which embody the movie’s convincing portrayal of motherhood, parental responsibility and love, but also the degree to which that bond is both unshakable and frightening for Joy, a method of survival which she struggles to recontextualize outside the walls of captivity.

“And here Room might be considerably less than it is were it not for the sheer, unaffected natural believability as mother and son, which is colored by exasperation and frustration as well as love, that radiates between Larson and Tremblay. The history of American movies is littered with plasticized, see-through portrayals of parent/child relationships, usually lathered with treacle or snark and absent a moment’s resonance with reality. On the other hand, Abrahamson’s movie is far more suited to a looser, more European-style sensibility—Abrahamson is Irish, and the movie was filmed in Toronto. It is no chore for an audience to almost immediately accept that these two are biological kin-- the body language and sense of intimacy with which Ma and Jack interact belie a mother and son who have spent five years in company and confinement, to say nothing of the even more intimate experience of having shared space within the same body. Ma and Jack’s is not a relationship concerned with a lot of chummy banter, and Abrahamson would seem constitutionally incapable of shooting a cute montage meant to sell qualities of familial bonding his actors have failed to suggest themselves.

“Everything you’ve heard about Brie Larson’s work here is true—she conjures emotions and effects and connections with the other actors in Room that are genuinely mysterious and lovely. But her unostentatious brilliance might not have been so vividly realized without Tremblay, who delivers what might be the most realistic, least precocious performance by a child actor I’ve ever seen. For an actor his age (he was seven when the movie was shot), there is tremendous awareness and feeling in the way he brings Jack to life, a sensitivity to his surroundings that is natural but also, because of the demands of the story, intelligently, purposefully applied. However it may have happened, this is not a performance that betrays step-by-step directorial or editorial interference. As much or more than Larson, Jacob Tremblay carries Room and is an integral part of what makes it a movie that is bound to resonate far beyond the range of awards season hosannas. He’s the movie’s tiny, tender, terrified beating heart. He makes Jack as real as the turtles.” ~ Dennis Cozzalio

2015 Muriel Awards Best Film Countdown: #28. Mistress America

"’It was too much fun to agree with her,’ Tracy Fishko (Lola Kirke) says about her almost-stepsister Brooke Cardinas (Greta Gerwig) at the beginning of Mistress America, before either character appears onscreen, and her observation, like most that she makes throughout Noah Baumbach's extraordinarily witty movie, proves to be spot-on. Both Tracy and Brooke are deluded about aspects of their own lives, but they remain remarkably astute about the people around them, and eventually, at crucial emotional moments in the story, about the lies they tell themselves.

“Mistress America is a lively and clever comedy, and this appreciation could easily consist solely of a list of quotable lines. But the genius of Baumbach and Gerwig's screenplay is that nothing is said simply for a laugh, that every seemingly tossed-off line provides new levels of character insight. Brooke, a dreamer who lives in the literal embodiment of superficiality (Times Square), seems to be driven entirely by her own unearned self-confidence, but her obliviousness is her protective shell, her way of pushing away all of the doubts and insecurities that she never forgets entirely.

“Brooke's insecurities and Tracy's insecurities dovetail perfectly, as the two young women bond instantly thanks to the impending marriage of their parents. The awkward Tracy, struggling to fit in during her freshman year of college, is both awed and inspired by Brooke's breezy self-regard, and she uses it to bolster her own confidence. Brooke in turn feeds off of Tracy's unconditional support, and they fuel each other's best and worst tendencies in equal measure.

“Their symbiotic relationship comes to a climax during the film's brilliantly staged half-hour stretch at the upscale suburban home of Brooke's ex-boyfriend Dylan and frenemy Mamie-Claire. First, when Brooke presents her wildly unrealistic idea for a homey restaurant called Mom's, Tracy fills in the gaps of her pitch, describing something that sounds more like a surrogate for the healthy family life neither one ever had, and both are now seeking in the other. Then, when Brooke reads Tracy's scathing (but incisive) fictionalized story about her, the illusions of their relationship break down completely. While minutes earlier they were constructing a fantasy life together, now their selfish inner agendas are laid bare.

“Even at its most emotionally devastating, though, Mistress America is never depressing or pessimistic. Brooke and Tracy have high-class problems, and being high-class is part of their problem, but they are not bad people. They're too smart and too naive, about both each other and the world around them, but Baumbach and Gerwig don't judge them for it. The movie alternately laughs at and with the characters, and allows them to laugh at and with each other. Life is ridiculous, and sometimes the only way to get through it is to pretend you have everything figured out. Brooke holds on to that belief all the way to the end, and it's too much fun to agree with her.” ~ Josh Bell

2015 Muriel Awards Best Film Countdown: #29. 45 Years

"One must let the play happen to one; one must let the mind loose to respond as it will, to receive impressions, to sense rather than know, to gather rather than immediately understand." — Edward Albee

“Let the things that happen onstage be just as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life. For instance, people are having a meal, just having a meal, but at the same time, their happiness is being created, or their lives are being smashed up.” — Anton Chekov

Mash those two quotations together and you might come up with something that evokes the delicate balance of stylized realism and metaphorical theatricality in Andrew Haigh's 45 Years, an unnerving semi-absurdist chamber drama in seven discrete acts. I think it's the most fully realized feature I saw in 2015 because (as I've said about certain Coen Brothers pictures), as you watch it, you recognize that it's firing on all cylinders (character, story structure, dialogue, performance, color, framing, mise-en-scène, sound design, cutting, music, etc.), using forms of cinematic expression most movies don't even know are available to them.

“45 Years, adapted — and entirely re-envisioned — by the director from a short story ("In Another Country") by David Constantine is a deceptively simple story about a long-married couple who have been skating along, obliviously and complacently, on what turns out to be perilously thin ice. When that ice cracks, then shatters, they and their marriage are plunged into unfathomable, bitterly cold waters.

“So, we start on the deceptively smooth surface: It is one week before a party celebrating the 45th wedding anniversary of Kate (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtenay). Geoff receives a letter regarding Katya, his young love from long ago, who died when she fell into a crevasse as they were hiking over the Alps. Climate change (something bigger than all of us that we can't see, but we still experience the consequences) has made Katya's body visible through the ice. Eventually, it will melt and the gush of water will carry her — preserved more or less as she was when she died — downstream into the village below, out of the past and into the present. (Enough conceptual/visual/physical metaphors for you? 45 Years takes place in a universe swimming with them.)

“That's unsettling news by any measure, and at first it unsettles Geoff the most. He becomes more distracted than usual and starts brooding, as if he is finally facing the grief he has repressed for all these years. But Geoff's withdrawal unsettles Kate and triggers a re-assessment of her own dormant, troubling feelings about her vision of herself, the shape of her life, and her marriage. What might have been a minor temblor becomes a major quake that shakes up everything they once took for granted about themselves and each other.

“45 Years is written and constructed like a chamber drama, broken into seven segments, short acts named after the days of the week counting down to the anniversary party. At times you feel the ghost of Edward Albee, with hints of Strindberg, Ibsen and Chekov. I was reminded particularly of Albee's A Delicate Balance (in which an unnameable dread is introduced into the seemingly cozy marriage of an elderly couple); Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (in which a metaphorical shared fantasy becomes a pawn in a marital power struggle); and The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? (in which a man's passion for another lover devastates his family).

“The diegetic use of pop songs from Kate and Geoff's past is so theatrically and figuratively dead-on that it's sometimes quite hilarious, as when Kate punches the car radio as Gary Puckett starts singing, ‘Young girl, get out of my mind…’; or when you realize during the first scene in the kitchen that Kate and Geoff chose ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ for their first dance on their wedding day: ‘When a lovely flame dies, smoke gets in your eyes…’ By the end, Kate seems to have really heard and understood those lyrics for the first time.

“And yet for all these theatrical devices and allusions, 45 Years is richly cinematic, with an attention to detail few films can match. It doesn't literally display or explain its themes (as both Albee and Chekov advocate above) so much as it keenly observes its characters and suggests what they might be going through. Much of the drama is necessarily ambiguous, but thrillingly so. Take the last shot of the exterior ‘prologue’: Kate has been walking their German Shepherd in the countryside and just before they enter the driveway of her house, the Shepherd stops and looks past the camera, alerted by the barking of another dog off-screen. That's an early indication of how much of the drama here will be taking place out of sight. Further up the driveway, Kate encounters the postal carrier and congratulates him on the new baby his wife has delivered. And it's that carrier who hands childless Kate the handful of mail with the letter about Katya. She takes it into the house and we hear the dog's presence below the frame during the next scene in the kitchen, even though he is unseen most of the time.

“Sometimes a conversation will take place between Kate and Geoff with the latter out of frame (or behind a wall). The house itself creaks and cracks and moans in the wind, as though we were hearing this old marriage straining to withstand the buffeting of unseen forces. (Writer-director Haigh writes of keeping old notebooks and journals in his attic, but fearing that their emotional weight would cause them to come crashing down on him though the ceiling.) A shot from outside the house shows Kate framed in a window, her image blurred and distorted as if she were Katya, viewed through the ice.

“The real story here, of course, is not about Katya's fate, or the impending anniversary party, though they are essential plot devices. And it's not limited to familiar (but still essential) themes regarding the dangers of denial; or the dangers of honesty; or the unknowability of other people or of oneself (Albee: ‘I think that's foolishness on the part of the [writer] to write about himself. People don't know anything about themselves.’); or what happens when one of the partners in the shared fantasy of a relationship questions or loses faith in the agreement, spoken or unspoken; or the dangers of knowing too much about someone; or the resilience and fragility of the fictionalized stories we create and tell ourselves about how our profoundly unknowable pasts and how they inform our illusion of the present and project into the imaginary future.

"45 Years is concerned with all of that and more. But for me (and this isn't a spoiler because the film's climax is exquisitely ambiguous) the most powerful emotional undertow consists of the current unwelcome feelings and doubts that people can resist but can't overcome. They're caught up in the current and, despite their best efforts, they can't go back to where they were before. They know they don't have any legitimate or rational reason for their emotions, but that doesn't change them, and they castigate themselves (and, perhaps, their partner) for stirring up such anguish. It's an absurd and tragicomic dilemma. And it makes for a captivating experience at the movies.” ~ Jim Emerson

2015 Muriel Awards Best Film Countdown: #34. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence

“Roy Andersson's beautifully deadpan Living trilogy comes to an end – as, I am sure he would remind you, all things must - with A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence. Once again he has successfully mined life for its most absurd and darkly comic moments and assembled them as a series of tangentially related vignettes to (dis)comfort us and it is a lovely and drab parade. Populated by depressed novelty salesmen, hobbled barmaids, and King Charles XII of Sweden, Andersson's work continues to occupy a territory unlike anything else and the borders of that territory are all drawn with the thin line between triumph and utter indignity.

“Not to make it sound like a miserable slog. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's often quite incisive and funny. The awkwardness of claiming a dead man's drink (it is paid for, after all), King Charles XII hitting on a bartender, a girl stealing a bow at a school assembly that is otherwise boring her – in each of these instances, and many others like them, Andersson's characters are staking their claim. They are reaching out, however modestly, and grabbing life, and often comically so. When you relax and admit to yourself how ridiculous the whole notion of being alive on this planet actually is, it's downright hilarious.

“Andersson is concerned with more this time around, though. History has finally crept into the Living trilogy and it certainly sets this entry apart. The King Charles segment, the reminiscence that conjures up Limping Lotta and the finale, which takes on the inherent horrors of colonization, give Pigeon a scope lacking in the two previous films. Those episodes manage to simultaneously throw mundane daily struggles into sharp relief when juxtaposed against the rich backdrop of history and remind us that those struggles are no different, perhaps, than they have ever been. The finale does up the ante, though. As the colonizers force the colonized into a torture device that makes music from their screams, we have no choice but to reconsider everything Andersson has shown us and exactly how much pleasure we have taken in watching everyone navigate their trials. We are complicit, and it can't be funny all the time.

“Andersson has a singular ability. No other filmmaker makes me feel so simultaneously connected to and disconnected from the rest of the world (which I mean in the best way). What I mean is that he is equally skilled in reminding us that we are ultimately alone, yet making me feel complete sympathy for everyone else's little situations the entire time. He is occasionally bleak, but never mean-spirited and absolutely never dishonest.

“Grab those fleeting moments, man. A good one can carry a guy through sixty years.” ~ Cole Roulain

2015 Muriel Awards Best Film Countdown: #41. Horse Money

“The fourth part of a chronicle of Cape Verdean immigrants living in a nearly vanished neighborhood in Lisbon, Fontainhas, Horse Money is in many ways a quantum leap for Pedro Costa. For a director who cites his influences as Jacques Tourneur, John Ford and Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, Costa had previously restrained himself, ever so slightly, from many of the stylistic flourishes of his mentors. Costa’s collaborative working relationship with real-life subjects, including Ventura, central to Ossos, Colossal Youth, and in Horse Money, who play versions of themselves on-screen, and were previously documented moments ‘in the now.’ With Horse Money, the history of Ventura, an impoverished laborer who spends the majority of the film in a cavernous medical facility, rises to the surface and Costa’s palate expands.

“In what is a film about collateral damage of the 1974 left-wing coup in Portugal, ending generations of a fascist dictatorship, Horse Money feels like an exorcism of unaddressed privilege. For Ventura and African immigrants alike, this period was about suffering: in a sequence built on light and shadows, Ventura takes a knife wound to the head by a member of the revolutionary army. While in a hospital, Ventura still believes it is 1974, and in a nearly half-hour sequence towards the end of the film, listens to the extended soliloquy of a revolutionary soldier, painted silver, an attempt to close the wounds that had been fully opened for nearly forty years.

“But, like all great films, in Horse Money, images and sound lead and ‘psychology follows.’ This is a deeply personal film for Costa, as his youth was defined by and aligned with this revolution, and with that he moves closer to Ventura and his style deepens. With bursts of color and light, often shot at night, and a collapse in the distinction between past and present, Horse Money is Costa at his most expressionist, and it is possibly the most haunted film made since Chadi Abdel Salam’s Al-Mummia.” ~ Michael Lieberman

2015 Muriel Awards Best Film Countdown: #45. Jauja

“The word Jauja references an impossible place, an utopia, a place sought by conquistadores and desired by those who look for peace or riches or simply the fulfillment of their wishes. It is at the same time a non-place, something hidden between the rocks and the desert that is traversed by an old soldier, the Patagonia that seems to swallow the characters, that distances them, places them apart, minimizes them amongst such an intricate geography, intricacies and rock slides that never seem to end and that give every shot a certain texture, as if we’re looking at a city from above, where every crack, bump or formation creates a hidden topography, as if Jauja were hiding in each crack and it wanted to come out.

“Or maybe Jauja is not much more than a split off place, like when Raúl Ruiz said that every shot in a film was a new movie, in each shot of Jauja we’re being revealed a new dimension of what it means or what awaits to those that explore the place that seems to be the cinematic equivalent of the City of the Caesars or El Dorado that the conquistadores looked for. As if in every shot in its vertical depth could be put on top of the next one, like colored veils that one after the other cover something hidden, but at the same time form a new color.

“The filmography of Lisandro Alonso has been characterized for framing its characters in a second, third and even the furthest place of the depth of the shot, where they are the center of attention, but at the same time so precise and found, that the eye of the spectator tends to wander through the rest of the frame, and it is in Jauja, more than in any other film of his, where the landscape is fundamental. The Argentinian Patagonia resists that ocular search, the desert covered with little plants and herbs, trees, bushes, and it is there that we could consider a plotline that is hidden, it’s in the search behind the rocks, the desperate and failed pursuit of the father, who looks for his lost daughter, but he just ends up losing himself, the landscape swallows him, the geography corrodes him, he collapses and transforms himself in a new road landmark.

“Nevertheless, the film itself is more than just about the search of the father, as the search itself, as it progresses, is transformed into something dispossessed of passion, something rundown to a necessity, some sort of social obligation, where the roles of a society that is being built or trying to grow in a place where they don’t exist, where the emptiness of the scenery (though full) gives the signal of a futile and dispassionate absence that doesn’t require to be filled by more than the act itself of exploration of the place.

“Curiously it’s just in the same shot where we note a presence that fills the shot: creatures with character that seem to fill the space that’s always been empty for the most part. The sea wolves invade the framing, as if we now finally understand that society and what has been tried to be constructed, these efforts of structuration, and historical application in which the plot supports itself in its first minutes have been minutely and gradually deconstructed, so when the strange last minutes of Jauja run, they don’t cause discomfort, as they are part of a natural causation. Jauja is a searched and dreamt place just because there are no humans there, there’s no society; there’s no rules, it’s a paradise, but maybe it’s just for sea wolves.” ~ Jaime Grijalba

2015 Muriel Awards Best Film Countdown: #48. Buzzard

“Joshua Burge has arrived on the scene, and in a few years hopefully most cinephiles will know his name. Delivering a forceful and twisted comic performance as Marty Jackitansky, a beyond disaffected office drone that by day passes his time at work doing not much at all, stealing office supplies and ripping off the company a meager couple bucks at a time. By night he is in his own slacker punk nirvana, making garbage food concoctions and smashing video game controllers around.

“The obvious reference point would be Taxi Driver, both films being about alienated loners on seemingly doomed missions, and Burge delivers a performance that almost equals the disturbing heights DeNiro achieves. Always unpredictable, Burge seems like he could erupt in a violence outburst or pithy sarcastic remark at any moment, particularly when around his comic counterpart Derek (an almost equally great performance by writer/director Joel Potrykus), a relentlessly pathetic dweeb that seem to exist to push Marty's buttons. Burge's masterful comic timing makes the goofy and petty situations he's put into truly riveting, constantly putting the audience on edge, possibly doubled over with laughter if they can even manage to breathe waiting to see what he'll do next.” ~ Patrick Miller

2015 Muriel Awards Best Film Countdown: #65. The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

“Given the ugly hash he’d previously made of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective in two misconceived, cluttered and cacophonous features, the last thing I expected from Guy Ritchie’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was anything that could be remotely described as visual wit or elegance. But maybe even more so in this age, when bloated and degraded blockbusters are the multitudinous coins of the realm, a big-budget spy picture conceived initially as just another nostalgic cash cow has the capacity to surprise us when it looks to classic forms and attitudes not as something to be slavishly, crassly replicated but instead to be used as a comment on where the genre is now, and why it’s so often no longer as much as fun as it could be. Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes movies missed the point entirely by failing to trust that modern audiences could respond to Doyle’s characters without being bashed over the head with superfluous technique. But in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. he’s figured out a way to make technique speak and interact with the story, to use visual flourishes and strategies to enhance the comedy and the thrills that are part of the genre his movie lives in.


“This new U.N.C.L.E. exists squarely in the Cold War of the ‘60s, the same era over which James Bond presided—the series on which the movie is based was one of TV’s many responses to the phenomenon of 007—but it’s no relentless nod to fans of the show or a simple spot-the-cultural-touchstone joke-fest. (I confess to grooving on the appearance of a completely awesome Cobra rotary phone at one point, however.) Ritchie’s movie is fast-paced and modern, but at the same time, in its use of split-screen effects, its fealty to fashion as an element of its world to be enhanced and not simply parodied, its evocative score and implementation of smartly integrated but less familiar period pop, and its healthy respect for a classical style which respects the design of action and prizes the orientation of its audience within that action, it feels as if it could have been made in the ‘60s.

“There are individual sequences that can stand with some of the funniest and most breathtaking action ever staged—for instance, a car chase choreographed like an ice-skating duet that must have had Remy Julienne grinning from ear to ear while simultaneously stewing in envy. And Ritchie has learned buckets from Warner Bros.’ Termite Terrace geniuses in the area of background action— the second half of a spectacular boat chase speeds past the windshield of a truck (and our field of vision) inside which Napoleon Solo, oblivious to the aquatic action, regards a delicious sandwich and bottle of wine he’s found inside. Similarly, a nasty villain gets cooked by the faulty wiring of his own electric chair while, in the foreground and on the other side of soundproof glass, Solo and Ilya Kuriyakin debate the morality of turning the torturer’s methods on himself. Oops! Best of all, the siege-by-machine-gun of an aircraft carrier where a villainous nuclear threat is being developed has been brilliantly telescoped into zippy shorthand, a multi-screen barrage of color and sound in which individual frames glide and sweep and plummet throughout the Panavision frame with graphic insouciance and flair. In a brief couple of minutes Ritchie and his editors create a sharp and lively blast of coherent action, a bridge to the really good stuff, which most 21st-century action directors would have expanded into time-killing tedium.

“There is so much to enjoy in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., certainly including its actors, that it’s an even greater shame audiences more or less stayed away— Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer spar on everything from fashion to technology to nationalism with unexpected grace and humor, while Alicia Vikander, Sylvester Groth, Elizabeth Debecki, Hugh Grant and Jared Harris all have presence and individual moments of relish and style worthy of their talent and the conception of the movie as a whole. However, those tepid box office returns have all but assured that a franchise which could have been relished by those of us who have little use for the grim self-seriousness that has overtaken the Bond pictures will never come to pass. Be grateful, then, that this one somehow made it out of the factory, in no small part due to the guiding hand of Guy Ritchie, perhaps the least likely director ever to point a Panavision camera in the direction of this sort of swift, feather-light, presumably antiquated and thoroughly delightful good time.” ~ Dennis Cozzalio

2015 Muriel Awards Addendum #3: Beloved but Ineligible

“If you wanted to see Welcome to New York last year, you may have had a difficult time. While the film received a small run at some theaters, the film’s US distributor, IFC Films, gave it only a weekend in New York, technically making it Muriels ineligible. If you did manage to catch it in a theatre or on a VOD service, you were subjected to a bastardized 109 minute version that gave a very different set of accounts of this quasi-satire investigating the infamous Dominique Straus-Kahn affair. (For more specific information, Muriels voter Simon Abrams diligently explains this in his RogerEbert.com review).

“But if you did manage to see Abel Ferrara’s film by, ahem, ‘other means’ (which he himself endorsed), you got to experience a punch-in-the-gut takedown of capitalist enterprise in the post-recession era. For all their (relative) merits, both The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short are adrenaline fueled depictions of big business—they have a lot of fun both with and at their subjects, which has created some complications in their receptions. There’s energy in Ferrara’s vision as well, but the rhythms of Welcome to New York are closer to Bela Tarr. The film hits its first climatic moment during a late night indulgence of DSK stand in Devereaux and two buddies indulging in prostitutes. Closer to documentary than fiction, Ferrara’s long takes and garish lighting display their carnivalesque behavior somewhere between high parody and sobering awkwardness. Led by Gerard Depardieu’s commanding performance, how does one decide to hysterically laugh or quiver in shame after listening to his thundering grunts of sexual pleasure?

“All this is to set up what becomes a more daring critique of the relationship between the literal body and capital indulgence (pair it with Joel Potrykus’s equally great Buzzard for a flip side of the recession). The infamous rape (made into a subjective flashback in the idiotic edited cut) is shot in an unflashy series of high angled cameras like surveillance footage, the closest the film turns to an outside perspective. Then the film transforms into a Brechtian prison comedy, a brief moment of reprise where justice has its course, before course correcting to Devereaux wandering his Canal Street mansion, awaiting a decision (only glimpsed) and ruminating on the nature of his own power. Ferrara, one of the great American directors, might have a clear hatred for his protagonist, but his ability has always been to keep the roving camera focused directly at its subject with profound empathy. It’s a film brimming with contradictions, and thus fueled with a real anger about those who simply indulge in power, all because they can.” ~ Peter Labuza
 

“With a runtime of only 16 minutes, Don Hertzfeldt’s World of Tomorrow was too short to qualify for the Muriels, but that doesn’t change the fact that the film is a masterpiece and one of the very best films of 2015. I suspect that the reason I was asked to write about the film was because I wasn’t alone in expressing that opinion when submitting my ballot.

“World of Tomorrow imagines a future in which humans have begun cloning themselves and uploading their memories to those clones in an attempt to live forever. The film begins with a 4-year old girl named Emily (Emily Prime) being contacted by her third generation clone from 227 years in the future. Using experimental time travel technology, Emily Prime is transported into ‘the Outernet,’ a neural network that is the future’s answer to our Internet. Inside the beautifully imagined Outernet, moments from the next couple centuries of Emily Prime’s life are revealed to her by her clone. Her journey through time, space, and memory takes us to fantastical landscapes that are imbued with a melancholy that is foreign to the 4-year old Emily Prime but familiar to anybody watching.

“We eventually learn that the world as we know it is soon coming to an end and humans are embarking on increasingly desperate attempts to preserve their lives and memories. This is explained to Emily Prime as the two of them are standing on a hill looking up at the night sky. The third generation Emily coldly explains that humanity is doomed while Emily Prime is busy gleefully counting dead bodies re-entering the atmosphere as brilliant streaks of light. Emily Prime is delighted while her clone concedes that ‘yes, it is very pretty.’

“Emotionally, World of Tomorrow navigates the waters between wistful and heartbreaking but Hertzfeldt’s humanity and trademark wicked sense of humor prevent the proceedings from becoming too heavy. Visually, the film is gorgeously rendered. The stick figure-like characters will look familiar to anybody who has seen Hertzfeldt’s previous work but this time around, using digital animation for the first time, Hertzfeldt has them inhabit sublime landscapes that are bursting with both color and imagination.

“For a film so densely packed with ideas and visual inventiveness, its 16 minute runtime is a virtue. The film is terrifically rewatchable. In half the time it takes Domino’s to deliver a pizza to your house, Hertzfeldt invites us to ponder the meaning of life, confront our own mortality, and cherish every memory while experiencing life to the fullest.” ~ Benjamin Lim