Some unfamiliar choices so I’m including abbreviated descriptions. Read Hoberman’s full explanation at The Village Voice.
1. A DANGEROUS METHOD
Consummate classical filmmaking, A Dangerous Method has an exaggerated Masterpiece Theatre patina that is regularly fissured by geysers of desire (as well as dreams and ideas) and ultimately blown away as Spielrein, Freud, and Jung meet their respective fates.
2. MELANCHOLIA
…We are all ultimately alone, and yet this thrillingly sad, beautiful movie dares to imagine (and insists we do as well) the one event that might bring us all together.
3. MYSTERIES OF LISBON
… cuts its own Gordian knot to wrap with a magnificent, looping closer that metaphorically conflates the end of literature, theater, and cinema. The nothingness is Olympian.
4. AURORA
Ionesco meets Jim Thompson: This murder mystery, shot vérité-style, is less a psychological case study than a philosophical treatise…
5. SEEKING THE MONKEY KING
…Jacobs’s incantatory, hallucinated, apocalyptic screed is a deeply troubling combination of stunning abstract imagery and enraged political analysis.
6. TO DIE LIKE A MAN
Fado music makes something wistfully jaunty out of inconsolable loss, and so does this mysterious, fabulously sad fable about the final months of a fado-singing, pooch-pampering drag diva.
7. UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES
…conversing with the materialized spirits of the dead and watching the so-called living on TV exist on the same astral plane.
8. HUGO
After decades in the business, Scorsese finally makes a kids’ film, and it turns out to be the best Spielberg movie that Spielberg never made…
9. J. EDGAR
Like most Eastwood productions, this densely woven historical tapestry is frugal and underlit; like his better films, it has an undercurrent of nuttiness.
10. UNITED RED ARMY
The veteran Japanese pulp artist makes a new sort of horror movie—a grueling, engrossing three-hour account of Japan’s insanely ideological New Left…
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MILDRED PIERCE
(Todd Haynes, United States)
The most academic yet mass-culture minded of U.S. indie directors, Haynes made a characteristically sidelong move toward the mainstream by treating James M. Cain’s novel as epic domestic drama with intimations of historical tragedy. Haynes’s HBO miniseries saga of unrequited star worship, terminal class envy, failed self-empowerment, and self-immolating smother love is less a narrative than a fastidiously designed, endlessly resonant world that, harking back to Hollywood’s last golden age, might have appeared in the disillusioned days of The Godfather or Chinatown.
A dozen runners-up: Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (Tsui Hark, China); Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, Italy); Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland); Le Havre (Aki Kaurismäki, France); Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin, U.S.); Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, U.S.); Le Quattro Volte (Michelangelo Frammartino, Italy); Octubre (Daniel Vega Vidal and Diego Vega Vidal, Peru); Super 8 (J.J. Abrams, U.S.); Terri (Aza Jacobs, U.S.); Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean, Romania); Young Adult (Jason Reitman, U.S.).
Joan, I feel I should attempt to defend Aurora, a film that was near the top of my list last year (I saw it in Vancouver in 2010). What the director is doing is examining violence within a continuum of behaviour, as a language. Perhaps, as Freud implied, and Lacan asserted, the unconscious is structured as a language. Film has had a complex relationship with psychoanalysis, the feminine, feminism and violence (see any of Constance Penley’s books on the subject, for one interesting take.) What Cristi Puiu is doing in Aurora is removing all the moral claptrap and ethical rigamarole, and examining the act in cinema as a kind of language itself. By removing as much of the cliched motivations and expostulations and discursive proclivities cinema and cinematic language has gathered over the years, often by force, by censors and dogmatic nationalism in most countries in the past, which carries over today, in altered form, Puiu reasserts the individual, pushes the self forward, salient against whatever cognitive dissonance disguised as the norm appears at the moment. Aurora is a powerful film, and every bit as philosophical as many of the reviewers also found it to be. Action becomes powerful and significant again, outside these purile patinas of pleasantness and progress and purity. Is an act only significant because we can say something about it? I do not believe this is the case. This if pure idealism, the most dangerous thing in the world. As I once said in a poem, the ax falls, and the commentaries start.
Puiu pushes cinema forward in Aurora by stripping away years of doggeral and blather from it. He’s the anti-Mamet, and direly apt.
Aurora is one of the worst movies I saw at NYFF last year. Just awful, unnecessary, uninteresting, unprofound, etc. A Dangerous Method and J. Edgar too? For BEST of the year? Gag much?
At last, a mention of “Octubre,” which is Peru’s candidate for Foreign-language film. I saw it earlier this year, and found it a very nice quirky comedy/drama.
@Dan, Aurora finally got released in the US in 2011
Oh, Aurora. Loved that film – it really freaked me out a bit, but again, it was from 2010, wasn’t it? Also, is it just me, or are there definitely two sorts of lists this year, and only two – the standard Hollywood fare, and this and other lists like it? I know it’s a little like that every year, but this year it just seems a more dramatic divide.
Agree with Hoberman and Förföljare. “Aurora” is probably my favorite romanian movie since the filmography of that country become a movie-buff phenomenon in recent years.
You know, A DANGEROUS METHOD, was pretty damn good. It should be on more lists especially higher up.
So happy to see melancholia everywhere I look…… except the major awards….. shame. Even entertainment weekly caught on to von trier
Ryan, I think you’d love “To Die Like a Man”. If you haven’t seen it yet, of course.
Its good to finally finally see someone have the masterpiece Aurora on their list