Slant Magazine Top 25 (2013)

Spike Jonze's Her begins with a love letter—a misdirect. It's a billet-doux by proxy, ghost-authored, dictated to a machine. We open on the wide-eyed mug of Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), seeming to speak from the heart, recalling fondly a first love that proves, with the reveal of an incongruous anniversary, to belong to somebody else. So the "handwritten letters" of beautifulhandwrittenletters.com are merely approximations of the form: our near-future's phantom memorandum. But what matters here is that the love is real. Theodore's letters, in a sense the film's emotional through line, are never less than deeply felt, swelling with earnest affection. That he's talking through and to another can't reduce the depth of feeling in the sentiments. The genius of Her is that it doesn't ask you to believe in the truth of its speculative science fiction so much as it does the truth of its romance, which is to say that Samantha (Scarlett Johansson) means more as metaphor—for a hard-won connection, long-distance or otherwise remote—than as a prediction of future tech. Her is about "the modern condition," but not, importantly, in the strictly satirical sense: It tells us less about how we live than how we love. Calum Marsh

Steeped in the melancholy born of remorse and irresolution, the Coen brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis is a wintry valediction to the Greenwich Village folk music scene of the early '60s, whose eponymous man of constant sorrows, not to mention continual social *beep*-ups, is a couch-hopping songster caught between the Scylla of selfless devotion to tradition (emblematized by the haunting "Hang Me, Oh Hang Me") and the Charybdis of crass commercial success (the ludicrous anti-Space Race novelty tune "Please Mr. Kennedy"). Like the timeless music that Llewyn claims "was never new and never gets old," the Coens transmute historical events and persons into something else altogether, so that the film becomes a surreal odyssey across a desolate landscape of insult and invective where the timeframe soon gets sort of wonky. Being the Coen brothers, it's not all heavy treading, of course: Inside Llewyn Davis is laced with their bracing sense of absurdist humor, the brunt of it aimed at the conceits and depredations of the music biz, while the gentler bits involve an elusive feline with an unexpectedly apt appellation. In the end, Llewyn seems to glumly accept his anachronistic fate since, for better or worse, the times they are a-changin'. Wilkins

Verena Paravel and Lucian Castaing-Taylor's Leviathan is, first and foremost, a direct reminder of the visceral possibilities of cinema: to submerge us in a churning, nightmarish nocturnal ocean ballet, to mesh nature's tidal flow with the clanking repetition of machinery, to force empathy with a suffocating fish. Documentary in its purest, most spectacularly observational form, it also functions as both an unspoken rebuke to the staid presentation of most nonfiction films and a reminder of how few movies exploit the full sensory capabilities of the form. Every image presented here feels alien and invigorating, evoking the cold shock of sea water as the camera bobbles about the surface, the utter confusion of usually fixed visual axes being shifted or flipped upside down. Few films have managed to so brilliantly use formal disorientation to elicit both sinking dread and total wonder, results of an insistent focus on immersion and interaction, nature's primeval power pitted against the mechanistic efficiency of a system bent on its ruthless exploitation. Jesse Cataldo

A uniquely crafted hybrid film, incorporating narrative, travelogue, and art-essay conceits, Jem Cohen's Museum Hours saliently channels the excitement and alienation of traveling. Charting the fledgling friendship between a charitable museum guard and a middle-class Canadian woman who's visiting her hospitalized cousin in Vienna and passes time by wandering the galleries of the grand Kunsthistorisches Art Museum, the film insightfully cherishes the act of observation and a peculiar curiosity about life. Exceedingly proving the richness that patience yields, the audience—like the characters themselves—becomes acquainted with backstories and interests of the unassuming protagonists. At once pensive and playful, the film's most brilliant stroke comes from Cohen's ability to organically link the characters with the art that surrounds them to illuminate the power of observation and various existential inquiries inherent in art, leading to an understated personal investigation into the lives of these people we're asked to consider. With a keen eye for detail, Cohen offers the viewer a lens that shapes, and discovers, new ways to view both cinema and the world. Nick McCarthy

The heartbreak of Like Someone In Love settles in when Akiko (Rin Takanashi), a prostitute, asks her driver to pass around a roundabout for a second time. She's looking at her grandmother, who's patiently awaiting her arrival in Shizuoka, and whom Akiko may never see again. It's a heartfelt gesture, sure, but it's also a performance, something she does to portray her love for her beloved grandmother and the misery of her station, if only to herself. As with Certified Copy, the semiotics of expression in Abbas Kiarastomi's latest plunge us into an anxious and wholly unpredictable melodrama, a blind-eyed love triangle of sorts between Akiko, her john (Tadashi Okuno), and her fiancée (Ryo Kase). It's a mild comical conceit on paper, but Kiarastomi eloquently augments this idea by summoning his own fascinations throughout, particularly the deceptive nature of the image. The john sees romance and innocence in Akiko, while her would-be betrothed increasingly sees her only as a sex worker. The slight act of violence that caps the movie comes from a true realization, but as with all of Kiarastomi's masterworks, the truth and the "truth" are inseparable in this breathtaking high-wire act. Chris Cabin

With any luck, Andrew Bujalski's irreverent black-and-white comedy Computer Chess will sound the death knell of that most flippant moniker: mumblecore. Shot on vintage video cameras, the film initially resembles period public-access television, and Bujalski appears quite taken with the quirky deficiencies of the dated technology. But as it unfolds, the filmmaking becomes more ambitious. Bujalski incorporates split screen, avant-garde framing techniques, and surrealist interludes to liven up what might have otherwise been merely kitschy material—a story set during the early '80s in a grungy motel where nerdy computer programmers have gathered to pit their chess-playing software against one another. At first glance, this might seem like stylistic grandstanding, but the film's genuine sense of inquiry permeates all of its aesthetic gestures. Bujalski demonstrates the ways in which a crude format like analog video is capable of creating high art, and thematically, the film's amateurish, period-specific photography makes for a symbolic, if somewhat cheeky, examination of a subculture that, despite its meek social standing, has had arguably a larger influence on contemporary life than anyone else. Drew Hunt

Bastards is to the classic American noir what director Claire Denis's prior Trouble Every Day is to the biological horror film: A beautiful essay on the potential moral perversions of intense human hunger that's structured around genre trappings that are, in turn, refreshed and shaken free of the cobwebs of stale irrelevancy. The self-consciously derivative plot is a classic tale of a man lured into trouble, partially by his penis, who discovers a world of nearly primordial rot that far exceeds his comprehension. But, typical of Denis's films, it's the movement of bodies and faces you remember, particularly Vincent Lindon's poignant, commandingly gruffy and weathered cheeks and weary eyes, as well as Chiara Mastroianni's gorgeous body and deceptively tentative gestures. The love scenes are marvels typical of Denis: trysts that honor both the super-charged eroticism of genre tropes and the revealing physical vulnerability of sex as some of us might actually have it (perhaps, if we're lucky). Chuck Bowen

If Before Sunrise was about the exhilaration of connecting with a kindred spirit and Before Sunset captured the ways in which these connections define us long after we believe them defused, Before Midnight is the sobering reminder that all it takes to cripple such romantic synergy is its consummation. This affecting but surprisingly prickly entry in Jesse and Celine's saga manages to be thoroughly subversive of its predecessors without sacrificing the intense chemistry and Socratic rhythms that so endeared them to audiences. Where the earlier films were structurally predicated on the anxiety generated by impending deadlines, this one is pointedly shapeless, with tension arising from Jesse and Celine's excess of time together. The central duo—still conceived with preternatural assurance by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy—now share a committed relationship, children, and a decade of baggage, the weight of which threatens to turn a Greek sojourn into a potentially disastrous minefield of simmering resentments. The dazzling afterglow of young love gives way to the more muted palette of fortysomething disappointment. Take comfort, however, from the fact that the pair's travails never feel like the dissolution of that love but, simply another iteration of it. Abhimanyu Das

From the students debating race relations to the high-earning administrators embroiled in bureaucratic jargon, At Berkeley's sweeping cast of subjects are all captured with the same integrity, this sense of equality enhanced by Frederick Wiseman's sublime knack for refusing context or identification. And as a feeling of anxiety from financial strains on both the school and students collectively haunts the campus, a larger picture subsequently emerges: that of the present in constant reconciliation with the past in order to forge a path for the future. Between student protestors carrying on Berkeley's counterculture history and being ridiculed by the faculty that once engaged in such actions, as well as dinosaur skeletons jarringly juxtaposed with robotic legs helping a handicapped man to walk, time, like the personalities featured, is consistently clashing. By turns hilariously mundane and truly heartbreaking, not a single scene is wasted in this four-hour behemoth of a film, where everyone struggles to simply make do with the time they have. Wes Greene

Jia Zhang-ke announced his return this year from a half-decade working in nonfiction with a literal explosion—and in A Touch of Sin's fiery commencement we sense the master Chinese filmmaker turning a corner from the allegorical to something more circumstantial in the process. But while Jia's indignation manifests here in less subtle displays, framing this four-part treatise as he does around elements of the revenge, exploitation, and wuxia genres, the film's narrative dynamism may, paradoxically, yield his most thematically nuanced work to date. By locating these parallels in recent cases of violence throughout China, and proceeding to subvert the escapist thrills traditionally afforded such stylistic excess, he manages to deftly implicate an entire culture of civic and cinematic ignorance without betraying his aesthetic identity. Bold, disorienting, and palpably enraged even at its most meticulously constructed and composed, A Touch of Sin bleeds humanity from the wounds of hypocrisy. No longer simply practitioner of still lives and unknown pleasures, Jia has entered a new era of internal complexity, and this righteous manifesto may portend a future as bleak as it is invigorating. Jordan Cronk

Even if you're somewhat able, at this point, to process that 24-year-old Xavier Dolan is preternaturally fluent in the filmic vocabularies of everyone from Truffaut to Fassbinder, his idea- and ideal-festooned masterpiece Laurence Anyways, a raging indictment of heteronormativity that's nevertheless rich with love and status-quo compassion, still registers as an overwhelming show of staggering precocity. Though Dolan clearly speaks through his eponymous heroine (Melvil Poupaud), a transgender woman aching to express herself no matter the cost, he also gives resounding, feministic voice to two women gifted their proper forms at birth: Laurence's repressed mother, Julienne (Nathalie Baye), and Laurence's uncageable lover, Fred, the other half of an unprecedented screen romance, played by Suzanne Clément in the performance of the year. The central rebirth marks the scary, exhilarating, irreversible transformations of three women at different removes from societal demands, while sparking Dolan's stunningly florid formal proclivities—a Euro-pop-scored brand of baroque, sophisticated camp. From a swooning partnership that defies definition to the bitingly cheeky, ironic reveal that Laurence's tell-all is entitled In Praise of Normal, Dolan's epic finally leaves you with the notion that "normal" might be the most inhuman word in the world. R. Kurt Osenlund

A genre masterpiece with politics to spare, Drug War belies its prototypical shoot-'em-up surface at every turn. When Cantonese meth dealer—and sometime mule—Timmy (Louis Koo) comes under the thumb of police captain Zhang (Sun Honglei), he strikes a deal to clandestinely lead the cops into the heart of the local supply chain. The purity of Timmy's motivations is murky at best, but Johnnie To doesn't structure the film around either man's character so much as the unspooling repercussions of their collaboration. Zhang is domineering to a fault; Timmy takes smug satisfaction when the captain must, posing as a drug dealer, do several ceremonial lines of blow to seal a deal, while his horrified cadets watch on closed-circuit. To's portrait of mainland China is ultimately a network of desperate compromises, dotted from one end of the economy to the other. Much has been written about Drug War's punishingly violent finale, which is indeed the least equivocal piece of To's puzzle: If the narrative were a pane of glass carried by these two men, the film shatters it in breathtaking fashion, a gruesome anti-deus ex machina that spits you out into the blistering cold of the real world. Steve Macfarlane

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but with a "sprang breaaak forevvver." Mathematically constructed and patient where even the best of his prior films were largely powered by unpredictable excretory gestures, Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers plays the long game with a terrifyingly short fuse. Casting Selena Gomez as a string bikini-clad Jesus freak and James Franco (given free reign to culture-studies up this bitch) as the parasitic candy man who lures her and her clique away from dick-teasing, whip it-dazed fraternity meat, Korine refines his approach and purifies his knack for provocation, no less subversive here for being rendered in sun-kissed neon poetry. The film ties Godard to a Kmart pony ride, forces Malick at gunpoint to give him a lap dance, and sets the whole ground-zero graduation montage to the visual equivalent of a screwed "Teenage Dream" as covered by Pussy Riot. No regrets, just the detritus of America's well-oiled pleasure principal flexing like an overinflated hot-pink pool toy. It's enough to bring a tear to your eye. Oh, no, wait...that's chlamydia. Eric Henderson

While The Act of Killing wasn't the only documentary from this year to approach the difficult subject of genocide in South East Asia from an unconventional perspective, the successful formal and moral risks it takes are without equal. The involved experience of watching proud paramilitary soldiers reenact through Hollywood movie tropes their memories of torturing and murdering thousands of Indonesians in the mid '60s is surreal, causing unfathomable, layered, and fleeting responses ranging from horror to nausea to, surprisingly, laughter (the weirdly cathartic reaction that director Joshua Oppenheimer says is actually most common among Indonesian audiences). The brave choice to give these killers, who are still in power, free reign to recount this history as they would like to remember it walks a fine from accepting them to giving them rope to hang themselves, but because of how obviously deluded the aging thugs are about their wrongful acts, this fascinating and bizarre film manages to come out the other side of Mondo film territory looking like legitimate art. Kalvin Henely

A tale of mistaken identities and haplessly wooing couples, Matias Piñeiros's Viola borrows freely from Twelfth Night, and as in his previous works, it weaves an intricate tapestry of passion and circumstance. Sabrina, a fickle actress who breaks up with her boyfriend, is seduced by her friend, Cecilia (Agustina Muñoz), to prove Sabrina's vulnerability. Sabrina and Cecilia play, respectively, the impervious Countess Olivia and a resourceful, sweet-talking page in Shakespeare's play, thus drawing a parallel between life and art. This parallelism is enhanced by the all-female cast's ruminations on boyfriends, desire, and breakups. The action becomes looser as we meet Viola (María Villar), a young woman running a DVD-delivery business with her boyfriend, and much in need of romantic advice. As in all of Piñeiro's films, the rich ensemble cast creates a great sense of intimacy, to which the love games bring but momentary heartache, compensated by long-lasting friendships. There's a sense of an unshakable cool in many of the exchanges, but also a poignancy of youth, with its many romantic possibilities. Piñeiro may be using Shakespeare to show how life imitates art, but his creative appropriation is largely tongue in cheek, in a freewheeling, über-conversational style. Ela Bittencourt

Director Edgar Wright wraps up his "Cornetto Trilogy" with a rollicking alien-invasion ode to boozing up and moving on with The World’s End, which bests even Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz in its comingling of hilarious buddy humor, aesthetically electric action, and genre shout-outsmanship. The story of a group of high school friends reunited to complete a famed pub crawl at the behest of their once-great, now-pitiful leader (Simon Pegg), only to find that their sleepy rural England hometown has been turned into a picture-perfect haven for extraterrestrial cyborg pod people, Wright's film is a blistering barrage of contentious one-liners and CG-ified mayhem. Staged with the director's usual high-wire dexterity and bolstered a cast that handles whip-crack dialogue with giddy aplomb, it's the filmmaker's most exciting, inventive, and purely entertaining mash-up to date—not to mention, in its alternately sympathetic and critical portrait of a man-child navigating the literal and figurative pitfalls of growing up, also his most heartfelt. Nick Schager

The visual language of Frances Ha's poster and trailer promises an alienating kind of hipster sensibility, an ode to quirkiness built on mumblecore affectation and "farmer's market" irony. Director Noah Baumbach, however, rediscovers the sincerity of the original behind the inane copy in the way his New York City twentysomethings parade around like mumblecore caricatures, but laugh and suffer with pit-in-the-stomach gravitas. Theirs is a kind of hipster drag, the feigning of a communal style as a way to ensconce oneself from the solitude of cosmopolitan adulthood. Frances's non-story, played with disarming and infectious honesty by Greta Gerwig, doesn't thrive on the inside-jokeness of Brooklynite cool, but the cool of jazz, early Woody Allen, American sass, wit, and humanizing inelegance. Baumbach knows American film wins when it embraces the pedestrian-ness of its people and language. The beauty in the film isn't in the literal poesis of its words, but in the unabashed way the characters are allowed to roam around this world of non-productive play without the burden of pretty. Diego Costa

In amplifying the tactile qualities of seemingly innocuous details (violin strings being wound taut, blackberry juice crammed desperately into a makeshift pen), 12 Years a Slave sidesteps the conventions of other films depicting similarly tragic tribulations. Instead, natural beauty is consistently presented as a counterpoint to human corruption. The violin close-ups, which initially connoted the talent and trade with which Solomon Northup so proudly made his living, are later transposed as signifiers when his owner demands he play to appease customers during a heated scene. 12 Years a Slave never felt like just another case study for director Steve McQueen and his preoccupation with power structures. By creating a maximalist melodrama entrenched in one of America's most painful and corrupt periods, McQueen indirectly makes a political statement about the status quo of cinematic representation: We can do better in fictionalizing America's past, no matter how ugly it is. Tina Hassannia

Stories We Tell is the only movie this year that justifies spoiler-phobia. The question is: Just how little should one reveal? In this writer's opinion, the less you know the better, so let's just say that Stories We Tell is a documentary about director Sarah Polley's relationship to her family, particularly her mother, who passed away when Polley was 11. If that sounds conventional, rest assured that the film's structure and method border on revolutionary. And if it sounds like just another self-interested memoir, rest assured that the film's take on the shifting boundaries between truth and fiction, memory and reality, takes us far beyond navel-gazing. More than once, Polley quietly lays out false expectations before revealing a starkly different true hand. Such trickery works as well as it does because the film also offers a strong emotional punch. Polley's story of mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers is fascinating in part for its peculiarity, but the rivalries and alliances—the remembrances of love and heartbreak—that underpin it are equally compelling because of their familiar ring. Tomas Hachard

Rodney Ascher's visual essay is a dizzying wall of sound and visuals that simultaneously bolsters and slyly subverts the sometimes *beep* readings a group of off-camera interviewees have on The Shining, exposing Stanley Kubrick's classic as one of cinema's great white elephants. Despite Ascher's committed, profoundly empathetic sense of montage, collaging as he does footage from more than just Kubrick's cannon to give credence to his subjects' theories, sometimes multiple ones at once, the point of Room 237 isn't whether you think The Shining is a treatise on the genocide of Native Americans, the Holocaust, or an epic admission on Kubrick's part that he staged the Apollo 11 moon landing. And it isn't about why we continue to lose it at the movies so much as it is a portrait of an elusive, megalomaniacal artist and brilliant con man whose work remains a siren's call for the like-minded obsessive compulsive. Intentionally or not, Ascher reveals that the desperation with which people attempt to assign meaning to The Shining only corroborates Dick Hallorann's belief in the film that there's nothing in room 237 at the Overlook Hotel—except, of course, the stuff of our wildest imaginations. Ed Gonzalez

Ip Man may have been the starting point for The Grandmaster, but the legendary martial-arts instructor—himself the subject of a recent cottage industry of Hong Kong films devoted to his life—turns out to be more of an icon standing in for Wong Kar-Wai's thematic fascinations than the main character of his own biopic. The real central figure, in fact, is Gong Er (Zhang Ziyi), the daughter of a rival martial-arts master who, upon her father's murder, devotes her life to the single-minded pursuit of revenge—a quest that not only leads her to a kind of spiritual ruin, but also exposes the futility of the old-fashioned code of honor she had been following, far less fulfilling than Ip Man's more flexible philosophy of living. With its dazzling action sequences and even more impressive emotional and philosophical depth, The Grandmaster is the Hong Kong filmmaker's most vital, dazzling, and profound movie in about a decade, one whose slow-burn pleasures not even the Weinsteins' meddling for its U.S. release could entirely dim. Kenji Fujishima

"I'd hoped to never love again," says Marina (Olga Kurylenko), a French single mother who relocates to Oklahoma in order to live with her American boyfriend, Neil (Ben Affleck), in Terrence Malick's To the Wonder. It's a haunted confession of doubt—telling words that imply that there will be a painful expiration date to their whimsical romance. And the film progress along this fated trajectory. Early on, Marina and Neil are lost in each other's presence, as if nothing in this universe could come between their deeply felt connection. But as cinematographer Emmanuel Luzbeki's fluid camera continues to spin around them with the utmost grace, the relationship grows stagnant, like the Midwest landscapes poisoned by pollution that Malick highlights through Neil's occupation as an environmental scientist. Uncertainty is a constant throughout, and yet the film articulates a dizzying sense of reinvention via Marina's final dance on the beach. Here, Malick personifies the idea that happiness is possible when we find peace in the right place, at the right time, and with the right frame of mind. Hers is the transcendence that only happens when one learns to let go. Glenn Heath

A gifted fantasist, Michel Gondry has been most successful when he's grounded his surrealist reveries in a recognizable social reality, which is to say when he's been able to at least partially step outside his own head. While previous efforts like Be Kind Rewind were as much about the coming together of community amid depressed urban circumstances as they were the power of whimsical invention, the director's latest triumph is even more invested in its believably real-world dynamic, even as it largely unfolds in a single, theatricalized space. The product of two years of intense association between the director and a group of Bronx high school students who here play versions of themselves, The We and the I takes place during a long bus ride home from school in which the kids argue, flirt, goof around, and Gondry explores the specifics of a complex social dynamic. As the bus continues on and the numbers of students thin out, artificial barriers drop and the film cannily, movingly reveals the need for human connection that undergirds the restrictive, if necessary donning of public masks. Andrew Schenker

Barely slowing down to celebrate his ninth decade, Alain Resnais follows the sublime derangement of Wild Grass with another extraordinary balancing act of twilight introspection and youthful inspiration. A sense of mortality suffuses You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet from the start, as news of a playwright's demise summon a group of performers—including Michel Piccoli, Sabine Azéma, and Mathieu Amalric, all playing "themselves"—to the late artist's mansion. Yet it's not long before the doleful mood turns vibrant and the actors, faced with their friend's testament (a video recording of the rehearsal for one of his works), find themselves slipping in and out of the characters they've played over the years and the memories they've gathered over their lives. The spaces between past and present and performance and remembrance are familiar ones for the director of Last Year at Marienbad, but they've rarely been contemplated with such playfulness and heartfelt fluidity. Fusing the cinematic and the theatrical into a masterly meta-séance, You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet finds a serenely mischievous Resnais celebrating an art form that can connect us past even the limits of death itself. Fernando Croce

A key moment early in Gravity solidifies its allegorical underpinnings with guileless ease. Having just revealed the loss of her daughter to lieutenant Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) gazes across the Earth above which her life hangs by a thread, and in this single shot, Alfonso Cuarón devastatingly contrasts micro and macro visions of human life (and loss) against the emptiness of space from which our protagonists seek refuge. A miraculous fusion of populist spectacle and avant-garde audacity, the film's technical achievements are secondary to its spiritual longing, an implicit layer of this survivor's tale, and one fittingly underscored by the echoes of Maria Falconetti in Bullock's commanding close-ups. The psychological hellfire of her struggle is bolstered by Steven Price's electronic score, which suggests an exploding nebula of emotion, but it's ultimately Bullock's Stone who grounds the film, speaking to our collective fears and comforts with unyielding candor. Gravity's vision of human endurance is simplified, but it's far from simplistic, and those who think otherwise might do well to remember: Dying is easy; it's living that's hard. Rob Humanick