The 400 Blows (1959)

Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows is one of the most important films of the French New Wave and one of the most intensely moving coming of age stories ever to be put on screen. The director’s first film, made before his 27^th birthday, the movie is an exemplar of Truffaut’s best qualities as a filmmaker: his clarity, honesty, directness, his simplicity and deep feeling. A semiautobiographical movie, The 400 Blows follows the 12 year old Antoine Dionel (Jean-Pierre Leaud, who would reprise the role another four times), typecast by his mostly absent parents and socially incompetent teachers as a troublemaker and a liar, and lets us share in his minor joys and sorrows. The film’s personal nature is made obvious even before the opening credits, when we find out the film is dedicated to influential critic of Cahiers du Cinema and Truffaut’s mentor, Andre Bazin. The sense of intimacy and immediacy continues through the first few shots of the movie, long fluid takes of the middle-class quarters of the city in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. This is a Parisian’s Paris, seen in traveling shots of the empty streets and buildings and low angle shots directly under the tower, not the postcard cityscape establishing shots.

Saving Mr. Banks (2013)

Richly rendered, intoxicating and ingenious, Saving Mr. Banks is at times no less fantastical than stories about governesses who can fly. Director John Lee Hancock of The Blind Side fame, writers Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith, and the superb ensemble of seasoned actors create a riveting backstage account of artistic collaboration, a clash of Hollywood titans marbled with moments of high comedy. The Walt-worthy giddiness, depth of feeling, and the stunning performances elevate the story above its premise as an unapologetically retro valentine to the studio that is the most literal Hollywood dream factory.

Thick with affection and old-fashioned showmanship, the movie is a Disney fairytale based on fact, namely the making of Mary Poppins, the much beloved 1964 musical fantasy that put Walt and his boys on the map as serious creators of live action family entertainment. There are knowing winks to Disney’s flying nanny, but Saving Mr. Banks is accessible and enjoyable to even those entirely innocent to the original film—if such people exist.

After Earth (2013)

This father-son sci-fi wilderness adventure starring real-life father and son Will and Jaden Smith is nothing more than an overlong and overly sadistic obstacle course, both for its main character and the viewer. As the teenager hero of After Earth makes his way though dangerous territory, leaping from safe spot to safe spot, the movie leaps from lazy cliché to lazy cliché and listless life lesson to listless life lesson beat by predictable beat.

In the film’s exposition-heavy prologue we find out humankind now wears a lot of white unitards and moved to distant Nova Prime a thousand years ago because of Earth’s manmade downfall, elucidated through a stock montage of floods, fires, riots and explosions. The natives of our new home planet, none the happiest to be colonized however, have engineered super alien beasts known as Ursas—they are not bearlike, in case you were wondering—that are almost blind, but can track, hunt, and kill by smelling human pheromones—“they literally smell fear,” the voiceover helpfully explains. What I’ve just described—and so, so, so much more—could have easily been expanded into a full-length feature. Director M. Night Shyamalan squeezes it into about five minutes, and packs everything full of superficial details, justifications, and rationalizations that are both unnecessary and unimpressive.

Mud (2013)

 

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it,” Norman Maclean writes in the last lines of his autobiographical meditation on family, faith, and fly fishing, A River Runs Through It: “The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.” I couldn’t help but think of these words as I watched Jeff Nichol’s Mud, a down in the delta coming of age story that takes place in the wide mythic space where the Mississippi opens up and the horizon stretches boldly to infinity, expanding to encompass the whole world. On that threshold, reality and illusion, the past and the future, the sky and the river become one, and all things merge, pregnant with promise and hope.

But the unstill Southern waters Nichols wades in are as murky and dangerous as the past of the movie’s title character, a tattooed, broken-toothed bayou noir hero who cares about honor and justice more than he’d like to admit. With a graceful, unhurried rhythm and a rustic regional temperament, the movie reaches the patience and picturesque pastoral sights of a Terrence Malick film. Unlike Malick, however, the director of Mud places his characters firmly within their setting but also above it, offering subtleties and surprises in the way of suspense, humor, and a climax that would put many an action film to shame.

Definitely "Better Than Nothing": Debra Granik's Winter's Bone (2010)

An icy chill runs through Debra Granik’s raw, riveting Winter’s Bone, released in 2010. The film offers a tough, unflinching look at an impoverished Missouri community steeped in an insidious, feral, gender-segregated culture of illegal drug trade. Inflexible notions of obligation, honor, and shame, rigid obedience, and barely sublimated violence rule these rural hills and hollows. Granik creates an atmosphere of suspicion, foreboding, and everyday misery, turning Winter’s Bone into a stark, forceful, breathless thriller. Her movie is a realistic, gritty documentary portrait of a time and a place, a crime family melodrama, a Gothic Southern tale, a country noir, an ancient odyssey, and, most importantly of all, a powerful and poignant coming of age story of a young girl forced to mature into a strong, self-reliant, proud young woman. Ree Dolly (a nineteen year old Jennifer Lawrence in what is perhaps her greatest performance), provides the fierce, still center of the film, an ordinary, plain-spoken girl who becomes extraordinary through her unwavering resilience in the face of seemingly insurmountable physical and emotional obstacles. Like a modern-day Antigone, she depends on a dogged, unshakable faith that people will do the right thing, her stubborn sense of justice coming into sharp and dangerous conflict with the deep, intractable customs of the Ozarks.

***This is an in-depth analysis of Winter's Bone, and therefore contains spoilers.