09 Tony Takitani

Any attempt to take on the mundane but bizarrely mystical world of Haruki Murakami is worth a viewing – and this adaptation demonstrates that Murakami can be made not only palatable but penetrable for film audiences.  The film is based on a short story about a man who finds the ideal wife, only to discover that she has a fatal obsession with designer clothing.  Jun Ichikawa’s elegant direction perfectly captures the tale’s postmodern conceit and, more impressively, the ineffable sadness that is the hallmark of Murakami’s work.

08 A History of Violence

Crononberg nearly out-Mamets Mamet with this small but creepily effective film.  Viggo Mortensen plays Tom Stall, a small-town family man whose dark past suddenly and violently catches up with him.  At times, the storyline – involving men in black suits and the Philadelphia mob (!) – borders on comic, but there’s a surprising dramatic heft to the whole affair, mostly due to the pressures put upon Tom’s marriage and family.  It also doesn’t hurt that his wife, Edie (Maria Bello), is easily the hottest soccer mom in film history.  Their confrontation, where Mortensen transforms from innocent nice-guy into scary-ass killer, is particularly well-done.  Sadly, the film also features Ed Harris and William Hurt (phoning in yet another lugubrious cameo) but is gracious enough to dispense with them in particularly bloody ways.

07 Millions

Taking a break from junkies and surprisingly limber zombies, Danny Boyle opts this time for the sort of sweet family film normally relegated to the later stages of a storied career.  Adorable newcomer Alexander Etel plays Damian, a pious little boy whose mother has recently died and who happens upon a bag of cash when a bank robber’s plans go awry.  Damian takes it as a divine call to charity, but like all would-be saints, he finds that doing good can be a surprisingly difficult endeavor.  A series of ingenious plot turns and Boyle’s whimsical direction make this a consistently delightful film.

06 Capote

The one exception to the recent plague of shitty Hollywood biopics.  Its success is almost entirely due to the astonishing performance put in by Philip Seymour Hoffmann, who is easily the most talented ugly man working in movies today.  His Capote – limp-wristed, nasal-voiced, and decked out in Bergdorf – is nicely contrasted with the barely literate killers of a Kansas family, and the bleak Midwest landscape could not feel more remote or desolate.

05 Nobody Knows

The true story of four school-age siblings abandoned by their mother in a small Tokyo apartment.  Kore-eda’s unmistakable style – an almost hyper-real appreciation for the beauty in the day-to-day – takes on a greater immediacy than in his previous outings, as we watch the kids struggle for food, money, and any semblance of the stability or comfort so keenly needed in childhood.  Needless to say, this is truly heartbreaking stuff, and the film continues to prove why Kore-eda’s work is more original and affecting than almost anything anyone in Western cinema is doing today.

04 Me and You and Everyone We Know

Believe me, I fought the good fight against this one.  Artist-cum-director Miranda July’s suffocatingly saccharine vision of the world won’t sit well with everyone, but in the end, it couldn’t help but win over one cynical critic.  The film has the feel of Todd Solondz-meets-Amelie: A mixed bag of angsty suburban characters remotely connected to one another, each searching for love.  The sordid details – online chat rooms, scatological sex talk, fantasies of child molestation – are sweetly infused with July’s whimsical ideas of art, love, and an almost spiritual faith in mankind.  This trick could easily backfire in other, more egotistical hands, but her efforts are greatly aided by the talents of her cast, who make her stubbornly optimistic view of the world seem unique to each character – and by the end, the film succeeds in evoking something akin to life-affirming.

03 The Squid and the Whale

A minor but perfect film by a Wes Anderson partner-in-crime (surely they have matching blazers), Noah Baumbach.  The semi-autobiographical film details the demise of a dysfunctional Park Slope family and gets everything right, from the ’80s setting (the cars, the hair, the stonewashed jeans), to the family’s pseudo-intellectual dinner-table chatter while the younger brother furtively shoves pistachios up his nose.  Jeff Daniels is unexpectedly wonderful as the megalomaniacal patriarch, and even I am forced to acknowledge Laura Linney’s excellent turn as the pathologically adulterous mother.  Naturally, the two sons also have issues – the older one pawns off Pink Floyd as his own at a high school talent show, while the younger one masturbates in school and spreads the goods over library books.  None of this really qualifies as life-altering, soul-scorching, Bildungsroman-type stuff, but the film hits just the right notes of humor and heartache so reminiscent of adolescent crises.  William Baldwin is also amusingly smarmy as a washed-up tennis instructor, and Anna Paquin plays jailbait for the 20th time.

02 Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

Watching a new W&G flick with a running time thrice as long as any of their previous shorts almost feels too good – surely penance of some sort should be paid for such pleasure.  With his latest endeavor, Nick Park single-handedly puts to shame the legions of computer-animated, pop-culture-fueled kids’ movies of recent years.  Gromit’s eyebrows alone could warrant a feature-length film, which makes this affair an embarrassment of riches – bunnies floating captive in the Anti-Pesto rabbit chamber, an encounter between Wallace and Lady Tottington full of truly immature double-entendres in an oversized vegetable garden, and a staggeringly entertaining plane chase that manages to outdo the train chase of A Close Shave.

01 Junebug

A masterful variation on the well-worn theme of the family reunion.  A man returns to his North Carolina roots with his glamorous new wife in tow and finds that nothing has changed in his absence – his brother’s jealousy, his mother’s implacable adoration, and his father’s stiff inwardness.  The film does a beautiful job avoiding the tiresome stereotypes so common to the genre, but its master-stroke is all that, in the end, goes unsaid about these characters.  We inevitably fall short of really knowing the people we love, even those with whom we should share something as vital as blood.  Junebug effortlessly captures this, and offers one of the most intelligent assessments of the notion of “family” I have ever seen in film.  

I came to this realization as I found myself struggling to count on even one hand the number of really excellent movies I saw in the last year.  I’m not convinced I saw any at all – the leading contenders (”Before Sunset,” “Kill Bill Vol. 2,” “Primer,” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) were all good, made by smart-enough people, featured watchable, often star-studded casts, yet, for various reasons, fall well short of cinematic greatness.  They are certainly stronger than the hodgepodge group listed above, but still fit into a larger pattern emerging in recent years that points to the demise of arthouse film generally.

Before I go much further, it’s worth addressing the terms of this debate.  What rules of taste could one lay down to even begin such an argument?  What qualifies as “original” or “great”?  Who am I to define what “middlebrow” is?  Rather than directly answer these and other slippery questions, I fully own up to the painfully subjective nature of the topic.  My “2001″ could be your “Moulin Rouge” for all I know – in which case we probably won’t agree on any films at all.  But given a mutual familiarity and abiding passion for film and film history generally, can it really be argued that Alexander Payne is the new Woody Allen, or that “Million Dollar Baby” is the new “La Strada”?  ”Sideways” and “Million Dollar Baby” are not bad films, but they are, without a doubt, unremarkable and unoriginal, and neither you nor I are any better off in life for having seen them.  This might sound like an impossibly high standard, but it was not so long ago that arthouse films offered such experiences.  Yet as the indie scene has become increasingly accessible, it promotes films that merely recapitulate common human experiences in some semi-literate way, thereby relegating the entire genre to the realm of intellectual entertainment, rather than art.

Who is the main culprit?  I’d point multiple fingers at Miramax, which started the 1990s off so promisingly with revelatory films like “Pulp Fiction,” “The Three Colors” trilogy, and “The Piano,” but has since became a bloated parody of itself, and helped transform the independent film scene into something alarmingly middlebrow.  ”The English Patient” was certainly the original Miramax Trojan horse, and the start of the company’s demise.  Based on a Booker Prize-winning novel, featuring a decently talented cast, and directed by the dependable Anthony Minghella, it had all the right credentials to sweep the 1996 Oscars and provide the arthouse formula for so many films to follow.  And its most insidious aspect is, in fact, its relatively high quality.  Though lacking the ineffable genius of the truly great historical epics, it possessed just enough intelligence, beauty, and intimacy for highbrow literary types to laud, while remaining accessible enough for middlebrow types to like.  Its influence is evident in countless subsequent films, including “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “Life Is Beautiful,” “Chocolat,” “Moulin Rouge,” “The Hours,” “Chicago,” “Cold Mountain,” “Finding Neverland,” “The Aviator,” and every other mediocre-to-shitty film Miramax has trumpeted every Oscar season since.  All these films are prettily shot, capably directed, and feature credible actors who are exceptionally easy on the eyes, but perform the same trick of gaining the audience’s affections through familiar themes and saccharine charms.  I myself have proclaimed love for several films that probably didn’t deserve it, simply because they entertained me better, or slightly more intelligently, than I’d expected.  It was only after seeing Bergman’s 1982 masterpiece “Fanny and Alexander” for the first time recently did I finally begin to realize the mistake I’d been making, like hearing a real human voice after having long-mistaken a recording for it.

This is not to say that I’ve given up on contemporary cinema; it’s simply that I have a newfound resistance to being lulled into complacency by what is easy and familiar, which is, I believe, the way of current independent film.  ”Before Sunset” is a wonderful little movie, but ultimately too small in scope and simply too familiar to qualify as revelatory, which is, above all else, what great films should be.  I am ultimately not all that interested in films that repeat back to me the thoughts and experiences I’ve had (albeit more eloquently, with better-looking people involved).  Truly great cinema – like all great art – is that which expresses ideas I would never be smart enough to think up or fully understand myself, or contains images more beautiful than I will ever experience.  Films like “Fanny and Alexander” and “2001″ will always be my benchmark – those that effortlessly embody genius, that expand the purpose and meaning of cinema, and that stake their claims in film because it is the only art medium that could do justice to ideas and images so great.

Art lovers can wax nostalgic about the classics in each medium (and we often do) – the masters of the past who did it first, did it best, did it better than anyone today.  Such commentary is often counter-productive and self-defeating – after all, experience almost always starts from the contemporary, before history weighs in to inform and enrich our judgments.  But skepticism of “the new” is healthier than an immediate sympathy for it.  Just because every movie theater and Blockbuster focuses on the just-released does not mean those films are more deserving of our attention or affection than the lone dusty shelf of those past films that have been deemed “classics.” If anything, the test of time is more meritous than any other contemporary standard we could hold dear.

In formulating a healthier skepticism of new film, I hope to become a more discerning critic and moviegoer.  Each of us only has so much time on this good earth, and sadly, a fixed number of films we’ll ever have the chance to see.  (An abiding sadness I have in life is the thought of all the films in the future I won’t get to see, unless Heaven exists and is Good like that.)  Like every cinephile, I start each new movie wondering whether it will contain something profound, new, or at least better-stated than anything I’ve seen before.  Over time, I hope to understand and refine my tastes in a way that lasts, and above all, to never mistake what is merely pretty as being beautiful, or what is good as being great.