Slant Magazine

10. Poetry . In Lee Chang-dong's Poetry, a forgetful grandmother (Yun Jung-hee) finds for the first time, at sixtysomething, pleasure beyond self-effacement in her attempt to craft a poem for a writing class. This is an endeavor judged by her acquaintances as either too futile or lofty for someone of her status: "You're taking a what class?" She seems undaunted in the search for inspiration even when her grandson, for whom she is the de facto mother, takes part in an unspeakable crime. Like Bon Joon-Ho's Mother, Poetry places the Korean mother as unconditional devotee to her offspring to the point of incestuous sacrifice. They build their diseases together. The son's heinous wrongdoing works in both films as pleas for proof of a maternal affection that's never articulated through speech—pleas that are promptly answered by mothers willing to do absolutely anything to save the child, especially if it will keep them from ever growing up. In Poetry, this wordless game is psychosomatized in the grandmother's Alzheimer's disease, but also recovered through a kind of linguistic redemption when she begins to give poetic license for apples, flowers, or a flaccid elderly penis, to be something other than themselves. Diego Costa

9. Nostalgia for the Light. Celestial wonder and terrestrial atrocity make for instructive points of comparison in Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán's probing, contrapuntal documentary. Set amid the Atacama Desert in the director's native country, the film follows two groups of searchers, the astronomers who take advantage of the distant locale's unique propensity to facilitate stargazing, and families of victims from former dictator Augusto Pinochet's regime who search for the remnants of their loved ones buried deep beneath the land's arid surface. The legacy of the post-Allende reign of terror has long been Guzmán's chosen subject, but here he contextualizes the era's brutality not historically, but philosophically, weaving a rich web of meditations on past and present, the corporeal and the spiritual, the infinite and the achingly human-scale. Although some of Nostalgia for the Light's compare-and-contrast juxtapositions seem a little too on the nose, this is a work of significant moral and intellectual power, a movie that celebrates humankind's relentless thirst for knowledge or closure—or really anything larger than itself—and regards that unquenchable need with both awe and a resigned weariness born of too much history. Andrew Schenker

8. Tuesday, After Christmas. I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that Radu Muntean's Scope-framed portrait of an imploding marriage moves at the breakneck pace of something like Asghar Farhadi's A Separation. Tuesday, After Christmas is constructed of a series of very, very long takes, and the actors play their scenes at what you might call "life speed," and there are no Martha Marcy May Marlene-esque violent outbursts that have you dreading the third act. But somehow, unbelievably, in the harmony that comes from the interplay between these two rhythms (glacial camera, uninflected day-to-day domestic life), Muntean's clear-eyed portrait of a family in trouble—in trouble, but, you know, getting on with their lives—exerts a palpable force on the viewer that makes one feel, for once in a year of concept this and concept that films, like you made an organic connection. Jaime N. Christley

7. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Man's intrinsic relationship to animals and nature form the backbone of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, a hazy, hallucinatory work about a bee farmer whose fatal tropical malady summons both the spirit of his dead son—who's mated with a red-eyed Ghost Monkey to become a furry creature himself—and the ghost of his deceased wife. Politicized notions of silence and guilt creep into the film's portrait of the past's influence on the present, and eventually come to the fore through a mesmerizing narrative blending of time and space. Building upon the filmmaker's favored thematic concerns, Weerasethakul's latest is defined by its directorial style, full of languorous cinematography and immersive sound design, which creates a hypnotic otherworldly mood of both horror and hope. Just as its characters are in a constant state of physical and spiritual evolution, so too does the film prove a small but stunning progression forward in Weerasethakul's hauntingly ethereal cinema. Nick Schager

6. Margaret. In Margaret, the eyes have it. Kenneth Lonergan's follow-up to the infinitely more polite You Can Count on Me begins in tears, with a woman, horrifically run over by a bus and dying in the arms of young Lisa (spectacularly played by Anna Paquin), asking if her eyes are open, and ends with the teen and her mother (a resplendent J. Smith-Cameron) reaching for each over in mutual understanding across a river of tears. And seeing is believing what comes between Margaret's two operatic bookends: a two-and-a-half-hour snapshot of fear and loathing, conviction and compromise, longing and alienation, in post-9/11 New York City, presented through the point of a view of a teenage girl whose almost sadistic self-absorption is both agony and ecstasy. Bearing the battle scars of a contentious six-year journey from script to screen, Longergan's film maudit is all frayed nerves, every bit as messy, crazed, and alive with the promise and imagination of its main character. See them, for they may change the world. Ed Gonzalez

5. A Separation . A Separation opens with a two-shot that quietly informs every other event that will soon transpire in the film. An Iranian couple, Simin (Leila Hatami) and Naader (Peyman Moaadi, in one of the year's best performances) are appealing to an unseen representative of a family court for a separation. Simin wants to leave the country with Naader and their daughter, but he refuses to leave his father, who's in the grips of advanced Alzheimer's. Simin pleads, baring her frustrations and resentments while Naader tries to conceal his confusion and heartbreak to retain a semblance of traditionally masculine dignity. The court representative, apparently immune to the squishy, gray, unquantifiable emotions of the matter, only speaks of cut-and-dried rules and formalities. Sitting side by side, we can tell by their looks and gestures that this couple is still very much in love, but they've reached a perhaps fatal impasse. To reveal much more would be unfair, but Asghar Farhadi's devastating and extraordinary film isn't a predictable swipe at an antiquated, chauvinistic regime, but a more complex and human exploration of the varying standards—social, sexual, political, monetary—that insidiously imprison all of us. Chuck Bowen

4. The Tree of Life. Terrence Malick returns to the beginning of everything with his latest magnum opus, a spellbinding work that spans eons and comingles the ancient, recent, and present as a means of addressing the writer-director's guiding preoccupation with the inexorable continuum of life. Throughout, the cosmic is the microcosmic, with The Tree of Life eventually wending its way from the Big Bang to the 1950s Waco, Texas home of the O'Briens (a not-so-subtle proxy for Malick's own clan) and, specifically, to young Jack (a remarkably candid Hunter McCracken) and his struggle to reconcile his tumultuous inner division between cold nature (represented by Brad Pitt's hard father) and loving grace (Jessica Chastain's angelic mother). Working in an elliptical manner that suggests James Joyce and William Faulkner, Malick dispenses with conventional narrative in favor of a free-floating poeticism that casts the material as shards of personal memories ripped from its maker's subconscious—recollections that, culminating on an otherworldly beach, seem to have been pieced together in a desperate attempt, embodied by sequences of Sean Penn as adult Jack, to achieve a measure of reconciliation, salvation, and transcendence. Nick Schager

3. Mysteries of Lisbon. Rarely does a cinematic experience swallow you whole, but Mysteries of Lisbon, maybe the closest any film has come to being an epic poem, does just that. Chilean director Raúl Ruiz, who passed away this year at the tender age of 70, injects his simmering passion play about hidden identities and repressed memories with a graceful kinetic rhythm, a sense of cyclical movement that allows an ornate 19th-century Portugal to become an ocean of unrequited love and tragedy. It's a densely layered filmic landscape where textured interiors and sublime natural light surround an array of diverse characters—orphans, priests, soldiers, pirates, aristocrats—torn between emotional duress and philosophical enlightenment. The film's demanding temporal and spatial aesthetic, captured by haunting long takes and overlapping audio, creates a narrative Rubik's cube that keeps turning and twisting until each character has been aligned with their necessary fate. Yet despite its four-hour running time and laundry list of shape-shifting players, Mysteries of Lisbon is a breezy cinematic dream, a film that effortlessly mixes grand ideas (national trauma, historiography) with small emotional truths, ultimately revealing how one can perfectly mirror the other. Glenn Heath Jr.

2. A Brighter Summer Day. At last receiving an American release 20 years after its production, the late Edward Yang's drama of Taipei teenagers and their displaced mainland parents in the early 1960s is an austere, intensely emotional epic. Using only diegetic music (the sounds of Elvis and his western pop peers, heard on radio, phonograph, or covered with phonetic precision by idolatrous Taiwanese youths), it feels like Rebel Without a Cause or Cruel Story of Youth stripped of their lurid melodramatic filter, with gang violence and sexual awakenings viewed at an unromanticized, almost clinical distance, in the shadows of night, by flashlight or streetlamp. Its bursts of juvenile aggression are abrupt and messy (a brick to the head, a kick in the balls, wildly brandished swords) while the chief adult subplot, the unraveling of the central family's patriarch when the secret police grill him on past associates in Shanghai, climaxes with slow sadism in a spartan interrogation chamber. At nearly four hours, Yang's evocation of the time and place of his adolescence never plods, but lingers sadly over the gaps between home and exile, desire and madness. Bill Weber

1. Certified Copy. The year's most subtly intriguing cinematic puzzle is also its best film, a roaming two-hander that's by turns haunting, confounding, uplifting, and sad. Unnamed art-dealer She (Juliette Binoche) and visiting author James Miller (William Shimmell) wander through the streets of a rustic Italian village, encountering presumptuous baristas, sacred shrines, and hordes of hopeful brides, who blow into the frame like gusts of windblown flowers. Under the guiding hand of an eminent humanist like Abbas Kiarostami, what's essentially a rambling argument between two often-unlikable people turns into an extended examination of authenticity and imitation, expanding its characters' love for copies from art to architecture to humanity itself, an open tap endlessly spewing reproductions of itself. Less formally explosive than The Tree of Life, Certified Copy nevertheless solidifies Kiarostami's reputation as an international director, capable of porting his usual wistful themes and rigorous style onto a modern European setting, telling a story that's achingly specific but also beautifully universal. Jesse Cataldo