Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)

Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston make the perfect pair of ivory-skinned wraiths in maverick moviemaker Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive. These fabulously aloof, effortlessly stylish creatures are the coolest people you could imagine. They were hipsters before it was cool to be a hipster—a few centuries before, actually.  In the film’s hypnotic opening sequence a spinning 45-rpm record fills the screen, and Wanda Jackson’s witchy, bewitching wail fills your soul. The image dissolves into a revolving bird’s eye view of two silent, still figures, she surrounded by countless stacks of books strewn across the floor, he reclined in a couch amid vintage guitars and vinyl records, miles apart yet seemingly in the same room. Round and round they go, the camera circling closer and closer, inviting you to follow down the rabbit hole of this dark, delirious, delicious film. These bloodsuckers might be after your hemoglobin, but their story and style will start seeping into your veins as early as that first shot. Jarmusch’s undead really know how to live.

Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

 Between the months of May—or, if we follow the ever-increasing trend of cinematic climate change, much earlier than that—and August, I go through an intensive exercise of willful suspension of expectations whenever I set foot in a theater. Summer Movie Season, or better yet SUMMER MOVIE SEASON in all caps, is easily dismissed as a period of shameless studio profiteering in which the industry churns out dime-a-dozen spectacle films that cost a hell of a lot more than a dime. They’re too big, too loud, too expensive, too reverent to the altar of the lowest common denominator, too dependent on slick special effects and not enough so on narrative and character. I bemoan how otherwise gifted stars spend their estivate months squandering their talents in Hollywood products addicted to and addled by computer-generated monsters, robots, and explosions.

Then, every once in a while, something like Edge of Tomorrow comes along, and my faith in the mainstream, commercial American movie industry is renewed. I saw the film the Friday it came out. On Sunday, I had a 13-hour trans-Atlantic flight to get through. My first priority was not making sure I had a window seat, low-sodium meals on the plane, enough time to switch terminals between connecting flights, or, you know, that my passport was, indeed, in my bag. Between Friday and Sunday I was badgering everyone I know in Europe not only to go see this movie, but to wait until I got home on Monday and come see it with me.

Hands-down director Doug Liman’s best and most purely pleasurable effort in the twelve years since The Bourne Identity (if not longer than that), Edge of Tomorrow is less of a time-travel movie than an experience movie. One review called it “a cheeky little puzzle picture in expensive-looking blockbuster drag.” It’s a stylish, cleverly crafted, and continually involving mind- and clock-bending bit of action adventure that neither transcends nor redeems the genre, but, thanks to a superb creative team and star Tom Cruise, becomes a surprisingly satisfying exercise of that genre.

X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

Three years ago, Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaughn reinvigorated the Marvel franchise with the clever historical revisionism of 2011’s X-Men: First Class, which boasted a superb new cast, cool retro style, globetrotting intrigue, and a refreshing emphasis on character. Bryan Singer, the series’ original creator on board as director for the first time since 2003’s X2: X-Men United, confidently carries that same momentum, combining the gravitas of the early films with the playfulness of Vaughn’s follow-up. Making for exceptional pacing and relentless drive, Singer pulls together an ambitious, suspenseful film and secures a future for the franchise at the same time he continues to reinvent it.

The X-Men series has always been somewhat unique among its kind because it wears its allegorical heart on its sleeve. By chronicling the adventures of a despised minority, it pokes around some interesting social and political issues. The theme of ostracized, oppressed outsiders empowered to fight against their social stigma in ways both good and evil runs throughout the seven films to date. The central conflict is the endless moral argument between Professor X and Magneto, between the idea that mutants should fight for the redemption of mankind and the insistence that they should defend themselves by any means necessary. This time around, their misunderstood humanity is amplified by extreme physical vulnerability, their struggle framed by a genocidal battle in the near future.

August: Osage County (2013)

“Life is very long,” T.S. Elliot’s immortal maxim, opens August: Osage County, a pulsing panorama of unfulfilled lives. It must certainly seem so to Beverly (a wonderful, grizzly Sam Shepard), the melancholic poet patriarch of the quarrelsome Weston clan, because before long he decides to take matters into his own hands. In the first scene of the film, he is hiring a live-in caretaker (a thankfully reserved Misty Upham) for his ailing wife, Violet (Meryl Streep in a role that should garner her an Oscar if she didn’t already have a truckload). Beverly’s bristly voice betrays a history of bitter disappointment, a lifetime spent among a few good books and a few more bottles of booze. “Facts are my wife takes pills, and I drink. That’s the bargain we’ve struck, a little paragraph in our marriage contract.” This is only a small part of the family pathology that director John Wells (The Company Men) brings to the screen in August: Osage County. When Shepard’s character takes his leave, you will miss him; you might also envy him.

His family will soon gather to the faded farmhouse to pay their last respects to Bev—and their disrespects to each other, in a scalding, stormy symphony of sarcastic insults, sneaky insinuations, shouted accusations, smashed plates, and slammed doors. Adapted from the acid-tongued, Pulitzer-winning play by Tracy Letts, the movie’s raw, blistering, bitterly funny dialogue lets loose a barrage of nasty recriminations, mocking taunts and hurtful revelations, all hurled with corrosive aplomb by an electrifying ensemble cast. Long-hidden secrets are unearthed, lessons learned, tears shed, and award nominations eagerly besought.

Her (2013)

The movie’s official poster calls Her “A Spike Jonze Love Story.” The decidedly unofficial “honest” movie poster created by Uproxx calls it “a two-hour closeup of Joaquin Phoenix’s face.” More on that in a bit; for now I’d like to focus on the official tagline. Jonze (of the genre-bending—and genre-shaping—Being John Malkovich and Adaptation) is a filmmaker with an astute sense of the absurd. His films are genuinely provocative, brazenly original and bravely inquisitive, and Her, Jonze’s screenwriting debut, is no exception. But the film also offers one of the loveliest romances ever to have graced the silver screen. The fact that it transpires between a man and his software only increases my admiration for the delicacy and depth of feeling packed into the relationship, a brilliant conceptual gag that proves nonetheless sincere and completely plausible. Wildly inventive, challenging and engaging, this subtly profound film follows its own quirky, amusing course. It’s a melancholy, eerie love story unlike anything else you’ve seen this year—or ever.

In Her’s opening shots, Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix in a quietly heroic, beautifully hushed performance), is making an unabashed declaration of love to an unseen beloved. The actor, as well as his character, is unaffected, sincere, disarming. We quickly discover, however, that his lovely words are not addressed to his beloved at all, that this is what Theodore does for a living; the character is a latter-day Cyrano writing heartfelt notes-for-hire at BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com (the handwriting all computer-generated, of course). The cuteness is instantly turned to cynicism, in a movie that is both visionary and traditional, tender and cool, passionate and wispy. Like the lingering analog affection for handwriting in a digital age, Her argues for both the past and the future, with a soulfully poetic spirit that’s become extremely rare in American cinema.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

Subtle and surreptitiously soulful, Joel and Ethan Coen’s latest has a light, tender touch and a surfeit of sincere, deep feeling, two things the Coen brothers generally lack. A lot of the emotion comes from the music itself, supervised by T. Bone Burnett, a man who really knows his way around a ballad. The film is as melancholy as the somber, smoky, sweet songs filled with steely, blue notes, providing a startlingly straight-faced departure for the directing/writing/producing/editing duo behind Fargo, No Country for Old Men, The Big Lebowski, Burn After Reading, and Raising Arizona. Marvelous and mordantly funny, Inside Llewyn Davis is deeply personal, boldly original, and highly emotional.

The sounds of the early sixties folk music revival float in the air like a strange, intoxicating perfume, reflecting the lonesomeness and romance of the traveling life, particularly the meandering, fraught journey of a guitar-strumming balladeer trying to reconcile his life and his art. Oscar Isaac, who portrays the title character with sincere conviction and a haunting humanism, can definitely sing, in a fine, clear tenor voice that palpitates with the poignant pain of loss, longing, and loneliness. All of the songs speak to this pain and to the rootlessness and regret of his existence: “Fare Thee Well,” “Five Hundred Miles (Away From Home),” and especially “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me,” which opens the film: “wouldn’t mind the hangin’ except for layin’ in the grave so long, poor boy... I been all around this world.” The words and chords don’t just enrich the movie, they complete it, tapping into reservoirs of otherwise inaccessible feelings.

This Is the End (2013)

For most people, the apocalypse and eternal damnation are topics of sober reflection and deep despair. Seth Rogen is not most people. A graduate of the popular, profitable Judd Appatow comic fraternity, Rogen and co-writer/director Evan Goldberg create a perfect mix of hilarity and horror, goofiness and gore in the funny-as-hell This Is the End.

Based on the 2007 never-released short Seth and Jay vs. the Apocalypse, the movie is surprising, suspenseful, outrageous, absurd, and ultimately jubilant; it lets off an infectious sense of fun and the spiky comic energy of a foul-mouthed but generally good-natured hard R-rated comedy of near-cataclysmic levels of vulgarity and excess.

White House Down (2013)

For reasons best discussed between German-born director Roland Emmerich and his therapist, the king of disaster porn once again engages his fetish for destroying 1600 Pennsylvania Ave in White House Down. After what he did to the Capitol Building, Washington, D.C., this country, and the world in Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012, one wonders if he should be put on some sort of government watch list.

However you feel about the Oval Office, this country, or Emmerich’s compulsive need to re-enact the annihilation of everything that America holds dear, his latest is as ripping and riveting as it is ridiculous. A welcome throw-back to an earlier and more generous tradition of summer blockbusters that didn’t involve superpowers or science fiction, White House Down is cheerfully preposterous, marked with a simplicity, wit, and playful innocence so often missing from current action films.

Even rarer perhaps, it’s a slick, high-concept takeover movie with an inkling of shrewd political awareness. This time around there are no aliens, natural disasters, or even non-domestic terrorists—although the media in the film unanimously describe the White House seizure as an al-Qaida attack. The viciously violent coup is an inside job; in a way that would make Kubrick proud, the enemy comes from within. The villains are all disgruntled Americans with ideological axes to grind, right wing sociopaths, white supremacists, malcontent war vets and assorted bureaucrats with nasty agendas. Mixing fear, hope, and paranoia, White House Down is a dire political fable told with a pearly-white smile as tongue-in-cheek pastiche. It’s a sturdy, cheerfully preposterous, old-fashioned bit of escapism.

Les Misérables (2012)

 
Based on the musical written by Alain Boublil and composer Claude-Michel Schönberg (with English-language lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer), Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables opens up the teeming fresco of squalor and upheaval beyond the limitations of the theater. This story of oppression, liberation, and redemption produces a swooping, splashy cinematic panorama of an unjust, compassionless, unfeeling world, in which the innocent and the idealistic pay for crimes they have not committed, and plants a seed of barely flickering hope.

A work of audacious ambition, Les Misérables, Victor Hugo’s 19th century 1,400-page historical novel of rebellion and romance ran the emotional gamut, and the film, as well, sweeps viewers on a stirring, swelling wave of feeling that will leave few eyes dry. Mixing gritty, grimy realism with the artifice of stage production, Hooper brings Hugo’s characters to celluloid life with gusto and grace.

Cloud Atlas (2012)

“Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others. Past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future” – Sonmi-351, Cloud Atlas.

In Cloud Atlas, the infinitely ambitious, ingenious sprawling epic made by German director Tom Tykwer (of Run Lola Run fame) and Lana and Andy Wachowski (the creators of The Matrix), characters’ lives that transpire at different places in space and time are indelibly linked. A film about migratory souls and wayward civilizations, the movie intertwines not only the different narrative threads but the characters themselves; everything is connected. All human life is universalized through a thirst for freedom and a hunger (“Hunger? For what?” asks one of Tom Hanks’ many characters at some point) “for more.”

To begin to explain the plot(s) of Tykwer and the Wachowskis’ film would add up to nothing more than an enumeration of names, places, and times, and although the sheer scope of the film is worth describing, the complexly woven narrative doesn’t make for neat unpacking. Spanning a period of just under 500 years, this daring, daunting, dreamlike film is actually made up of six different, interlaced stories.

Based on David Mitchell’s visionary novel of the same name, Cloud Atlas begins in 1849 on a voyage in the Pacific Islands and ends some 200 years into our future, in a post-apocalyptic, neo-tribal Hawaii, linking the characters through life, death, triumph, defeat, art, fate, and above all, love.