Top 10 Lists

The Best Movies of 2013, #2: The Spectacular Now

Jeremy BeckReviews, Top 10 Lists

“I’d like to think that there’s more to a person than just one thing,” Aimee Finicky says early in The Spectacular Now. I’d like to think she’s right. There is certainly more than just one thing to The Spectacular Now, James Ponsoldt’s swooning, touching third feature. Like Aimee, it refuses to be pigeonholed. This is partly because, in strict genre terms, it has no strict genre; instead, it melds elements of various tropes, making it not only a winning coming-of-age story, but also an earnest teen romance, a wistful family drama, and even a sobering study of addiction. But far more important than the multiplicity of the film’s form is the raw power of its content. The Spectacular Now is not one thing, because it is many things: spry and funny, sad and heartfelt, honest and scary, rueful and rewarding. It’s a movie that would make Aimee Finicky proud.

Aimee, beautifully played by Shailene Woodley, is the film’s soul, but she is not its nominal hero. That would be Sutter Keely (Miles Teller), a brash, confident teenager who opens the movie narrating his college application essay, in which he waxes poetic about his recent glory days. As Sutter moans about his recent breakup, you may suspect that you’ve met him in other movies before, and that The Spectacular Now will trace his familiar arc from outcast to victor. But as it turns out, Sutter is not so easily classifiable. He’s lovesick, but he’s not a mope. He’s popular, but he’s not a jock. And though he’s smart, he does not appear to be a great student or even have an especially bright future. What he does have, though—and what Teller conveys so persuasively and effortlessly—is an abundance of ebullient personality, a gregariousness that simultaneously excites people and puts them at their ease. Oh, and he also has a drug habit. Read More

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The Best Movies of 2013, #3: Gravity

Jeremy BeckReviews, Top 10 Lists

“Life in space is impossible,” the opening crawl announces in Gravity. And so it is. Beyond the confines of our atmosphere, there is—as the crawl also succinctly informs us—no oxygen, no sound, no air pressure. Astronauts who brave the pitiless environment of space must take meticulous precautions just to survive; one mistake means death. It is for this reason that space is an ideal setting for a horror movie (such as one that sports perhaps the most famous tagline in all of movies). And true to form, Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón’s stunning depiction of one woman’s battle against the void, is consistently terrifying, with dread pervading it at all times. It places its protagonist in certain doom and watches her scrap and claw just for the opportunity to breathe air and set foot on land. It is spare, harsh, and ruthless. Yet it is also exquisitely beautiful, astonishing viewers with its formal command and visual audacity. As a piece of storytelling, Gravity is merciless. As a work of cinema, it is rapturous.

Its magnificent, extended opening shot instantly establishes this twisted duality. Gravity takes place almost entirely in the black, inky void of space, and as Cuarón’s camera—operated by six-time Oscar nominee Emmanuel Lubezki, who also shot Cuarón’s sublime Children of Men—glides toward a speck of an object, it immediately evokes the gargantuan, oppressive nature of the universe. Yet the camera does indeed glide, and there’s a breathtaking gentleness to its graceful swoop as it gradually homes in on that speck and reveals it to be a telescope and a pair of floating astronauts. These are Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), but the camera doesn’t settle on them; instead, it continues to rove, circling the gleaming telescope and looking back toward the stars. It’s an opening that’s equal parts horror setup and majestic opera, silently conveying the characters’ precarious situation yet also marveling at their fluid movements and their ability to exist in this cold, forbidding world. Read More

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The Best Movies of 2013, #4: Blue Is the Warmest Color

Jeremy BeckReviews, Top 10 Lists

Falling in love is magical, but what happens when the fall ends? Do you land gently and continue through life in a state of perpetual bliss? Or do you crash and suddenly find yourself helpless, paralyzed with numbness and confusion? Blue Is the Warmest Color, Abdellatif Kechiche’s soaring, searing story of love won and lost, examines the trajectory of a fairly typical relationship with atypical tenderness and honesty. In so doing, it runs the emotional gamut, depicting fully realized characters at their best and worst: joyous and disconsolate, hopeful and afraid, empathetic and hurtful. But even as it buffets its two lovers through emotional crosswinds, one thing remains constant: It always feels true. It is not an especially happy film, and viewers who demand that their protagonists prevail may leave disappointed. Yet Blue Is the Warmest Color is also deeply compassionate, one of the most swooningly romantic movies in recent memory. It lifts you up and intoxicates you, even as it shatters your heart.

Not that it is in any rush to advertise its greatness. It opens on Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos, stunning), exiting her modest home and loping to catch the bus to school, one of many mundane moments grounding a movie that otherwise spends a great deal of time up in the clouds. With an expressive, open face and wisps of brown hair that frequently whip across her brow, Adèle is a fairly normal 15-year-old. She works hard in school, gossips with her gaggle of friends, tentatively approaches boys, and—imagine this—has a healthy relationship with her supportive parents. But one day, Adèle strolls past Emma (Léa Seydoux), and the two catch each other’s eye. It’s an innocuous enough encounter (though it apparently took over 100 takes before Kechiche was satisfied), but Adèle soon finds herself besotted, dreaming of this blue-haired figure to the point that her sexual encounters with men feel hollow. She initially channels her fantasies by pursuing a relationship with an adventurous female friend, but that quickly backfires, at which point she seems truly lost. Read More

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The Best Movies of 2013, #5: Captain Phillips

Jeremy BeckReviews, Top 10 Lists
Tom Hanks in Captain Phillips

Paul Greengrass can’t sit still. From his two hyperactive entries in the Bourne franchise, to his nervy September 11 dramatization United 93, to his unappreciated Iraq War docudrama Green Zone, the filmmaker’s work is characterized most of all by a roving impatience, with frantic cutting and jittery handheld camerawork. It’s a kinetic approach that sacrifices cleanliness for liveliness, but if it often gets your blood pumping, it can occasionally feel jumbled and chaotic, as though the ravenous director is struggling to sate his appetite to cover as much spatial territory as possible. Yet Greengrass’ restlessness makes him ideally suited to make Captain Phillips, his gripping fact-based account of the war of wills and wits between an American merchantman and the Somali pirates who hijack his ship. Because the film transpires in a bare minimum of cramped locations—first Phillips’ lone freighter stranded in the vast ocean, then a tiny lifeboat floating even more helplessly amid the waves—it is necessarily claustrophobic. But rather than being hamstrung by such a constrained space, Greengrass finds himself liberated. Unable to overextend himself in terms of breadth, he opts instead for depth, continuously amping up the energy even though there is nowhere for his camera to go. Watching the movie, you won’t be able to escape either.

In one of the least showy and most powerful performances of his career, Tom Hanks plays the titular sailor as a brusque, inherently competent commander, a man who instinctively knows every nook and cranny of his vessel, the Maersk Alabama, even if he’s less adept at ingratiating himself with his crew. His assignment is to shepherd the Maersk and its unspecified cargo around the Horn of Africa. It’s a routine job, and Phillips’ terse professionalism—immediately upon stepping aboard, he instructs his first mate to tighten some of the ship’s security mechanisms without offering so much as a greeting—creates the impression that he’s prepared for anything. He’s not.

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The Best Movies of 2013, #6: 12 Years a Slave

Jeremy BeckReviews, Top 10 Lists

Slavery was horrible. This is not up for debate; it’s a fact. Yet our discussion of this wretched time in our civilization tends to feel removed and academic. How, we wonder, could society have countenanced the suppression of an entire race? What forces could have conspired to treat people as nothing more than property? Was nineteenth-century America motivated by economic gain, rationalizing that the ends justified the means, or did slave owners honestly believe in racial superiority? These are questions worth asking, lest such horrid history repeat itself, but they approach slavery more as an intellectual concept than as the actual, systemic brutalization of humans. 12 Years a Slave—Steve McQueen’s gripping, unapologetically savage account of one servant’s struggles—bucks that trend and instead takes a hauntingly intimate approach. It is not about slavery’s politics. It is about its mechanics.

After opening with a brief series of ragged scenes that bluntly depict the daily rigors of plantation workers, the movie flashes back to Upstate New York, where its hero, Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), lives comfortably with his family. One night, he goes out drinking with his white colleagues, oblivious of their plans to sell him into slavery. (As Solomon passes out, one of his companions murmurs, “More’s the pity,” with a tone of scalding indifference that will pollute the remainder of the film.) He wakes to find himself in chains, and his protestations of freedom are met with the lash. Then, he’s shipped downriver, and his dozen-year nightmare begins. Read More

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