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

2015 Muriel Awards Addendum #2: Other Performances We Loved

“In Ex Machina, Oscar Isaac is given the responsibility of providing the film with much of its atmosphere. The base is already there, and is the work of writer/director Alex Garland. The film is about three characters: Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), who was hired to determine how close to a perfect AI is the robot named Ava (Alicia Vikander), and was hired to do so by Ava’s creator, a billionaire genius named Nathan (Oscar Isaac). The setting is Nathan’s immense underground home and lab, in which he lives essentially by himself. Some of the rooms look like very high-end, tricked out, but habitable living rooms and kitchens, whereas the hallways and bedrooms (of which there seem to be at least dozens) look like they belong in an empty hotel.

“So, what Isaac has to do with his performance – and it’s not something you ever see him do, and it may well have been something he never thought about, which doesn’t the change that he achieved it – is turn vast antiseptic loneliness into a human being. Not by playing Nathan as a barely human mannequin who resembles his inventions, but rather going the other way entirely, and playing him as someone whose humanity is all too present, whose confidence is drowning in beer and vodka, a guy who walks through these endless halls of glass doors and red carpets and spits on the floor, because it’s his floor, all of it. “Isaac plays Nathan as a man both dissolute and rigorously in shape. His eyes can be alternately warm and shining with contempt. Isaac can do the same with his voice, and he does all of this almost simultaneously throughout Ex Machina. It’s an intensely charismatic and chilling performance: Nathan is a man whose interest in you can make you feel good about yourself, while you quietly suspect that he probably hates you. And thus is the atmosphere of Ex Machina created – the seamless integration of soulless beauty and gross, misanthropic humanity, as presented by Nathan and his home, reflected back by the soulless beauty of Ava, who was born stripped of anything like grossness, and who is too inhuman to be misanthropic.” ~ Bill Ryan

“I don’t think much people could’ve predicted how great Charlize Theron was going to be in Mad Max: Fury Road. Personally, as I wasn’t subjected to trailers and just entered the theater expecting to be wowed (and I was), I literally had no idea just how important her role was going to be, especially as she’s practically the lead. It’s not that she hasn’t played these kind of characters before (remember Aeon Flux? No? Ok, that’s better actually), but that she didn’t portray them as seriously as she does in this science fiction dystopia action film. Personally, I’d say it’s in the eyes.

“When Immortan Joe mentions Furiosa (what a great name, means ‘woman who is furious’ in Spanish), that’s the first time we see her: riding her rig, a metallic arm, her ragged shirt, but none of that matters, as the few seconds that the shot lasts we’re enraptured by the way that she looks up towards the leader that mentioned her name: her eyes bright, barely squinting, surrounded by the grease that she uses to blacken her forehead and around her eyes. She’s already defiant, as if we’re expecting what she’ll do, she’ll betray Immortan Joe, and only with one slight movement of her eyes, we know everything we should about her.

“Even when the darkness stops covering the upper side of her face, she still commands the movie through the movement of her eyes, scrutinizing the horizon, and going through the motions of editing through her perspective and the people that she talks to. Her beautiful clear eyes surrounded by an exterior of madness and violence bring the necessary touch of inner trauma that the character needs for it to be understandable in every action that she makes, even making all of the backstory unnecessary.

“Besides is the fact that her physical presence is daunting and particularly enticing to watch, as she moves her body through the motions of driving and fighting as if it were a second nature. She appears to control every muscle, both in the tense situations, when she needs to stay calm and not a muscle moves, nor when she feels defeated and we can see her body flow and fall to the sand, crying and screaming, closing the circle of all the emotions that her character needed to express in the film.

“A personal note: I don’t think that Furiosa, as played by Charlize Theron, should have a new movie of her own, as I feel that her travel through the picture is completed by the end. What I could buy is a movie about her past. Now, there’s an idea, movie producers. Furiosa: The Early Years.” ~ Jaime Grijalba

“Samuel L. Jackson makes a lot of movies, and is good in most of them. He brings an exponential depth to each of his characters. If it’s a one-dimensional part, he’ll add layers of complexity. But if the role is already complex, he imbues the full spectrum of humanity into it, allowing each viewer to leave with a different impression of the character. In The Hateful Eight’s centerpiece sequence, Jackson plays a variation on True Romance’s infamous Sicilian scene. Using charged rhetoric, his Major Marquis Warren exploits the racism of an old man to elicit a desired act of violence. Is Warren telling the truth? The whole truth? Anything but the truth? One can’t be certain. What is certain is that Jackson’s performance in the scene - in which Warren details the torture, rape and murder of an old Confederate soldier’s son - is so electric few notice that Mexican Bob stopped playing the piano midway through the story. Which means Tarantino so trusts Jackson’s ability to command audience attention, he bases Bob’s alibi for not poisoning the coffee on the assumption nobody could possibly be paying attention to anything but Warren’s story. And, with Mexican Bob in mind, Jackson so convincingly has Warren argue that Minnie hated Mexicans, it still comes across as truth after Tarantino shows Minnie treating Bob with kindness. Jackson is so good, many still believe the lie even after the contradicting truth has been revealed. Damn, he would have made a hell of a politician.” ~ Kevin Cecil

“The premise of Phoenix could work in most genres: inspirational tale of survival, hard-hitting melodrama, ice-cold mystery, body horror, even unconventional love story. That's an ideal starting point for Nina Hoss, with her uncanny ability to slip among film iconographies with a turn of the neck and the right plume of light. In her last collaboration with director Christian Petzold, 2012's Barbara, Hoss was a Fassbinder diva, a Verhoevian femme fatale, a Hitchcock blonde, and a John Waters renegade all in one performance. So how exactly do you raise the bar? Can such a thing be done? And yet somehow, Hoss does. As a survivor emerging into the Berlin she once knew, bearing a new face representing the doctors' best efforts to reconstruct — no, as beloved friend Lene would correct, re-create — the Nelly of before, she begins fitting the jagged pieces of her life into some semblance of order, retracing steps amongst the wreckage. And we are with her through each of those difficult steps she must take through the life that she led and thought she understood all too well. Leading, of course, to that exquisite ending, where she wipes the floor with our emotions. It's a staggering performance.” ~ Jason Shawhan

“Brie Larson has been getting the lion’s share of the acclaim for Room, but it’s Jacob Tremblay who is at the center of the film. The film is told from his point of view--sometimes literally. More, the filmmakers ask Tremblay to change over the course of the film as his world is expanded. The boy who rages at his mother because he thinks she’s making up stories about the outside world in the first act is very different from the boy who finds himself normalizing with friends and dogs near the end. There are plenty of adult actors who seem incapable of performing this kind of change over the course of a movie, but for an actor as young as Tremblay, it’s remarkable.” ~ Christianne Benedict

“There are two things that some people seem unwilling to forgive Leonardo DiCaprio for. One, he came into our lives as a dreamboat Romeo Titanic victim, and even as he evolved into One Of Our Great Actors his genetics had the audacity to keep reminding us of that. Try as he might, he could not hide the boyish looks even as a repeat Scorsese leading man, or while playing an aging Howard Hughes or J. Edgar Hoover (the latter an undervalued movie and performance in my view).

“Two, he prefers a show-offy approach to acting that some, in their greater taste and wisdom, can't have fun with. He loves accents, tics, gesticulation, facial hair. Even when playing an internal character he's likely to have great charm, make a bunch of speeches, do some emotional yelling, just not necessarily about what's going on inside.

“In recent years I think he's taken his talents even further. In both Django Unchained and The Wolf of Wall Street he applied his skills to characters who were unrepentant scumbags, and who required great comic timing. In Wolf he gave his most physical performance to date. The most remembered scene in an all around great movie is the one where he spends several minutes just trying to get into his car.

“In The Revenant he leaves the humor behind but doubles down on the physicality, spending most of the movie with more injuries than John McClane has at the end of a Die Hard. He crawls, limps, groans and sputters through the snow, lips scabbed over, body made up to have open wounds, frozen snot globs in his mustache. He pushes himself to the limit to play the human embodiment of hammered shit, and then bad guy Tom Hardy gets all the dialogue and laughs. I've only ever heard the trivia that DiCaprio ate raw bison liver on camera in the context of critics making fun of him for it, but if that's what he needed to do to become this phantom of grimy, slimy vengeance then who am I to judge his dietary choices?” ~ Vern 

“Tangerine was one of those movies that I didn't take to immediately. On my initial viewing, the first act didn't hook me and the unfocused energy of it was as distracting as it was interesting. I almost bailed out on it after about fifteen minutes, ready to chalk this one up as another casualty of overhype and undeserved notoriety derived from ‘shot on an iPhone’ novelty. I'm glad I stuck with it, though. If I hadn't, I would have cheated myself out of learning about Mya Taylor, one of my favorite cinematic discoveries of 2015.

“Often, with a film that I am wrestling with, I will look for that one character that is my foothold, my way in. Mya Taylor's Alexandra was that foothold for me with Tangerine. She is the more subtle, reasonable complement to Kitana Kiki Rodriguez's volatile Sin-Dee and, to me, the heart and soul of the film. As the film moved along and seemed to find its footing, it was Taylor that kept giving me those reasons to keep watching. Every time the action threatened to get too frantic, Taylor gently guided Rodriguez back on track. She acts as a buffer for the other characters when they're on the street, she knows when to encourage and when to diplomatically discourage Sin-Dee's manic energy, she even gives up her wig. That's true friendship. For a screwball comedy team to really work, the zany half of the act needs a good foil and Taylor fulfills that role admirably. It's a great decision, then, when director Sean Baker shows us her performing at a pay-to-play nightclub. She's not just second fiddle to Sin-Dee and we get a glimpse of her dreams and aspirations, modest and compromised as they are. It elevates the character from sidekick to something much greater and it's Taylor's warmth, grace and humor that make all that hit home.

“One of the great things about cinema is that it is a window into innumerable worlds. Hollywood vehicles are still obviously, woefully circumspect with respect to that. I am thankful that groups that are marginalized by mainstream cinema – the trans community, sex workers, African-Americans, the list goes on and on – are out there, making movies, not giving a damn. There are so many stories that I might never otherwise have access to, so many stories that might not otherwise be heard at all. I'm glad I stuck with Tangerine. Even more importantly, I am glad everyone involved in making it stuck with it. 2015 was a better year for it being a part of the cinematic landscape. With any luck, the years to come will be better for it as well.” ~ Cole Roulain 

"Neorealism by definition rejects analysis, whether political, moral, psychological, logical, or social, of the characters and their actions. It looks on reality as a whole, not incomprehensible, certainly, but inseparably one” – Andre Bazin

“When filmmakers Josh & Ben Safdie discovered Arielle Holmes in a Manhattan subway, the attraction was to her look, but what they fell in love with was her story. Holmes was a charismatic free spirit, who happened to be homeless, a heroin junkie, and a hopeless romantic, incredibly in love with a self-destructive Russian street kid named Ilya. The Safdies got her story in bits and pieces over coffees and lunches. They were grooming her for a role in her next film, but the reality that was her life, was far more compelling than anything they were working on. They eventually asked for her story on paper. Holmes would visit Apple stores and libraries to jot down her thoughts, which the Safdies paid her for by the page.

“The resulting film, Heaven Knows What, would be Holmes’ own story. She plays an on-screen version of herself named Harley. The film tells her story about living on the street, coping with heroin addiction, and her unwavering devotion to Ilya (Caleb Landry Jones). The Safdies would film in many of the actual locations from her life and utilize many of the actual people who would be cast as themselves. The resulting picture is one of the most raw and real films of the past decade. It comes to life through Holmes, whose performance is quite simply one of the most honest and brutal portraits of love and addiction to have ever graced the screen. It’s one of those rare bits of acting that never seems to really seek reality, but simply is reality, inseparably tied to the actress who brings it to life.” ~ Adam Lemke

“That distinct moment when you have to ask yourself if something that you're watching is – okay. It happens periodically (more often than that in the films of Bruno Dumont, to be sure), and it's a dangerous kind of uncertainty, because it can kill a film dead for the viewer. There's nothing as captivating as Bernard Pruvost in L'il Quinquin to be found in the vast reach of cinema this year, and it's not because he's a differently-abled actor. He is a captivating presence that demands the viewer's attention, and one who haunts the subconscious long after the film ends and life as we know it takes up the slack on the other side. And still, after three full viewings, knowing what little there is to know about this professional gardener, there's that voice in the back of the critical mind; only this time it's asking, ‘Is he fucking with us?’ “ ~ Jason Shawhan

“There’s a late scene in Gett in which Vivian Amselem is alone and agonizing over the nightmare in which she finds herself. This is one of the few scenes where we see Vivian’s interior life writ on actress Ronit Elkabetz’s face. Most of the scenes show her interacting with the court, with her husband, with her lawyer, and in these scenes, Ronit mostly plays rage and exasperation and they’re the kind of scenes that show actors to advantage, sure, but in this scene by herself, the levee breaks and everything pours out. It’s a wordless scene, the camera just looking at her, and in this scene her face says...everything. Set next to the back and forth of the rest of the film, it’s startling enough, but, my god, does Elkabetz use the scene to deliver the killing stroke to the audience. She has a grievance with the world, and it hurts just to look at it.” ~ Christianne Benedict

“Tom Noonan is the apotheosis of the creepy everyman in Anomalisa. He voices every character in the film other than the two stars, David Thewlis and the transcendent Jennifer Jason Leigh. It’s a testament to the strength of his voice work here that it took me a second viewing of Anomalisa to realize all the the Noonan-voiced characters had the same face. (Wait, seriously, you missed that? Yeah, shut up.) Noonan’s voice is preternaturally calm, its gentle mundanity slipping into the sinister.

“Noonan often deftly straddles a line between intelligent loner and disturbing cipher. (See also What Happened Was… which he wrote, directed and starred in, and his X-Files turn as serial child killer John Lee Roche.) His kind eyes and soft voice are almost comforting, but cross so easily over to weirdness. Noonan has been a Charlie Kaufman alter ego before. Or, rather, the alter ego to Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kaufman’s alter ego in Synecdoche, New York. In Anomalisa, he’s the embodiment of Kaufman’s alter ego’s self-loathing. A complicated combination of the self and others that disgusts our protagonist. Everyone is Noonan. And Noonan is dull, vapid, prosaic, angry, dismissive, needy, desperate, clingy, demanding, controlling, terrifying, and inescapable. Everything Michael Stone hates and fears in himself, repeating itself over and over again with every encounter, until he finds Lisa, pure, new, exciting and thrillingly other. But Lisa predictably comes up short, her fragile and beautiful voice morphing into Noonan’s immovable sameness. No matter where you go... there you are.” ~ Marya Murphy

“Sidse Babett Knudsen was a breakthrough performer for me in 2015 with her portrayal of Cynthia in Peter Strickland's The Duke of Burgundy. That breakthrough status is entirely my fault, not hers. Unfortunately for me, this was my first exposure to her, even though she is fairly prolific in theatre, television and film in her native Denmark. On the plus side, what a rich introduction. Even though I always feel like I've been a little remiss when I finally discover someone with an extensive body of work that I feel I should have been aware of, that is always offset by the excitement of having a wealth of material to dig into. The Duke of Burgundy is a pretty thrilling jumping off point.

“I was really taken with this film and particularly Knudsen's performance. It's such a lush, beautiful environment. It would have been easy to make something simply titillating with this subject matter, these actresses and this backdrop. It transcends that, though, and much of that is attributable to Knudsen. Don't misunderstand me, it is certainly erotic. That eroticism, though, all comes from its finely observed, and fluid, power dynamic. Much to marketers' and reviewers' chagrin, it refuses to be pigeonholed as a lesbian film, a BDSM film, or a knockoff imitation of sleaze relics from the '70s, and one of the main reasons for that is because Knudsen elevates the material with her focus on what is universal in the story. In her, we see the insecurities that the older partner often faces in a relationship – Can I keep up? Will they trade me in for a younger model? How much do I compromise what I want? Haven't I put in enough time on this earth to have earned some modicum of security and comfort? She communicates all of this, and then some, subtly and sensually. She makes it relatable, arousing and touching, regardless of gender or level of interest in kink. It's a knockout performance that bends but doesn't break and she deserves to have her cake and eat it too.” ~ Cole Roulain

“The lingering tragedy of Straight Outta Compton is how ultimately limited it became by having Ice Cube and Dr. Dre join on as producers. This, of course, is the amount of star power nitro that helped to get the film made, so it was likely an unavoidable step in the film's development. But because of that, a lot of the edges on both the characters and the historical individuals of Dre and Cube got sanded off. Not so, Eric Wright. The Artist Forever Known as Eazy-E's tragic death from complications from AIDS may be the funneling point of the film's choppy, quilty second half, but it's Eazy's story that captivates from beginning to end. He's the audience's way in to the story, and it's him who remains complicated and viscerally alive. Jason Mitchell is exceptional in the role, bringing boundless energy to each of his scenes, navigating the zigzags of tone that result from so many stories, so many writers, and so many producers. His Eazy is the most complex character in the film, in the way he bridges the business worlds of pushing weight and selling records, but also in the wrenching Greek tragedy that he's undertaking with Paul Giamatti's Jerry Heller. (It seems really obvious that someone, somewhere along the development of the Straight Outta Compton film read Heller's book Ruthless, because much of the film's dialogue in scenes between only Eazy and Jerry seem to have come directly from it.) But Mitchell does something amazing in the film, finding the humanity and the universality in someone who could have just been a cipher.” ~ Jason Shawhan