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The 100 Best Films of the 2010s

Our top films of the decade offer insights and riches that are inexhaustible.

The 100 Best Films of the 2010s
Photo: Icarus Films

While the increasingly tiresome bubble of online film discourse only seems capable of processing one or two works of art in any given week, the number of films released in North America each year has doubled in the past decade. The story of the next decade is likely to be one studio’s stranglehold on the box office and the theatrical moviegoing experience writ large, but the sheer volume of new voices with fresh ideas and perspectives continues to grow unabated. It’s up to us to grant them the attention they deserve.

Our top films of the decade contain ample proof that much of the most vital art being made today comes from a place beyond the ken of the algorithms attempting to control our attention. They offer insights and riches that are inexhaustible. Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret began the decade spinning a city symphony out of a teenager’s first brush with tragedy; today, its classroom scenes are a harrowing, uproarious omen of the discourse we trudge through each day. Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse and Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God are twinned in their monochromatic, overwhelming shrugs toward the apocalypse, while other final films (Abbas Kiarostami’s 24 Frames and Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie) mine the sublime from stillness.

Most of the directors cited here more than once (including Lonergan, Kiarostami, and Kelly Reichardt) are firmly ensconced in the canon of contemporary auteurs, while a few have more stealthily entered the conversation. Maren Ade’s Everyone Else and Toni Erdmann are scabrous examinations of moneyed classes that are nonetheless immensely heartfelt. Robert Greene has developed a remarkable body of work scrutinizing the nature of performance, but this phrase does nothing to explain how one filmmaker could produce films of such disparate conceits and ideas as Kate Plays Christine and Bisbee ‘17. Don Hertzfeld, conversely, puts his inimitable tragicomic stamp on two distinctly expansive animated visions.

Surrounding the dozen-plus filmmakers making numerous appearances here are a string of works by both established and emerging artists that point to the continued innovation of both studio and independent film. Ramon Zürcher’s The Strange Little Cat is a marvel of contradictions, diffusing a boisterous family drama into a patchwork of discrete asides. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan and Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s Manakamana are sumptuously designed documentaries that reorient our sense of the cinema as spectacle, a word that must be associated with George Miller (Mad Max: Fury Road) and Leos Carax’s (Holy Motors) lone outings this decade. And works as unalike as Ezra Edelman’s O.J.: Made in America, Hamaguchi Ryûsuke’s Happy Hour, and Mariano Llinás’s La Flor reminded us that seemingly any manner of story can be worthy of a length most audiences reserve for a season of television.

The difference between the two mediums is becoming increasingly slippery, and for some unearthly reason a noisy portion of the internet never seems to tire of pedantic debates about which creators and which works belong in which canon. A few entries on our list aired as TV miniseries here or in Europe (Li’l Quinquin and Olivier Assayas’s Carlos) but were released theatrically in North America. Some of us saw most of these one hundred films in theaters, but they made their way to us in many different scenarios, on screens that were inches, feet, or stories high. They’ll endure on any format. Christopher Gray

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The Voters: Chuck Bowen, Pat Brown, Jake Cole, Clayton Dillard, Ed Gonzalez, Christopher Gray, Wes Greene, Glenn Heath Jr., Eric Henderson, Rob Humanick, Oleg Ivanov, Joshua Kim, Carson Lund, Sam C. Mac, Niles Schwartz, Diego Semerene, Derek Smith.


Creed

100. Creed (Ryan Coogler)

If the modern franchise product is Lebron James, pummeling opponents and raking in billions through sheer might, then Creed is its Steph Curry, infusing a familiar formula with an uncanny and seemingly effortless grace. Cinematographer Maryse Alberti has been rightly hailed for Creed’s mid-film, single-take fight scene, but hasn’t received enough credit for realizing one of the decade’s most complex and indelible shots, literally projecting the legacy of deceased fighter Apollo Creed onto his illegitimate son, Adonis Johnson (Michael B. Jordan). As Adonis shadowboxes with the ghost of his father, Alberti, Johnson, and director Ryan Coogler set up both the film’s primary plot and its meta-textual thesis: A legacy is both a burden and a privilege. This is one of many clichés that Creed infuses with an earnest, timeworn vibrancy. Bolstered by charismatic performers and a patient sensibility that allows dramatic scenes to last a few self-questioning beats longer than expected, Coogler has transformed a very white franchise into one pointedly concerned with black lives and traditions. The triumphant result is, like Adonis running through the streets of Philadelphia with a crew of dirt bikers and updated version of Bill Conti’s iconic score, at once unapologetically schmaltzy, supremely self-conscious, and resoundingly progressive. Gray


Bastards

99. Bastards (Claire Denis)

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


The Lost City of Z

98. The Lost City of Z (James Gray)

“I will help you, because you will make sure that nothing will change,” says a plantation owner and rubber baron (Franco Nero) dressed in a fine white suit and fanned by a native slave, to Major Percival “Percy” Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam). The baron assumes that Fawcett’s mapmaking expedition in the Amazon is meant to maintain the constancy of early 20th-century colonialism—of occupations that mitigate conflict through control. But in actuality, like Marion Cotillard’s Ewa Cybulska in James Gray’s earlier The Immigrant, Fawcett exists outside of the strictures of his time—a deliberate anachronism. The man’s break from the era’s accepted social norms, his belief in exploration as more than a means of exploitation, and his dreams of the future as a corrective for the past reflect both his repentance for an “unfortunate” ancestry (his father was a gambler and a drunk) and broadly represent emergent 20th-century modernism. Gray’s opulent formalism channels Fawcett’s delusions of grandeur, making for an intoxicating adventure film. And the director’s typically bracing intelligence—employed here to examine the psychological toll of obsession, and the philosophical weight of understanding, and accepting, change—lends the narrative the scope and detail of a classical epic. Like The Immigrant, The Lost City of Z is about ideologies out of step from the present moment of the world they exist in, and is itself a film out of its own time. Sam C. Mac

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In the Family

97. In the Family (Patrick Wang)

The decade 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.


Museum Hours

96. Museum Hours (Jem Cohen)

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


Oslo, August 31

95. Oslo, August 31st (Joachim Trier)

Drug addiction is by now overly familiar cinematic terrain, and yet Joachim Trier finds new ways to investigate the struggle to manage dependency with Oslo, August 31st, a piercing snapshot of one man’s struggle to survive a day-long trip out of rehab for a job interview. Along that journey, Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie) also visits an old party buddy and attempts to reunite with his estranged sister, and Trier’s camera sticks to Anders with an intensity that’s matched by Lie, whose inner turmoil bubbles with increasing volatility beneath his placid, haunted exterior. Lie radiates wrenching confusion and aimlessness, lending Anders the quality of being on the constant precipice of either transcendence or doom. Throughout, the film never operates as a straight melodrama, instead assuming a tranquil, compassionately observant stance on its lost, ambiguous protagonist, who seems potentially incapable of not just big-picture change, but of making the daily transitions—in attitude, in emotion, in reaction—required by life. It’s a tragedy of personal proportions, imbued with greater dimension through Lie’s magnificent performance and Trier’s affectionate portrait of the titular Norway capital as a place of both perpetual change and of unforgettable, and inescapable, memories. Nick Schager


The Treasure

94. The Treasure (Corneliu Porumboiu)

A (literal) excavation of Romanian history, Corneliu Porumboiu’s The Treasure explores a single, unremarkable plot of land (it had previously served as a kindergarten, steelworks, brickworks, and bar, but now lies empty and abandoned) as a microcosm of a nation’s variegated past and desultory present. With meticulous pacing and rigorously composed long shots, Porumboiu develops an ever-so-subtle suspense as we observe a trio of down-on-their-luck men equipped with metal detectors comb the land for loot supposedly buried there by a wealthy ancestor before the country’s communist takeover. The meticulousness of Porumboiu’s form provides ironic contrast to the hapless bumbling of his characters, creating an abiding air of melancholy deadpan that’s relieved only by the film’s jarringly triumphalist final image, a swooping crane shot that soars up to the heavens. After so long staring at the ground, simply looking up can feel like liberation. Keith Watson

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Certain Women

93. Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt)

Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women is a modern exploration of the role of feminine certitude within the context of the dyed-in-the-wool codes and attitudes of the American West. Three strivers embodying gradients of progressive womanhood—a headstrong lawyer (Laura Dern), an eco-conscious homebuilder (Michelle Williams) managing her own husband, and a solitary rancher (Lily Gladstone, in a breakout performance) harboring inchoate lesbian longings—all carry the titular quality, and yet the film dramatizes, in Reichardt’s characteristically sobering manner, the clash of that conviction against obstacles that invariably thwart the fulfillment of desire. The film is thus a delicate rejoinder to the all-American bromide of self-sufficiency and will power as routes to fulfillment, the defining thematic constellation of the western in its classical form. That Reichardt emulates the genre’s components just cannily enough (expansive landscape photography, a climactic horse ride) while also subtly defamiliarizing them (plentiful dead air, unnervingly detuned ambient sound) makes her persuasions—her certainty—that much more revelatory. Carson Lund


Zero Dark Thirty

92. Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow)

Much like Fritz Lang’s M, Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty begins with violent death that’s aurally suggested rather than seen, and concludes with a woman’s ambiguously symbolic tears. These disorienting overloads of affect bookend a deceptively rational police-procedural thriller, cataloguing the steps taken by a steely C.I.A. operative (Jessica Chastain) to hunt down Osama bin Laden through a political decade defined by torture and mishap. Hyperkinetic drama trumps context throughout; discussion of Operation Cyclone and even Islam is riskily absent, as though Bigelow were writing history with lightning. The code-named characters meanwhile behave like they’re auditioning for HBO; Chastain’s self-proclaimed “motherfucker” of an agent, who scrawls angry notes on her male superior’s office window (a.k.a. “the glass ceiling”), has an anemically sketched inner life. Yet all of these vernacular tropes form a shrewd, daring rouse. In a move worthy not only of Lang but of Brecht, Bigelow has politicized her pop aesthetics. Her compulsively watchable film brings a global exchange of unthinkable pain down to earth while still retaining the essence of its ineffability. Zero Dark Thirty is ultimately about unknowable cost—not only the cost of keeping a worldwide hegemony afloat with grisly violence, but the cost of maintaining a worldwide entertainment industry with facsimiles of the same. Joseph Jon Lanthier


La Flor

91. La Flor (Mariano Llinás)

Mariano Llinás slyly constructs La Flor as a series of loosely interlocking labyrinths with no clear resolutions, presupposing cinema as being solely about the journey rather than the destination. Across its exuberant 14-plus hours and six episodes, several of which add digressions within digressions, Llinás upends expectations and stretches his formal muscles as his film traverses an array of genres, styles, and spoken languages and playfully dismantles and toys with the very notion of storytelling itself. As its production lasted for a full decade, Llinás’s sprawling magnum opus inevitably sees its four main actresses, who star in all but one of the six episodes, gracefully age as they shapeshift from musicians and scientists to spies, assassins, actors, and, ultimately, themselves. As a structural gambit, La Flor is as ambitious as anything released in the past decade, let alone year, and the symbiotic relationship between Llinás and his magnificently malleable performers—particularly Pilar Gamboa, whose brooding intensity reaches its height during the emotionally wrenching song which concludes episode two—lend the film’s wildly inventive metafictions an unmistakable warmth. Derek Smith


Carlos

90. Carlos (Olivier Assayas)

Olivier Assayas’s jittery epic on the ascent and dissipation of the Venezuela-born ’70s terrorist Carlos the Jackal keeps its dizzying procession of splashy crimes, revolutionary debate, and global political theater spinning to a late-punk, new-wave song score, from headline-making coups to the Jackal’s ignominious, anticlimactic capture. Édgar Ramírez’s embodiment of the ambitious killer begins as sexy and dogmatic—he vows to a skeptical lover that he will deliver “behind every bullet, an idea”—and, after exile turns him puffy and nihilistic, spirals into the amorality of contract arms-running, and the shrunken status of an insubstantial fly in world capitalism’s ointment. Despite some nerve-frying sequences, like the 1975 hostage-taking of OPEC ministers, what Assayas drives home throughout Carlos is the banality and incoherence of the Jackal’s desire for “la gloria” through asymmetric warfare. Bill Weber

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The Naked Room

89. The Naked Room (Nuria Ibañez)

Gilles Deleuze once wrote of the close-ups in Persona: “Bergman has pushed the nihilism of the face the furthest, that is its relationship in fear to the void or the absence, the fear of the face confronted with its nothingness.” A reckoning of sorts with that nihilism, even a rebuke of it, The Naked Room gives a face to the void. Director Nuria Ibañez, a “direct cinema” proponent, places the viewer in the position of the unseen psychologists who allow a collective of boys and girls at a Mexico City hospital to open up about how such horrors as sexual and physical abuse, rape, homelessness, and domestic violence have affected their young lives. And through the tapestry of haunted faces she stitches together, a picture of a nation failing its youngest generation slowly comes into focus, though this is less rage against the machine than potentially healing show to empathy. Whether sobbed or whimpered, these confessions ring with a sense of relief, as if being safely spoken aloud for the first time, suggesting that these children may not be chased by their wounds for the rest of their lives. Ed Gonzalez


Listen Up Philip

88. Listen Up Philip (Alex Ross Perry)

Alex Ross Perry’s comically deadpan study of the repellent Philip Lewis Friedman (Jason Schwartzman), a writer whose narcissistic dedication to his craft leaves a trail of emotional damage in its wake, uses a searing black wit, literary dialogue, and abrupt shifts in perspective to subtly give way to something disarmingly tragic: The inability to reconcile artistic success with a gratifying personal life. In Philip’s insecure worldview, one can’t benefit from the other without one suffering, which cannily furthers Perry’s ongoing exploration into the complex human need for intimate companionship, and comes branded with the director’s unique and eccentric sense of empathy that transcends the film’s easy pigeonholing as a Philip Roth love letter. The personalities featured in the unapologetically lo-fi Listen Up Philip are mercilessly insufferable, despicable and alienating, but, in a time when an increasingly gentrified indie-film landscape has become overrun with filmmakers’ tepid Hollywood calling cards, their company (to paraphrase the perfectly cued Supremes track at the end of Listen Up Phillip) brings on a symphony. Wes Greene


Romancing in thin Air

87. Romancing in Thin Air (Johnnie To)

In an extraordinary run of largely action movies, from 2013’s Drug War to 2016’s Three, Johnnie To has embraced the artifice behind deftly constructed set pieces and twisty potboiler narratives by delving into the layered games of role play—undercover cops in the mob and moles in law enforcement—that they pivot around. Right before that cycle kicked off came 2012’s Romancing in Thin Air, a reminder that the formulas underpinning To’s romantic comedies are just as rife for drawing out their potential complexities as those of his ultraviolet films. Here, role play is deliriously implicated in a romantic roundelay between a frigid motel owner (Sammi Cheng) and an alcoholic movie star in hiding (Louis Koo). Both are reeling from losses that can only be compensated for by what each has to offer the other, but To builds to this eventual realization methodically, never revealing the full scope of his ambitions until one revelatory sequence that uses the medium of cinema—and its revisionist ability to rewrite the roles that our lives cast us into—as a profound catalyst for healing. To has made films more traditionally impressive for their aesthetic brio, but he’s never made a film as conceptually daring, nor as emotionally affecting, as this one. Mac


The World of Tomorrow

86. The World of Tomorrow (Don Hertzfeldt)

In the vibrantly colorful and dizzyingly surreal World of Tomorrow, Don Hertzfeldt depicts an isolating, emotionally vacant future where generation upon generation of clones carry the uploaded memories of their human primes. Hertzfeldt’s typically neurotic musings on humanity’s inescapable fear of death and his own anxieties over the increasing sense of solitude and disconnection fostered by a society intent on boundless technological innovation are cleverly counterbalanced by his caustic wit and pitch-perfect deadpan humor. In pitting the adorable, hilariously oblivious toddler Emily Prime (voiced by Hertzfeldt’s four-year-old niece using candid audio recordings), who’s replete with all the naïveté and unfettered joys of youth, against a future where technology has completely divorced people from their humanity, Hertzfeldt encourages us to cherish the profound beauty and joyous absurdities of existence while we can. As the elder clone reminds young Emily, “Now is the envy of all the dead.” Smith

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Kate Plays Christine

85. Kate Plays Christine (Robert Greene)

Actors frequently discuss in interviews their creative process in constructing a character, but how often do we actually see this process? Robert Greene’s not-quite-documentary Kate Plays Christine begins as such a showcase, in that we observe actress Kate Lyn Sheil roaming around an otherworldly vision of Sarasota, Florida as she develops the physical and emotional nuances of her role as Christine Chubbuck, the WXLT-TV newscaster who took her own life on live television on July 15, 1974. But as Sheil’s oscillation between herself and her Chubbuck persona become as slippery as the film’s depiction of reality and fiction, Greene’s impossibly multifaceted whatsit unfolds into a discourse on the ethical quandaries in repackaging Chubbuck’s struggle with female identity as mass media. In this sense, and due partly to the concerns Sheil voices to Greene over his desire to tell Chubbuck’s story, the film engages in critical self-analysis and (especially in the climax) deadpan self-deprecation. Yet this dose of humility shouldn’t mislead from the simple fact that Kate Plays Christine is one of the most profound and necessary commentaries on the filmmaking process. Greene


Carol

84. Carol (Todd Haynes)

Whereas Far from Heaven felt slightly calcified by its devotion to Douglas Sirk’s signature aesthetic, Carol seems to at once acknowledge its influences—Sirk, Robert Altman, Vincente Minnelli—and push beyond them to get at Haynes’s personal artistic perspective. There are images in this tale of two women in love that seethe with desire in ways that the filmmaker has only hinted at before, from a flexing, bare back to the titular housewife eating forkfuls of creamed spinach with impossible poise. Both Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara summon an immediate sense of kinship, empathy, and hunger for each other’s characters, communicated through practiced, graceful deliveries, eloquent gestures, and glances and gazes that seem to be understood as code. Haynes, working from Phyllis Nagy’s measured, evocative script, cloaks this timely, angry, and melancholic tale in exquisite production design and period detail, which has caused some to accuse the film of favoring style over substance. On the contrary, Haynes’s luminous aesthetic both suggests the old-fashioned nature of the romance that’s portrayed here, and a modern world stuck in the past, still unable to fully accept passions as simultaneously unique and familiar as those felt, and shared intimately, by Carol and Therese. Chris Cabin


The Grand Bizarre

83. The Grand Bizarre (Jodie Mack)

A film that’s constantly on the move, Jodie Mack’s The Grand Bizarre is a brilliant bonanza of color, texture, and globe-trotting good vibrations. With extensive use of time-lapse photography, stop-motion animation, and quick-cut montages, Mack creates a sense of boundless energy and constant movement, of people and things (but mostly things) in an endless flow around the globe. Mack takes fabric—vibrant, beautifully crafted swatches and scarves from a range of different cultures—as her central image, seeing them on trains and planes, popping out of suitcases, on the beach, in rear-view mirrors, and in dozens of other configurations that present them not as objets d’art to be admired in some folk art museum, but as products moving in the international stream of capitalism. Though it runs just over an hour, The Grand Bizarre is epic by the standards of Mack’s oeuvre, which has mostly consisted of shorts, and so it’s no surprise that the documentary is essentially a series of vignettes providing endless variations on the same themes: globalization, the interconnectedness of culture, and the beauty of traditional textiles. Repeatedly, Mack emphasizes the thing-ness of these fabrics. These are items that were made—some by hand, others by machine—before they were subsequently packed up and shipped off to different corners of the world. Each one originated in the artisanal traditions of a particular place and people, to which they are just as deeply rooted as the music and language of these cultures, parallels that Mack draws with a uniquely jaunty sense of style and wit. Watson


Timbuktu

82. Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako)

In Timbuktu’s opening sequence, a line of ancient African figurines and masks torn apart by jihadi bullets lie in the sand like so many mutilated bodies, a foreshadowing of killings to come. But writer-director Abderrahmane Sissako, who grew up in Mali and Mauritania, is less interested in the terrible violence jihadists have inflicted on his people than in the many smaller humiliations and restrictions the jihadists impose and the heroic acts of defiance that often greet them. As he did in Bamako, Sissako illustrates the damage done by a ruthless institution (in this case, fundamentalists bent on establishing a new caliphate) by focusing on its effect on one formerly happy family. Professional and non-professional actors alike—including singer Fatoumata Diawara, whose improvised song of mourning provides the film with one of its most terrible and beautiful scenes—contribute to the film’s realism by inhabiting their characters with un-self-conscious ease. At the same time, Sissako ramps up the underlying sense of dread. Unfolding his story of occupation, resistance, and collateral damage at a stately yet relentless pace, and often either cutting just before a moment of high drama or filming it from a distance, he maintains a powerful thrum of tragic inevitability while avoiding any hint of propagandistic exploitation. Elise Nakhnikian

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Paterson

81. Paterson (Jim Jarmusch)

At a time when certain doom seems to hover just above our heads, a film like Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson becomes all the more essential, its understated, rhythmic rendering of ordinary existence feeling both timeless and entirely modern. Telling the most mundane of stories, the film recounts one week in the life of a bus-driving, happily married poet without resorting to high-stakes conflict, strained symbolism, or overwrought showmanship, featuring no villain greater than an ill-tempered bulldog or a frenzied spurned lover with a gussied-up squirt gun. Its aims may seem modest, but Paterson excels by operating in a register few films bother to touch, serving as an important reminder of the sanctity of the everyday, the pleasures of the routine, and the sacred rite of doing something you love without the expectation of reward. Condensing William Carlos Williams’s sprawling city-spanning epic poem of the same name down to a small-focus character study, Jarmusch constructs one of the most effortlessly lyrical films in recent memory. Jesse Cataldo


Everyone Else

80. Everyone Else (Maren Ade)

This richly playful, intuitive, and frank romance ponders a deceptively simple question: Is respectability necessarily a sign of maturity? The answer lies in a heartbreaking scene from Maren Ade’s Everyone Else, during which Birgit Minichmayr’s Gitti enters a store and, feeling defenseless, allows a clerk to apply makeup to her face, which she promptly scrubs away a scene later with the ferocity of someone upchucking a night’s worth of booze. That moment is a realization for both the character and the audience, when it becomes absolutely clear that Gitti is obscuring her uniqueness by bending over for class snobbery, comes a little later for Lars Eidinger’s Chris, during a euphoric scene that, like many before it, is at once horrific and comic—a reminder that love means never having to pretend to be someone that you’re not. Gonzalez


The Day He Arrives

79. The Day He Arrives (Hong Sang-soo)

Shot through with a vein of melancholy that’s perfectly in keeping with its moody monochromatic cinematography, Hong Sang-soo’s The Day He Arrives is ostensibly a comedy of (ill-) manners centered on Seong-jun (Yoo Jun-sang), a former filmmaker who returns to Seoul after several years’ self-imposed exile in the countryside. Within this characteristically shaggy-dog narrative, Hong puts into play themes he’s returned to time and again: masculine irresponsibility, the emotional and psychological ramifications of random events, the paradoxical incongruity between our interiority and the social self we present to others. Only the emphasis this time out is on compulsive repetitiveness: Hong keeps resetting the clock by returning his drunken band to the same bar (ironically named Novel), just as Seong-jun seeks out the bar owner because of her resemblance to an ex, only to wind up repeating the same self-serving behavior. What’s more, Hong’s forking-paths narrative possesses an improvisatory musical quality, akin to the piece Seong-jun plunks out on the bar’s piano, reiterating recurrent themes amplified by revelatory variations. For Hong, these twin qualities establish our existential limits, representing the warp and woof of our very lives. Budd Wilkins


Monrovia, Indiana

78. Monrovia, Indiana (Frederick Wiseman)

After making a series of films over the last few years that took encouraging views of communities and institutions, celebrating how people of different backgrounds can be brought around to new ways of thinking, Frederick Wiseman settles with Monrovia, Indiana on a milieu whose relative social, cultural, and religious homogeneity results in a brutal narrowing of horizons for the eponymous town’s population. Over the course of a relatively curt two-and-a-half-hours, the film volleys between town council meetings, commercial farming shifts, freemasonry ceremonies, class sessions at a high school, and more. Wiseman stitches each episode together with depopulated shots of Monrovia’s one-block main street and surrounding cornfields—all edited in uptempo fashion to emphasize the almost chilling emptiness of the town. The filmmaker lingers attentively on the minutia of labor within Monrovia, even as he leaves out the ultimate upshot of all this repetitive work. What awaits the souls of Monrovia—or contemporary America, for that matter—other than the grave? Wiseman’s elegy, which concludes with one of the most profoundly unsettling monologues in his oeuvre, seeks this answer and comes up wanting. Lund

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Somewhere

77. Somewhere (Sofia Coppola)

Somewhere is a Hollywood film about Hollywood that completely ignores the rules of traditional narrative filmmaking, and of indie filmmaking: This experimental pop film stands on its own, peerless and without precedent, at least in the movies. And it’s only in relationship to music that I can position the film. With its sugar-pop harmonies created out of flowing waves of dissonance, Somewhere is like Nowhere, the 1990 album from the British band Ride that was a key work in the shoegaze movement—also known as “the scene that celebrates itself,” not unlike the criticisms often unfairly hurled at Coppola. The film kicks in with a hum; a low sound, like the sound of a car’s revving engine, rides underneath the rock song that accompanies the opening credits, enveloping and overwhelming viewers until they’re disarmed. Miriam Bale


Chi-Raq

76. Chi-Raq (Spike Lee)

Chi-raq appears to have gurgled up out of the deepest recesses of an American culture in the midst of a death rattle. In the beautifully blunt and incisive opening, the lyrics to Nick Cannon’s haunting “Pray 4 My City” fade in and out over a black screen that subsequently blares with the message “This is an Emergency” in red block letters. The emergency in question is the unending wave of death spurred by the United States’s addiction to guns, and the insidiously cultivated institutions of disenfranchisement that incite it. The film takes pop culture’s instruments of mass distraction by the reins—namely its obsessions with sex and money—and repurposes them for agitprop that transcends preachiness by the sheer force of its figurative power. Chi-raq is willing to try anything, reaping astonishing emotional returns on director Spike Lee’s daring and empathy. Musical numbers, ancient Greek theater, oration, rhyming verse, documentary, dance, farce, lewd, lurid hijinks, and high tragedy are all fused together by a sensual formalism that’s commanding even by Lee’s considerable standards. There’s never been anything quite like this film, which always appears to be on the verge of collapsing in on itself, under the weight of its vast ambition and scope. It’s this sense of risk and tension that ultimately render Chi-raq so scalding and unforgettable. Bowen


The Assassin

75. The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-hsien)

Just as Millennium Mambo’s prologue teases momentous turn-of-the-century events that conspicuously fail to materialize, so, too, is The Assassin’s opening a misnomer of sorts, a lengthy text on the 9th-century power struggle between the imperial court of China and the renegade province of Weibo. Although Hou Hsiao-hsien thrusts his titular assassin straight into the swirling vortex of this rivalry, he shows little interest in disentangling its intricacies, as consequence doesn’t necessarily follow cause, proverbs and recollections trump exposition, and the ellipse is everything. The focus is placed instead on something far more radical, the sensation of following discussions conducted in candlelight behind fluttering curtains, of passing through vast landscapes in the hope of finding direction, of having to land blows your mind is no longer behind. The Assassin is a ravishing repository of ever-shifting colors, textures, and shadows, a piercing assertion that recreating a historical era must take into consideration how differently said era might have grasped time, space, and narration. And Hou remains just as capable of conjuring forth islands of pure emotion without any recourse to standard identification: the story of a bluebird only induced to sing by the sight of its sad reflection, a body racked by sobs, its face entirely covered, a golden mask in pieces on the forest floor. James Lattimer


The Strange Little Cat

74. The Strange Little Cat (Ramon Zürcher)

With The Strange Little Cat, first-time German filmmaker Ramon Zürcher delivers a tour de force so quietly beguiling that by the end of it you may still be asking yourself what it’s all about. It’s unclear to what extent Zürcher aimed to channel Kafka’s Metamorphosis, with a cast standing in for the beetle, but here’s a tale of family dynamics that’s as imaginatively insular and, oftentimes, as enthralling as Gregor Samsa’s. The film’s minimalist plot can be summed up thus: a middle-class family breakfasts and cooks together, while the family’s cat and dog go on apartment-wide prowl. Soon more family guests arrive, and the afternoon, shot almost entirely inside the apartment, ends with the ailing grandma snoozing at the dinner table. The Strange Little Cat can’t be said to strictly have a plot, but its structure isn’t patchwork either. What follows are small ways in which family members shut or seek each other out. The fine-tuned, delicate performance of Jenny Schilly, as the mother, weaves the scenes together, like a musical piece. Fleeting moments are deliberately charged: a bottle spins inside a pot, a moth clings to the lampshade. Objects, pets, and people occupy the same plane of interest in this beautiful mosaic of domesticity—and yes, occasional, miniaturist terror. The effect is Kafka meets haiku, wonderfully grounded yet undeniably abstract. Ela Bittencourt

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24 Frames

73. 24 Frames (Abbas Kiarostami)

Abbas Kiarostami’s final film, a study of five paintings and 19 photographs, is his ultimate reduction of cinematic form. Yet these are anything but still lifes, with animation and in-camera effects adding dynamic motion to the paintings and photographs. Chimneys in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Hunters in the Snow subtly begin to spew smoke, while a silhouetted image of a bird and tree comes to resemble the animated work of Lotte Reiniger. Through it all, Kiarostami continues to develop his core theme, that of the slurred and porous boundaries between reality and art. By using effects to illustrate this theme, he makes more explicit the unreality of his art while nonetheless pulling some clever illusions to make one forget that this is all fake. At times, Kiarostami’s digital trickery, rudimentary yet engrossing, recalls David Lynch’s use of similar effects in Twin Peaks: The Return. At once a departure and distillation of Kiarostami’s style, 24 Frames is a fitting send-off for this grand master of Iranian cinema. Jake Cole


No Home Movie

72. No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman)

Chantal Akerman’s final feature is irrevocably haunted by its maker’s ghost, sensed most palpably in her off-screen sobs in the final shot. But the entire film is a ghost movie in progress, albeit one meant to chart the director’s uncomfortable anticipation of her mother’s death. Akerman splits the document of her mother’s final months between trademark shots of the woman’s cluttered domestic space as it gradually forms the walls of her coffin and moments of direct confrontation over the mother’s repressed Holocaust memories. If cinema typically gains its poetry through editing, Akerman finds it in duration, as in a shot in which an empty recliner seems to animate with its owner’s spirit as a window focuses fluctuating sunlight onto it. No Home Movie is the fraught culmination of a master’s career, tying together all of Akerman’s thematic and formal innovations into an anguished howl. Cole


Drug War

71. Drug War (Johnnie To)

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


Ash Is Purest White

70. Ash Is Purest White (Jia Zhang-ke)

The culmination of Jia Zhang-ke’s career-long exploration of the changing social and moral landscape of China, Ash Is Purest White is a damning portrait of a repressive society in thrall to its belated embrace of late capitalism. Well within the director’s recent turn toward using the syntax of genre cinema to express his feelings on China’s political and social failings, the film is a gangster epic from the perspective of a moll (Zhao Tao) who abruptly learns that the codes of honor among thieves matter little to mobsters and even less to their girlfriends. A prison sentence roots the protagonist in place as time rapidly drifts by, and when she gets out after a few years she finds a China she cannot recognize. As in Martin Scorsese’s own crime films, corporate organizations prove to be even more ruthless and law-flouting than mafias, whose gangsters are far crueler in a boardroom than they ever were on the streets. But this is also a kind of ghost film, one where people and even full cities disappear under the weight of China’s second cultural revolution, leaving one to think that at least the chaos caused by the first was ostensibly in the name of progress, not profit. Cole

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Everybody Wants Some!!

69. Everybody Wants Some!! (Richard Linklater)

Richard Linklater is a free and exacting talent, but he can be awfully smug and precious. In Everybody Wants Some!!, the filmmaker rediscovers his greatest gift as an artist: an awareness of an individual’s poetry of being. Heriffs on the structure of his Dazed and Confused, following another scruffy, sexy assortment of young and entitled American hedonists over the course of a compact time, but 23 years has passed and Linklater has mellowed out. The snide-ness of Dazed and Confused has washed away, leaving a bruised empathy that’s counterbalanced by a remarkable sense of rowdy comedic force. Linklater can still swing, his sweeping camera pirouetting around his large ensemble in fashions that simultaneously bring to mind the fluidity of Max Ophüls and Howard Hawks. Mounting a semi-sweet parody of masculine force, Linklater grants himself permission to play again, in the process making one of his greatest and most resonant films. Bowen


Nostalgia for the Light

68. Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzmán)

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 film 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


Lady Bird

67. Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig)

With her screenplays for Frances Ha and Mistress America, Greta Gerwig proved to be a formidable surveyor of the intricacies of female relationships, but her solo writing and directing debut, Lady Bird, while evincing her customary wit, articulates an even deeper and more profound humanism than her earlier work. The self-involved Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson’s (Saoirse Ronan) fraught relationship with her mother, Marion (Laurie Metcalf), over the course of the former’s senior year in high school serves as the catalyst for Gerwig’s nuanced exploration of the tension between our youthful ego and the realization that we’re not the center of the world, merely minor individuals in a vast ensemble made of infinite narratives. As Lady Bird’s complicated and often revelatory confrontations with other characters spur the development of her sensitivity to the multifaceted lives of those around her, the empathy with which Gerwig has imbued her film shines through in the singular perspective of her protagonist, marked by a symphonically comedic rhythm of dialogue and gesture. Gerwig’s singularly offbeat vision of Sacramento contributes a specificity of place to this rare, unsentimental portrait of youth that feels unabashedly, bracingly alive. Greene


Let the Sunshine In

66. Let the Sunshine In (Claire Denis)

Time has steadily eroded the patience of—and prospects for—the artist and divorced mother played by Juliette Binoche in Claire Denis’s funny, sad, and capacious encyclopedia of dashed expectations and missed opportunities. Cinematographer Agnès Godard, Denis’s longstanding collaborator, captures Paris with an autumnal radiance that’s nonetheless a bit cramped and shadowy; this, along with the steady drumbeat of men who Binoche’s Isabelle is lustful, hesitant, and disdainful about, suggest that Paris is no longer the world of possibilities it once was for Let the Sunshine In’s heroine. The director, working with the novelist Christine Angot as a co-writer, devotes herself almost exclusively to Isabelle’s romantic travails, largely eliding her roles as a worker and a mother. This slyly radical act of structural generosity, full of diamond-cut edits that may span hours or weeks, yields a symphonic study of conflicting and perhaps irreconcilable desires, every note of which is distinctly legible on Binoche’s face. Denis’s most unassuming masterpiece deftly translates Isabelle’s anger, frustration, lust, and hope into a film that’s as wise as it is bittersweet. Gray

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Before Midnight

65. Before Midnight (Richard Linklater)

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


Cemetery of Splendour

64. Cemetery of Splendour (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

Sometimes the most obvious sign of greatness is familiarity rather than innovation. The defining features of Cemetery of Splendour are equally evident in Thai master Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s other films, while the more eye-catching narrative bifurcations and unruly shifts in tone of his previous work are notable by their absence. The past can still cast its spell on people and locations alike, the mythical can still intrude on the everyday, and boundaries between different states can still be suspended at the drop of a hat, yet all these shifts now occur with a newfound matter-of-factness, a calm, tender inevitability that approaches the sublime. This serene drama about how politics and history gently seep into life in a country hospital is at once a singular illustration of how any one place may contain the entire world and the sign of a director relaxing into a new phase of his career, where rigor and freedom, restraint and invention flow together as one. Lattimer


The Social Network

63. The Social Network (David Fincher)

Awe and uncertainty reverberate equally throughout The Social Network, David Fincher’s fictionalized take on Mark Zuckerberg and the birth of Facebook. Spearheaded by Jesse Eisenberg’s commandingly nuanced lead performance, the film is a sleek, scintillating portrait of intellect and ambition, a snapshot of a particular time and place, a stinging class-hierarchy comedy, and a universal story of trying to fit in. As Aaron Sorkin’s rat-a-tat-tat script psychologizes its programming-prodigy subject, Fincher’s enthralled camera swings, pops, and speeds alongside the meteorically rising Zuckerberg, all while sumptuously evoking the Ivy-League privilege that his protagonist both coveted and ultimately circumvented on his way to billions. Thrillingly electric and yet quietly tragic, it’s a keenly observed film about genius, technology, and social desires that’s rooted in ambivalence. Schager


Horse Money

62. Horse Money (Pedro Costa)

Pedro Costa’s films have always been referential, but Horse Money may be the first film of his career to feel wholly his own. The nocturnal flipside to the harsh, documentarian light shone on Colossal Youth, the oneiric, abstract structure of this film places the camera in a dreamscape in the mind of Ventura, Costa’s muse du jour and a living reminder that the same cultural revolution that gave the director and his comrades liberty made life even more terrifying and uncertain for Portugal’s post-colonial immigrants. The political message is distorted by abstract imagery that reduces remembered and imagined foes as nameless apparitions of fear, but the film occasionally pulls into sharp focus to deliver its most devastating commentary. One scene, of Ventura’s widowed friend reading her identification documents and crying to see her life laid out on a few pieces of paper she can only hope will satisfy officials, summarizes the callous bureaucracy that oppresses immigrants in only a few minutes. Another sequence, of Ventura riding an elevator bound, perhaps, for hell, evokes PTSD in the guise of a living soldier statue, though the traumas dredged up are as much social as militaristic, suggesting that, for some groups in society, peacetime can feel as hostile and dangerous as a war zone. Cole

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Manakamana

61. Manakamana (Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez)

Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s Manakamana effortlessly blows a day’s tiniest quotidian moments up for the big screen, wasting zero time explaining or tiptoeing around its rigid, chapter-like narrative structure. The documentary cycles through 11 long, single takes filmed within a rickety cable car en route to one of the most sacred temples in Nepal (the film’s namesake); all journeys are either to or fro, but the passengers change with each successive round. Spray and Velez’s trips hum along meditatively and yet with a whiff of the filmically confrontational: Clearly coached to avoid engaging the lens, passengers’ faces hover with disengagement, just out of bounds for the viewer and yet also mired, front and center. There are plentiful glimpses of surrounding green valleys, but they’re refracted through the window, basking the travelers—on a clear day, at least—in rear-projected daylight. Muted and transcendent (at one point an elderly woman, enjoying an ice cream sandwich, muses, “Hills and trees everywhere, so delightful”), this is a documentary as aware of its endemic restrictions as it is liberated from them. Macfarlane


It’s Such a Beautiful Day

60. It’s Such a Beautiful Day (Don Hertzfeldt)

It’s Such a Beautiful Day is the finest animated depiction of depression since Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion. Don Hertzfeldt’s film uses the disintegrating mental faculties of its purposefully bland protagonist to muse on the horror of losing a life that wasn’t well lived. But, then, the deeper the film probes Bill’s collapsing grasp of time and memory, the more it questions what a well-lived life could even be, and whether it’s possible to have one that can remotely stand up to the grim blackness of death. Hertzfeldt’s avant-garde mash-up of crude line drawings, Brakhage-esque montage, and stop-motion animation visualizes the mounting tension generated by Bill’s breakdown. Hertzfeldt rages against the dying of the light so violently that, not unlike the finale of The Man Who Laughs, he flagrantly throws off the shackles of narrative expectancy to rescue his own creation. And, as in End of Evangelion, the film finds hope in annihilation, suggesting that the void, for all its terrible endlessness, may be the only way to start again and improve. Cole


Goodbye to Language

59. Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard)

Jean-Luc Godard started his career nudging at any and all constraints, carving out new rhythms based on an eccentric fondness for tongue-in-cheek reinterpretation, creating a personal cinema indebted to memories of the past while intently focused on the future. That initial thorniness has only grown stronger with each successive film, as he aged into the form of the prototypical restless auteur, utterly refusing to rest on laurels, even as this sense of exploration left him detached from a public not ready for the audacity of his experiments. It now finds him, at the age of 84, once again on the forefront of cinematic progress. Just as In Praise of Love identified possibilities in the digital form that still haven’t been adequately explored by other filmmakers, Goodbye to Language bursts through another wall, forcing 3D technology directly into the faces of viewers, exploiting the technology to achieve simple but breathtaking effects which question the mechanics of the entire act of seeing. It’s another reminder that the true capabilities of technology don’t belong to the studios, the big-budget hacks, and the hollow spectacles they produce, but to the bold, the imaginative, and the obstinate, the artists willing to repeatedly break with the sacred tenets of respectability of tradition, broadening and expanding the possibilities of the form. Cataldo


Good Time

58. Good Time (Josh and Benny Safdie)

Manny Farber’s conception of a film defined by “unkempt activity” often gets shortened to “termite art,” even though his full, original designation was “termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art.” The unwieldy term seems precisely the point: Wild and ferocious, such a film wants to worm and rip its way through your viscera with little concern for the damage incurred. In Good Time, directors Josh and Benny Safdie tailor a shredding electronic score by Oneohtrix Point Never to energize the caustic, Christmas-set NYC tale of Connie Nikas (Robert Pattinson), an anti-Santa Claus who leeches his victims, including Nick (Benny Safdie), his mentally challenged brother, of their possessions and trust. Right from the devastating opening, in which Connie snatches Nick from a therapy session as the latter is on the verge of a breakthrough, the Safdies convey Connie’s desperation not through backstory or exposition, but as a compulsory, breathless sprint toward destruction. A handful of African immigrants are caught in the crosshairs of Connie’s mad dash of a day, with their professions and lives routinely jeopardized by his sociopathic behavior. The systemic danger of white-male anger, especially as it’s informed by Connie’s vaguely defined sense of personal injustice and self-righteousness, has rarely been represented in American cinema as an urgent public health hazard, with its noxious effects no different than the choking, billowing haze of an exploded dye pack. Clayton Dillard

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Frances Ha

57. Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach)

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 Semerene


Inherent Vice

56. Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson)

Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterful, streamlined adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s shambolic stoner noir manages to locate the frangible heart of the author’s luxuriantly overstuffed narrative. Abounding in double crosses and double agents, Inherent Vice evinces an acute case of double vision, keeping one eye on the future’s vanishing point, while inevitably casting nervous glances into the rearview of historical hindsight. Hence it’s a logical extension of those downbeat ’70s L.A. noirs that straddle eras—a relentlessly demythologized past and a present that’s up for grabs—to elucidate the vices inherent in each. Here that’s the troublous heritage of the 1960s, its boundless urge to revolutionize, as well as its tendency toward self-destructive solipsism. While giving witness to the vexing vicissitudes of addiction (whether to smack or frozen bananas), Inherent Vice posits a shadowy conspiracy bent on reclaiming the counterculture’s best instincts for the “ancient forces of greed and fear.” Nothing proves safe from its baleful influence, not even that last bastion of society, the blissfully insulated romantic couple, as the Burt Bacharach song PTA cannily selects for the closing credits ruefully acknowledges: “Any day now, love will let me down.” Wilkins


The Irishman

55. The Irishman (Martin Scorsese)

Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour epic is an embarrassment of riches, of novelistic moments, details, and characters that seep into your bones. For such a big film, The Irishman is robustly intimate, composed mostly of a handful of men eating and talking and casually influencing America’s post-WWII disillusionment. Our protagonist is Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), who reveals that Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) had a penchant for hot dogs and ice cream, and that men who drank around him had to drink in secret, and that another powerful gangster, Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci in the performance of his life), dipped crusty bread in red wine. The Irishman is an ecstatic slipstream of memories within memories, an old-man’s film in which Scorsese informs the mob genre he helped to invent with an austere, piercing, not unfunny gravity, reckoning with the rock-star machismo of his earlier work in the process. Sheeran is the center of the film, but he’s also at the mercy of his world, his complacency indicting our own, recalling Ryan O’Neil’s character in Stanley Kubrick’s similarly existential Barry Lyndon. Bowen


The Ghost Writer

54. The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski)

Survival in a wolfish world has been Roman Polanski’s career-long theme, and this impeccable, Nabokovian comedy of menace finds the controversial auteur in insinuating fine form, his traumas and foibles embossed in every foreboding widescreen composition. The narrative’s vaudeville of intrigue and politics is handled with black-velvet elegance, but it’s as a sly and delicate personal allegory that the film most lingers and stings (is Polanski Pierce Brosnan’s house-arrested celebrity in legal trouble, or Ewan McGregor’s exiled artist who insists on investigating despite having been assigned to an impersonal project?). Wily and wise, The Ghost Writer might be the director’s own A King in New York, an acidic, shot-in-Europe love letter to an America full of shadowy trails and people who can’t resist entering them. Fernando F. Croce

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Bisbee ‘17

53. Bisbee ‘17 (Robert Greene)

Director Robert Greene’s Bisbee ‘17 frames performance as an act of historical reckoning. In charting the progress of Bisbee, Arizona’s recreation of 1917’s horrific Bisbee Deportation—in which a coal company transported and stranded hundreds of striking workers in the nearby desert—Greene creates his most ambitious work to date. Wiseman-esque snapshots capturing Bisbee’s citizens rehearsing and providing their various opinions on the deportation accumulate to form a head-spinningly complex commentary on America’s historical mistreatment of minorities, immigrants, and the working class. Bisbee’s history becomes yet another example of how the “Land of the Free” motto is, if anything, a misnomer. But in also following Fernando, a citizen tasked to play a striking miner, Bisbee ‘17 shows the awakening of social consciousness. Presenting the disturbing recreation of the Bisbee Deportation with earnest intensity, the film posits, as Fernando realizes, that the only true way to grapple with the sins of the past is to live it. Greene


Mysteries of Lisbon

52. Mysteries of Lisbon (Raúl Ruiz)

Rarely does a cinematic experience swallow you whole, but Mysteries of Lisbon does just that. Chilean director Raúl Ruiz 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. Heath Jr.


Personal Shopper

51. Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas)

Kristin Stewart shops, Olivier Assayas buys, and cinephiles everywhere throw away the receipt. Assayas’s greatest indulgence in diva worship seems rigged to pin Stewart like a butterfly in cinematic isolation for as long as the apparatus can get away with it. Stewart stars (and rarely has the word “stars” felt so inadequate) as a spiritual medium moonlighting in Paris as a buyer for a hangry fashionista, and desperately trying to come into contact with her recently departed twin brother. Filmed in a sense like an exorcism of its leading player’s own fame-making turns in pop-horror blockbusters, the stages of grief embodied throughout Personal Shopper are at once redolent of funereal urban ennui and wrapped too tight. By the time Stewart is spending the film’s thrilling and entirely dialogue-free central act nervously trading texts with “Unknown Caller,” Assayas has encroached fully upon her space while depicting her, in every sense, alone. Not since Kyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse has a ghost story more closely replicated the anxiety of modern communication. And not since Vertigo has the act of dressing up felt so illicit. Eric Henderson


Mr. Turner

50. Mr. Turner (Mike Leigh)

No living director is Mike Leigh’s peer in portraying the gradual accumulation of detail that eventually renders a human life in full. Mr. Turner isn’t a conventional biography of the great British painter J.M.W. Turner. Leigh concentrates only on the last 20 years of Turner’s life, and the episodes he crafts don’t reveal much in the way of traditional expository information, ultimately proving just how little typical textbook tickertapes actually matter. Instead, Leigh and his gifted cast, particularly the extraordinary Timothy Spall, paint a minutely textured portrait of an emotional realm. Little anecdotes gather and mutually intensify one another: Turner hugging his father upon return from an art trip, or forgiving a debt owed to him by an envious and poverty-stricken painter, or so delicately and gingerly painting a prostitute, or having quick, desperate sex with his housekeeper. The through line is Leigh and Spall’s conception of Turner as a man whose self-centeredness arises as an almost tragic perversion of an essential gentleness that only reaches unconfused expression in his paintings. Mr. Turner is one of the fullest and most moving biographies ever made. Bowen

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Cosmopolis

49. Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg)

In the end, it’s mere gravy that David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis unfolds in a world that eerily, and almost blatantly, reflects our modern headlines, its Occupy themes and global-capital woes perpetually looming. What’s truly depicted in this gorgeous adaptation of Don DeLillo’s prescient 2003 novel is the whittling down of the poster boy of individual, millennial anxieties, sparked by the deadly, rampant elixir of privilege, apathy, and telecommuting. From his rolling command center of a white limousine, the WiFi hot spot of the obscenely rich, billionaire Eric Packer (a revelatory Robert Pattinson) is at once linked up to the world and maddeningly removed from it, his personal, untried revolving door granting equal access to wisdom and delusion, personified by the limo’s parade of guests. Evoking its director’s past aesthetics and bodily interests with cool restraint, Cosmopolis is a wry, stylish nightmare of contemporary disconnect, and an audacious charting of all that crumbles when reality seeps in. With much dialogue lifted verbatim from DeLillo’s text, the film’s dizzying verbosity may be challenging to swallow, but in a cinematic year teeming with lone protagonists clawing for ways to survive, it has more to say—and to mull over—than maybe 100 movies. R. Kurt Osenlund


Elle

48. Elle (Paul Verhoeven)

Halfway through Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, Michèle (Isabelle Huppert), the CEO of a video-game company, discovers that a certain male employee is responsible for creating a harassing video of her. Faced with any number of paths for punishment, Michèle looks at him and says: “Take out your dick.” As in Basic Instinct and Black Book, Verhoeven finds ways to cap scenes with tense moments of “who’s the victim here?” through reversals of sexual power that undercut masculine pride. The scene distills the filmmaker’s aesthetics into microcosm; women are made into agents of power who use their sexuality as weapons against male oppressors, yet they may also actually be murderers in the same breath. Simultaneously a Buñuelian satire of the bourgeoisie and a Chabrolian thriller of manners, Elle is ultimately wholly Verhoeven’s own in its play with the limits of sexual delight and all of its irreconcilable contradictions. Dillard


The Kid with a Bike

47. The Kid with a Bike (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)

Like all of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s profoundly humane films, The Kid with a Bike isn’t without its allegorical implications. It’s in the heartbreaking embrace Samantha (Cécile de France) gives 11-year-old Cyril (Thomas Doret) inside her car, a pieta of sorts that evokes the equally hungry bear hug forced on Gillian Anderson toward the end of Ursula Meier’s similarly themed Sister. It’s in Doret’s wild child, as viscerally single-minded as Igor, Rosetta, Bruno, and Lorna before him, pushing throughout the film a bike whose weight could be that of an enormous cross, a reminder of all that he’s inherited from a father he refuses to believe no longer wants him. And it’s finally in a frightening and heartbreaking scene that’s practically a test of the audience’s faith in matters that extend far beyond the spiritual: Having been doomed by fate to what would seem to be a life of trading hurt for hurt, Cyril falls from a tree and is seemingly resurrected from what looks like certain death, and in the sharpest cut to black we feel not only his life’s agony, but his relief at having been given a chance at rediscovering his essential goodness. Gonzalez


Heart of a Dog

46. Heart of a Dog (Laurie Anderson)

There is, according to a 2015 New York Times article, an empathy gap in all of our brains. Empathy is a choice, and scientists are trying to map out its pathways in hopes of helping us build a bridge toward a greater capacity for compassion. But if only an expert can deal with a problem, then these scientists have nothing on Laurie Anderson. A less scathing kissing cousin of her great 2010 album Homeland, an amalgamation of observations about climate change, the shithole of war, and our pop-cultural obsessions, Heart of a Dog provides another resplendent scan of this great artist’s kooky dream body and the rabbit hole of philosophical reverie through which it drifts in search of meaning. Throughout this free-associative mind melt, Anderson connects her memories of her rat terrier Lolabelle—and by extension that of her late husband, Lou Reed—to ruminations on everything from the panic that gripped the world after 9/11 to our oppressive surveillance state, arriving at the realization that the purpose of death is the release of love. The work of a profoundly benevolent artist, Heart of a Dog announces itself first as an emotionally coherent testament to its maker’s method of self-healing before offering itself to us as a means of rooting out all our failures of empathy so we can, at the very least, stay sane in a world full of so much pain. Gonzalez

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Computer Chess

45. Computer Chess (Andrew Bujalski)

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


Her

44. Her (Spike Jonze)

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 (voiced by 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


Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood

43. Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino)

“You’re just a dollar sign to Jake Cahill,” says the narrator for the TV western Bounty Law as Jake (played by Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton), guns down some bad guys. Years later, while in the company of his stunt double and best friend, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), Rick comes to realize that he, too, represents little more than a dollar sign. In Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, Rick and Cliff anchor an expansive slice-of-life depiction of a bygone Hollywood. Throughout, their personal and professional foibles are offset by our rearview knowledge that the story will conclude near Rick’s home on Cielo Drive, where Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) and her friends were massacred. Tarantino’s ploy isn’t simply to redeem a tragic historical outcome through fantasy, but more importantly to reverse how the symbolic resonance of the Manson murders have overshadowed Tate’s inner life. What makes this film breathe and linger is the remarkable affection Tarantino has for all his characters—real and imagined—as he stirs subtle undercurrents of regret and sadness into a film of great warmth and humor. Niles Schwartz


The Wolf of Wall Street

42. The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese)

Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street frames the story of investment huckster Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) as an epic satyr play, a romp of excessive ribaldry that sustains its hilarity across nearly three hours. As Scorsese sucks us deeper into the riotous devil-may-care sensate of the world Jordan and his team have created for themselves, the film transcends palliative social satire to become a pulsating canvas representing the wild-eyed beastliness of deregulated human nature. Think Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights reimagined with investment brokers. And as Jordan acts as a devious Mephistopheles to the audience, inviting us to cast aside all good conscience and cackle at the boons of his propitious apathy, the film adopts a sheen of commercial advertising. Depiction of such excess was resonant in 2013, but watching The Wolf of Wall Street years later, namely its extended sequences of Jordan’s egomaniacal demagoguery at company rallies where his followers cast aside inhibitions with frenzied, demonic intensity, it all plays as harrowing prophecy of a nation going mad as it stumbles to ruin. By making our tragic disposition so funny, Scorsese helps us endure the unendurable. Schwartz

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Meek’s Cutoff

41. Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt)

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 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. Cataldo


Dogtooth

40. Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos)

This exhilarating Greek surprise package is a high-wire act of batshit absurdism and disturbingly visceral shocks. Director Yorgos Lanthimos’s elegantly blunt scenario of three twentyish adult children imprisoned by a crypto-dictatorial father on their lush estate, force-fed an incorrect vocabulary and myths of menacing housecats, reads just as well as a gloss on the permanent baggage of family as it does a metaphor for the ruthless daddyism of political strongmen. Dogtooth establishes this household’s level of deadpan normality with Father’s delivery of a hapless menial for Son’s sexual needs, sibling sex play and knifings, a spastic sister-act dance, and a musical message on the turntable from their grandpa, Frank Sinatra. Its world comes to seem as inevitable and convincing as those of Buñuel and John Waters. Weber


Silence

39. Silence (Martin Scorsese)

Martin Scorsese has consistently confronted issues of spirituality and with all the neurotic insistence of a not-entirely lapsed Catholic. With Silence, he does so most directly since 1997’s Kundun. That film was reverential but pessimistic, chronicling the rise of a sacred figure while detailing how the strictures of organized religion slowly wear the luster off the pure, unthinking pleasures of faith, expressed by a gorgeous mountain landscape or a stand of white clouds amid a pure blue sky. Silence pays tribute to the labors of missionaries while making sure to orient them within the socioeconomic context of their time, and the mercantile systems within which their efforts at seeding salvation operated. As in The Last Temptation of Christ, Scorsese seems intent here on extricating the humanity from the fossilized ceremonial iconography of Catholicism, employing metallic fumi-e tablets, painted icons, and hand-woven crosses as milestones along this path. Along with Kundun, these three films form a continuum, a progressive portrayal of flawed but persistent conviction that increases the complexity of that rendering through its merging of doctrinal inquiry with ethical and secular concerns. Beyond all of this, Silence works as a standalone portrait of personal crisis, a staggering recreation of a struggle familiar to even those whose lives exist entirely outside of religious stricture, the fight to hold onto some vestige of belief in a world seemingly designed to shake and shatter our moral foundations. Cataldo


Li’l Quinquin

38. Li’l Quinquin (Bruno Dumont)

When human body parts start turning up inside dead cows in a rural French village, the subsequent police investigation reveals the nation’s countryside to be populated by inept cops, racist children, reactionary farmers, and harmless imbeciles. Bruno Dumont’s blackest of anti-comedies uses the metaphysical murder mystery at the center of its plot to explore the economic malaise, terror, xenophobia, and cretinous culture of globalism submerging Europe today. Released in America just before the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Li’l Quinquin seemed to foreshadow the ensuing year’s wave of terrorism and right-wing populism, albeit reflected in a funhouse mirror where physically and psychologically malformed preteens, clueless bureaucrats, and rural simpletons struggle with the moral darkness and ethical chaos unleashed by these phenomena. Immersing its characters in “the heart of evil,” as the head investigator calls the murders, the film walks a fine line between tragedy and parody that ultimately gets closer to conveying the grief and despair precipitated by unspeakable acts of violence than would a more conventional drama. Largely employing actors with real-life physical and mental handicaps unleashing their characters’ unfiltered thoughts with the irrepressible mania of patients suffering from Tourette syndrome, this uncomfortable comedy was one of its year’s uncanniest and most cathartic viewing experiences, proof that laughter is the strongest antidote to fear and sorrow. Oleg Ivanov

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Burning

37. Burning (Lee Chang-dong)

Lee Chang-dong’s adaptation of the Haruki Murakami short story “Barn Burning” captures the creeping surreality of the author’s worlds. The film’s main character, Jongsu (Yoo Ah-in), seemingly can’t be sure of anything. He meets and sleeps with Haemi (Jeon Jong-seo), a woman who insists she grew up with him, but he can’t remember her. She asks him to watch her cat while she’s on vacation, but in an almost comically literal take on Schroedinger’s famous paradox, the cat is nowhere to be found in Haemi’s one-room apartment. Then Haemi suddenly disappears, but is she really gone, or is it just that Jongsu can’t find her? Burning gradually finds its main narrative thread, using a dream logic that constructs a reality at the same time as it subtly undermines our trust in it. Haemi returns from vacation with a new boyfriend, Ben (Steven Yuen), a quietly arrogant millionaire who gets off on burning down greenhouses. The meek, unreadable Jongsu is haunted—or perhaps jealously fascinated—by the naked wantonness of Ben’s destructive hobby, the man’s license to indulge his arbitrary power fantasies. When Haemi disappears again and Jongsu begins to suspect Ben is responsible, Lee’s drama of South Korean class conflict becomes, true to its title, the best slow-burn thriller in recent memory. Pat Brown


Zama

36. Zama (Lucrecia Martel)

Once the ruler of the Western Hemisphere, the Spanish Empire was considerably weakened by the late 18th century. The Catholic monarchy’s supremacy—at this point little more than a dream of power—was unravelling; the crown’s subjects in the New World were no longer Europeans, but not quite Americans either. Call it an existential crisis, and one whose effects are felt centuries on. Ever the dissector of the vices and petty weaknesses of Argentina’s ruling classes, Lucrecia Martel is perhaps the perfect chronicler of royal Spain’s twilight in the colonies. Zama is a historical fever dream told through the devolving subjectivity of the impotent Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a low-level Spanish functionary in Argentina who wants to leave his backwater post but is blocked from doing so at every juncture. Sure, masculine frustration is as well-worn a theme as any, but it’s rare that a film can take such particular and humiliating failures—the dogpiling aspirational and libidinal upsets of this single, irrelevant servant of the crown—and make them coincide with the anxious insecurity and moral turpitude that have kept colonialism’s afterlife running. And certainly, few films display such careful modulation of visual and aural perspective, giving a darkly comic, surreal image of the havoc that colonialism, and its agents’ constant need to appear powerful, wreaks on the minds and bodies of both colonizer and colonized. Peter Goldberg


The Immigrant

35. The Immigrant (James Gray)

Given how poorly The Immigrant was handled by the Weinstein Company, the sort of undue treatment endured by Hollywood masters during the days of vertical integration, it’s almost fitting that James Gray has cited silent cinema and studio-era melodrama among his inspirations for the project. So nakedly Borzagian in its sentimentalism, the film relates the story of a Polish émigré, Ewa (Marion Cotillard), adjusting to American life under the guise and employ of a spineless pimp (Joaquin Phoenix) in 1920s New York City. Its voluptuous emotional tenor reverberates from its unspeakably beautiful imagery; there is, of course, the justly renowned final shot, one of many images whose pathos arises from the way characters’ interiors are woven into the painterly compositions. But it also flits across Cotillard’s face, so concurrently wrapped in sorrow and happiness, fear and hope (shades of Lillian Gish). To watch Ewa look upon a crowd of boorish womanizers, to watch her study her pimp from across a café table, to watch her regard an illusionist levitate on stage, is to witness her wrestling with the roots of the American dream. Hunt


Knight of Cups

34. Knight of Cups (Terrence Malick)

A Hollywood player roots around the hollows of his soul in Terrence Malick’s most brashly experimental film to date. A wayward romantic on an inverted hero’s journey, Christian Bale’s Rick is the director’s Don Draper, visited by a series of spectral lovers and tortured family members who attempt to prod him out of his torpor. Many of Malick’s great films cast a metaphysical eye on a masculinist historical narrative, but after To the Wonder, Knight of Cups felts like the next step in a reckoning with that conceit. Dynamically shot by the peerless Emmanuel Lubezki and stitched into a seamlessly impressionistic collage by editor Billy Weber, the film gives Rick’s structuring absence a visual mirror in the environmental dislocation surrounding him. Endlessly jolting iterations of a teeming, defiantly unnatural city surrounded by an unforgiving desert strike at the film’s resounding theme, an ecstatic simultaneity of awe and dismay at the world we’ve built and the damage we’ve done to ourselves in the process. Gray

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Leviathan

33. Leviathan (Verena Paravel and Lucian Castaing-Taylor)

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 films 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. Cataldo


Transit

32. Transit (Christian Petzold)

At once conceptually audacious and urgently humane, Christian Petzold’s faithful adaptation of Anna Seghers’s 1944 novel situates a story about German refugees in geographic and bureaucratic purgatory in present-day Marseilles. This simple gambit simultaneously deromanticizes the middlebrow WWII cinema of recent decades and historicizes the geopolitical turmoil of today, but what proves most thrilling about Petzold’s collapsing of history is his intent focus on collapsed souls, all held captive to the whims of fate and oppressive forces. Georg (Franz Rogowski) arrives in Marseilles with a series of opportunities to assume new personas—as an esteemed writer, a father, and a lover—but as Transit pivots from thriller to melodrama, Petzold interrogates the very possibility of exercising selfhood under the thumb of fascism. Mesmerizingly rich with incident yet suffused with the melancholy and confusion of isolated souls desperate for connection in hopeless circumstances, the film pulses with yearning even as it subjects Georg to a devastating series of narrative dead ends. Gray


Nocturama

31. Nocturama (Bertrand Bonello)

A coterie of gangly young terrorists, frustrated with society, concoct a plan to synchronize attacks around Paris: from shootings to bombings to fires set to statues, all to interrupt the quotidian stagnation of modernity. Their motivations are somewhat nebulous, and their end goal unspecified, but they commit to the plan—if not any discernible purpose or impetus—and pull it off. Subways act as their underground tunnels, a shopping mall their eventual bastion. They seem edified, discussing Pinochet’s regime in cafés, the ethical quandaries of terrorism, the perils of consumerism, but also just as susceptible to the allure of stuff; inside the mall, they regress into emulations of the people they hate, of the mannequins on display. This is terrorism as Pop art. Behind Nocturama’s glistening surfaces and pretty faces is an emptiness, a dearth of conviction. This is, of course, by design. As depicted by Bertrand Bonnello, who has a penchant for voluptuous camera movements, Paris is decadent and vile. Even the idealists aren’t immune to the city’s sybaritic sickness. In a coruscating materialistic world, there’s a profusion of reflective surfaces and no self-awareness. For all the gazing the young characters do—at TVs, out windows, into mirrors—they never see what’s staring back at them. Greg Cwik


Manchester by the Sea

30. Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan)

The broadness of scope in Kenneth Lonergan’s raw post-9/11 New York melodrama Margaret, along with the writer-director’s legendary struggle to reach final cut only to see it dumped by its distributor, turned the film into one of the true causes célèbres for Film Twitter™. Manchester by the Sea, his comparatively brisk follow-up, arrived with no such triggers to help its cachet. If anything, its top prize back in 2016 from the incurably square National Board of Review suggests quite the opposite. But, unfashionable and ill-timed as its depiction of raw-nerve masculinity in a state of inveterate crisis may seem in this moment, Manchester by the Sea’s articulation of grief not as a cycle but as a hardening—a pitiless freeze that won’t even allow you to bury your dead—will only continue to resonate so long as there remain shreds of evidence that things may indeed never get better. Life’s daily pinpoints of humor and twists of fate are deftly balanced by Lonergan, but by the end of the film, the fog still hasn’t lifted. Henderson

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Spring Breakers

29. Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine)

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, 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, Harmony 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. Henderson


Uncut Gems

28. Uncut Gems (Benny and Josh Safdie)

In Uncut Gems, the fundamental exploitativeness of capitalism becomes the fulcrum for a sui generis screwball tragedy in which characters from various class backgrounds fit into an overlapping food chain of unbridled ambition. The narrative aligns the mining, medical, diamond, and sports industries as a sprint of ongoing, breathless dealings, and sees in each a fundamentally freewheeling, if ethically detached, sensibility, best expressed by Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) to NBA star Kevin Garnett: “So, look—let’s fucking bet on this shit.” Cosmic forces, Daniel Lopatin’s haunting soundscapes, and winking references to Sandler’s filmography are of equal interest to the Safdie brothers, American enfant terribles whose thematic and sensory pursuits might play for the uninitiated like a cacophony of manic behavior and electronic dissonance. On the contrary, numerous genres and eras of film history from screwball comedy to the New Hollywood inform their work. The film, like Garnett, sees beauty in the allure of materialism and the necessity of myth, but it also finds chilly caution in victory at all costs, which is ironized through Garnett’s empty sports talk (“When you win, it’s all that matters”). Uncut Gems shows that what goes up must come down—or, to use the film’s unique visual law, what goes in one hole (or into someone’s pocket) inevitably comes out of another. Dillard


Happy Hour

27. Happy Hour (Hamaguchi Ryûsuke)

In Happy Hour, Hamaguchi Ryûsuke follows four intelligent Japanese women in their 30s as they discover that their dialectal beliefs are no longer adequate compensations for their emotional estrangement. Hamaguchi mounts an epic film of intimate gestures that unfolds in great lapping movements containing minute stanzas of heartbreak, in which a meditation class, a post-workshop happy hour, a divorce hearing, and a book reading are allowed to exist both as worlds onto themselves as well as links in chains comprising larger existences. The women debate with themselves, resenting and reaching out to the equally miserable husbands and lovers who disappoint them, attempting to rediscover the healing primacy of touch in the film’s overarching sequences. Hamaguchi is that rarity: a tough, exacting humanist who puts his characters through their paces, relentlessly pointing and counterpointing their actions, his elegantly tensile imagery serving to render them wholly explicable and mysterious in seemingly equal measure. Bowen


Like Someone in Love

26. Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami)

The heartbreak of Like Someone In Love settles in when Akiko (Rin Takanashi), a prostitute, asks her driver (Koichi Ohori) 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 film 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 (Ryô 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 film 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. Cabin

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Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

25. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

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 Palme d’Or winner 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. Schager


Holy Motors

24. Holy Motors (Leos Carax)

It would be tempting to describe Holy Motors as a gonzo sketchbook of cinematic flourishes that Leos Carax wasn’t quite able to fit into prior projects—and the film is, indeed, a wildly episodic meta movie-movie that abounds in references to past Carax films as well as seemingly every other movie ever made. On one level, this is a grand revel in unfettered excess that’s inclusive of every genre, every kind of set piece, and seemingly every living performer. But there’s also an unshakable despair that lingers underneath the inventiveness. Denis Levant’s strange mutation of actor and therapist at times literally races from one incarnation to the next in an effort to keep loneliness from finding him, an aspiration, that’s revealed, in the daringly slow final third, as a fool’s errand. There are moments in the film that are painfully sensual in their evocation of elemental yearning, and performers you think you know, such as Eva Mendes or Kylie Minogue, are reborn under Carax’s transformative gaze. But Holy Motors belongs to Levant, in a staggering performance, as a man who’s at once transparent and opaque, complicated and unfettered, and, like all of us, altogether unknowable. Bowen


Toni Erdmann

23. Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade)

Toni Erdmann boasts a script that’s hyper-constructed yet always free-flowing, two faultless, effortlessly varied performances by Sandra Hüller and Peter Simonischek, and a trenchant understanding of how late-phase capitalism hollows out the individual that’s as wryly funny as it is unbearable. Yet what’s most remarkable about Maren Ade’s third feature is the idea that the true essence of family relationships can only be revealed via performance. The father slips into the role of the embarrassing, yet brutally revealing Toni Erdmann and his daughter can’t help but respond in kind, as their game-playing and one-upmanship gradually carries them both into the realm of the primal and into each other’s arms. But much like in Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, the final, devastating turn of the screw suggests that archetypical relationships are inherently ambivalent: There’s so much solace in an embrace, but how much difference does it actually make? Lattimer


Tabu

22. Tabu (Miguel Gomes)

“The image you keep of me hardly resembles reality,” reads one missive shared between doomed lovers in Miguel Gomes’s Tabu, a line that distills the beguiling play of memory and artifice in the Portuguese auteur’s sublime third feature. A trance-like work at once rigorous and playful, it starts off as a study of intertwined friendships in modern-day Lisbon, where the weight of a troubled past is never far off. Then, a deathbed revelation and an encounter usher in a tragic romance set decades earlier in colonial Mozambique, and Pedro Costa-like portraiture morphs gracefully, teasingly into Guy Maddin-like reverie. Titled “Paradise Lost” and “Paradise” and shot in lustrous black and white by Rui Poças, these halves form Gomes’s inquiry into the emotional and political aspects of cinematic remembrance, where Portuguese melancholia is given pop expression by a cover of the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” and a crocodile lurks as an ineffably eloquent silent witness. Like the 1931 F.W. Murnau film with which it shares its title, Gomes’s film is a fable of phantoms and sensuality, an intricate puzzle that squeezes the heart. Croce

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Magic Mike XXL

21. Magic Mike XXL (Gregory Jacobs)

The difference between Magic Mike and its sequel calls to mind how Robert Christgau described the difference between listening to janet. on a junk radio box versus a hi-fi stereo system as “the difference between daydreaming about sex and having somebody’s crack in your face.” In jettisoning the original film’s three-faced Cerebrus standing sourly at the gates of Good Time Island (bad boss, inapt pupil, and prude love interest), Gregory Jacobs’s Magic Mike XXL cashes the check the original only postdated. It frees its mind, lets its ass follow, and invites you to do the same, making it one of the only truly transgressive Hollywood franchise installments in recent memory. Its endorsement of the male form and breezy, optimistic depiction of an America unshackled from mansplaining releases Hollywood’s dogged “no homo” insistence on militarizing engorged mams and cakes. It makes love with its USDA Prime, not war. (That benevolent progressive attitude even carried over into breathtaking promotional pushes.) Few films depicting the pleasures of getting the job done have so gleefully wolf-whistled while they worked, and the only appropriate response is to put your lips together and blow. Henderson


A Quiet Passion

20. A Quiet Passion (Terence Davies)

Terence Davies’s portrait of Emily Dickinson, A Quiet Passion, charts the poet’s course from a silver-tongued teenager (Emma Bell) to a sly recluse (Cynthia Nixon). The narrative is spindled around less than two dozen lines of Dickinson’s posthumously published words, and by the time they’ve run out, the pleasures of nonconformity within high Massachusetts society have given way to the creeping disappointment of a chaste middle age. Davies shows the agony of Dickinson’s kidney disease in unsparing long takes, anchoring her story, for all its high-mindedness, to the same mortal coil that unites us all. Call it transcendental pessimism. The film fits snugly among Davies’s (indeed, quiet) masterpieces for the way it wrings the sublime from the strained confines of everyday life, refusing the luxury of easy liberation on either side of the screen. By the time Dickinson asks her sister, Vinni (Jennifer Ehle), “Why has the world become so ugly?,” this tender and heartbreaking film has taught us better than to expect an answer. Macfarlane


In Jackson Heights

19. In Jackson Heights (Frederick Wiseman)

Though the common line on Frederick Wiseman is that he dissects institutions, In Jackson Heights suggests an even broader general through line for his career: a chronicler of no less grand a subject as American society as a whole, and in all its facets. What better canvas for this great filmmaker, then, than the titular neighborhood in Queens, New York, one of the most culturally diverse communities in all of the United States? Per usual, Wiseman shows utmost patience and curiosity in exploring seemingly all of Jackson Heights’s various nooks and crannies. From the most mundane nail salons to the highest reaches of local government, In Jackson Heights checks in on them all, in a film that’s heartening for its inclusiveness—ethnic, institutional, and otherwise. Not that this is merely a 190-minute all-over-the-place hang-out movie. Encroaching gentrification, for instance, is a frequent concern among some of the ethnic groups, threatening to erase Jackson Heights’s melting pot of an identity. Such is the way of America, Wiseman implicitly concludes. But rather than dwell on such unfortunate inevitabilities, he prefers to bask in the here and now—local color, joyous music, jubilant fireworks and all. Kenji Fujishima


Stranger by the Lake

18. Stranger by the Lake (Alain Guiraudie)

In which a Gallic neo-Hitchcock charts out the undulations of what the French refer to as “little deaths,” and then sets a Grimm fairy tale in the dead zone representing that throbbing, nobly malignant impulse deep within the limbic system of all gay men. And inadvertently explains why so many puffy-chested boys who struggle to accept remaining “just friends” with their closest objects of desire (indeed, denying the psychological damage that doing so will absolutely wreak) cry every time Britney Spears sings about the world ending. Few other films, including the august Un Chant d’Amour itself, have been this bold about taking Jean Genet’s most politically untenable indecent proposals out for a nude swim. On the surface a murder mystery, Alain Guiraudie’s graphic, terrifying day-night-day-night in the country is otherwise stripped of all elements that don’t define the prison wall Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps, with his perfectly boy-next-door looks) constructs in order to blow smoke up his acquaintances’ asses, and offer up his own ass to anyone but them. If Stranger by the Lake made any more sense, it would have to friend-zone you. Henderson

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This Is Not a Film

17. This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi)

The decade saw its share of cinematic love letters, evincing their creators’ throbbing, all-consuming passion for film, but how many risked as much as Jafar Panahi? How many were as formally and expressively ingenious under such enclosed circumstances? Trapped under house arrest, legally prohibited from creating, the persecuted Iranian director brazenly flouted his sentence, assembling a virtuoso masterwork inside his own apartment, sneaking the footage out of the country on a flash drive hidden inside of a cake. With a cast comprised of Panahi himself, fellow director Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, a garbage collector, and an iguana, This Is Not a Film is the work of a man wryly shaking the bars of his cage—staging scenes from prospective films he’s been barred from shooting, reliving moments from his oeuvre, capturing glimpses of the protest and celebration going on just outside his purview. Continuing his habit of tying fiction and reality into an indistinguishable knot, Panahi produces a film that makes the most of the man’s restricted circumstances, ending with a beautiful finale that feels almost too perfect to be real. Cataldo


Stray Dogs

16. Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming-liang)

Every bit its equal in terms of its distillation of all the world’s looming despair into a lonely one-man narrative, Tsai Ming-liang finds with Stray Dogs his own equivalent of Edvard Munch’s famous Scream in the form of Lee Kang-sheng annihilating a head of lettuce. Like Munch, Tsai has always demonstrated a knack for making the external world seem a drooping reflection of his subjects’ psychic and emotional damage, and Stray Dogs, like The Scream, feels like its maker’s quintessential statement. Kang-sheng’s single—and, in the film’s biggest mystery, perhaps divorced—father lurking around the bowels of Taipei scraping together odd jobs in a never-ending effort to feed his children is both a politically charged proxy for the homeless population and another one of Tsai’s elemental sad-sacks fighting an upward battle against a cruel society. Yet, filled as it is with leaky interiors and marathon long takes (some here pushing 20 minutes), this is definitively not a routine lap through the Tsai playbook: a daring tonal 180 enacted around the midway point takes this hard-hearted social-realist tract into mournful surrealist territory, at which point that lettuce’s unfair end retroactively seems the only logical expression of Kang-sheng’s overbearing existential imprisonment. Lund


A Separation

15. A Separation (Asghar Farhadi)

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) are appealing to an unseen representative of a family court for a separation. Simin wants to leave Iran 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 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. Bowen


The Turin Horse

14. The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr)

An immersive exercise in temporality, Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse entraps us in intertextuality, from its philosophical evocations to the inevitable “a horse is being beaten” Freudian allegories, and the cinematic references it organically evokes: This could be Mouchette’s rickety house in a Sokurov parental eulogy, the horse Balthazar, the father (János Derzsi) a meeker version of the patriarch in The White Ribbon. But mostly, this is António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro’s Trás-os-Montes, a counter-zeitgeist world where one simply cannot forget about time, where one must endure it, fight it, work through it as though it were the land. Everything seems to conspire against survival, against harmony, against pleasure. It’s only in the labor of the repetition that there’s solace. “You aren’t going anywhere” is how the daughter (Erika Bók) puts it to the horse, who’s just been flogged by the father’s crop and by Mihâly Vig’s assaulting score. The Turin Horse is essentially a film about the death drive, what happens between the “not going anywhere” of the subject, and the moment when “even the embers” go out. Semerene

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Mad Max: Fury Road

13. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller)

Pulling off a genuine Trojan-horse maneuver of cinematic subversion within the cloak of a beloved franchise, George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road stands as a statement on how even the most stringently managed of studio properties can be massaged to produce miraculous results. It also proves that poetry and pandemonium, not to mention inventive filmmaking and healthy box office, don’t need to be mutually exclusive. Moving up from the unfocused weirdness of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome into new heights of inspired madness, this innovative vision from a familiar apocalyptic wasteland retains the series’s general outlines while also further reducing its titular hero to a mythical supporting character. Yet for all the implicit progressive politics and outsized metaphoric constructions, the film is most successful as a blunt expression of impassioned force, its strident stands on a variety of hot-button issues used as fuel to stoke a cacophonous combustion of energy and noise. Structured around the spectacle of a single extended chase sequence, it spins out a Keaton-esque carnival of dodgy practical effects, ingeniously tactile set pieces, and equivalently creative CG. Subtlety and contemplation have their place, but Fury Road scratches a different sort of atavistic itch, satisfying the compulsion for genuine awe and amazement so often neglected by modern tent poles, exhibiting its ultimate allegiance toward the viewer rather than the monolithic dictates of the brand. Cataldo


Margaret

12. Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan)

In Margaret, the eyes have it. Kenneth Lonergan’s long-delayed follow-up to You Can Count on Me begins in tears, with a woman (Allison Janney), horrifically run over by a bus and dying in the arms of young Lisa (volcanically 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. Gonzalez


The Act of Killing

11. The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer)

While The Act of Killing wasn’t the only documentary from 2012 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 experience of watching proud paramilitary soldiers reenact through Hollywood film 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 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


Under the Skin

10. Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer)

Under the Skin’s extraterrestrial seductress Laura (Scarlett Johansson) shrinks in stature as the film progresses, from an indomitable, inviolable man-eating ghoul to an increasingly fragile woman suffering from the psychic trauma wreaked by her own weaponized sexuality. It’s a heartbreaking process to witness, one that flips a sleek, mysterious sci-fi thriller into a singular melodrama focused on the unlikeliest of protagonists. Establishing an atmosphere in which each new intrusion of feeling delivers another blow to the character’s once-steely exterior, director Jonathan Glazer spins out a maelstrom of dread as Laura simultaneously contracts and expands, adapting to the frailty of her assumed human form. Mirroring this development, the film’s polished style comes into sharp conflict with the tangled complexity of empathy and emotion, a clash embodied by the alluring dissonance of Mica Levi’s shrieking score, the stunning gloom of the film’s Scottish landscapes, the strange, wounded beauty of men pickled in their own putrid desire, and the poignant spectacle of a monster barred by circumstance from becoming anything more. Cataldo

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First Reformed

9. First Reformed (Paul Schrader)

Paul Schrader’s First Reformed is apocalyptic in the most fundamental sense of the word. The comfortable demarcations of metaphor and reality, which render other films safely removed from viewers—be they spiritual or topical message dramas—are stripped away here. The urgent matter at hand in the film is the inexorable fact of climate change, as Reverend Toller (Ethan Hawke) is propelled to become an environmental activist and stand up to corporate interests and human apathy. Toller is a minister in a maze of environmental decay, existential worry, and physical disease, and his own unraveling leads him to self-martyrdom. First Reformed reverberates in the head—in the way it embroils us in Toller’s spiritual hunger for permanence. Hanging over every edifice, especially the First Reformed Church, is a dark specter of silence. Prayers, journals, memorials, anniversaries, best-of-the-year film lists—such things keep us tucked in a neatly compartmentalized present moment, but First Reformed is conscientious of its own transience. What will the garden of earthly delights mean after the last human is dead? Schrader is one of American cinema’s great architects of loneliness, and First Reformed understands how it’s the weight of loneliness that fills us with fear and trembling, compelling us to zealously pursue the certainty of consoling ideas. Schwartz


The Grand Budapest Hotel

8. The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson)

For the enamored, Wes Anderson’s films aren’t unlike the Mendl’s cakes that play a key role in The Grand Budapest Hotel: meticulously constructed, gorgeous, and, like all great art, capable of bearing invaluable life tools—or breaking a great fall. A tale twice removed, the bulk of the film unfolds in and around the titular institution, a one-time jewel in the crown of the fictitious Republic of Zubrowka, where passions and crimes of the sort rock the already turbulent life of Zero (Tony Revolori), a lobby boy orphaned and displaced by war, now under the tutelage of one Gustave H (Ralph Fiennes). Joy and melancholy, love and loss, chaos and control—all these and more mingle and magnify within the nesting doll of a narrative, an illusion sustained by Anderson’s breathless tonal mastery and cunningly insular use of artifice as a memory echo chamber. A light film carrying a heavy heart, The Grand Budapest Hotel’s whimsical flights of fancy are worthy of comparison to Georges Méliès. Rob Humanick


Inside Llewyn Davis

7. Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Cohen)

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 1960s, whose eponymous man of constant sorrows, not to mention continual social fuck-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 (Oscar Isaac) 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


O.J.: Made in America

6. O.J.: Made in America (Ezra Edelman)

O.J.: Made in America is about much more than O.J. Simpson, the national celebrity who rose to fame first as a football phenom and then as a murder suspect in “the trial of the century.” Director Ezra Edelman casts his net deliberately wide: The spectacular first 90 minutes of his documentary, in particular, cover systemic racism and the socioeconomic injustice plaguing this nation through the decades before O.J.’s time (and continuing to after). This is one of the great works of American cultural history over the last half-century. But it infuses that imposing breadth with the singular, personal story of a man who, in effect, at the height of his public life, found his triumph and his tragedy iconographically representative of an American ideal, and the dissolution of it. Mac

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Hard to be a God

5. Hard to be a God (Aleksei German)

Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God proceeds from an immediately incongruous setup: a science-fiction film set in the murky recesses of a Dark Ages nightmare, its apocalyptic vision of the future looking backward instead of forward. It’s within this seemingly counterintuitive concept that German finds the most perfect expression of a career-long fascination with the contact points between civilization and chaos. The film’s imperious protagonist is an astronaut with an unorthodox mission, sent to a planet on the cusp of a renaissance to nurture the growth of a more equitable world. But as so many leaders embarking on the forcible democratization of unprepared societies have recently learned, the conceit that guidance from one advanced culture will foster another easily falls apart under scrutiny. Our sophisticated hero is thus reduced to one warlord among many, his habitual bloody noses tapping him into the collective stream of nasty fluids that flows throughout this amazingly grotesque film, cementing him as just another corrupt figure in the pitch-black Rabelaisian saturnalia that results. Cataldo


The Master

4. The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson)

Following There Will Be Blood, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson set his eyes once again to the American West for this defiantly odd consideration of man at once leashed and untamed. Pitting Joaquin Phoenix’s mangy, malevolent beast of impulse against Philip Seymour Hoffman’s silver-tongued monster manipulator, Anderson quickly subverted expectations that his “Scientology movie” was mere furious exposé. In fact, the structured belief system scripted by Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd remains purposefully ill-defined, allowing Anderson to freely and brilliantly ruminate on will, dominance, suggestion, and fanatical compliance. In The Master, control over others is a refracted image of one’s own instability and lack of self-control, repression of the rambunctious animal within. As Dodd’s would-be Cerberus, Phoenix’s Freddie Quells is ferocious and, yes, dangerous, but also wounded and abandoned, haunted by a simple image of grace and adoration: his gentle, redheaded lost love singing “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (with Anyone Else but Me)” softly to him. Dodd’s retort, a hair-raising climactic rendition of “(I’d Like to Get You on a) Slow Boat to China” underlines the heart of masculine conflict: that sad, long search for self-possession. Cabin


Certified Copy

3. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)

Certified Copy is a subtly intriguing cinematic puzzle, a roaming two-hander that’s by turns haunting, confounding, uplifting, and sad. An unnamed art dealer (Juliette Binoche) and author (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 solidified 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. Cataldo


Phantom Thread

2. Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson)

Imagine a version of Rebecca staged with the offbeat majesty of Barry Lyndon and you’ve just begun to limn the uncanny, gorgeously sustained tenor of Phantom Thread, Paul Thomas Anderson’s film about a megalomaniacal, self-obsessed artist and the women who love him unconditionally. The World War II-era couture fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) is an impeccably groomed British fussbucket, a man of elaborate routines whose freedom to create comes from the labors of his sister, Cyril (Lesley Manville). Their traditions are disrupted after Woodcock discovers a muse in Alma (Vicky Krieps), an immigrant waitress who proves determined to earn and keep her position in Woodcock’s affections, along with his business. The vast majority of Phantom Thread is confined to the ivory-hued interiors of Woodcock’s home office, but the eccentric love triangle that ensues is a luxuriously expansive discourse on creation wrapped in a perfectly concise, endlessly surprising period drama. Assisted by Jonny Greenwood’s staggeringly dextrous score and a trio of beguiling lead performances, Anderson digs into his characters with exquisite sensitivity, lingering on flushing cheeks and a taxonomic array of moony, mischievous smiles. Rhyming love’s fickle rhythms with the fundamental ephemerality of high fashion, Phantom Thread gradually becomes a singular musing on the artist’s legacy. To think any piece of clothing or unfettered emotion will last forever is a uniquely human folly, but each of Anderson’s unforgettable characters prove rapturously committed to the notion. Gray


The Tree of Life

1. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)

Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life regards family and relationships the way it does the planet: an organism plagued by disruptions both splendiferous and repulsive before submitting sadly to extinction. We will never know the older Jack (Sean Penn) in the present in any sort of concrete sense, but as he’s led toward a desert purgatory and toward the sea by his younger self (Hunter McCracken), on a journey his father (Brad Pitt), his mother (Jessica Chastain), and at least one brother before him once followed, we understand that he chose the path of his father, the same one that informed his anger long ago to tie a frog to a rocket and shoot it into the sky, and to the great disappointment of his angelic mother. Throughout these scenes, you gather that Malick is confessing to making films so he won’t become the man who shoots a dog in Badlands, and you hope, pray even, that Jack has finally found the peace his mother’s path might have once afforded him. Goodness and badness are forever knotted in The Tree of Life, just as in our own lives, impossible to separate like a mosquito from summer, and like a spell, the film’s mystified, sometimes glacial grandeur is such that it’s memory becomes difficult to shake off—even, one imagines, in death. Gonzalez

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