Slant Magazine

20. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The best episode of Mad Men never made, Tomas Alfredson's smoke-and-beige-lacquered film of John Le Carre's 1974 novel doesn't just focus on Well-Dressed Overgrown Boys, it also locates much of the same sense of proportion, and down-is-up layering of priorities, that underwrites the belief structure of each world. Me before you, ego before country, secrecy before loyalty, bureaucracy and shitty vindictiveness above all. In a deliciously rendered husk of post-imperial Great Britain, Alfredson performs the miracle of transforming Le Carre's prose—aggressively obfuscatory when it's not quietly purple—into a tapestry of fragments, half-heard conversations, and indelible details. Almost every actor in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is cast against type (Gary Oldman the church mouse, Tom Hardy a mop-topped ragamuffin, Mark Strong a largely decent fellow with a slight case of soul-sickness), but nobody is denied their moment in the sun. Jaime N. Christley

19. Meek's Cutoff. After stripping and reassembling the male-bonding journey movie with Old Joy and the neo-realist weepie with Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt set her sights this year on the western, perhaps the hoariest and most loaded of American genres. In Meek's Cutoff, her barebones approach is impressively realistic, imagining a cross-country journey through arid, featureless Eastern Oregon as an exercise in numbing frustration, an approach that more importantly lays the groundwork for the film's core gender conflict. Preserving the mystical status of the Old West as a place for allegorical fables and origin stories, she shapes this dusty journey into a parable of feminist agency. The westbound wagons of Meek's Cutoff represent not only the creeping vines of a still-growing nation, but the occasion for one woman's development, as Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams) progresses from dissatisfied frontier wife to rifle-wielding voice of reason, a welcome corrective to decades of decisive, bravely trailblazing male heroes. Jesse Cataldo

18. Leap Year. The perversions that take shape when nobody is watching pervades Leap Year, Michael Rowe's perfectly concise film about an ordinary woman (Monica del Carmen) alone in her apartment in Mexico City. She spends her time eating canned noodles, picking her nose, staring at the walls or at the neighbors, sometimes masturbating to their most banal gestures of intimacy, and, most symptomatically, having sex with strangers who always leave too soon. The rituals, the repetitions, the horror of solitude, as well as the ridiculous fantasies that it harbors—she could be Jeanne Dielman if she charged for her body, or a New Yorker with a Craigslist account. Del Carmen's realistic portrayal of a seemingly ordinary woman with supposedly extraordinary needs exposes the massive chasm between the performance of everyday life and the existential agony that underpins it. Leap Year is also an astute rumination on Latin American temporality and kinship. Here, time is tracked by whether or not one has already had lunch or dinner, and the family both haunts and suffocates even when, or especially when, it's the least physically present. Diego Costa

17. A Dangerous Method. For all the repression and freaky sexuality and obsession and caning Keira Knightly across the ass, A Dangerous Method might be David Cronenberg's sunniest take on the question of "the new flesh" in all the 40-odd years he's been contemplating it. Mildly heartbreaking that it should also seem to look forward to two World Wars. It's also the case that Cronenberg hijacks very proper and very dry prestige material and, in the very act of giving said material the deluxe, clean-lined, hi-fi treatment, finds what may be Patient Zero of all the perversions and blasphemies to come, right in the fabric of the film. It begins with Michael Fassbender's faithful husband and good doctor Carl Jung applying the "talking cure" to Knightley’s hysterical Sabina Spielrein, who seems beyond help. With perverse precision and spotless period detail, Cronenberg performs the talking cure on his own film at the same time as Jung performs his, unraveling and redeeming the 20th century even as it's only getting just started. Jaime N. Christley

16. El Sicario, Room 164. El Sicario, Room 164, one of the most revealing and shocking documentaries ever made about the drug trade, is mostly a series of fixed shots of a masked man talking to a camera. The sicario's story is a familiar, eerily three-act rise-and-fall crime saga: A young poor child is seduced by a Mexican's cartel's vast power and gradually evolves from performing petty errands and crimes to kidnapping and torturing people for maddeningly vague reasons. Eventually tiring of the lifestyle's accompanying drug abuse and alcoholism, the assassin becomes a pariah in danger of winding up on the wrong end of a gun himself. There are haunting, inventive touches that quietly speak to the matter-of-factness of his dehumanization: The former killer sketches accompanying images on a pad while talking, and he occasionally rises from his chair to pantomime some of his more outrageous acts. These simple gestures, which speak of the effectiveness of elegantly pared filmmaking, suggest a truth, and a disturbing empathy, that more enraged, self-righteous documentaries rarely manage: the terrifyingly casual roots of evil. Chuck Bowen

15. Beginners. The past—familial, historical, collective—haunts the contemporary in Mike Mills's beautifully modulated, crystal-eyed Beginners, a relationship drama that employs a fractured flashback structure to precisely situate the present. Built around a trio of superb performances, Mills's film details Oliver Fields's (Ewan McGregor) inability to commit to girlfriend Anna (Mélanie Laurent) because of the tensions in his own parents' marriage, largely the result of his father's (Christopher Plummer) gayness. But the film is concerned with far more than this somewhat reductive psychology; it's about the precision of individual experience , which Mills evokes with astonishing exactitude, whether detailing the elder Fields's late-life involvement in the Los Angeles gay community or in constructing wonderfully offbeat scenes, as when Oliver dons a Sigmund Freud costume (and persona) for a party. Beyond its understanding of individual interactions, though, Beginners views its characters as players in a shifting socio-historical drama, one in which familial roles and concepts of queerness evolve and define the life of a country and its citizens. The series of contextualizing voiceover montages that Mills concocts—melancholic snapshots of different eras—not only entwine the personal and political, but get at the raw heart of lives lived under the shadow of the past, poised for new beginnings. Andrew Schenker

14. Tomboy. What's in a name? A kindred spirit of Andre Téchiné, Céline Sciamma is an astute chronicler of difficult emotional terrain and a subtle explorer of young people's bourgeoning sexual identity. Tomboy, a work of almost bucolic serenity filled with poignant glimpses of the bonds of sisterhood, begins with prepubescent Laure (Zoé Héran) bathed in the Edenic glow of family, a force so mesmeric as to convince anyone of feeling invincible to pain and heartache. And so, after moving to a new town with her parents and sister, a cherubic little thing ostracized by her youth from the very world her older sis seeks to belong to, the sensitive Laure, confused for a boy by a neighbor girl who might not want her if she knew Laure was developing breasts of her own, introduces herself as Michaël. What follows is a tense, impeccably detailed study of all the lies, compromises, and secret negotiations that must take place for Laure to maintain the illusion of belonging to a world dominated by the games forbidden to girls by boys. Ed Gonzalez

13. In the Family. This year saw the release of many impressive debut films, but they all feel weightless compared to Patrick Wang's ambitious, compassionate, and devastating three-hour masterpiece. The story may seem small and contained on the surface: interior designer Joey (Wang) loses his partner Cody (Trevor St. John) in a car accident, which upends his paternal relationship with Cody's young son and isolates him further from a surrogate family who were once so close. But there's nothing minor about the brilliant way In the Family handles regional identity and societal contradictions, themes that are explored during dialogue-driven set pieces where humility and understanding can be found in every pause. With an Ozu-like attention to detail and silence, Wang establishes a palpable sincerity toward Joey's disintegrating sense of family that never trivializes or moralizes his suffering or scorn. Instead, the film values conversation, the impact of waiting, and the power of optimism. Unlike most sentimental Hollywood schmaltz, In the Family earns its tears by spending long amounts of time with characters we care about, those who speak to each other and not at each other. Most notably, in Wang we have found a major talent, a chronicler of complex emotional collisions and reflections who expresses himself profoundly without resorting to theatrics. Glenn Heath Jr.

12. Film Socialisme. Manny Farber wrote over 40 years ago that no filmmaker matched Jean-Luc Godard in making him feel like an ass. Farber is gone, but Godard, now past 80, continued to intimidate and divide with this latest provocation, a video essay that, particularly in light of world events since its debut, seems inescapably about the end of Europe as we've known it. Its first half full of rich metaphorical fun aboard a cruise ship tooling around the Mediterranean, Film Socialisme's technical palette encompasses stunning HD frames of churning surf and low-grade phone cam to capture neon-lit dancing and drinking, as shadowy characters and a narrator ponder the history of Egypt, Palestine, Odessa, Greece, Naples, and Barcelona. On dry land, a family operating a gas station is embroiled in politics and media attention, though it's hard to say for certain why a llama and a mule are tethered to the tanks out front, since Godard supplied only "Navajo subtitles" running an average of three words to translate the English-language release. Repeated viewings figure to enlighten, flummox, and assify contemporary Farbers, but Godard's cryptic travelogue through the past is ambitious and elegiac enough to ponder for the rest of this epoch. Bill Weber

11. Take Shelter. Much has been made of the very last scene in writer-director Jeff Nichols's powerhouse follow-up to Shotgun Stories. But if this confusing and mostly negligible ending were more important, it wouldn't be the film's coda. Take Shelter is more of a study of the fractured psyche of blue-collar family man Curtis (a more-haunted-than-usual Michael Shannon) than it is about the apocalyptic visions that he's afflicted with. The puissance of the trauma that he experiences is more important than whether or not these nightmarish daydreams actually mean something. Suggesting Hour of the Wolf set in heartland America, Take Shelter is about the working-class Southern gothic milieu that engenders Curtis's hallucinations. It's also about how Curtis's problems immediately threaten his family. Jessica Chastain gives one of the year's best performances as Curtis's concerned wife and partner, and the scene where she and Shannon argue about whether or not they should open their cellar's storm doors is devastating. Simon Abrams