At long last!

The official Muriels site is completed for 2010, with all voter pages up to date! New and shiny! Go on and take a look.

And now, on with 2011...

A few words on the wrap-up of this year's Muriels

Another year gone, another ceremony done and enjoyed by all. I think this year went particularly well, all things considered - I'm really starting to get the knack for this.

The Muriels 2010 page is ready for your viewing pleasure. You can access it here. The voter pages are still under construction. Hopefully, by Thursday I'll have wrapped that up.

Thanks to all the voters and writers who participated this year. I tried to thank you all individually upon receiving your pieces, but I know I probably forgot a few. Don't think that means I didn't appreciate what you gave me - you all stepped your game up this year. The consistent high quality of our writing this year was heartening. Thanks also to everyone who read, commented, recommended, passed on links and/or bitched about our selections, either here or on Twitter or on other websites. The link field on the side has been updated to include the new voters. Link roundups should resume next week (if I can remember/find time to do them). Now, I leave you with this:

Golden Muriel for Best Picture of 2010

The Social Network [268 points / 23 votes]

"For a long time before The Social Network was released, people just called it "The Facebook Movie" -- even after the inspired trailer (the one that combined footage from the movie with Facebook screenshots and a choir singing Radiohead's "Creep") made it clearer that it dealt with the human stories behind how the social networking site was created.

I joked that the studio should adopt the approach used in the famous trailer for Stanley Kubrick's Lolita in 1962: "How did they ever make a movie of Facebook?" That turns out to be the title of the "making of" documentary on the extras DVD (the people who made this movie have an exceptionally sharp sense of humor). Since it opened the New York Film Festival in October, it's been described as a ruthless ladder-to-success story, a thwarted romance (with Erica or Eduardo?), a courtroom drama, a fast-moving portrait of a generation and The Way We Live Now -- and "a movie about 2.0 people made by 1.0 people" (that last comment written by a person still in beta, apparently).

Is it any of those things -- or all of those things? I don't think we know yet. As the movie's Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) says of the newly launched Facebook to his friend and CFO Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield): "We don't even know what it is yet. We don't know what it is, what it can be, what it will be." That may be the smartest thing Mark says in the movie, and I think it may apply to The Social Network itself -- a deceptively conventional film that races by at such high-bandwidth speeds that even after you've seen it, you may not be sure you know what you've seen. I've seen it only twice (though I've gone over individual scenes in shot-by-shot detail), but I feel like it's been downloaded into my brain and I'm still trying to process it. What I know for sure is that it's exquisitely designed and thrilling to engage with. (John Pavlus was absolutely right to compare Fincher's direction with Jonathan Ive's designs of Apple products.)

Actually, there's a kernel of truth to that "1.0 vs. 2.0" comment: the visual grammar of The Social Network is fairly traditional. Establishing shots, two-shots, reverse angles, limited use of steady dollies and cranes rather than shakycams and extended takes. (Though, as I learned from the DVD supplements, the shot over which the title appears is really several shots stitched together.) The difference is the rapid speed at which they are deployed, and the effortlessness with which the movie delivers multiple streams of information.

Unlike that other 2010 movie that made such a big deal of explaining arbitrary rules for getting from one level of storytelling to another, The Social Network just does it. And you get it -- without the actors reading you instruction manuals encoded into dialog. It shifts backward, forward, sideways in time and space (with no "present tense" defined), through depositions, memories, e-mails, affidavits... and you may get temporarily/temporally thrown now and again, but it's not hard to follow. Again, unlike the science-fiction movie that preceded it into theaters in 2010, The Social Network is complex without trying to appear complicated. Indeed, its design and direction, the tools of its tale-spinning, are far more sophisticated, but less ostentatious. And more fun. And lead to a better life." - Jim Emerson

Multiple Levels of storytelling in THE SOCIAL NETWORK from Jim Emerson on Vimeo.

Muriel Awards Countdown to Best Picture: #2

True Grit [180 points / 20 votes]

"My recurring dream, as a young girl, was that the world needed saving and nary an adult was willing nor able to do anything about it. I’d fly around, battling evil and righting wrongs, while the adults in my life bumbled about like benevolent buffoons. My father always wore a top hat.

Mattie Ross in True Grit is this dream fully realized, and Hailee Steinfeld inhabits the character like she was born haggling for ponies and bringing evildoers to justice while the language of Charles Portis tumbles acrobatically out of her firmly set jaw. She is a wonder and a force, staring down corrupt businessmen, wayward marshals and the man who killed her daddy while haughtily, scoldingly reminding her companions that she is, “only fourteen years old.”

Mattie is the brilliant center of a film that hits every mark. The Coen Brothers, the Kings of the Remake and the Jesters of Genre, kept very true to the original text, rarely getting cutesy Coeny (the Medicine Man comes to mind). It’s a love affair with the Western, gorgeously shot by Roger Deakins (oooh, that night ride!) and achingly scored by Carter Burwell, playing gracefully with the traditional hymns that disqualified him for Oscar consideration.

The cast supporting Mattie (yes, she is the lead here, Academy) is uniformly marvelous. Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn doesn’t reinvent the character canonized by John Wayne, but delves deeper into his true grittiness. His shoot-em-upmanship with Matt Damon’s Texas dandy is the funniest bit in a film that massaged my every emotion. Barry Pepper and Josh Brolin round out the crew of scruffy bad 'uns.

But it is Mattie who moves us. Mattie whose sense of right is unfailing and happens to entail hiring the most ruthless marshal she can find to track down the man who killed her daddy and bring him back dead or alive. Mattie who politely and eloquently bulldozes everyone in her path to get what she wants. Mattie’s insistent, “I want what I want!” is a line my five-year-old echoes instinctively, and one I’ve forgotten completely. Where is my inner Mattie?

My favorite update to the original film calls back to the novel where adult Mattie comes looking for Rooster, who’s already passed away. And adult Mattie? She’s no more willing to take any crap than child Mattie was. We don’t have to lose that strength, that drive, that conviction. True Grit is a nearly perfect film that, as Mattie tells Rooster after a particularly violent interlude, “displayed great poise.”" - Marya Murphy

Muriel Awards Countdown to Best Picture: #3 (tie)

Dogtooth [148 points / 12 votes]

"Dogtooth, Yorgos Lanthimos's revelatory drama about cats, lamps, incest and video tapes, is that rare transgressive drama that's able to transcend the stigma of the taboos it employs onscreen and truly dazzle even the most unadventurous viewers with its filmmaker's craft, sense of humor and limitless imagination. Lantimos has grown leaps and bounds since Kinetta (2005), an equally mysterious film about willfully assimilating corrupted information and the creation of a new language through bastardized rituals. Dogtooth is similarly just as much about how we absorb information as it is about the end of the concept of family -- a fantasy of dizzyingly indeterminate meaning. (Just try to limit its meaning to a single coherent allegory) It immediately exudes raw intellectual and visceral power in virtually every scene. And the best part is, while watching and then later endlessly rewatching Dogtooth, one realizes: Lanthimos is at the height of his powers as a storyteller and is only just getting started. Long live the new flesh." - Simon Abrams

Muriel Awards Countdown to Best Picture: #3 (tie)

Toy Story 3 [148 points / 12 votes]

"Toy Story 3, a whiplash-paced wonderment, goes through so many evolutions in its running time it's difficult to keep up. It's a kids movie! It's a buddy movie (again)! It's a prison-break movie - a molded-plastic Brute Force with a sense of whimsy! It's a celebration of childlike imagination! It's a horror movie about the physical destructiveness of little kids! It's a rumination on mortality and the afterlife! All this, and it's STILL a kid's movie! Able to switch tone on a dime, from hilarious ("Spanish Buzz") to heart-crushing (the incinerator) and back again, Lee Unkrich and company have provided the rare 'something for everyone' film that actually does have something for everyone while managing to not alienate any part of its audience. It's a dizzy, unpredictable and moving delight, a cinematic feast in CG form. Hell of a balancing act you got going there, boys." - Steve Carlson

Muriel Awards Countdown to Best Picture: #5 (tie)

Winter's Bone [118 points / 14 votes]

"Despite all of its plaudits during awards season, I feel the need to defend Winter's Bone against a charge I keep hearing levied at it: that it’s just another Sundance-feted minstrel show, depicting those poor flyover state slobs and their beautifully ugly, inconsequential lives. Certainly, on paper at least, all of the elements of those “hix pix” that the “sticks nix” are here.

However, like Jeff Nicholl’s Shotgun Stories before it, Bone transcends any potential pandering rednexploitation by exercising impressive formal control and simply keeping itself very, very weird. Deborah Granik approaches Daniel Woodrell’s “country noir” as a folk or fairy tale rather than a piece of ethnography. Cinematographer Michael McDonough frames the Ozark hinterlands as hazy blue-gray wastes that are more akin to Werner Herzog’s Eastern Europe in Nosferatu the Vampyre than the sun-dappled Americana of, say, Sling Blade.

Ree Dolly’s quest to find her father takes her through coded interactions with redneck chieftains, skittish meth heads, and her spectral uncle Teardrop. Granik pares Woodrell’s already tight prose down, giving these exchanges a cadence that’s hard-boiled, poetic, and (yes) a little folksy. What keeps all of this from feeling affected is the film’s preference for storytelling over message-mongering. Thanks to Jennifer Lawrence’s taciturn performance, we’re never asked to view Ree as an object of pity. Rather, we end up infected with her obsession to pursue the mystery to its horrifying end." - Philip Tatler

Muriel Awards Countdown to Best Picture: #5 (tie)

The Ghost Writer [118 points / 14 votes]

"In form, The Ghost Writer is most reminiscent of Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” On the surface, it brims with a plethora of characters, offers a resonant colour palette and a distinctive landscape. But a closer inspection reveals the artistic detail that went into its creation. Whereas Seurat’s pointillist masterpiece blossoms out of uninflected dots of colour, Roman Polanski’s equally admirable film is an intricate web of performances, both in the actual narrative and out of it. Polanski’s ensemble is what gives the film its power -- it’s what makes the film.

In the centre of it all is Ewan McGregor’s anonymous (that word lately has such a different meaning in the context of the film’s events) writer, a boozing hack, drifting from one shitty biography to the next. McGregor adopts the role’s slimier qualities with gusto: you might not want to be friends with this man, but you’d definitely get drunk with him. Similarly, Pierce Brosnan instills in his character, the former British PM, a shadiness, sure, but also intelligence and cunning behind a veneer of false respectability. Thankfully, he never tries to physically mimic Tony Blair. As his trusting but shifty wife by his side, Olivia Williams is a modern-day Jezebel-meets-Lady Macbeth. Again, you probably wouldn’t want to marry this woman, but you’d fuck the living shit out of her. Which, later, turns out to be the point.

But, naturally, the ensemble is more than just those three. Everyone sparkles, everyone shines. Tom Wilkinson’s the embodiment of corruption and malice, and hats off to the man with the most avuncular face in Hollywood for forging a latter-day career out of playing assholes. Kim Cattrall, despite her risible accent, is wonderful as the ex-PM’s once-hot-but-now-rough-round-the-edges secretary, the first performance of hers I’ve enjoyed since she took off her Vulcan ears. Random cameos, from Tim Hutton (!), Eli Wallach (!!), and Jim Belushi (!!!!), add to the film’s Hitchcockian flair as each character comes alive. The sum, as they say, is indeed greater than the parts. But the parts are rather magnificent themselves." - Ali Arikan

Muriel Awards Countdown to Best Picture: #7

Carlos [117 points / 12 votes]

"The kind of sprawling epic global blow-out that Olivier Assayas has been flirting with for some time. Edgar Ramírez, in the male performance of the year, reveals the terrorist, more commonly known as Carlos the Jackal, as a ballsy, grandstanding fraud. The picture can be read in a number of ways, most obviously as an exploration of the endless, labyrinthine world corruption that few fully understand. But the picture becomes truly great about 3 1/2 hours into its 5 1/2-hour running time when it transforms into a sadly banal comedy of a wannabe revolutionary as a typically hen-pecked, bloated, domestic schmuck. Nothing ever changes and everybody ultimately wants the same things." - Chuck Bowen

Muriel Awards Countdown to Best Picture: #8

Exit Through the Gift Shop [107 points / 10 votes]

"The debates that Exit Through the Gift Shop seems to inspire most are typically ones of veracity: is the film real, a distortion of truth or a complete work of fiction perpetrated by a well-known prankster and cultural terrorist? Is the documentary’s erstwhile filmmaker and eventual subject,Thierry Guetta, actually Banksy, the incognito street art sensation who as recently as last month put Los Angeles into a tizzy by splashing his guerrilla work along Sunset Boulevard? Or is Guetta merely Banksy’s greatest creation, a real life Chance the gardener unleashed upon the world, serving as a paint covered finger in the eye of the very art collectors who made Banksy a millionaire?

These questions, while fun to entertain, tend to overshadow the accomplishments of the film itself, which are beyond debate. An anthology of street art (or vandalism depending on whether it’s your property being defaced) culled from thousands of hours of footage and a decade in the making, Exit Through the Gift Shop is the defining document of a temporary medium. Embedded with the likes of such artists as the omnipresent Shepard Fairly, Ron English, Invader, and Banksy himself, Guetta obsessively videotapes (and serves as the occasional accomplice on) covert missions to ironically tag public buildings and billboards, providing ground-level access to a world of vaguely criminal imps and muckrakers. At the absolute least, the film is a showcase for a marginalized form of outsider art that is frequently washed away or papered over mere hours after its creation.

What really gives Exit Through the Gift Shop its charge though is how consciously it muddies the waters of subjectivity and the age-old, unanswerable, question, “What is art?” Like the boomers who spent millions on Eric Clapton guitars and baseball cards in years past, the film explores the commoditization of pop art, ridiculing bourgeoisie collectors spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on pieces that expressly mock the wealth, class and status of those who purchase them. Nothing if not a gifted self-promoter, Banksy uses Exit Through the Gift Shop to further disseminate his legend -- filming his own testimonials while hooded, in shadow and with a digital distortion on his voice as though he were in hiding from the mob, implicitly acknowledging that his notoriety and bad boy status is more valuable than anything being hung inside of a frame.

All of which makes the direction the film goes in such a glorious, hilarious rebuke. After being dismissed from the project for turning in an avant-garde inspired rough-cut of the film (which Banksy calls “unwatchable” without a hint of irony in his mechanized voice), the roles of documentarian and subject are reversed: Guetta rechristens himself Mr. Brainwash and distorts every cynical lesson his mentor instilled in him, while Banksy and his camera crew can only look on in horror. Creating highly derivative, easily reductive work and exploiting the public’s insatiable demand for hype, Mr. Brainwash (or MBW) becomes a media sensation, instantly wealthy and a towering art world figure for our Lady Gaga-inundated times (not for nothing, the best joke in the entire film is the revelation that MBW had been commissioned to design the cover of a Madonna album).

Sickeningly funny and equally effective as an appreciation of, and bludgeon against, modern art, Exit Through the Gift Shop attempts to use context and intent to differentiate between good art and bad.Inevitably though, the film places Banksy and Fairley, amongst others, into the roles of befuddled critics scratching their heads over how anyone could be hoodwinked by this “junk.” It’s both sour grapes from the cool kids and a long sobering look in the mirror: how much value can there be in a discipline if really anyone can do it? Ultimately the film argues that the worth of art is entirely in the eye (and wallet) of the beholder. How fitting then that Exit Through the Gift Shop is my choice for the best film of last year." - Andrew Dignan

Muriel Awards Countdown to Best Picture: #9

Black Swan [105 points / 11 votes]

"“I just want to be perfect,” broods Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), the prima ballerina protagonist of Black Swan, early on in the film as she struggles to master the dueling personalities of her character. Ironically, the film itself never shares in such travails; from the get-go, wunderkind director Darren Aronofsky and his cast and crew perfect both the formal control of the white swan and the raw passion of the black swan.

So much has been said of Portman’s career-defining turn in the lead role, and at first it is tempting to say that she carries the movie. Once the viewer gets the chance to externalize from the film’s thrashing ride after it’s over, however, Black Swan begins to seem a lot like an auteur piece, as Aronofsky’s directorial hand is evident in every piece of the puzzle, including Portman’s performance. But that impulse soon gives way to the broader realization that all of the pieces are just as, well... perfect. The film is a collaborative effort in the truest sense.

It is in the aforementioned bipolarity -- the fine line between lightness and darkness -- that Black Swan attains greatness. On a narrative level, one can choose to believe either Nina is literally going insane, becoming one with her art to the extent at which she disassociates from reality, or she is metaphorically coming to sanity, confronting the foreign concept of womanhood for the first time. These readings could not be more opposite. Furthering this complexity, the film switches on a dime from a straight-laced drama to a “WTF!?”-provoking grindhouse horror flick, to the point at which, like blurry faces in the night, one isn’t sure which is which.

Even the filmmaking itself mirrors the dueling dynamic. At once, the cast and crew exercise technical preciseness and produce work that overflows in passion. Here is a movie that wants to take the viewer to an uncomfortable place, as all great cinema should, and it knows how to get there. Each aspect is impeccably tuned to illicit such a result. Gritty as Matthew Libatique’s 16mm cinematography is, I dare you to find camerawork that was more thought-out than this was. Next, consider Clint Mansell’s score, which provides such a unique dramatic undercurrent for the material, and yet it is derived almost entirely from the original "Swan Lake" compositions. The list goes on. Likewise, each performance is expertly crafted as a diametrically-opposed foil to Portman’s immature, rules-driven Nina: Barbara Hershey as her maniacal, controlling mother; Mila Kunis as her passionate, unafraid rival; and Vincent Cassell as her assertive, no-nonsense coach.

So much of Black Swan is hyperbolic and abstractly emotional that it is easy to understand why its greatness has been lost on many general audiences. But for those of us who connected with the miracle of how it is able to master the cinematic art-form as we know it and, at the same time, push it into uncharted territory, there was not a more perfect movie all year." - Danny Baldwin

Muriel Awards Countdown to Best Picture: #10

"Bong Joon-ho’s Mother begins with a strange slow dance performed by an unnamed middle-aged woman (Kim Hye-ja), an improvised solitary glide up a grassy knoll. But this fleeting bout of inspiration cuts to a dire sight: A dimly lit medium shot of the dancer now shrouded in darkness, eyes staring deeply into the camera. This stark juxtaposition foreshadows a lengthy timeline of suffering where repressed memories breed new traumas, forming an intricate procedural full of devastating delusions.

When her handicapped son Yoon Do-joon (Bin Won) is accused of murder, Mother goes to great lengths to prove him innocent, yet her investigation unearths hidden skeletons. This maternal spider weaves her web with unconditional love, and this is what defines her relationship with her son and both characters’ skewed perspective. In Mother, time and doubt erodes all sense of self and the truth only makes matters worse. This makes Mother a distant cousin of Memories of Murder, Bong’s masterpiece about the failure of state institutions to conquer evil. But where that film oozes with genre subversion, Mother turns into a singular exploration of pain, peeling away layers of mania to reveal the heartache underneath." - Glenn Heath Jr.

Muriel Awards Countdown to Best Picture: #12

Everyone Else [94 points / 10 votes]

"Maren Ade burst onto the scene in 2003 with her low budget, shot-on-video feature The Forest for the Trees, a dark and potent gem that was nothing short of brilliant but failed to gain the recognition it deserved. With her new feature Everyone Else, Ade has people everywhere scrambling to catch up, as clearly we are in the presence of a new master. By charting not the formation but the disintegration of a couple, Ade exposes life with another person in a detail rarely displayed on screen.

Gitti and Chris are a young, attractive couple vacationing in Italy for the summer. He is a designer whose career is not quite taking off, she is his unconditional supporter who wants nothing more than to see him succeed. What comes next is not your typical break-up movie. Ade’s film is a collection of those fleeting instances where we jump from loving to loathing, from enjoyment to annoyance and all the other mood shifts that inevitably come about when you spend every waking hour with someone. Acted to sheer perfection and lensed with an acute awareness for the physical and mental games lovers play with one another, this is honest drama served up Cassavetes-style. If we come out of the film thinking Chris and Gitti are a little fucked up, we only need consider the implications of the title, for no matter how like/unlike they are from us, love only needs two people to make sense." - Adam Lemke

Muriel Awards Countdown to Best Picture: #14

A Prophet [86 points / 8 votes]

"Metaphorically speaking, Jacques Audiard's A Prophet is urgently relevant in today's increasingly multi-ethnic, transborder society; cinematically speaking it is a masterful showcase of acting, cinematography, tone, pacing (even at 150 minutes), suspense, music, action, and, most importantly, global insight. Winning nine of the record 13 César Awards for which it was nominated, A Prophet somehow lost to Argentina's The Secret in Their Eyes in last year's Academy Award face-off for Best Foreign Language Film (what was the secret in AMPAS voters' eyes in making that decision?). Shiny statues aside, A Prophet is also one of the best crime sagas in the last decade, and, along with the recent Lion's Den and Hunger, has ushered in a new era of harrowing prison dramas (the last memorable one being... what, The Shawshank Redemption?).

Beautifully filmed and convincingly acted, A Prophet boasts incredible verisimilitude for a completely fictional story. Maybe it's not surprising considering former convicts were hired as extras and advisers, but Audiard himself has admitted that prison life is rarely depicted in French film and television. French citizens are apparently clueless about what goes on behind prison walls in their country, so it doesn't take much convincing to accept this story as reality. And indeed, life on the inside is reflective of life on the outside: the established French/European power structure is fading as new immigrant groups - particularly Arab Muslims (that term should not sound nearly as redundant as it does, so tainted is our view of Islam in 2011) - are arriving and establishing their identities as the new French citizenry.

I'm always hesitant to label a film a "masterpiece", particularly if I'm considering it in the hours or days immediately after seeing it. A full year removed from my first viewing of A Prophet, however, I'm as convinced now as I was then about the film's prominence among the best films of the year. I find it to be a nearly flawless piece of cinema, awe-inspiring on a first viewing and richly in bloom on repeated viewings." - Daniel Getahun

Muriel Awards Countdown to Best Picture: #18

Another Year [68 points / 6 votes]

"Another Year is another wonderful film by the British director Mike Leigh, and it's tempting to take it for granted, as Leigh tends to release similarly wonderful films every few years. But this picture - which follows the lives of several unhappy misfits over the course of a year as they circle a settled, seemingly have-it-all couple that sort of functions as their social nucleus – has, at its center, a shocking, ineffable toughness; and it's this toughness that inspired some to write the picture off as being unpleasant for its own sake.

A less original director would've held the central couple played by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen up as a beacon of understanding and compassion – the other players' oasis from their misery. But Broadbent's Tom and Sheen's Gerri are more discomforting creatures: somewhat enabling, somewhat judgmental, somewhat aloof. In another words, Tom and Gerri's troubled friends, a veritable island of lost toys most prominently represented by the lonely alcoholics Mary (Leslie Manville) and Ken (Peter Wight), are weighing themselves against a seemingly faraway contentment that's partially illusory -- they're so mired in their unhappiness that they miss the terror and resignation in Tom and Gerri's faces. For those who think Mannville went too far in her nearly amazing performance, I say: you're lucky if that pleading, embarrassing, yet oddly electric behavior strikes you as false due to lack of familiarity. I'm making the picture sound like a depressing dirge in the vein of misery porn such as last year's god-awful Jack Goes Boating, but Another Year is rich, contradictory and strangely exhilarating in its refusal to offer false, obliging hope; it's a bracing testament to our right to be unfulfilled, acknowledging that our existence is baffling and difficult but that we're in this together whether we know it or not. Another Year is the most beautiful and haunting picture I saw last year." - Chuck Bowen

Muriel Awards Countdown to Best Picture: #20

Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl [53 points / 5 votes]

"In the introduction to the novella "The Yellow Sofa," a letter by author Eca De Quieros is excerpted where he argues for a "collection of short novels...which would be a reflection of contemporary life in Portugal." He added, "the attraction of these tales is that there are no digressions, no rhetoric, no philosophizing: everything is interesting and dramatic, and quickly narrated." For the most part, Manoel de Oliveira's Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl, an adaptation of Eca De Quieros' "Singularidades de uma Rapariga Loura", follows these suggestions: its brevity (60 minutes), the lack of digressions (cinematic, thematic, dramatic), and a particular sense of the present. With that, Eccentricities is something of a modernist throwback, with its moral code footed in the 19th century while striking directly at them with its 20th and 21st century views on capitalism (this is one of the great films about the current global recession), gender (the female passenger on the train, whose eyes are below frame level, gazing at us), and art (a visual palate which owes as much to de Oliveira's silent films as it does to Modrian or Paul Strand).

Eccentricities is, remarkably, de Oliveira's lightest film in years, while being as political as A Talking Picture and having similar touches of magical realism that made The Strange Case of Angelica slightly leaden. The doomed love of Macario (the perfectly Bressonian Ricardo Trepa) and Luisa (Catarina Wallenstein) is seen through flashbacks that are strikingly adolescent: exchanged glances substituting the kind of rapture we've grown accustomed to seeing in movies, which need to be approved by both of their families and classes. When the film concludes that Luisa is something of a thieving femme fatale, Marcario's simple reaction is demanding that Luisa "Go away," with the burdens of love not in sight or even existent. And, even with the burdens of literary history framing an otherwise simple tale that takes place in the present, it's as of de Oliveira prefers the curiosity and discrepancy about the two periods to be rooted in humor and distance.

In a remarkable career capped by his surrealist masterpiece Doomed Love, de Oliveira is quickly making new work (10 features in the last decade, including one not yet released), and changing formal techniques: the time between the astonishing Oporto of My Childhood and The Strange Case of Angelica is a mere 9 years. Eccentricities is one of de Oliveira's best late films and, after reading Eca de Quieros' short story, one of the most lovely and curious adaptations I know. Pure pleasure." - Michael Lieberman

Muriel Awards Countdown to Best Picture: #26

October Country [38 points / 3 votes]

"A quiet, absorbing portrait of an American family as unassuming as it is unexpectedly moving, October Country is nonfiction filmmaking at its finest. Director Michael Palmieri, with photographer Donal Mosher (who stays off camera), elliptically tracks the impoverished Mosher clan of Mohawk Valley, New York over roughly a year's time, from one Halloween to the next. He shifts his focus from an elderly couple to their daughter, then to their daughter's daughter, who has a newborn baby of her own. While he never telegraphs his intent, his patient, observational style gradually expands our knowledge of these people, cluing us into the mistakes they've made and the specters of the past that still haunt them. Palmieri illustrates the Moshers' struggles with poetic evocations of time's passage, and of its lasting effects; he lingers on the ghosted image of fireworks and the whirring of a light fixture, the slow drift of cigarette smoke and, most achingly, an old home movie of the eldest Mosher slow-dancing with his granddaughter on Christmas morning. The filmmakers' interests here are universal; they carefully record cycles of life, linking one woman's bad decisions to her upbringing with a mother who was victim to similar patterns, and finally back to her mother's father, haunted by ghosts of the Vietnam War. The film's depiction is of a family that could only be American, their misfortunes rooted in poor economic standing and in the sacrifices they've made to protect the freedoms of this country—as beautifully symbolized in an image of a waving American flag shot through with rays of sunshine. It's a modest film of disarming power, so precisely capturing the lives of its several characters that you'll feel like you spent a year with them yourself." - Sam C. Mac

Muriel Awards Countdown to Best Picture: #27

White Material [34 points / 3 votes]

"White Material examines European colonialism in modern Africa, dissecting various traumas and their ramifications at all ends of the social spectrum. Set in an unnamed country during a rebel uprising, Denis’s film follows white coffee plantation owner Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert) as she attempts to salvage her crop and homestead despite mounting violence and unrest. While whites and blacks flee from the perilous countryside en masse, Maria holds her ground, steadfast in her insistence to stay and bear witness to the chaos as it engulfs what was once her home. This isn't a character study, or even an allegory; it's a primal expression of Maria's feelings of displacement during this period of violent transition. Denis takes what could've been a linear story and deconstructs it with a serpentine narrative full of half-remembered flashbacks, elusive tangents, and hypnotic set pieces that weave each character into a volatile timeline. She connects the melodrama of Vial’s crumbling family unit with the consequences of wealth in an impoverished state. She also instills a pervasive sense of menace in every scene, thanks partially to Yves Cape’s incredibly jarring cinematography and Stuart Staples’s foreboding score, which sweeps through the trees like a mighty wind. A storm of immersive sound cues and tracking shots wash away all political posturing and stereotypes, leaving only the remnants of flawed colonial traditions. Poverty, ignorance and guilt chart this unknown country's dying soul, a map without clear borders or reference points. White Material is a staggering achievement of cinematic form, but more importantly, it’s a crucial document of familiar conflicts, and of a revolution that will not be televised." - Glenn Heath Jr.

Muriel Awards Countdown to Best Picture: #30 (tie)

Lourdes [28 points / 3 votes]

"Lourdes asks what a miracle is, on whose terms one should be determined, and who is deserving of such a blessing. A marvelous Sylvie Testud plays a woman with severe multiple sclerosis who is healed while on a pilgrimage in the southwestern French town. Director Jessica Hausner observes with detached amusement and seriousness how this seeming miracle changes the individual and the crowd in typical and unexpected ways. Lourdes shows reverence to the mystery while skewering how people try to divine it." - Mark Pfeiffer

Muriel Awards Countdown to Best Picture: #35 (tie)

Father of My Children [25 points / 2 votes]

"Mia Hansen-Løve's disarming and beautiful Father of My Children, her second feature-length movie, not only celebrates the (relatively) brief career of a patron of the arts, played by Louis-Do de Lencquesaing (and inspired by the late actor/producer Humbert Balsan), but also worries about the future of art in an age of commerce and dwindling audiences. It follows what I found to be two exemplary family-centered movies out of France in the last two years: Olivier Assayas' Summer Hours and Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale. Those two films were pensive and heartfelt, and this one is no different: the second part of this picture is about the way the living have to pull themselves together after a tragic loss.

What inspires awe in this picture is the surefire way it dodges easy sentimentality and the way it skillfully changes directions midway through. Reading reviews of this picture before you see it isn't recommended: it's best (if possible) to go into it cold. Generally, I don't like it when movies shift their narrative focus so drastically - they tend to become uneven affairs - but Hansen-Løve is more than aware of this, and the picture's second half brings to mind (of all people) Andy Warhol's quote, "Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone's got to take care of all your details." When Lencquesaing's character leaves the movie, his spectre haunts the rest of it, as his dutiful wife tries her best to step in and manage her husband's projects... but to no avail.

What's also important to keep in mind is the title: when we pass on to the great discothèque in the sky, all of our earthly accumulations may not amount to much. Lencquesaing's character tried (and failed) to battle his own demons and left several budding (and potentially amazing) films unfunded and unfilmed. But he does leave behind two lovely daughters, which, in its own mushy, Hallmark-card kind of way, may be the most important artworks he created, educated and nurtured." - Matthew Lotti