Best of 2010

The delightful Mexican poster for Uncle Boonmee



Herewith a roundup of the 20 best new films I saw for the first time in 2010. The ranking is somewhat arbitrary.

1. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
2. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)
3. Mysteries of Lisbon (Raul Ruiz)
4. Poetry (Lee Chang-Dong)
5. Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard)
6. Carlos (Olivier Assayas)
7. Oki’s Movie (Hong Sang-Soo)
8. The Strange Case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira)
9. Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean)
10. Another Year (Mike Leigh)

The first ten films all played at this year’s especially strong New York Film Festival. Only three of them will have opened theatrically in New York by the end of the year.

Guest

11. Guest (Jose Luis Guerin)

A film about a year spent attending film festivals as a guest, Guerin's beautiful black-and-white film is only tangentially about the festivals where he presented his great film, In the City of Sylvia, in 2007-8. His real subject is the people he meets outside the festivals, primarily the poor and dispossessed citizens of cities such as Bogota, Cali, Havana, São Paulo, Lima, Santiago, and finally Jerusalem. Their eloquence matches the power of Guerin's poetic images.

12. The Social Network (David Fincher)
13. Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese)
14. The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski)

The next three films prove that genuine auteurs can still occasionally make great films within the decaying remains of the Hollywood system.

The Portuguese Nun

15. Our Beloved Month of August (Miguel Gomes, 2008)
16. The Portuguese Nun (Eugène Green, 2009)

Two belated releases from Portugal that further confirmed the vitality of a national cinema that nurtured masters such as Ruiz and de Oliveira, Pedro Costa, João Pedro Rodrigues and the late João Cesar Monteiro, some of whose delightfully unclassifiable films I first discovered this year.

17. Inside Job (Charles Ferguson)
18. And Everything Is Going Fine (Stephen Soderbergh)

Two excellent documentaries: a lucid explanation of how the financial crisis happened and who is responsible; and a moving, engaging portrait of the late Spalding Gray that uses no superfluous commentary, only clips from the arc of his fascinating life and career.

19. The Father of My Children (Mia Hansen-Love)
20. Animal Kingdom (David Michod)

UPDATE 1/18: I'm going to see the powerful Australian crime thriller/dysfunctional family drama Animal Kingdom for a second time in anticipation of my trip to Sydney and Melbourne in March.

UPDATE: Let me add that one of the most powerful, emotionally wrenching films I have seen in this or any year, Lee Chang-Dong's Secret Sunshine, now playing at IFC Center, screened over 3 years ago at the New York Film Festival which is where I first saw it. If I had not seen it previously it would surely rank near the top of my list.

Honorable Mention: Somewhere (Sofia Coppola); How I Killed My Mother (Xavier Dolan); Greenberg (Noah Baumbach); Winter's Bone (Debra Granik); Please Give (Nicole Holofcener); Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright); Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold); True Grit (Joel and Ethan Coen); October Country (Michael Palmieri, Donal Mosher)

The Tree of Life

Here is the trailer for Terence Malick's long-awaited film, The Tree of Life, and it looks extraordinary. Palme d'Or 2011, peut-être?

Late Spring / Late Autumn

Above, Setsuko Hara plays the daughter who marries and leaves her widowed father (Chishu Ryu) alone at the end of Ozu's Late Spring (1949).

11 years later, in Late Autumn (1960), Hara plays the widowed mother who decides not to remarry and is left alone after her daughter's marriage. The angle of Hara's head in the two images is almost identical, but the change of expression speaks volumes about the passage of time.

Mundane History

Anocha Suwichakornpong's modest but beautiful new Thai film, Mundane History, which played at the Rotterdam at BAM festival earlier this year and is currently at MoMA's Contemporasian for a week, is a very promising first film. Its deceptively simple story follows the relationship between a recently paralyzed young man, Ake, and the male nurse, Pun, who is sent to his family's mansion to care for him following his accident. Pun encounters bitterness and resistance from Ake and considers leaving, but gradually a relationship of trust and even affection develops between them. There are also subtle scenes of Pun's interaction with Ake's distant father and with the family servants.

The director shows hints of influence from modernist directors like Tsai Ming-Liang (close-ups of a turtle swimming in a tank), Lisandro Alonso (a burst of jarring guitar music over the opening credits), and David Lynch (the droning musical score), not to mention Apichatpong Weerasethakul in the film's divided structure. The chronology of the story is occasionally reordered, which allows for the film's amazing centerpiece, a cosmic view of the universe and an exploding supernova, to take us by surprise. This sequence later turns out to be part of a planetarium exhibit which the two young men are visiting, a setup for a funny scene where they are the only two people in the auditorium trying to decide where to sit. Jeanette Catsoulis in her NY Times review even praises Ms. Suwichakornpong's "ability to depict nongratuitous full-frontal nudity," which is also not a bad reason to see the film.

Mikio Naruse's Yearning

Last week Asia Society screened Mikio Naruse's late masterpiece, Yearning, to a completely sold-out house. I was 15 minutes late to the screening and had to stand in the back the entire time, but I never considered leaving. The film's raw emotional power had a cumulative effect, building through a 3-act structure to one of the most devastating finales in all of cinema. Keith Uhlich in Slant Magazine describes the film well in his 2006 review from the time of Film Forum's massive Naruse retrospective.

Naruse's great lead actress, Hideko Takamine (an icon for Naruse comparable to Kinuyo Tanaka for Mizoguchi and Setsuko Hara for Ozu) plays Reiko, whose life has been built on self-denial ever since her husband's death in the war 18 years earlier. She is trying to run a small family grocery store whose days are numbered as a new supermarket chain threatens to destroy the business. Her much younger brother-in-law, Koji, has been living a dissolute life of drinking and sleeping around when he suddenly confesses to Reiko that he has loved her all these years. Her slavish devotion to her late husband's memory makes her instinctively reject this new reality. She is of course simultaneously attracted and repelled by Koji's attentions. The husband's framed photo recurs constantly in the background of several shots, and becomes a sort of fetish object in her suitcase when Reiko finally packs up and tries to escape.

At this point the heartbreaking final act begins as Reiko boards a train to flee to her distant hometown. This might serve as the end of a late Ozu film, with the resigned departure on the train and acceptance of her lonely fate. But Naruse ups the emotional ante, as Koji follows Reiko onto the train and they begin a flirtatious courtship during the long journey. Once they stop for the night, however, Reiko rejects Koji again, leading inevitably to tragedy. Reiko has placed a paper ring on Koji's finger, a symbol and portent of the fragile nature of their bond. Koji slips away and when Reiko wakes in the morning, she looks outside and sees the paper ring identifying his dead body. She runs after him but fails to catch up as stretcher-bearers carry him away.

Keith Uhlich aptly describes this shattering ending: "This brings us full-circle to Reiko's final close-up, about which pages should be written though such extended analysis will not be attempted here. Suffice to say that it is one of the cinema's most primal images, a silent scream of recognition and understanding by way of soul-crushing regret, one that forever hangs, like a masterpiece of portraiture, within its own timeless space, waiting to be looked upon so that it may gaze back, alternately, in horror and in revelation."

UPDATE: I've added a couple new photos, in their proper Tohoscope ratio.