Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: Monday Morning Quarterbacking

Well, that was fun… right?

With the fifth year of voting for the Muriels Hall of Fame behind us, I guess now is as good a time as any for us to take stock of where this thing is now. The longer this has been going on, the more I’ve come to see it as a kind of attempt for us to create our own version of the cinematic canon, such as it is. For one thing, I see our HOF inductees as a damn fine starting point for anyone who wants to become versed in classic cinema. This is one reason I made an extra attempt to get the voters to recognize movies from around the world this year, rather than just the usual regions that tend to be studied by Film Studies 101 courses: the USA, Western Europe, and to a lesser extent Japan.

So, did we accomplish that goal. Well… yes… ish? It was definitely good to see us inducting movies from Eastern Europe and even one that’s kinda-sorta from Africa, and it was doubly nice that we could keep up our streak of three years running that we’ve been able to induct at least one film directed by a woman. Yet the switch to the voting format also highlighted another issue we continue to face. To put it bluntly, it seems like we’ve burned off most of the “obvious” consensus choices for really old (say, pre-1950) inductees, and now we’ve focusing somewhat disproportionately on movies that only recently became eligible for induction.

To wit: after five years of inductees, the Muriels Hall of Fame has inducted seven films from before 1930. This year, we inducted that same number of films from 1966 alone. As great of a year as ’66 was – and I’m not denying that it was awesome – it does seem like we favor more recent films than the really old-school classics. I like to think there are at least a few really great and worthy titles that haven’t made it in yet (hello, Griffith and Méliès!) and that the well hasn’t run dry. Maybe we need to divide up the ballot again next year, only by time period rather than by nationality. Thoughts?

One disappointment, for me anyway, was that for the first time this year no short film mustered up enough votes to be inducted. In fact, only three of the 88 films on the final ballot, only three - The House Is Black, Ménilmontant, and Window Water Baby Moving - were short films. Have we just not seen enough short films beyond the handful of classics that have already made the cut? I’m open to the possibility of setting up a smaller group of voters who are better-versed in classic shorts enough to select a worthy inductee, but only if there’s interest. Is there anyone who’d be down with doing something like this?

A few more observations:

- When we like a filmmaker, we really, really like him. Consider that, out of the seventy films we’ve inducted to date, fifteen of them have were directed or co-directed by Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Buñuel and Hawks. Add to this additional “double dippers” like Buster Keaton, John Huston, Fritz Lang, David Lean, Orson Welles and Billy Wilder, and we tend to show a lot of filmmaker loyalty. And while that’s not a problem in and of itself, there are also some great filmmakers who haven’t yet made the cut – of directors who’ve directed a decent number of films during the eligible period, people like Preminger, Clouzot, Kazan, Capra, Cocteau, Rossellini, Vidor, Wyler, and aforementioned Messrs. Griffith and Méliès spring immediately to mind, but there are plenty of other worthy names besides. It’s bound to happen for at least some of those dudes eventually, I’m sure.

- Something interesting I noticed when looking over the master list of inductees is that every inducted film that whose primary spoken language is something besides English has been released on DVD and/or Blu-Ray at some point by The Criterion Collection. Every. Single. One. Again, not categorically a bad thing. Just sort of interesting to see how much of a dominant presence Criterion has been in shaping today’s cinematic culture, especially with regards to classic foreign-language films. And while it’s tempting to chalk it all up to Criterion’s vigilant effort in bringing canonical classics before the eyes of true film lovers, it’s also hard to deny that at least a handful of the titles in question would probably have had little to no chance of being inducted if not for their getting a Criterion release. Daisies, anybody?

Finally, while I’m grateful for all the enthusiasm the voters and especially the people who wrote pieces this year were able to muster, I sometimes get the nagging feeling that, aside from the voters themselves, there might not be all that much interest in Muriels Hall of Fame voting. Am I wrong about this? I’m not as active on the Film Twitter as a lot of you are, so maybe I just haven’t picked up on it.

Anyway, here’s how the voting went down. It should be noted that The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was inducted on the basis of winning the 50th Anniversary Muriel Award earlier this year. Titles marked with an asterisk were inducted this year:

12 votes:
*High and Low (1963, Kurosawa)
*Persona (1966, Bergman)

10 votes:
*Rashomon (1950, Kurosawa)
*Daisies (1966, Chytilova)

8 votes:
*The Earrings of Madame De… (1953, Ophüls)

7 votes:
*Metropolis (1927, Lang)
*Only Angels Have Wings (1939, Hawks)
*Notorious (1946, Hitchcock)
*Godzilla (1954, Honda)
*Viridiana (1961, Buñuel)
*Andrei Rublev (1966, Tarkovsky)
*Au Hasard Balthazar (1966, Bresson)
*The Battle of Algiers (1966, Pontecorvo)
*Blow-Up (1966, Antonioni)

6 votes:
Nosferatu (1922, Murnau)

5 votes:
*Last Year at Marienbad (1961, Resnais) [inducted following runoff vote against Hiroshima Mon Amour as both films have narrowly missed induction over the past five years]
The Crowd (1928, Vidor)
Pandora’s Box (1929, Pabst)
Grand Illusion (1937, Renoir)
Black Narcissus (1947, Powell & Pressburger)
Johnny Guitar (1954, Ray)
A Man Escaped (1956, Bresson)
Wild Strawberries (1957, Bergman)
Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959, Resnais)
Peeping Tom (1960, Powell)
Contempt (1963, Godard)
The Haunting (1963, Wise)
Kwaidan (1964, Kobayashi)
Woman in the Dunes (1964, Teshigahara)
Black Girl (1966, Sembène)

4 votes:
I Was Born, But… (1932, Ozu)
The Old Dark House (1932, Whale)
Bringing Up Baby (1938, Hawks)
The Wizard of Oz (1939, Fleming)
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, Welles)
Detour (1945, Ulmer)
La Belle et la Bête (1946, Cocteau)
Daisy Kenyon (1947, Preminger)
All About Eve (1950, Mankiewicz)
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953, Hawks)
Paths of Glory (1957, Kubtick)
Imitation of Life (1959, Sirk)
Window Water Baby Moving (1959, Brakhage)
La Dolce Vita (1960, Fellini)
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962, Mulligan)
The House Is Black (1963, Farrokhzad)

3 votes:
Greed (1924, von Stroheim)
The Gold Rush (1925, Chaplin)
The Grapes of Wrath (1940, Ford)
The Shop Around the Corner (1940, Lubitsch)
Cat People (1942, Tourneur)
Children of Paradise (1945, Carné)
The Big Sleep (1946, Hawks)
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946, Capra)
Out of the Past (1947, Tourneur)
Orpheus (1950, Cocteau)
A Star Is Born (1954, Cukor)
Kiss Me Deadly (1955, Aldrich)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, Siegel)
The Killing (1956, Kubrick)
Horror of Dracula (1958, Fisher)
The Apartment (1960, Wilder)
Lolita (1961, Kubrick)
The Birds (1963, Hitchcock)
The War Game (1965, Watkins)
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966, Nichols)

1 or 2 votes:
Our Hospitality (1923, Keaton & Blystone)
Safety Last! (1923, Newmeyer & Taylor)
Ménilmontant (1926, Kirsanoff)
Vampyr (1932, Dreyer)
Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933, LeRoy)
It Happened One Night (1934, Capra)
The Awful Truth (1937, McCarey)
Make Way For Tomorrow (1937, McCarey)
Gone With the Wind (1939, Fleming)
Stagecoach (1939, Ford)
Sullivan’s Travels (1941, Sturges)
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, Wyler)
Unfaithfully Yours (1948, Sturges)
The Steel Helmet (1951, Fuller)
Lola Montes (1955, Ophüls)
12 Angry Men (1957, Lumet)
A Face in the Crowd (1957, Kazan)
Ashes and Diamonds (1958, Wajda)
Mon Oncle (1958, Tati)
The Housemaid (1960, Kim)
A Hard Day’s Night! (1964, Lester)
Tokyo Drifter (1966, Suzuki)

And as always, a big thank you to our awesome voters!
Jason Alley
Danny Baldwin
Kent M. Beeson
Josh Bell
Andrew Bemis
Scott W. Black
Danny Bowes
Donald G. Carder
Paul Clark
Dennis Cozzalio
Philip Dyess-Nugent
James Frazier
Kenji Fujishima
Luke Gorham
Jaime Grijalba
Glenn Heath Jr.
Odie Henderson
Stacia Jones
Sam Juliano
Benjamin Lim
Craig D. Lindsey
Matt Lynch
Sam C. Mac
Willow Maclay
Patrick J. Miller
Marya Murphy
Matt Noller
Cole Roulain
Jason Shawhan
Alice Stoehr
Ryan Swen
Philip Tatler IV
Ian Scott Todd
Scott von Doviak
Patrick Williamson
Bryce Wilson
George Wu

See you in January!

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: Godzilla

And this year's final inductee is...

"The film trusts us to be human in our response, because goosing the viewer with emotional tricks wouldn’t just be cheating. It would cheapen everything Godzilla has to say. Because what it wants is for the audience to not only take in what a nuclear world means, but also, what it means to have nuclear weapons."

~ Kent M. Beeson

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: Daisies

"Though Daisies may have bloomed from the context of the Czech New Wave, its unruly ethos has reverberated through the subsequent decades. Watching it now, it’s still unpredictable with its explosive burlesque of a narrative. It’s still filthy and feminine and fun.”

~Alice Stoehr

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: High and Low

“What follows is an exciting thriller-slash-police procedural, a real nail-biter of a yarn that's all the more remarkable in light of Kurosawa's meticulous planning, framing and choreography. High and Low is so heavily micromanaged that by all rights it should be dull and plodding, but Kurosawa is a master of cinematic control." ~ Stacia Jones

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: Only Angels Have Wings

"Only Angels Have Wings seems to me, each time I see it, to rank as the greatest movie Hollywood ever produced. It’s Hawks’ perfect, profound, entirely unfussy fusion of his love of adventure, his admiration of professional aptitude and passion, for simple (but not simplistic) skill, and even his own deftness with strains of melodrama and comic energy, the template for the sort of action experience that seems more and more out of the reach of modern filmmakers with each passing, terminally bloated and self-important season."

~ Dennis Cozzalio

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: The Earrings of Madame De...

“Someone once said of Max Ophüls that the mere mention of his name makes all cameras stand rigidly to attention. Never was it more evident than here in this wonderfully cynical yet romantic eulogy to the very idea of romance and, indeed, truth."

~ Sam Juliano

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: Notorious

"It may be an espionage-fueled film noir, with Grant’s cynical G-man recruiting Bergman’s tormented daughter-of-a-Nazi-spy to infiltrate a Brazil-based crew of Nazis by getting close to one (Claude Rains), who just happens to be an old flame of hers. But no matter how suspenseful and intrigue-infested this movie gets, you’re always reminded that Notorious is about two people whose desire for each other is so palpable, so intense, so friggin’ sexy, they can’t hide it...!"

~ Craig D. Lindsey

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: Blow-Up

"Like its cinematic cousins... Blow-Up uses the ‘sculpting in time’ element of film to shatter time itself. It’s at once a capsule of a place/culture/era and a living, breathing item that may or may not be completely different the next time we view it. Like those images the photographer pulls out of his negatives, the film reveals stranger and stranger layers the more we obsess over it." ~ Philip Tatler IV

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: Last Year at Marienbad

“Representative of cinema as modern art, Last Year at Marienbad moved away from narrative and resists precise elucidation. The viewer must work to assign meaning in the film only to find the film evades any single interpretation... Marienbad points the way toward the postmodern.

~ George Wu

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: Viridiana

“Viridiana marked Luis Buñuel’s return to shooting films in his home country of Spain. His decision raised as many eyebrows as his Palme D’Or-winning film ultimately did. For biting the hand that thought it was feeding him, Buñuel had his most delicious provocation banned by the Catholic Church and Franco’s government of Spain."

~ Odie Henderson

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: The Battle of Algiers

"The legendary stature of The Battle of Algiers is hardly in question. From the infamous stories of Black Panthers taking notes during screenings on how to stage a revolution, to its showing at the Pentagon just before the invasion of Iraq (obviously more than a few lessons were ignored), the relevancy and potency of its message has perhaps only gotten stronger as the film approaches the 50th anniversary of its U.S. premiere. However, the message would mean very little indeed without a form, and Gillo Pontecorvo provides a truly remarkable one, full of anger, passion, and most of all humanity."

~ Ryan Swen

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: Metropolis

“Fritz Lang’s Metropolis may not be the first science-fiction movie ever made, but it comes close, and 90 years after it was released, it remains possibly the genre’s most influential work. Especially in the version restored and released in 2010, it’s an epic of boundless imagination and passion, as awe-inspiring and relevant now as it was in 1927."

~ Josh Bell

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: Au Hasard Balthazar

“Bresson is rightfully revered for taking great big abstractions like loss and transcendence and making fearless and unflinching films about them. On the surface, Au hasard, Balthasar details the life and cruel death of a donkey in rural France, yet also encompasses the suffering and descent into sexual nihilism of the donkey’s first owner Marie (the haunting Anne Wiazemsky), the cruelty that one man can inflict, indiscriminately, on beast and woman and fellow man, and the horrifyingly self-focused nature of humanity."

~ Jason Shawhan

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: Andrei Rublev

"No other filmmaker has ever rivaled Tarkovsky’s ability to make the dreariest of settings feel sublimely beautiful. Andrei Rublev is a testament to the power of the artist to transcend—and transform—the world around him.”

~ Ian Scott Todd

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: Persona

"Any number of established classics are good, even great, films to watch and re-watch, but how many of them possess this ability to turn themselves and the viewer inside out every time? How many can show you something new, no matter how many times you come back to them?”

~ Cole Roulain

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: Rashomon

“Most modern works in which unreliable narrators reveal their motives and deceptive self-images by constructing competing narratives around the same event end up playing the discrepancies for laughs, or, worse, use it as a set-up before triumphantly revealing what ‘really’ happened. Rashomon leaves you uncertain about everything that happened... Now that the film is canonical, many people may overlook the fact that using a visual meeting that capitalizes on people's inclination to believe whatever their eyes are telling them to convey this message is highly subversive.”

~ Phillip Dyess-Nugent

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2017: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Hey everybody! Welcome to the announcement of this year's Muriels Hall of Fame inductees!

Before we get to our first movie, I just wanted to say something about a change to our voting system this year. Normally, our voters nominate their favorite eligible movies, then everyone simply picks from the nominees. But this year, in the interest of diversity, I decided to split up the ballot by region - the US, Western Europe, and the rest of the world. It was my hope that this might help us honor movies that weren't American, British or French, which are by far the most-represented nationalities in the Hall of Fame. Did it work? Stay tuned!

As always, we'll start with this year's 50th Anniversary Muriel Award winner, then announce the other inductees two per day until we've unveiled them all. So keep an eye on this page for the next week or so.

But enough of my yakkin' - let's boogie!

“How many hundreds of times have we heard Morricone's iconic coyote-howl theme used to signify ‘this is a western’? It's ironic that Leone's deconstruction of the genre has become one of its benchmarks, its imagery and sounds as famous as anything it was meant to satirize. But then again, it makes perfect sense." ~ Vern

Click here for the full piece.

2016 Muriel Awards Best Picture Countdown: #1

And the 2016 Golden Muriel Award for Best Picture goes to…

[246 points / 23 votes]

“Jim Jarmusch’s sublime Paterson is a movie in which every unobtrusive, offhand moment seems to matter. I’ve always run hot and cold on this director’s brand of deadpan observation—Stranger Than Paradise, Night On Earth and Dead Man are better than fine, but I find movies like Down by Law and Coffee and Cigarettes close to insufferable, the nadir being The Limits of Control, in which the director precisely locates the dead zone of his title and practically disappears in a black hole of Eurotrash cool. But Jarmusch’s next movie was an astounding rebound, the dazzling, achingly muted Only Lovers Left Alive, and the analog-only sensibility of the vampires in that film feels strangely of a piece with this new work. Paterson looks an awful lot like a masterpiece to these eyes.

“Among the general choruses of praise for this film, I have heard dissent, objections to what has been perceived as shallow celebration of an unremarkable milieu as processed through the usual detached urban romanticism that has been Jarmusch’s bread and butter. But in much the same way the director managed to worm his way inside the sympathies of centuries-old bloodsuckers who couldn’t help but absorb the effects of a developing culture over (lots and lots of) time, Paterson reveals itself as not so much a hipster’s evocation of a working-class hero as it is one imbued with an acuity which illuminates, with a precision that’s never precious, the modest and poetic pursuits of its title character, played by Adam Driver, a Paterson, N.J. bus driver also happens to be named Paterson. (First name or last is our guess.) In Paterson Jarmusch manages to evoke an ostensibly familiar setting that’s attentive but also respectful instead of just acting as fodder for arch observations about the numbness of the lower middle class. This is one of the only movies I can think of in which the routine of the everyday isn’t portrayed as soul-killing drudgery but instead as a source of inspiration. (Paterson toils on a poem throughout the film, the words of which are written in the air in halting rhythms that duplicate his struggle to evoke imagery and the sound of words working together.) And all of this without feeling the necessity to draping its protagonist in a cloak of everyday sainthood along the way.

“Taking its cue from Paterson himself, the movie’s persona is almost preternaturally serene, ushering us to an understanding of the way he sees the world and intensifying those occasional moments which are suddenly anything but tranquil or untroubled. Paterson, and Paterson, is almost subconsciously intuitive in regard to the ephemeral connections that seem to reverberate through the air largely unprocessed-- there are instances when the viewer’s Spidey-sense tingles with moments that in other hands would connect all too clearly. But in Jarmusch’s that tingling is left to resonate, to form independent angles and attitudes inside the viewer’s head. The movie has an offhanded fixation on twins—Paterson and Paterson, N.J., Paterson and Paterson, the William Carlos Williams poem that seeds the bus driver’s soul. And early on, on his nightly walk to the neighborhood bar accompanied by stubbornly lovable bulldog (a hilarious performance by Nellie, as Marvin, who Jarmusch rewards with a great payoff joke involving the bus driver’s mailbox), Paterson encounters twin brothers named Sam and Dave, who themselves add little to the movie beyond another thread in its observational tapestry, but whose presence sensitizes us to the curious longing in Paterson that is beginning to develop. There can be no doubt that Paterson unfailingly loves and supports his wife (Golshifteh Farahani), an effervescent dabbler in homespun creativity who designs their modest home with her painterly whims and fills the air with bake-sale cookies and dreams of being a country-music star. But he has an unarticulated hope for a connection with someone else in his bustling, preoccupied workday who is sympathetic with his way of processing the world, and it is on this plane that Jarmusch’s twinning motif pays of in an ephemerally lovely way.

“The Italian poster for Paterson features the catchphrase ‘La bellezza spesso si trova nelle piccolle cose,’ which translates to ‘Beauty is often found in the little things,’ an exquisite distillation of Paterson’s, and Paterson’s beating heart. Jim Jarmusch’s unassumingly gorgeous and expansive movie locates that beauty. It’s the story of a man who searches for, and eventually finds, a measure of fulfillment in work, and in love, and simply by keeping his eyes and ears and soul open to the quotidian wonders of being alive.” ~ Dennis Cozzalio

Click here for complete results

2016 Muriel Awards Best Picture Countdown: #2 (as well as Best Documentary)

In Best Film – 243 points / 22 votes

In Best Documentary – 133 points / 30 votes

“First of all, let’s get that pesky film-versus-television debate out of the way. On an aesthetic level, I suppose I understand the gripes from the ‘O.J.: Made in America is TV, not film’ camp. Those fades to black are clearly meant to be commercial breaks, which may well throw some people off in a theater; and as far as the filmmaking goes, Ezra Edelman’s nonfiction epic hews pretty closely to a fairly conventional talking-heads style familiar to faithful ESPN 30 for 30 watchers, the nonfiction series in which the film debuted on television. And maybe the questions surrounding the fact that O.J.: Made in America qualified for year-end poll and awards-season consideration simply because it played for one week in one theater in New York City—which, in some people’s minds, adds up to little more than category fraud—are worth pondering, especially as plenty of other films—like Jonathan Demme’s Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids, which premiered on Netflix—were disqualified for not playing in any theaters for a week. Maybe we all need to rethink those qualifications in the first place, especially with more people seeing movies through streaming platforms instead of in theaters these days.

“In the end, though, O.J.: Made in America, as with any work of art, deserves to be considered as an experience unto itself, regardless of the medium in which it was consumed. And Edelman’s film (yes, you’ll see me refer to it as a ‘film’ from here on in; deal with it) is, by any measure, quite the experience. O.J.: Made in America is so consistently gripping throughout its almost-eight-hour length that it’s perhaps all too easy to be suspicious of how effortless Edelman makes it all seem. After all, the story of O.J. Simpson has just about all the tried-and-true elements of great drama: a rise-and-fall arc, a charismatic yet complex and possibly deeply disturbed protagonist, a courtroom drama in the middle of it all with a host of colorful supporting players and a whirlwind of interlocking and/or diverging motives, and so on. One might uncharitably argue that Edelman has hold of a great subject, and that O.J.: Made in America works simply because he doesn’t screw it up.

“But such faint praise would be doing a grave disservice to Edelman’s startling achievement here. Surely, it took a filmmaker of deep vision to not only see the broader implications of the ‘Trial of the Century,’ but to boldly give those implications their full exploratory due. Edelman isn’t afraid to spin off into lengthy tangents that dive into, among other subjects, the fraught history of American race relations, especially in Simpson’s own home city of Los Angeles, all of which would feed into the murder trial itself, turning it into even more a referendum on racial progress in this country than it was about discovering whether Simpson really murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. In some ways, Edelman sees O.J. Simpson the way most of the U.S. did during that trial: as a symbol, though in Edelman’s case, it’s one with the full weight of not just American racism, but the American Dream itself and how it can curdle in an instant.

“Still, all told, this is the story about one particular individual and his own personal experience, and Edelman knows that to give us the full dawning visceral awareness of just how high he climbed and how steeply he fell, he has to give us his entire story, without any shortcuts: from celebrated athlete to plain celebrity, and from tabloid notoriety to eventual has-been scraping the bottom of the barrel for any remnants of his previous fame. At the very least, O.J.: Made in America offers a sterling example of the inadequacy of any two- or three-hour biopic to bottle up a person’s life into an easily digestible package, especially one as full of twists and turns as O.J. Simpson’s, and especially one as chock full of unsettling connotations for race and class in America.

“Ultimately, it’s Edelman’s thoroughness that mightily impresses. But let’s not give short shrift to O.J.: Made in America’s brilliance as filmmaking. In his Chicago Reader review of Reds, Dave Kehr talked about what he saw as Warren Beatty’s skillful evocation of the ‘novelistic effect’ in his film: ‘the network of delayed effects, sustained motifs, developing characters, and echoing ideas that gives a great novel its power.’ This is precisely the artistic arena Edelman is playing in with O.J.: Made in America, to equally powerful effect. Seeing, say, home-movie footage of O.J. Simpson with a protege re-appear on-screen about an hour later in a starkly different and more sobering context, it’s clear that we’re in the hands of a sure-handed filmmaker who is shaping his material for maximum revelatory dramatic impact. O.J.: Made in America doesn’t need to reinvent any aesthetic wheels: It already has the richness of a great piece of long-form journalism, one that, considering our current political climate, will probably still resound for years, maybe even decades, to come.” ~ Kenji Fujishima

Click here for complete results of the Best Documentary category

2016 Muriel Awards Best Picture Countdown: #3

[243 points / 21 votes]

“Moonlight is a gloriously, painfully romantic film set in modern-day Miami, following the early life of Little (Alex R. Hibbert), a black gay kid growing up in the hood. Moonlight may be about as modern as a film can get, yet it's reminiscent of classic Hollywood love stories. Moonlight's days are infused with the hot yellow-white of the sun, at once beautiful and unforgiving, and at night, the deepest black of the sky framing the harsh glow from urban streetlights. Throughout are the bright colors of a fable, tiny splashes of aqua and red and gold, royal colors to remind us of ancient tales of romantic conquest. Thanks to director Barry Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton, the film boasts the confidence of long takes in everyday locations, lingering stills in a religious Renaissance style, and deliberate use of washed-out color and unsynchronized sound, knowing that these techniques could easily be blamed on the film's low budget, but doing it anyway, fearlessly, the film's construction mirroring the emotional growth of the young boy whose story it tells.

“Little, about 10 years old when the film opens, struggles with poverty, bullies, and a mother falling into drug abuse, while local drug dealer Juan (Mahershala Ali) and fellow student Kevin (Jaden Piner) help him navigate a harsh world, in their way. Kevin kindly offers to help toughen Little up by teaching him how to fight; several years later, Kevin does it again, but not kindly, and not until after he and Little, now known by his given name Chiron, have had a fleeting romantic night together on the beach. The third panel of this cinematic triptych finds a 30-something Chiron, again renamed, this time as Black (Trevante Rhodes), driving his way back to Miami after an unexpected call from Kevin (André Holland).

“Just as in classic Hollywood romances, the characters in Moonlight move like they're in a musical, deliberately and gracefully, as the passage of time speeds up and slows down and the space around them bends and stretches, having broken completely free of the science that explains it, instead being powered by the sheer will of emotion. The old-fashioned romance genre is used in a very modern set of circumstances, where traditional tropes -- coming-of-age, lost love, loneliness -- are recontextualized within non-traditional realities such as homophobia, institutionalized racism, violence and poverty. The big minds at the big studios would surely have passed on such a tale, thinking that its themes would alienate most audiences, when in fact the opposite is true: Moonlight is universal.

“That's not to say the film bypasses cinema's past altogether. The adult Kevin is a cook at a diner, something that can't help but be a nod to the dozens of black actors who spent entire decades-long careers playing nothing but background characters in service positions. How many films came out of Hollywood where the only black character was a diner cook or a porter or a butler, who often didn't even have a word of dialogue? Hollywood for decades, and even to an extent now, has contempt for both the non-white actor and the real-world people in the service industry they play.

“In Moonlight, the adult Kevin, whose job at the diner is more about slinging hash than haute cuisine, is a success story, and that success story is both social commentary and a show of the character's strength. At the same time it acknowledges the scores of underdeveloped characters just like him in films of the past, chiding those films a little, asking how dare they consider this job some little nothing that never mattered. It did matter. It always mattered. And here we see, in terms that cannot be denied, that cooking is care and it is love, and you don't have to be of a certain Hollywood-approved demographic for that to be true.

“On the surface, Moonlight sounds like a social commentary film, and it is to a certain degree, but it's also a fine example of modern independent filmmaking that has been deeply influenced by the classics. It's the kind of film that would have been relegated to a specific genre not that long ago -- LGBT film, or black film, or indie film -- and to an extent, it's a bit of a surprise that it wasn't this year, but if nothing else, we should know by now that with Moonlight, the rules very happily do not apply.” ~ Stacia Jones

2016 Muriel Awards Best Picture Countdown: #4

[214 points / 22 votes]

“I saw Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester By The Sea at the Sundance Film Festival the morning of January 24th, 2016. (Later that afternoon I saw Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women. It was a very good day.) I mention this not to sound like a showoff calling ‘firsties,’ but rather to explain just how long I've been living with the film, and the front row seat we festival-goers had for how perceptions change as movies get chewed up by The Thinkpiece Industrial Complex.

“It's difficult to believe that the Oscars used to be held in April, given the endless grind of what's come to be known as ‘Awards Season’ -- which now lasts half-a-year, stretching from the Telluride Film Festival in early September to the Oscars at February's merciful end. During this time there are frontrunners and there are dark horses, with exorbitantly expensive campaigns keeping a cottage industry of nutty pundits in business, struggling to either capture or maintain ‘momentum’ through an endless procession of precursor awards seemingly designed to sap any of the joy and spontaneity out of seeing actors you like dressing up in fancy clothes and giving emotional speeches on television.

"’Momentum’ comes and goes, but the movies stay the same. When I saw Manchester last January I said I didn't think I'd see a better film all year, and I was right. (Silence came awfully close, though.) At that time, Kenneth Lonergan was a Hollywood pariah still in exile after the six-year editing room battle over his sophomore feature Margaret. Casey Affleck was basically Batman's kid brother, struggling to get back into the industry's good graces after he and Joaquin Phoenix's (brilliant) performance art prank I’m Still Here went over like a fart in church. Here was a strong, sad little movie without easy resolutions or even a theatrical distributor -- one that I and most others at those early screenings assumed was destined to be doomed commercially but remembered fondly by film lovers.

“Of course Amazon Studios felt otherwise, buying the film for a jaw-dropping ten million dollars and going on to gross almost five times that at the box office on such a tsunami of hype that my friend Ty Burr's rave review in The Boston Globe was worded as a warning to potential audience members expecting the film to cure their psoriasis and lower their mortgage rates. Manchester had more than ‘momentum,’ it was already ordained as a modern American classic.

“But the problem with our accelerated media culture is that we quickly run out of angles with which to feed the content maw, and attention spans aren't what they used to be. (A lot of the time we in the cultural commentariat have grown tired of arguing about them before they're even released.) These films get picked to the bone during the Bataan Death March to Oscar Night, and contrary takes are what get clicks, which is why you see bizarre headlines calling La La Land ‘fascist’ and such.

“Manchester By The Sea got tagged and dismissed in certain circles as a ‘sad white people’ movie, which I guess is technically accurate as the characters are indeed white and often quite sad. I understand that Trump's election threw a lot of us lefties for a loop, but if you can't feel sympathy for a janitor whose kids died in a fire because he's a member of the white working class then you've got much bigger problems than a movie. The discourse got even sillier and more shrill on the run up to awards, with Lonergan derided as of all things a Hollywood insider and Affleck's checkered personal history dragged into nearly every discussion of the film. I was told by more than one person that Manchester By the Sea is ‘a Trump supporter's Best Picture pick.’ (I guess none of these folks heard of Hacksaw Ridge.)

“Now that the Oscars are finally over things will hopefully settle down and we can go back to having real discussions about the brilliance of these performances and whether or not you dig Lonergan's distracting classical music cues. Despite changes in perception, presidents and thinkpiece trends, Manchester By The Sea is still the same film I loved last January, and it's the kind of movie that will endure for some time.” ~ Sean Burns

2016 Muriel Awards Best Picture Countdown: #5

[193 points / 19 votes]

“When talking, or thinking, about Silence, Martin Scorsese’s thirty-years-in-the-making passion project, from the novel by Shusaku Endo, about two Portuguese Catholic missionaries (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) in the 17th century traveling to Japan to both aid the violently persecuted Japanese Catholics and to discover the truth about the fate of Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson), who, it’s been said, has apostatized and is currently still living in the country under a Japanese name and with a Japanese wife, it is natural, and useful, to think also of The Last Temptation of Christ and Kundun, Scorsese’s two earlier, explicitly religious pictures. All three films deal with religious faith, the responsibility to others of men with religious authority, oppression, and violence. Yet what recently occurred to me, and I’m certain I’m nowhere near the first person to think of this, is that the Scorsese film that philosophically, metaphysically, and passionately (if not stylistically) most gracefully, in all sense of the word, matches Silence is Mean Streets, his 1973 film about a low-level gangster played by Harvey Keitel struggling, and pretty much failing in my view, to live up to his understanding of the values of his ingrained Catholicism while continuing, with it must be said little in the way of the kind of remorse that would do anybody any good, his life of crime. Though not especially violent, and apparently not murderous, himself, and even displaying a genuine heart and genuine caring from time to time, Charlie’s, the Keitel character, willingness to not only stay put but also not stand up to any of the crime bosses who might do him good down the line, allows (in a small way, but nonetheless a real one) the violence and murder around him to continue unabated.

“Contrast this with Father Rodrigues, the character played by Andrew Garfield in Silence. Eventually, he and Father Garupe (Driver) are forced to separate in order to not further endanger the Catholic villagers to whom they’ve been bringing the long-craved-for Christian sacraments and blessings (there being no ordained priests in the village). Villagers have been brutally murdered by government officials for not admitting their Catholicism, and this will only continue if they continue to harbor two priests. But soon enough, Father Rodrigues is captured and imprisoned by The Inquisitor (an exquisitely strange and frightening Issei Ogata) who demands one thing only: that Rodrigues, and the Japanese Catholics imprisoned with Rodriques, step on a picture of Christ. This symbolic gesture will count as a renunciation of their religion and they will be free. When all refuse, the Inquisitor begins murdering the Japanese peasants. The only way to save them, Rodrigues is assured by both The Inquisitor and his translator (Tadanobu Asano, giving a performance comprised equally of fierce intelligence and complete moral indifference), is to put his foot on the face of Christ. This is purely symbolic, and it will save their lives. Believing himself to be in Hell, a terrified, furious, sickened Rodrigues continues to refuse. And he does this in the shadow of God’s apparent absence. And the violence continues unabated.

“So in Mean Streets, a man’s faith is too weak to help him or those he cares about, whereas in Silence a man’s faith is, if anything, too strong. Which I find interesting but is nevertheless a gross simplification of both films, especially Silence, a film that is for me is one of the three or four great masterpieces of Scorsese’s career. It’s a film of startling, stomach-turning violence – the opening shot of a Japanese soldier standing by severed heads on a table, the tableau lost and then found every few seconds by thick, drifting fog is one of the most alarming opening shots I’ve ever seen, particularly in a major studio production – as well as terrible bravery, and the beauty of the hope that is the bedrock of true religious faith. Much has been made by some critics, both pro and con the film as a whole, of the arrogance of Father Rodrigues, and of the missionary quest in general (some have also taken the morally grotesque route of insisting that the viewer remember that historically the hands of the Catholic Church aren’t bloodless; therefore, presumably, while we would never condone the beheading of a Japanese peasant only because he’s a Catholic, it is still worth noting etc. etc. etc.). And it’s true that, if The Inquisitor is to be taken as a man of his word (a big if, I might argue, but anyway), Rodrigues would have saved lives by stepping on that picture of Christ. It is also true that those peasants who die because he does not do this were at least under the impression that they could save their own lives by stepping on that picture themselves. Which they didn’t. Rodrigues’s argument, when faced with the accusation that he’s more complicit in their deaths than the actual executioners’, that apostatizing would be a betrayal of the victims and their faith, and would further mean that they’d died in vain, is not the argument of an arrogant man – or at least, of a man who is not merely arrogant – but rather it is the argument of a man who seems to understand death and why the Japanese Catholics died, and were willing to die, better than any of the men who by act or by order are stopping the hearts of poor villagers whose hands are tied behind their backs.

“And as a film, Silence is also rapturous. Garfield’s performance is intense in a way, and with a restraint one doesn’t often associate with intensity, that I wouldn’t have thought him capable. Late in the film, his Rodrigues appears and sounds, honestly, physically and spiritually, pummeled. And yes, he plays a certain arrogance, as well as a love for humanity, and of God, and frustration and prickliness and disgust, and abject, mortal terror. It’s an astounding piece of acting, placed in the middle of one of the most unusual and talented supporting casts that Scorsese has assembled, at least in many years. The characters played by Ogata and Asano have such color and personality. There’s a moment in the film when The Inquisitor and Rodrigues are debating their mutually intractable positions, and Rodrigues says something that deeply disappoints The Inquisitor. Ogata begins to slump in a way the audience should recognize – it’s something like a full-bodied sigh. But Scorsese holds on him long after such a physical motion would have completed itself, and Ogata continues to sink in on himself, to collapse slowly downwards in his seat. Before the shot became funny -- which it is, I believe, intentionally -- I thought ‘What am I seeing? What is happening?’ Though reserved by Scorsese’s standards, and by those of his editor Thelma Schoonmaker, Silence is a film that somehow in its visual construction, and even in its moral construction, can allow a moment like that, and still be, as it is especially late in the film, heartbreaking in its simplicity. That last shot is some kind of a flourish, though, isn’t it? Finally, Silence comes to a perfect and beautiful and sad end, and so the film becomes something that lifts up as it’s also despairing. Silence is not merely the best film of last year, but one of the greatest films I’ve ever seen.” ~ Bill Ryan

2016 Muriel Awards Best Picture Countdown: #6

[190 points / 20 votes]

“What is she thinking?”

“There's a reason the title of Elle translates to She or Her. In the end, it's all about what's going on in the head of Isabelle Huppert's character, Michèle Leblanc. In the very first scene, she gets raped, in such an archetypal way that it could easily have become abstract: violently, by a stranger in a ski-mask.

“Many viewers have expressed bafflement at how Michèle reacts. They don't understand why she simply cleans up the mess, takes a bath and orders sushi. An anonymous Oscar voter recently admitted that they didn't vote for Huppert: ‘I eliminated her because when you get attacked, beaten and raped, you're not the same person afterward, but she was, and I wanted to slap her to try to get a reaction out of her.’ Some called the movie a modern comedy of manners, which does not quite prepare you for the more brutal moments. One reviewer, taking the current trend of treating movies as puzzles to be solved entirely too far, even concocted a theory claiming that Michèle was the one who really committed the murders her father was convicted of.

“Before the film's release, director Paul Verhoeven predicted – with no small amount of glee – that Elle would enrage feminists. Some feminists indeed decried the film, claiming that it strengthens the sexist idea that women secretly want to be raped. Others, however, embraced it, seeing Huppert as a ‘post-feminist’ hero who subverts the traditional rape-revenge narrative in unsettling ways.

“Personally, I see Elle as a movie about a woman who is determined to regain control of her life in any way she can after someone wrests that control from her – but the beauty of the movie is that it allows for all kinds of interpretations, some of them contradictory, at the same time. In that sense it is very much of a piece with Verhoeven's earlier oeuvre: Starship Troopers and Robocop, which can be seen as either satires or endorsements of militarism; Showgirls, which is either cheap exploitation or, in the words of Jonathan Rosenbaum ‘one of the most vitriolic allegories about Hollywood and selling out ever made’, etc.

And Verhoeven's hand has only become steadier. Take the opening of Elle. We hear the rape first. And then the first shot shows … Michèle's gorgeous gray cat, who boredly takes in the scene in front of him and then walks away. ‘You couldn't at least have scratched him a little?’, Michèle asks the cat later, after she has a traumatic flashback in which the rape is shown start to finish. In this way, Verhoeven plays with our expectations: do we really want to see? Will that help us understand?

“Verhoeven is helped by a script (by David Birke, based on a book by Philippe Djian) full of complicating factors: the fact that Michèle's son is being abused by his fiancée, for instance, or that she herself is complicit in eroticising rape at her work at a video game company, where she orders underlings to make an attack in the game more orgasmic.

“His main ally, however, is Isabelle Huppert. She makes the movie – and this complex character – her own. This is also what makes the comments by the Oscar voter quotes above so short-sighted: Huppert's performance is all about her reactions. The fact that the movie ends up being surprisingly funny is due in large part to the reaction shots in which you can, from just a twitch of her mouth or an eye-roll, see exactly the contempt Michèle has for most of the world around her. And in the scenes in which she does show you a glimpse of the vulnerable woman under the hard, jaded shell, she makes you empathize with this woman who stubbornly resists empathy.

“I don't know if I'll rewatch Elle any time soon: the rape scenes aren't exactly easy to watch. But it's stayed with me since I watched it mid-2016, and I'm sure I'll be thinking about Elle – and elle – for a long time to come.” ~ Hedwig van Driel

2016 Muriel Awards Best Picture Countdown: #7

[186 points / 19 votes]

“You know who doesn't get enough attention? Park Chan-wook. After making a splash with Oldboy way back in 2003, he's made a string of inventive, intricately crafted, diabolically perverse (on multiple levels) genre movies that haven't gotten nearly enough attention: the third and best part of his ‘vengeance trilogy,’ Sympathy for Lady Vengeance; a bonkers sci-fi romantic comedy that I didn't even know about until yesterday, I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK; an adaptation of a classic Émile Zola novel about adultery with added vampires, Thirst; a spin on Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt starring Mia Wasikowska and Nicole Kidman, Stoker; and last year's The Handmaiden, which is equal parts British gothic thriller, tract on Korean-Japanese relations, Polanskian provocation and The Sting-esque conman thriller. Park is a genre mixmaster on the level of Tarantino, and one with a wider, more sophisticated set of international influences who is yet still happy to include tentacle porn as part of his cinema.

“So why aren't we talking about Park these days? Possibly it's because the movies he made his name with were more masculine and action-oriented, and his films have become increasingly more interested in feminine themes, less interested in revenge for revenge's sake and more concerned with structural societal issues; multiplexes are more likely to show Korean movies if they have hammerfights than girdles.

“But this is not to say that Park is getting more respectable as he's moved from adapting manga to140-year-old French novels. The Handmaiden might feature double layers of subtitles and a plot loosely modeled on Wilkie Collins, but it still has all the Lesbian sex of an Abdellatif Kechiche movie, unapologetically presented through a very male gaze that nonetheless regards men as fools and perverts.

“Credit also goes to the broad array of craftspeople working at the tops of their games here, most of whom are longtime collaborators with Park: co-screenwriter Jeong Seo-kyeong, cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon, doing some of the most velvety perfect work of the year, production designer Ryu Seong-hie and editors Kim Jae-bum and Kim Sang-bum. But special attention goes to the two women carrying the film, and both giving unusually tricky performances, Kim Min-hee and Kim Tae-ri. Between them, they have to be sexy, crazy, seductive, seduced, defeated and victorious throughout the length of a particularly complex, plot-heavy film.

“For me, this is the kind of film that represents a kind of platonic summation of what movies can do: look beautiful, be made with precision and total control of tone and concept, be constantly surprising and inventive, be simultaneously part of its world and part of a totally synthetic formal realm; and leave you someplace that you didn't expect to be. No 2016 movie was more baroquely beautiful and grotesque to me than The Handmaiden.” ~ Jeff McMahon

2016 Muriel Awards Best Picture Countdown: #8

[149 points / 16 votes]

“If there was one recurrent trend among the great films released in 2016, it was the dominance of documentary filmmaking. From the highly touted one-two punch of the monumental, mammoth O.J.: Made in America and striking I Am Not Your Negro, to the less known but equally ground-breaking works like Kate Plays Christine, No Home Movie, and The Other Side, and everything in between, there was at least one documentary that any sensible movie viewer loved this year. But no other non-fiction film was as groundbreaking, profoundly revelatory, or intensely personal as Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson.

“Formed from fragments and outtakes shot for myriad documentaries over the documentary camera operator’s twenty-five year career, Cameraperson begins with a brief statement of intent that says, ‘These are the images that have marked me.’ Indeed, many of these images are astonishingly indelible, though some are more immediately arresting than others. They span the gamut of human existence literally from the cradle to the grave, jumping around through space and time in the span of a single cut to an intertitle. And these intertitles (containing the simple location of the following clip) are key, placing these contextless clips in just enough of a framework to link the otherwise disparate locations.

“Of course, these clips are fundamentally associated through their ‘creator’ and documentarian. There are undoubtedly strong similarities between Cameraperson and Chris Marker’s masterpiece Sans soleil, in the way they both use a vast assortment of sharply edited footage from around the world to provide a revolutionary vision of the human experience, but the former is the more personal work. This manifests itself clearly in Johnson’s heartbreaking footage of her mother, but it is just as key in the small interjections she makes from behind the camera, in the empathy that manifests itself in nearly every clip even and especially in the harshest, most desolate of locations.

“It is a film that exists irrevocably in the moment, but it also belongs to all times. Cameraperson’s most haunting and impactful scene is one of its few montages, a compilation of a shocking amount of places around the world where unimaginable atrocities and violence have taken place, but there is equal importance in the individual stories, in the struggle of a newborn to stay alive and in a family living in postwar Bosnia simply living. Behind it all, there is the watchful, intensely emotional eye of Kirsten Johnson, who provides perhaps the most noble of all cinematic intentions: the act of witnessing.” ~ Ryan Swen

2016 Muriel Awards Best Picture Countdown: #9

[144 points / 15 votes]

“No, it’s not a comedy, it’s a drama.” – Maren Ade describing her film Toni Erdmann after referring to it as a 3-hour comedy.

"The circular irony in the remark above is that not even the writer/director/producer knows how to adequately place her film into a predescribed genre. In fact, Toni Erdmann is probably one of the hardest films to pin down from moment to moment, as you will ever encounter. The film is at once hilarious and heart wrenching, uncomfortable and comforting, surreal and honestly real.

"If you are familiar with Maren Ade’s work, this inharmonious array of stylings may represent something of a trademark quality. Her college thesis film Forest for the Trees centers around a young teacher in a new city, struggling to connect with her students and co-workers and her inability to make friends outside of work. The film went on to be accepted into the 2003 Toronto Film Festival and is something of a minor masterpiece. Seemingly descended from the Dogme-95 movement but alive in a way that none of those films ever managed to be, Ade was immediately a name to watch out for. Special recognition should be given to the media label Film Movement for originally jumping on this work and distributing within the US on home video.

"If any doubts existed as to the caliber of Ade as a writer/director following her debut, her sophomore effort Everyone Else (2009) should have set that record straight. Billed as a romantic comedy, the film charts a young German couple on holiday as they navigate a minefield of insecurities surrounding their careers, relationship status, and obsessing over what their peer’s may or may not think about them. You could call the film romantic if it wasn’t so damn depressing and likewise it’s a comedic gem if at a given moment, things didn’t take an about face into Cassavetes level angst every other minute. Scenes are structured masterfully with Ade’s camera taking a restrained approach and allowing the actors and script to evolve naturally in front of us. The sentiment on display throughout is pretty clear, and again it is that circular irony of Ade’s; we all want to be like everyone else but everyone, to a degree, is fucked up and miserable. Happiness and unhappiness are intrinsically linked in ways we probably shouldn’t comprehend.

"When I was asked to contribute some words on Toni Erdmann, it only seemed natural to use 2/3rds of those words discussing its creator and her body of work. Taken on its own, the film is pretty out there, but contextualized with the likes of Forest for the Trees and Everyone Else, Toni Erdmann follows a natural progression down what I’ll refer to as Ade’s 'Dilemma of the Awkward.'

“'Imagine we are sitting in an ordinary room. Suddenly we realize that a dead body is standing behind the door. In that same moment the room in which we sit begins to change, and each everyday thing in it begins to look different…It is we who have changed and things become what we perceive them to be.' Carl Th. Dreyer on the element of horror in Vampyr

"Toni Erdmann at its most simple is about a father and a daughter trying to connect with one and other. When Winfried (a brilliant Peter Simonischek) loses the one thing in his life keeping him grounded – his dog – he takes it upon himself to pay a surprise visit to his estranged daughter Ines (equally brilliant Sandra Huller) who is in Bucharest on business. Winifred loves gags and loves to play roles and pretend to be other people. You get the impression he was frequently the type of parent who took harmless delight in embarrassing his child in front of their friends.

"From their first encounter in a hotel lobby, where neither father nor daughter exchanges so much as a word, the Dilemma of the Awkward is in full effect. Like Dreyer’s approach to Horror, Ade is using her trademark sense of 'awkward' to enhance and extract deeper meaning out of each and every set-up. As the film progresses, these encounters become increasingly bizarre, with things progressing to a crescendo the likes of which would have made Luis Bunuel stand up and applaud. That alone is a feat and something that makes Toni Erdmann something to seek out. What takes Ade’s film beyond this however, and firmly plants it as one of the best films of the year, is that lump that resides in your throat when these moments occur. The dilemma that rests in the viewers heart is that what we are seeing is really awkward but yet it is real, goddamn alive, in a way that it could not be without the 'awkward.' It’s a cinematic voice we’ve been lacking since the inception of the medium and we need to welcome with open arms, bad wig, false teeth, Bulgarian kuker included. Even if we formally reject it at first and have to chase it down the street to say thank you. Give this film a hug. It will hold you back just as tight." ~ Adam Lemke

2016 Muriel Awards Best Picture Countdown: #10

[135.5 points / 13 votes]

“Being newly single can be a very difficult adjustment to make. Especially when the police come and put you on a bus that takes you to a luxury hotel on the Irish coast, where you're given forty-five days to find a new partner, lest you be surgically transformed into an animal of your choosing. Unless, of course, you’re okay with violating some personal liberties with fistfulls of tranq darts…

“The Lobster is the most narratively, politically and viscerally exciting film I've seen since David Cronenberg's Crash. To view it is to feel within you a short circuit that sets the mind racing down countless paths. It is as chaotic, inescapable, daft and exhilarating as being alive, and you're never entirely ready for it.

“The just shy of genial atrophied charm of Colin Farrell is like a scalpel, and he gets that helplessness that comes with someone who thought they had a reliable longterm relationship and now has to recapture the part of themselves that they let start slipping away. Ben Whishaw and John C. Reilly are great at finding the core, reptilian selfishness that lurks deep inside even the kindest of folk. Lea Seydoux’s opposition leader encompasses so much that it would take an entire season of a cable drama to get at the meticulously arranged complexities that she puts forth in a cruel gesture. And what does it say that I imagine Olivia Colman’s character as one of the routinely deranged spokespersons we’ve been seeing everywhere since the inauguration?

“The Lobster is a film that demolishes your sense of security, yet leaves you invigorated and ready to start a new chapter in your love life. Or end one. It defies easy synopsis, yet any of its narrative facets is enough to hook potential viewers of all sorts. It has such a specific effect that a few years down the road, you may see it as cinematic shorthand in online dating profiles — or divorce settlements. It's a gloriously weird film, deeply funny, fiercely political, and oddly enough, overwhelmingly romantic (even as it could be seen as defiantly anti-romantic). After my first viewing, I spent a good half hour just trying to puzzle out the specifics of its SciFi angles- how such customs would develop, how technology would arise to fulfill the Hotel’s objective (or how the Hotel would be oriented around the capabilities of technology), how its central dialectic tension between the Hotel and the forest dwellers seems tied to Seydoux’s character’s family. “The Lobster encompasses multitudes, thankfully.” ~ Jason Shawhan

2016 Muriel Awards Best Picture Countdown: #11

[134 points / 12 votes]

“Minimalist is a word that gets thrown around a lot when people talk about the films of Kelly Reichardt, and while the slow pacing and small, low-incident stories she tells bears out that description it misses something that distinguishes her from many other filmmakers that bear the label. Directors like Tarr, Tarkovsky, Kaurismaki or Tsai use a similar aesthetic frequently to express various moral, spiritual and social vacuums in their stories. Reichardt's films use their frequent quiet patches to house subtle but significant detail which often speaks louder of her characters and stories than what you might consider the action. Taking her gift for small stories even farther than she has before, this past year she brought us Certain Women, where the scope of her stories has become so small she had to include three of them.

“Stepping away her longtime writing partner, author Jonahtan Raymond, she found inspiration in the short stories of Maile Meloy. Set in Meloy's home state of Montana Reichardt's triptych examines three very loosely connected stories of three Midwestern women. The first, centered around a lawyer (played by legendary actress Laura Dern) and her difficult client (Jared Harris of Mad Men) is far and away the closest to being what one might ‘action packed.’ There is some ‘little guy getting screwed over by a negligent company’ litigation and even a hostage situation, which is as low key a hostage situation can be without dipping over into straight comedy. The second, the most underrated in my opinion, centers around an upper middle class woman (played by Reichardt regular Michelle Williams) whose efforts to acquire some old sandstone for a wall in the rustic house in the country that she's building pivots on an awkward conversation with an aging neighbor left many scratching their heads. The third and far and away the most popular segment is also the longest; it takes up half the film's running time. Centered on an isolated ranch hand (newcomer Lily Gladstone in a role that won her universal acclaim and this year's Muriel award for Best Supporting Actress) whose care taking of multiple stables of horses is an all day job, forges a tenuous connection with the out of town teacher of a night class (Kristen Stewart) she begins sitting in on as it’s the one building in town with cars parked outside of it in the evening.

“Each starkly simple short released on its own would be worthy of accolades, but taken collectively the depth of the astonishing cast and the skill with which they're directed exude a hypnotic aura over the audience. One might call it comforting if not for the unspoken tension that runs through these and every Kelly Reichardt story. Emotionally engrossing, but as far away from maudlin or melodramatic as you can get before you hit the icy chill of the gaze of someone like Michael Haneke. With Certain Women Kelly Reichardt remains one of the United States’ most exciting and essential independents, though she still proves too daring for the arthouse mainstream.” ~ Patrick J. Miller

2016 Muriel Awards Best Picture Countdown: #12

[125.5 points / 15 votes]

“The Witch (2015, directed by Robert Eggers) has been the new big thing in the horror genre since it debuted at Sundance. Like the last new big thing in horror--take your pick between It Follows, The Babadook, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, or what have you--it's a film with ambitions beyond the canned thrills of genre horror. It's a film that gazes into the abyss of America's myths about itself and about its founding and finds the abyss gazing back. The result is a bitches brew of feminist rage, religious critique, and a lacerating demolition of the ideal of the American as individualist. This is a horror movie as art film, true. It has the deliberate, slow burn of a contemporary art film. But that doesn't mean it skimps on the horror. No. Not at all. It ends on notes of such profound disquiet and shock that it renders moot the idea that they don't make genuinely shocking horror movies anymore. This is the real deal.

“The plot of The Witch follows the fortunes of a family expelled from the Plymouth plantation for heresy. The father, William, is a zealous man, to whom the Christian fundamentalism of the Puritans wasn't extreme enough. He and his family are banished from the plantation and head into the unsettled New England woods to hew a life for themselves from the wilderness. William has a wife, Katherine, two daughters, and three sons. The eldest child, Thomasin, is almost an adult. The youngest child, Samuel, is newborn. In between are Caleb, the eldest son, and the twins, Jonas and Mercy. As the eldest daughter, Thomasin is charged with babysitting Samuel. One day, during a game of peekaboo, Samuel vanishes. The family searches, but cannot find him. Has he wandered into the woods? Has he been taken by a wolf? Or has something more sinister happened to him? Thomasin comes under her mother's scrutiny. She is not trusted. Misfortune follows misfortune: the farm is failing and the family hasn't enough food to last the winter. William takes his wife's silver cup and trades it to the Indians for traps, but the traps are empty. The twins play games with the family's goat, Black Phillip, and accuse their older sister of being a witch, which Thomasin plays up to get them to behave. This backfires in spectacular fashion. William and Katherine begin to plan on sending Thomasin back into town. To avert this, Caleb plans to round up game from the traps in the forest. Thomasin won't let him go without him. Caleb ends up chasing a sinister rabbit into the forest, while a spooked horse throws Thomasin. Caleb is lost. Thomasin is found. When Caleb eventually wanders home, he's on the edge of death from exposure. The twins accuse Thomasin of witchcraft, an accusation Thomasin throws right back at them for their games with Black Phillip. William confines them all while Katherine mourns for Caleb. Meanwhile, supernatural forces gather in the night...

“According to the end credits, The Witch takes whole passages of dialogue and incident from contemporary diaries and court records. Colonial New England in the 17th century was a land haunted by superstition and religious terror. Although Salem, Massachusetts is notorious for its witch trials, it is by no means unique. At least twelve other ‘witches’ were executed in Massachusetts and Connecticut before the Salem executions. Witches and devils were very real to the early New Englanders. It's not for nothing that New England haunts the work of H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, and Stephen King. Its reliance on documentary sources makes The Witch a hybrid film, an amalgam of fiction and non-fiction. You see this, too, in the film's production design, which has an obsessive attention to period details. If the world of this film seems alien to a contemporary audience or even to an audience weaned on more European Gothics, it grounds its otherness in a firm reality. This is important to the film's overall effect.

“I may be presumptuous in describing the film's world as alien, though, because the contemporary United States is as much a slave to superstition and religion and patriarchy as 17th century New England. For all its period trappings, The Witch has very serious things to say about the contemporary body politic. The other-ing of women as witches when they won't submit to patriarchy is something that continues to this very day. Pat Robertson once described feminism thusly:

’The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.’

“This is not some historical relic. Robertson said this in 1992, and has been spouting similar things unto this very day. So the accusations of witchcraft directed at Thomasin have a contemporary feel. Thomasin is not in charge of her own sexuality. When her younger brother has sexual thoughts about his sister, it's her fault, not his. When Caleb eventually stumbles home, naked and quivering, it's Thomasin who comes under enhanced scrutiny as the one who led him astray. Nevermind that Thomasin is never shown to be disobedient or disrespectful, until she finally stands up to the false accusations she has endured. Thomasin's ultimate embrace of witchcraft as an escape from patriarchy at the end of the movie has a perverse catharsis underlying it.

“The identity of the eponymous witch is the subject of much speculation throughout the film. We are shown that there IS a witch early in the film, when Samuel's fate at the hands of his abductress is shown. But who is she? Is she some presence in the woods outside of Thomasin's family? Are Thomasin's twin siblings agents of witchcraft? Thomasin's mother, in a paroxysm of grief embraces witchcraft in one of the film's most startling scenes. This is a film where the dichotomy of inside and outside horror collapses on itself. The horror is everywhere.

“The only character seemingly untouched by witchcraft is William, whose pride won't allow him to bend to the authority of the Puritans in Plymouth. William is the American libertarian ideal of the radical individual. He's Ayn Rand's Howard Roark, a man so possessed of the rightness of his views that he has no use for anyone else. Damn society! He'll go it alone. This film puts this idea under a speculum. Humans are social animals. We know this from anthropology and sociology and from the uncomfortable fact that the worst punishment you can deal to a human being is to isolate her from human contact. This is why solitary confinement is so horrible. William has severed his family from the body of humankind and they predictably go mad as a result. This has repercussions for the narrative. Are the phenomena these characters interpret as witchcraft even real? Is this a reliable narrative? Or is it the result of religious hysteria combined with isolation and the formidable vastness of the unconquered wilderness? This isn't the first film to suggest that America was wrought from the wilderness by lunatics rather than pioneers, but it's among the most forceful.” ~ Christianne Benedict

2016 Muriel Awards Best Picture Countdown: #13

[117 points / 11 votes]

“Until Sunday evening, February 26th the wildly popular musical La La Land seemed secure in the annals of posterity, regardless of what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences were set to bestow upon it. The film won the prestigious Best Picture Award from the New York Film Critics Circle in early December and the domino effect extended all the way to London, where a similar group also crowned the throwback musical their own top prize. After the critics in a rare show of favorable unanimity for a musical film continue to issue unqualified praise, the Oscar precursor groups like the Golden Globes, the BAFTAs and the Critics' Choice followed suit, and audiences responded in a big way, making the film a worldwide box office smash. The film's astonishingly youthful director Damien Chazelle and his cast and crew didn't need to win a single Oscar after the kind of haul they took in during the three-month awards window, but were poised to cap off their miraculous with a body that would seem the friendliest of all toward the ebullient product they were selling.

“And after winning a slightly less than an expected six Oscars during the marathon show they had the winning Best Picture Oscars in their hands for about two minutes before chaos broke loose on the stage. A colossal, unprecedented gaffe in this age of painstaking precision was perpetuated by a tweet-crazy Price Waterhouse accountant backstage, who handed over a duplicate envelope of the prior Best Actress award to presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. Beatty initially fumbled, no doubt because the envelope had Emma Stone's name again, but the impatient Dunaway eager to get past Beatty's odd procrastination at the late hour saw the film's title and confidently announced what was to be the incorrect winner. After two full speeches the wall caved in on the triumphant La La Land delegation, though they displayed remarkable class in turning over their awards to the crew of Moonlight, the night's rightful Best Picture winner, even going as far as to hug and congratulate their respected colleagues. Though La La Land and Moonlight will forever be identified in the context of this unconscionable gaffe, there were some beautiful moments that will hopefully work against the embarrassment perpetuated by an unfocused voting official, and eventually bring the film's artistry back to its rightful prominence. Sadly though, this is not something likely to happen 'straight away' as the Brits might opine.

“The bare bones theme of La La Land revolves around what it means and entails to be in love. As showcased in this spirited, kaleidoscopic work it is strictly, as it is in real life, a fleeting affair, but while it lasts it is defined by pure ecstasy, an enraptured state of mind that briefly puts everything else in suspension. The film, almost in self parody, is set over a full year in a seasonal mode that flies in the face of a geographical region that almost never is affected by seasonal temperament. A crowded highway on the rim of the City of Angels is where the film launches and an anarchic dance number framed as ‘Another Day of Sun’ depicting song and dance as an outgrowth of exasperation and perhaps even a panacea for road rage. The bouncy tune, the first in a surprisingly melodic score that leaves you humming weeks after you leave the theater, was composed by Justin Hurwitz, who when all is said and done is this poignant musical's real star. Car roofs, the hot summer pavement and the back compartments of trucks serve as the stage for a bouncy number that recalls more recent musicals like Rent, but before long it is clear that Chazelle's major reference points are classic musicals like An American in Paris and the French The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

“Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, the eventual lovers who get off to a rocky start are miles away from Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as singers and dancers, but that is precisely the point. Critics who bemoaned the missing talent ignored the fallacy of the claim: these were two young people who possessed musical skills just marginally better than the rest of the population. To be polished musical stars would work against the story's believability. Yet Stone and Gosling were quite fine and imbued the film's big numbers: ‘City of Stars,’ ‘Audition (The Fools Who Dream)’ and the Planetarium medley with aching melancholia.

“At the end one feels the connection between the Stone and Gosling characters could not possibly be erased by a marriage and family, much as Bogart and Bergman's Parisian fling could never be psychologically negated. The arc also evokes the young songwriter Jimmy Webb, who wrote songs of loss for a girlfriend he regularly met in a Los Angeles meeting point known as MacArthur Park. They too chose different paths, but are forever unified by stirring lyrics, much as the La La Land couple will be musical soulmates based on compositions written during their time together. There are some sublime moments like the one in the Griffith Observatory where gravity is suspended to enable the duo to dance their way to the star studded heavens. Near the end in the film's buffo visual sequence, they expand the color barrier in an outdoor Parisian dance, bookended by some ravishing silhouette captures. The tearful nightclub visit and the imagining of what could have makes one wish for a happier ending, but it would violate the whole thematic premise of the picture.

“What ultimately doomed La La Land at the Oscars was an unusually vitriolic backlash that seemed to unite the musical haters and accentuate the huge nomination haul, which say the naysayers bring the film to unfavorable comparison with its predecessors. Combine the late surge of Moonlight and the use of a preferential ballot, and an unthinkable upset materialized. The silver lining is that La La Land won't fall victim to the second-guessing all Oscar winners go through years after when most winners are invariable downgraded. It will be up to posterity to assess La La Land's reputation down the line, but for the present it has offered audiences a hopeful message at an especially difficult time. Naysayers will point to the stereotypical showcasing of African Americans in a white romantic sphere, and jazz lovers will be a bit perplexed by the woeful jazz-rock band Gosling hooks up with, but historically this is all too true. If you give it a chance, La La Land, like its flawed but impassioned protagonists, will sweep you off your feet. This kind of exhilaration is a rarity in the theater these days.” ~ Sam Juliano