Before Oscar Season — The Top 10 Movies (So Far)

by Gabriel Valdez

Oscar season is upon us, and that means one thing – everyone’s opinion is about to change. When many of the best films of the year are held until the holiday season, top 10 lists will completely transform by January. Earlier movies will be seen a second or third time and will climb or fall down lists accordingly. As was the case with my top two films of 2013, The Place Beyond the Pines and The Grandmaster, I’ll even catch up with smaller or foreign films on DVD.

On the cusp of Oscar season, let’s do an experiment. I’ll list my top 10 films today and we’ll check back in with the list come January:

10. How to Train Your Dragon 2

The list is rounded out with big-budget fare that’s more ambitious than the average summer blockbuster. How to Train Your Dragon 2 might be the best American animated film since Pixar’s sadly passed golden age, but it’s not just about kids and their dragons. It possesses an epic visual streak rare in animation and speaks to the dispossessed of our society – children of broken families, the disabled, and war veterans alike.

9. Captain America: The Winter Soldier

This is our best (non-Batman) superhero film in a cinematic era overrun with them. Like many blockbusters of the last two years, it’s incredibly socially-minded, using comic book tropes to deliver a sharp critique on the oxymoron of a marriage between the Pentagon’s mandate for freedom and the rise of private military contractors.

8. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

For all its visual effects wizardry, this boasts one of the best-told stories of the year. It also challenges Noah for number of Bible references, posing original sin, Cain-and-Abel, and Jesus conceits against the backdrop of civil war in what’s effectively a third-world country. It’s rare that you could take away an action movie’s bigger setpieces and still be left with one of the best films of the year.

7. Noah

Noah is just on the outside of the top tier looking in. I’m big on its style and message, which were enough to make me forgive its unwieldy stretches on first viewing. I’m still a huge fan of its screenplay, which conflates various cultures’ flood myths, the entirety of the Old Testament, and a very meta approach to film narrative into a single story. That’s no easy feat. Darren Aronofsky’s “story of creation” is the best three-and-a-half minutes on film this year, and reveals that the film is better viewed as a postapocalypse fever dream than a direct religious adaptation. It tackles so much that I’m still putting it above much tighter films, but its unevenness can’t help but detract when we’ve had so many off-kilter masterpieces this year.

6. Nightcrawler

I just recently wrote on this film and, if you read on Monday how personally it struck me, you’ll accept my apology if I’d rather not write more on it for the time being.

5. Gone Girl

I don’t know if this is Gone Girl the movie so much as it’s David Fincher the movie. Rarely has a film been so precisely directed. You get the feeling that if there were a fleck of dust out of place on set, it would be moved into position before the camera rolled. It’s an accomplishment to be sure, and Gone Girl says a lot with a wry smile.

It’s a perfect film, essentially, but it knows it a little too much. It’s still pretty secure in the top 10, and I suspect it may move up once I see it again, but is it as important as some of the other films here? No. ‘Important’ doesn’t necessarily equal ‘good,’ but it can add a certain weight to a film. Gone Girl is an artistic triumph, but it’s also like looking at a date who’s a little too perfect. Like its protagonists when they meet, there’s no messiness there, and you get the sense their personality is a put-on. It’s intriguing and you might see where it goes, but really you’re looking for someone who’s more willing to make a mistake or embarrass themselves.

4. The Raid 2

What the hell’s a martial arts movie doing this high? Imagine if Stanley Kubrick had ever designed the sets for a martial arts film with a gangland story told by Martin Scorsese and choreography that harkens back to the riskiest stunts of Jackie Chan’s youth. That might be a mess for a film without a motive, but The Raid 2 is a tight gangster story that reflects Indonesia’s frustration with powerful organized crime.

What’s most impressive is its cinematography. Quiet, emotional moments barely move, as if trapped in a snow globe. Yet you never see the most impressively choreographed stuntpeople – the ones holding the cameras, who weave in and out of the action with as much exacting complexity and artful nuance as the actors themselves. For martial arts films, this doesn’t just create a new way of filming fight scenes, it creates new opportunities for telling more story through them.

3. The Rover

Capturing the sensibility of a short story in a feature length film is incredibly difficult. In The Rover, it requires a narrow focus on character and something shrouded and immaculately protected in their souls. You feel compelled to learn more, to stick with disgusting characters because you need to know what it is that drives them toward a task so meaningless and without consequence. What makes it personal?

In a postapocalyptic world, following a character who couldn’t care whether you live or die, what makes his journey important at all? Something does, you get the sense of it haunting every moment Guy Pearce holds the screen like some cornered, wounded animal, vicious and feral about protecting himself yet already given up to the idea there’s no point left in living. Then there’s Robert Pattinson, playing the dull-witted boy who makes up his mind to be like Pearce’s nameless drifter, play-acting the part of wounded animal. Both are performances for the ages in as sparse and unforgiving a film as I know. It’s a film that – once it finishes – makes you thankful for stepping into the sunlight and hearing the noise of cars and seeing planes in the sky. The Rover is a masterpiece of what it’s like to be desolate not just in the world around you, but inside yourself.

2. Fury

And then there’s Fury. Like The Rover, it presents us with a young man (Logan Lerman) being trained to survive through developing a skill for hatred. In fact, many films this year – Nightcrawler, the villain in Maleficent, and even Lerman’s role in Noah – give us characters who demonstrate the hatred created through uniquely male pressures. These characters are taught to find strength through layers of domination, learning to abuse the “lesser” violently and sexually in order to secure a role in society. None of them communicate it like Fury, however, its metaphors stripped to the bone in as stark a depiction of war as has ever been put to the screen.

1. Under the Skin

A Scottish art film in which each artist – sound designers, composer, cinematographer – was allowed to go wild when creating their own, unique perspective of a central vision, edited into a horror film about identity and sexual consumption. Scarlett Johansson plays an alien in human form whose job is to capture and digest human beings. She does so by luring drifters and other lonely men away from the public, tempting them with sex, and consuming them in some of the creepiest visual metaphors you’ve ever seen.

What Under the Skin does best is tricking us into viewing the narrative through the perspective of a sexual predator, and later using nontraditional means – inverted lighting schemes and Pavlovian musical cues – to coldly bring us out of it and make us consider what we’ve seen. It’s a mad, pulsating, unnerving film you don’t always know what to do with, sometimes frustrating but always captivating. What’s most impressive is that it doesn’t organize every artist’s contribution beneath a single directorial vision, which is usually better for a film – each perspective and artistic layer can still be seen in the final product. In truth, it’s the only way a film like this could have worked so well, as a rarity that can be viewed from so many different angles.

Earlier this year, I had the chance to interview Michel Faber, who wrote the novel on which Under the Skin is based.

What will change by January? Probably a lot, even though I have a very hard time seeing those very top films unseated. Hopefully, I’ve inspired you to go check out one of them. Is there anything I’ve missed that you feel strongly about?

The Half-Year Awards for Film — The Final Tally

Last week, I listed the most outstanding performers, writers, directors, and designers we’ve seen in film so far this year. Consider it a sort of six-months-in Oscars. This is a recap and a final tally – click on the links themselves to read the reasoning behind each decision. These aren’t Oscar predictions, they’re one critic’s opinions on the best we’ve seen in film this year.

First, we ran the technical and design awards:

Best Sound Design
Johnnie Burn, Under the Skin
Best Musical Score
Mica Levi, Under the Skin
Best Art Direction
The Raid 2
Best Make-up
Kumalasari Tanara, The Raid 2
Best Stunts
Yayan Ruhian, Iko Uwais, Bruce Law, The Raid 2
Best Costume Design
Michael Wilkinson, Noah
Best Visual Effects
Industrial Light & Magic, Noah
Best 3-D
Edge of Tomorrow
Best Animated Film
How to Train Your Dragon 2
Best Cinematography
Daniel Landin, Under the Skin
Best Editing
James Herbert, Edge of Tomorrow

Then, we ran the awards for the best acting we’ve seen this year:

Best Supporting Actress
Jennifer Connelly, Noah
Best Supporting Actor
Robert Pattinson, The Rover
Best Actor
Guy Pearce, The Rover
Best Actress
Scarlett Johansson, Under the Skin
Best Ensemble
The Monuments Men

Finally, we finished out with the big awards, for writing, director, and best film overall:

Best Adapted Screenplay
Darren Aranofsky, Ari Handel, Noah
Best Original Screenplay
Joel Edgerton, David Michod, The Rover
Best Director
Jonathan Glazer, Under the Skin
Best Film
Under the Skin

So what’s the final awards tally?

6 — Under the Skin
4 — Noah
3 — The Raid 2
3 — The Rover
2 — Edge of Tomorrow
1 — How to Train Your Dragon 2
1 — The Monuments Men

You can read all my movie reviews for this and last year right here. Enjoy!

Half-Year Awards — Best Screenplays, Director, and Film

You know the preamble. Let’s just dive right in:

Best Adapted Screenplay: Darren Aronofsky & Ari Handel, Noah

A lot of people hate the story in Noah. It’s too bastardized, they say. Damn straight, I say. The story of Noah doesn’t belong to the Bible. It was around long before, transmuted into a plethora of different stories across different cultures that highlight contrasting details. Noah never adopts an orphan in the Bible. This is a reference to Korean flood mythology. There are no giants in the Bible’s Noah. This is a Midrashic conceit that belongs to certain sects of Judaism. Noah doesn’t contemplate exterminating his grandchildren in the Bible. This sequence combines reflections of other Biblical books – the jettisoned baby in Exodus, the crisis of faith in Job, and most importantly the tale of Abraham in Genesis.

There are countless other details from a variety of other religions folded into Aronofsky’s retelling of Noah. It creates a Frankenstein’s monster of a myth, housing itself inside Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic religions alike and vibrantly socially aware of the moment in time it arrives in our world.

Feel free to hate it for not being accurate to your interpretation of Noah, but Noah was never yours to begin with. Neither is it Aronofsky’s or Handel’s, and their patchwork retelling reminds us that it’s not so much the detail in the story that’s important – those details are completely different for everybody – but it’s the common meaning those various interpretations seek to teach us that is crucial.

The narrative details aren’t sacred. They’re just as bastardized in the Bible as they are out of it. The meanings are sacred. The world’s done a horrible job of getting this through its head. We argue about the length of Noah’s ark and its width and what wood it was made from and how he fed the animals while we ignore that in all those stories, God sends down the flood because we were annihilating each other and so lost in petty bickering we ignored the needs of the helpless among us. Understand that before you come at Noah complaining it’s not accurate enough.

Devoutness of detail can often be a useless habit. Give me a new interpretation that reminds me of the old meaning any day of the week.

Best Original Screenplay: Joel Edgerton & David Michod, The Rover

We so rarely get short stories on film anymore. Our movies today sprawl, like labyrinths meant to make the biggest and most widely talked-about mark on our social calendars. Every character gets his or her own realization mid-plot, so we can check the character development box off the list and justify a dozen different character-specific posters. Even in our blockbusters, two sides aren’t enough anymore. I like my seven-sided, choatic end-battles, believe me, but there are only so many writers and filmmakers who can truly hack that.

What about the short story? What about visiting a time and place for just a moment, getting just a glimpse? What about leaving us wanting to know more? Many of our works of art have forgotten how to shield their characters from us. Characters are thrown at us with gadgets and costume changes and sidekicks for spinoffs. That’s fine…so long as we don’t forget those other movies, the ones that contain characters we should never want to see again, or that we should wish to save, or that we should pity, or that we should hate. Sometimes all at once. The Rover visits a time and place we should never want to see and delivers characters we should never want to meet. It stays long enough so that we begin to care what happens anyway, that we begin to understand why someone might be a way we never could be ourselves, and then it exits gracefully.

Like The Proposition a decade before, which also starred Guy Pearce, it crafts a haunting story from an elegant blend of poetic dialogue, stark visual, and simple structure. In a short story, every word matters. So, too, in The Rover. Every word, every shot, every cut matters, and builds to a whole at just the right moment – the second before the credits roll. It forces you to take a piece of that time and place you’d never visit back with you into the real world, to contrast the two, to be terrified at their similarities and joyous at their differences. It’s a staggering work that demands tears and silence and reverence. The Rover is a fire-and-brimstone sermon in the church of film.

Best Director: Jonathan Glazer, Under the Skin

My choice for this at the end of last year was Alfonso Cuaron for his pioneering work in Gravity. At least until I saw Wong Kar-Wai’s The Grandmaster. But that’s another essay. This year, it’s the polar opposite of those two directors. Instead of Cuaron’s painstaking cinematic techniques, so groundbreaking they demanded new inventions, and instead of Wong Kar-Wai’s precise, artistic framing (nearly every shot is so painterly it’s worthy of its own essay), Glazer is much more hands-off. He gathered a wild array of fringe talent and let them go wild.

In various Guardian articles, and in my own interview with author Michel Faber, who wrote the novel on which the film Under the Skin is based, Glazer’s loose, guerrilla approach to filmmaking began to take shape: Conversations with passersby recorded on hidden camera. Covert microphones hidden in umbrellas picking up stray conversation on the streets of Edinburgh. An FX studio let loose to envision an alien’s digestive tract in visual metaphor. Documentarian shots of both nature and civilization. An experimental rock musician asked to score it all.

What Glazer does is invite chaos into his movie, trusting himself enough to shape it. The result is a mash of experimental techniques fused into a powerful whole. These diverse technical experiments shine through so much that you can even see how contributors’ interpretations agree and disagree. It’s rare that so loose and experimental an approach results in a film so tight and complete. The most difficult part of directing is knowing when to control chaos and knowing when to unleash it. For mastering the balance, at least for this film, Glazer does something just as impressive as inventing new technologies or framing everything with painterly perfection.

Best Film: Under the Skin

Any other year, this wouldn’t be a contest. It would be The Rover with nothing else close. But Under the Skin is the best film we’ve had in many years, the most challenging, the one that does something film is very often incapable of doing. Many films put you in someone else’s shoes. Almost none trick you into filling out the shoes of a sociopath and rapist. The film has such command of allegory, it truly makes you stop and contemplate a perspective that’s (hopefully) completely alien to you, and it transports you very uncomfortably outside of your own realm of sensation and experience.

Also take a look at our Half-Year Technical Awards and our Half-Year Acting Awards.

Half-Year Awards — The Performances

We’ve already had several Oscar-worthy performances this year. What’s unfortunate is that they’ll all be forgotten come the Oscars and the rest of Awards-season, as voters only seem to remember their last few months. Certain performances deserve a hell of a lot more, and I have a few in mind:

Best Supporting Actress: Jennifer Connelly, Noah

Anthony Hopkins. Russell Crowe. Ray Winstone. Emma Watson. That’s Hannibal Lecter, Maximus the Gladiator, Beowulf, and Hermione Granger all in one cast. And none of them holds a candle to Jennifer Connelly. She chooses her projects very carefully, so it’s easy to forget just how very human she can be.

Director Darren Aronofsky got the best performance in her career out of her once before, in Requiem for a Dream. You can feel Aronofsky trusts her enough to give her free emotional range in Noah. She’s smart enough to understate her role most of the time, to exert a sort of quiet power and patience over the film. It makes that one moment when her measured performance is lit on fire something special. It is a daunting and undeniable moment of pure acting, and it sets everything else – Russell Crowe’s dramatic power, the raging visual effects, Aronofsky’s pure auteur-ism – to the side.

For a moment, everything becomes meaningless aside from her. It’s a viciously human moment, and it’s a rare skill to know how to complement four such powerful actors for two hours and when to sweep them all away for five minutes. This is one of the unique gifts Connelly brings to film acting – her performances are very often in support of the films around her, yet she can overpower them at a moment’s notice. In this way, she’s one of the wisest actors we have, never showing off, yet with a fount of pent up, dramatic power always locked beneath her performances.

Best Supporting Actor: Robert Pattinson, The Rover

Playing someone who’s “slow” is a daunting task. Watch Forrest Gump all these years later and it doesn’t feel quite as acceptable as it once did. And that’s Tom Hanks. The Rover is wise to never quantify the intelligence of Robert Pattinson’s Rey. Whether he’s mentally handicapped or not isn’t particularly important to the plot. He’s slower to pick up on the reality of a situation than everyone else and this leaves him deeply impressionable. His conscience is malleable in a way the rest of ours aren’t. This makes him the only hopeful element in The Rover‘s post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Pattinson’s Rey progressively turns to violence more as a solution than a danger as the reality sinks in that there’s no one around to foster the hope that he represents. It’s a shade too real. We see it every day. It reflects a society that may already be experiencing a sort of moral post-apocalypse, whose world may’ve ended in a whimper so quiet nobody noticed. It’s a phenomenal performance on Pattinson’s part, full of personality tics and a man’s thought processes laid bare. What it has to say about the rest of us and how we treat the least among us is why his performance will last.

Best Actor: Guy Pearce, The Rover

And then there’s Pearce. Have you ever looked at a Hieronymus Bosch painting and wondered what its tormented denizens might feel? What they’d have left in them, what possible drive could keep them going through it all? It might be impossible for us to know the answer. The distance from here to there, the amount of experience a human mind would have to undergo to cope with it all…it might just be too alien.

In The Rover, this is what Guy Pearce accesses. We can understand at the most basic mechanical level how he does and says the things he does and says, but we have no way to comprehend his inner workings or private feelings. He seems so vacant of soul that his monstrousness feels droll, normal, uneventful. Maybe that’s what Bosch’s hellfiends feel – normality. Nothing special. Another day. It makes those flashes in Pearce’s eyes, those brief acknowledgments of his humanity painful, searing, unforgettable. Those flashes are subdued so quickly, shielded with such hardness, that the humanity in his performance only exists in his viewers.

We have to be human for him, even at the end when we understand…well, not everything – we just understand a moment in his life. That’s it. A moment. And it wrecks us, one moment finally understood in this world of his. And we have to walk out of the theater feeling humanity for him, feeling as if his tragedy is special in a world where tragedy is droll, normal, uneventful. That’s the beauty of Pearce’s performance – making us feel everything he won’t. It’s one of those rare performances you realize no other actor could have realized. It may be the singular masterpiece of his career.

Best Actress: Scarlett Johansson, Under the Skin

A few years ago, I referred to Scarlett Johansson as a showhorse. Like Taylor Lautner and his abs in the Twilight franchise, I believed she was getting roles she didn’t deserve based off her looks. In movies like The Island and The Black Dahlia, I felt she was either flat or campy. She lacked the dramatic core to sustain the lead performances she was being given. It never occurred to me her performances were the result of working with a run of directors whose abilities had long ago dried up.

I was wrong about her, and this year proved it. She was the most compelling part of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and she delivers one of the best performances of the year in Under the Skin, as an alien who preys on lonely drifters, luring them in with the promise of sex only to consume them. It’s a difficult performance in that the amount of silence in the film could easily trick an actor into playing the role too flat, and the subject matter could tempt an actor into playing it too campy. She does neither, playing a sexual predator, an unfeeling murderess, and a pioneer in a wilderness that’s strange to her.

Johansson communicates her own character’s alien experience while inviting viewers to see the world through sociopathic eyes, an experience that’s a bit scarring for the empathetic viewer. It’s a scary role, sexualized yet rarely sexy, unemotive yet immensely sensory. She nails her performance by simply playing it – moments of understatement or overstatement are rare. It demands a lot from an actor to simply exist as something so alien without big moments to express that difference.

Best Ensemble: The Monuments Men

There’s a lot in this movie that shouldn’t have worked as well as it did. Quiet, contemplative moments in which men consider themselves and each other and make a subdued, witty comment before getting back to contemplating. Yet this is a rare cast, a group of older comedians whose youthful zeal to tell every joke has given way to the wisdom to tell the right one at the right moment. The Monuments Men wouldn’t be the film it is without the patience and nonchalance of Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, John Goodman, Jean DuJardin, and Hugh Bonneville. Combined with the frenzy of George Clooney, the optimism of Matt Damon, and the tenacity of Cate Blanchett, this is a cast that lends their film an unassuming earnestness unheard of in today’s build-a-better-mousetrap school of event filmmaking.

Take a look at yesterday’s article for the technical awards. Tomorrow, I’ll tackle best screenplays, director, and film.

Half-Year Awards — Film Design and Technique

The midpoint of the year is a fantastic time to highlight the amazing films we’ve seen so far, many of which have passed hidden underneath the bigger event films of the summer. Let’s get on with the design portion of our Half-Year Awards:

Best Sound Design: Johnnie Burn, Under the Skin
Best Musical Score: Mica Levi, Under the Skin

Eavesdropped conversation on the downtrodden streets of Edinburgh, Scotland. The digestive system of an alien beast. Wind bending the pines. The raging ocean and the cry of a child. Feet racing through falling snow. The back of your jacket rubbing mossy bark off a fallen tree.

And Mica Levi’s score over all of it, spare, atonal, discordant, threatening and yearning, relentless yet lost, pulsing, an organic system all its own, a sound that exists before you walk into the theater and stays with you long after you walk out. She may even hijack the movie’s conclusion through a shift in musical cue, perhaps one of the most important musical moments since Jaws.

How do you portray the remorseless sociopathy of a rapist in music? How do you communicate the aching you feel in your chest on witnessing the beauty of nature, the hard stone in your stomach on spying its unfeeling violence? This is the score you’ve felt in your bones when you look at the dark woods under a bruised sky and feel like all the menacing possibilities of your imagination lurk in those shadows. This is the soundtrack you’ve felt all your life when chills run up your spine. Mica Levi gives our most basic impulses and fears notes to play by.

Best Art Direction: The Raid 2

This could just as easily be The Monuments Men, but The Raid 2‘s production design isn’t quite as piecemeal; it comes together to form a more cogent whole with its other elements. The Indonesian film’s red-walled dining hall is straight out of a Kubrick film, its vibrant night clubs would feel at home in a Nicholas Winding Refn piece, and its snow-draped alleys speak to Zhang Yimou’s influence on martial arts production design. To design a movie at once gangster, drama, spy, war, and martial arts film demands an eclectic mix. To bring it all together into a whole that feels part of a singular world is nothing short of breathtaking.

Best Make-up: Kumalasari Tanara, The Raid 2

With a core cast that becomes progressively more bruised and bloodied over the course of the film, and dozens of extras sliced and diced along the way, The Raid 2 separates itself from other martial arts films by taking its technical elements the extra mile. Director Gareth Evans doesn’t want your basic henchmen, though. He wants each to have their own story, so that one man’s victory is always another’s tragedy. In this way, he crafts an incredibly bloody film that’s simultaneously anti-violence. Evans often tells these smaller stories through Tanara’s make-up design, which allows lengthy fight scenes to develop their own emotional pulse free of the choreography.

Best Stuntwork: Yayan Ruhian, Fight Choreographer;
Iko Uwais, Fight Choreographer;
Bruce Law, Stunts Coordinator, The Raid 2

There are basic rules about fight choreography that are there to keep directors from biting off more than they can chew. Director Gareth Evans breaks most of them. The more difficult the choreography, the more impractical his shot selection. Ruhian and Uwais’s choreography is presented in long, unbroken takes, much like dance choreography is. In one fight, dozens of fighters are filmed in a space so narrow that cameras barely fit. In another, 30 combatants wage war in a muddy prison yard. Choreography in thick mud is already ill-advised – shooting it with overhead crane shots that show every fighter at once is next to impossible.

A later sequence involves three fighters in a narrow hallway. Most films would cut back and forth, shooting the fight from behind one side and then shooting it from behind the other. Here, the camera is choreographed with the actors, swinging in between and under them as they fight. The fight choreography itself is already top-notch, but nothing like the intricately choreographed camerawork in The Raid 2 has ever been done before. It’s too impossible a task. Or at least, it used to be.

Best Costume Design: Michael Wilkinson, Noah

Noah wins this by default. There just haven’t been a lot of strong entries so far this year. However you feel about its story, its technical elements are brilliantly executed, and its costuming is very detailed.

Best Visual Effects: Industrial Light and Magic, Noah

Darren Aronofsky uses a number of techniques that are inherently broken or hopelessly dated in modern cinema. The quick montage. Stop-motion. Time lapse. BodyCam. Shooting in silhouette. Yet he translates all of them into his own cinematic language, and for Noah that means implementing visual effects.

It’s not just about the rock giants and the mythical Great Flood Noah depicts, it’s also about how Aronofsky uses visual effects to enhance and emulate his other cinematic techniques, to create a big-budget version of his particular views of religion and philosophy. For me, visual effects aren’t just about fidelity, but also about how they are used, and few films use visual effects so effectively and experimentally as Noah does.

Best 3-D: Edge of Tomorrow

Like it or not, 3-D is here to stay. It’s unlikely it will ever overwhelm 2-D film – people work on a visual level in too many different ways, and until we can take the burden off the human eye and put it on the technology itself (read: a big step forward in holographic tech), 3-D will remain too uncomfortable and unhealthy for too many people.

That said, it can be fun for some. In terms of 3-D, no film takes full advantage of it this year quite like Edge of Tomorrow does. Is it as revolutionary as Gravity? No, and we’re not going to see 3-D used as well as Gravity used it every year. But there were moments when I’d move a hand to wipe incoming debris from my eye only for my brain to check myself and remind me it was only in the film. That’s the measure of 3-D for me – how well can it trigger kneejerk physical responses in ways that 2-D can’t. Edge of Tomorrow wins that comparison handily.

Best Animated Film: How to Train Your Dragon 2

I look for an animated film not just to be beautiful, but to communicate meaningful themes to adults and children alike. How to Train Your Dragon 2 has a lot to say about growing up, trusting oneself, and taking responsibility, but most big-budget computer animated movies do that. What puts it in a class all its own is what it has to say about betrayal and forgiveness, about divorce, about death and loss.

Combine this with its bright color palette and phenomenal mythic imagery that speak to legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins’ consultancy on the film, and – despite being a cameraless film – you have no idea how tempted I was to suggest How to Train Your Dragon 2 for this next award as well.

Best Cinematography: Daniel Landin, Under the Skin

There’s something in the cinematography of Under the Skin that’s like looking at Winslow Homer’s “Wild Geese in Flight.” In the painting, those geese are being cut down by something unseen as they fly in. Countless more are on their way. We don’t know what’s killing them. In Homer, the perpetrator is out-of-frame. In Under the Skin, the perpetrator is largely silent. In both, the artist imitates your perspective well enough to make you believe it’s your own, and so that pile of dead animals becomes a weight on your conscience. Except here, while death of nature is still the subject, it’s not geese being shot – it’s sexual assault, acts of possession and consumption.

This is fused together with an approach that highlights bright figures in dark surroundings during the film’s first half, only to switch to dark figures in frames only edged with light in its second part. In many ways, the visual approach shifts us from a documentarian beginning to a narrative end, while also reflecting the powerful predator’s burgeoning confusion as she begins to identify with her prey and their natural environment.

Best Editing: James Herbert, Edge of Tomorrow

Edge of Tomorrow is nothing particularly new. On paper, it falls into the gimmicky column that thousands of other action movies inhabit. But this is a film that lives or dies in the editing room, and I’ve rarely seen a film edited so tightly. If it were beef, it’d be 99.999% lean, and that sounds fricking delicious. So it is with Edge of Tomorrow. You’ve tasted this movie before in Aliens, Predator, Terminator, (oddly enough) Groundhog Day, and Saving Private Ryan flavors. But Edge of Tomorrow does it all so well that it ceases to matter – it puts its own stamp on things and it does it through editing.

Moreover, it’s a throwback breed of action movie that’s not all that heavy on action – visual effects used to cost tons of money, and that meant you had to have a lot of character. While Edge of Tomorrow isn’t short on visual effects, it harkens back to the days when an action movie’s intensity relied on caring about its characters first and foremost, and the action was secondary. I’m glad I caught this in the theater, and I intend to watch the crap out of this movie once it’s streaming. I highly recommend you do the same.

I’ll publish my choices for Half-Year Awards in acting tomorrow, and for screenplay, director, and film on Thursday.

Wednesday Collective — Is Historical Accuracy on Film Important?

Today’s Wednesday Collective is a special edition. I want to highlight an ongoing conversation that’s been taking place across a few different sites, namely between Sam Adams at IndieWire, A.E. Larsen over at An Historian Goes to the Movies, Chris Braak over at Threat Quality Press, and myself. It regards the need for historical accuracy in movies and whether that accuracy should be a quality that critics evaluate.

“Please Kill The Expert Review“

This all started when Sam Adams, editor for IndieWire, posted a rejection of the “expert review,” the kinds of articles that declare “What Noah Gets Wrong About the Bible” and “What House of Cards Gets Wrong About Money in Politics.” Half the time, these “expert reviews” fail at their own game, overlooking some pretty simple facts, or assuming some historical intent on the part of filmmakers that isn’t there. For instance, Noah isn’t based on Noah and the Flood alone, it’s based on Jewish religious stories, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Abraham and Job and Moses, and Asian flood mythologies. And House of Cards is based on Kevin Spacey eating you alive.

“Wednesday Collective – Films of Excess, Black Widow, & All Your Ark Are Belong to Us”

We highlighted Adams’s article in a “Wednesday Collective” that also featured some other great articles and a pretty broad Something Awful reference all of two people picked up on. I didn’t altogether agree with Adams that expert reviews need to be eradicated. I did agree that expert reviews have become so widespread and inaccurate that it’s inevitable many of them are written by non-experts. They might think half an hour of hitting up Wikipedia is the equivalent of doing enough research to post a 1,000-word article (hint: it’s not). After all, “expert reviews” get clicked on. They appeal to our curiosity. They appeal to our desire to have even more to discuss about the film we just saw, and our desire to impress others by doing so. They appeal to some pretty basic schadenfreude we feel when famous people do something wrong. So they persist.

“Why Historical Accuracy on Film Matters”

A.E. Larsen at An Historian Goes to the Movies wrote a rebuttal to Adams’s original article, detailing the importance that evaluating historical accuracy has. If we cut out that evaluation, Larsen argues, we avoid discussing some pretty important artistic decisions and the social, cultural, and political consequences those decisions can cause in the real world. He cites the rise of the powerful independence movement in Scotland as a reaction to Braveheart, and the effect crime procedurals like CSI have had on both the taxpayer expense and burden of evidence necessary to carry out criminal trials in The United States. It’s worth noting that Larsen also considers it important for films to sometimes forgo historical accuracy, such as in the narrative and costuming in The 13th Warrior. Accuracy isn’t always important, Larsen says, but discussing it is.

“On History, Historicity, and the Responsibility of Art”

Chris Braak at Threat Quality Press sought to separate history from historicity, further expanding on Larsen’s argument while also putting the onus of responsibility on artists themselves. The issue as an artist isn’t to always be historically accurate, Braak says, but rather to have a reason when you aren’t. Many artists use history as a backdrop to talk about modern-day issues. If that’s what you’re doing, decisions can’t just be made willy-nilly – they each carry into the messages that viewers take away. Braak uses Shakespeare, Philadelphia theatre, and Larsen’s example of Braveheart to write a fairly brilliant article.

“‘Accuracy is the Poor Man’s Authenticity’: (A Few) More Thoughts on the Expert Review”

Finally, Adams featured Larsen’s rebuttal, as well as two others, in a piece that contained far too much punctuation in its title and met him halfway. He still sticks to his guns, but he admits he just had to get “Please Kill the Expert Review” off his chest. He also says that art doesn’t have a responsibility to stick to fact. I have a tendency to agree with Braak – art does have that responsibility, except when there’s a reason to choose differently. So the conversation has paused by putting the burden of responsibility on the artist, but it did begin by calling out critics. That still needs to be addressed.

My Own Take

The value of making movies that are historically accurate should be self-evident – failure to do so can lead to the rewriting of history itself. The single, most offensive episode of TV I’ve seen all year did just this, in an ill-advised attempt to trade historical accuracy for scientific, as if you’re only allowed to allot a certain number of accuracy points between the two.

Art’s ability to turn history on its head does offer unique opportunities, however, the way The Monuments Men seeks to champion art’s value to a society that’s busy cutting arts education left, right, and center. Or the way Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained change history entirely to create power fantasies for the historically maligned. In this way, they empower and engender pride today while challenging typical ethnic portrayals and culturally training us to see hate and racism for the wholly ridiculous things they are. By making villains who literally tent their fingers and twirl their mustaches, and KKK members who whine about the imprecise tailoring of their white sheets, we begin to associate the very same positions in the real world as childish and cartoon-esque.

What’s a critic’s role in this? To evaluate the historical accuracy in Inglorious Basterds is a fool’s errand, yet in evaluating the details and nuances director Quentin Tarantino does include, we might better see the craft behind the image. In art history, you’re taught to examine every nuance – the painters whose work has lasted centuries rarely included useless details. Even brush strokes can communicate something – where the painter seeks to turn your eye, and the relationships between different characters.

And what should the requirements for the critic be? I try to review a movie’s success with some degree of isolation from it’s background. I want to know what the movie’s saying or failing to say. Under the Skin and Children of Men and A Clockwork Orange (I just came up with the most depressing triple-feature ever) say completely different things from the novels on which they’re based. Does that mean they’re failures? Absolutely not, but why they have completely different messages is important.

Likewise, Basterds, Django, Braveheart, and Monuments Men divert completely from history to make their points, and why they choose to do so is the most important component in each of these films. That requires analysis, which requires pointing out the historical details those films overlook or change.

Even so, I agree with Sam Adams on his broader notion that the proliferation of a certain type of “What X gets wrong about Y” review isn’t doing criticism any good. I don’t think he’s talking about the “expert review,” however. The expert review, such as what A.E. Larsen does at An Historian Goes to the Movies, is a crucial component to understanding movies as an art and storytelling form. I believe what Adams criticizes should be called the “inexpert review,” in which critics feel pressure to be all things to all people, and often evaluate the accuracy of topics on which they aren’t really familiar.

Critics should not pretend to know everything. It’s one reason I do “Wednesday Collective.” It’s the reason I seek out other writers to feature here, like Vanessa Tottle and Russ Schwartz. You can’t read a critic in a vacuum; you need other input. One of the most valuable things you can do as a critic is admit what you don’t know. It’s academically honest, and it will let readers know that if you do have a point to make, you’re only making it when you know what you’re talking about.

Go back and look at Roger Ebert’s archive of reviews and essays – it’s easy to select the ones he wrote from a drop-down menu up-top. Ebert was an incredibly smart writer, yet again and again, he prefaced his viewpoints with what he didn’t know, either on an academic subject or another culture’s storytelling techniques. This allows you to be aware of exactly what he does know. Being aware of his perspective and his knowledge gives you more information, gives you a better sense of how to understand his opinions.

The expert review doesn’t need to stop. The inexpert review needs to stop. Critics need to admit when they don’t know something, not pretend they know everything. We need to talk about film from our own perspective, from our own experiences and knowledge. We need to be proud of our specialties, and seek out others to complement them, to refer to when we don’t know something important. Pretending to be an expert in a field you don’t know about is a way of being ashamed at your lack of knowledge. I’d rather be proud about what I do know, and honest about what I don’t. It’s the only way criticism survives as something more than top 10 lists and Metacritic scores. The only way.

Wednesday Collective — Films of Excess, Black Widow, & All Your Ark Are Belong To Us

ARTICLE OF THE WEEK
The Cinema of Excess
Izzy Black

This article. Dear lord, this article. Last year was a banner year for characters who rejoiced in their own excess – in Spring Breakers, The Bling Ring, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Great Gatsby, and The Counselor, just to name a few. These are movies that “speak to the false, illusory, or destructive promise of the American dream,” to quote Izzy Black.

By comparing The Wolf of Wall Street to American Psycho, Black highlights the qualities that separate the new genre of excess from satire and anti-consumerism films – a lack of judgmentalism on the part of the director, a use of formal techniques to emphasize the sensory overload of debauchery over the comfort of glamor, and the use of montage and monologue voice-over as a sort of infinite accounting by sensory barrage. She even dips into music’s recent entries in the genre – covering Kanye West, Lana Del Rey, and Lorde.

Black’s article makes so many points I’ve circled around for ages but struggled to put words to. It is an insanely well-studied and comprehensive piece. Cinephiles get reading. This is one of the best pieces of film writing we’ve seen this year.

Reviewing Black Widow
Gavia Baker-Whitelaw

I’ve made it a priority never to review a woman’s performance in a film differently than I would a man’s. There are obvious exceptions, such as when those differences are crucial to a movie’s themes, but in the case of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Scarlett Johansson could play the Captain and Chris Evans could play Black Widow and it wouldn’t make a jot of difference to the plot.

I’m not here to review a woman’s sexiness. If your eyes and your brain can’t do that much on their own, you’ve got bigger fish to fry. What Johansson is wearing ought to make as much difference to me as a critic as what Evans is. In fact, less so – his costume change gets its own scene, starring Stan Lee. Besides, I’m pretty sure Black Widow’s most notable accessories were an assault rifle and a jet plane.

So here’s where I’d take the majority of mainstream critics to task for reviewing Black Widow’s wardrobe over her function in the plot or Johansson’s excellent performance…except Gavia Baker-Whitelaw already did at The Daily Dot. I highly suggest you read her compilation and condemnation of so much of the sexist laziness and celebrity-revue-as-criticism we so regularly rail against here.

Lessons from The Wind Rises
Qina Liu

Qina Liu has a treasure trove of deep, intelligent, heartfelt reviews. She blends a broad analytical knowledge of theatre and literature with a passion and storytelling ability that gets her reviews to that next level, where they themselves become pieces of social commentary and art.

Storytelling is about giving your reader all the information they’ll need for that one perfect sentence that hits them in the gut, without ever letting them know that’s what you’re doing. Liu has that ability in spades. She does it succinctly to make a cultural point about The Wind Rises and she draws her reading of August: Osage County into a dreamlike contemplation on family and death that reflects and expands on the themes of the film itself.

I discovered her this week and already she’s leapt to the top of my list of fellow critics.

TV’s Love of Dead Women
Sarah Marshall

This is a fascinating article that picks apart the trope of that eternal, plot-driving mystery of the murdered woman. Sarah Marshall at New Republic deconstructs its use on Twin Peaks, a TV show that used that mystery to drive its first season but plummeted into ratings obscurity once her killer was found.

Marshall juxtaposes the comfort we have in publicly mourning the loss of a dead woman – even if she’s just on a TV show – against the difficulty we have in coming to terms with details of her life that don’t match our preconceptions. By doing so, she calls out a lazy cliché relied upon far too heavily in TV storytelling, and whose time has passed.

Captain America vs. The Tyranny of “Dark”
Ross Lincoln

Here’s why you should read this article: “Captain America is, at his core, someone who believes, really believes, in the potential for goodness in people, in the values America purports to represent, and in basic concepts like personal freedom, equality, and fair play. He isn’t a ‘my country, right or wrong’ kind of person, he’s a ‘my country can and should be better’ kind of person. If there’s any period from US History he embodies, it isn’t the Nixon years, it’s the New Deal.”

What Wednesday Collective Gets Wrong About Wednesdays and Collectives
Sam Adams

A few weeks ago, I foolishly clicked on an article Huffington Post blatantly ripped off of Politico. It was titled “What Noah Gets Wrong About the Bible.” I waited eight years for Huffington Post to load 765 separate ads and finally read an article in which the writer clearly demonstrated his vast and boundless ability to not know anything about the Bible. He also didn’t know how to interpret a film any way but literally, which is your last priority when going to see an Aronofsky flick like Noah, but that’s secondary.

Critic Sam Adams isn’t a big fan of this type of article. He argues that articles about the X number of things that Y gets wrong about Z should be banished to the Seventh Circle of Hell (that’s Dante, not the Bible, for those keeping score. Please don’t interpret Dante literally, you’ll hurt yourself.) Adams argues that movies and TV shows aren’t often meant to be accurate depictions of what they cover. An article about what absurdist comedy Veep gets wrong about the vice-presidency is clearly useless.

I’d suggest these types of articles aren’t particularly factual either. They’re assigned in a day. Critics need to tell their audience when they don’t know something, not pretend they do. Informational inaccuracy in movies comes in so many forms, it needs to be treated like a disease – you need to find the right specialist in every genre.

For instance, click on Huffington Post and you’ll learn that Noah never had an adopted daughter who was barren but then later had children. What deep analysis. How dare Aronofsky and Russell Crowe make something up like that! Anger, anger, pitchforks & torches.

Click on the link of someone who’s studied the material and you may learn that the orphan is drawn from Korean flood mythology and that her barrenness is an analogue for Abraham’s wife Sarah, who in the Old Testament was barren until God gifted her with Isaac, who God then demanded Abraham sacrifice. How 10,000 critics missed that Crowe’s Noah is playing Abraham the last half of Noah is beyond me, but that’s why you find the right specialist in every genre. Let me recommend a good one:

Forget about Noah, it’s time for Russian Ark
A. E. Larsen

Look at that segue. Here’s yet another stellar article from An Historian Goes to the Movies. This time, Larsen passionately implores you to see Russian Ark, an intricate movie containing 300 years of Russian history and filmed using 2,000 actors and 3 orchestras in 33 rooms across a single 96-minute take in Russia’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. I’m guilty of not having seen it myself, but I’m pretty sure I just got convinced.

Disfigurement Stigma and Under the Skin
Elizabeth Day

Day reports on her interview with Adam Pearson, an actor with disfiguring growths on his face. He discusses how his new film with Scarlett Johansson, Under the Skin, helps to isolate preconceptions we hold about those who look different from the norm.

“Noah” Folds the Entire Old Testament into One Film

How do you adapt the story of Noah’s Ark into a movie? Whose version do you use? The Jewish version came before the Christian one, which came before the Muslim one, but in each broader religion there are dozens of sects who dispute everything from the size of Noah’s ark to the type of wood used to build it. There are even Middle Eastern religions that predate the other three and regard Noah, not Jesus or Muhammad, as their prophet.

Most agree that Noah is warned by his creator that a great flood is coming to wipe humanity from the face of the Earth. This is due to mankind’s wickedness. Noah and his family are to build a great ark, a ship that shall endure the flood and carry two of every animal so that these innocent species will survive the cataclysm.

Director Darren Aronofsky’s Noah is not one religion’s Noah story or even all of them put together. This film is the entirety of the Old Testament, its challenging and lasting philosophical ideas using the narrative structure of Noah much as the animals use the ark – as a housing in which to survive.

Aronofsky creates a striking environmental parable, includes heroic giants from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and tells the entire story through the lens of a post-apocalyptic action fantasy. It is a self-assured, visionary, feverish, and schizophrenic achievement. Aronofsky always has you exactly where he wants you, and that’s not knowing where you’ll be next.

Don’t go into this thinking you’ll see anything resembling a straightforward Noah’s Ark narrative. If you know the Old Testament, be prepared to see a dozen stories told at once. If you don’t know the Old Testament, that’s OK – enjoy one of the maddest, most intriguing movies you’ll see in a long time.

Aronofsky is known for the low-budget Pi, a gritty sort of Book of Job-retold as horror movie, and the stately magical realism of The Fountain. In Noah, he dashes from straightforward narrative to metaphysical interlude to family drama at the drop of a hat, occasionally taking the scenic route through Lord of the Rings to borrow a battle sequence.

Noah’s visions from God are chilling. Aronofsky may only show about 30 seconds of the wickedness for which mankind is being punished, but he’s better than any other director at putting images in your mind that simply don’t leave. Similarly, when Noah (Russell Crowe) tells his family the story of Creation itself, it is beautiful and touching and inspiring. When he moves on to the history of mankind, it is intense, points the finger directly at the audience, and makes you squirm. Perhaps the most memorable moment comes when God collects the animals of the world two-by-two. His word spreads as a river in a unique and artistically overpowering montage.

Noah crosses paths with grandfather Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins) and the warring King Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone). Emma Watson is also very good as Noah’s daughter Ila. When the actors who played Maximus, Hannibal Lecter, Beowulf, and Hermione Granger are stomping around, it can be very easy to forget the true powerhouse of the cast. Don’t worry, Jennifer Connelly – as Noah’s wife Naameh – will remind you. No giants or battle scene or CGI flood can compare to the moment when she lets loose.

Noah is ludicrous and accomplished. What’s on-screen will seem insane one minute, and gut punch you the next. Nothing can be taken literally, even if it’s told that way, and even less can be taken personally, even though we’re all possessive of our religions.

By the end of the film, Noah simultaneously acts out the Book of Job and the Binding of Isaac to the point where Ila begins playing out Exodus. All this while son Ham re-enacts Cain’s murder of Abel because he earlier repeated the temptation of Eve. This is conceptually thick stuff made easy to swallow only through effects, fantasy and sheer, audacious artistry.

Noah conflates these many narratives to show the cyclical nature of mankind’s tendency toward corruption. In this Noah, humanity’s rebirth is precluded by the same old sins that got us into trouble in the first place. It’s a stark look in an unforgiving mirror. Like many things that make us uncomfortable, some will laud it and others will dismiss it. Some will say it isn’t their Noah, but this film’s challenge to its audience is in accepting Noah wasn’t yours or mine or Aronofsky’s to begin with. This is every Noah, every Job, every Abraham, every Old Testament lesson bound into one story and asking you, point blank: “Now what do you do with it?” It’s up to us how to answer.

Noah is rated PG-13 for violence and disturbing images.

A Whole Lotta Christian Bale: The Films of 2014, #10-1

10. The Missing Picture

March 19 — Rithy Panh tells his memoir of the Khmer Rouge massacres in 1970s Cambodia, using clay figures to fill in for the archival footage that’s missing from one of the most forgotten genocides in 20th century history. It’s an idea that sounds like a student art project gone wrong, but it’s one that in its simplicity becomes overwhelming even in a 2-minute trailer. The Missing Picture is currently up for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. You can watch that trailer here.

9. Gone Girl

October 3 — If Se7en, Zodiac, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo have proven anything, it’s that David Fincher is the greatest modern director of the movie mystery. Gillian Flynn, who wrote the bestselling novel, is handling the screenplay solo, and it’s rare for a first-time screenwriter to be given that kind of carte blanche for a major release. Rosamund Pike joins Ben Affleck, Tyler Perry, and Neil Patrick Harris in what has got to be the strangest cast Fincher’s ever lined up. This last gives me pause enough to not rank this higher, but Fincher’s track record is just too strong to keep it out of the top 10.

8. Noah

March 28 — Darren Aronofsky makes dark, disturbing films like Black Swan. His Requiem for a Dream, about the drug addictions of four New Yorkers, requires emotional recovery time after viewing. Noah is out of left field for him, though he says it’s been his dream project since youth. No one knows how accurate to Judeo-Christian interpretation his adaptation of the Biblical Flood will or won’t be. Previews make it look like he’s playing it straight. Some test screenings for religious groups resulted in criticism, some didn’t. It was enough to cause the studio and Aronofsky to fight publicly over final cut, which any Aronofsky fan could’ve predicted miles off. Let’s hope Aronofsky kept his vision intact. Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Anthony Hopkins, and Emma Watson star. You can watch the trailer in all its madcap visual glory here.

7. Inherent Vice

No date set — There Will Be Blood was a statement film that immediately took its place as one of the most important movies in America’s cinematic history. Director P.T. Anderson’s Inherent Vice, based on the Thomas Pynchon novel and starring Joaquin Phoenix and Jena Malone, earns a place based on the fact that Anderson has yet to misfire. Phoenix is already one of our best actors. Malone is overdue for recognition. They’re joined by Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, and Reese Witherspoon.

6. Exodus

December 12 — Starring Christian Bale as Moses. If that’s not event viewing, I don’t know what is. The last time director Ridley Scott ventured back in time in the Middle East, it was for the Crusade-era epic Kingdom of Heaven. The theatrical release was a gutted mess that cut out entire protagonists, and it was only in the director’s cut that the film evolved from a middling action movie into a profound contemplation on faith, moral obligations, and one’s place in the world. That director’s cut is Scott’s best film by far, and most will never see it. It’s exciting that he’s finally returning to his favorite subject matter, and with Bale, Ben Kingsley, Aaron Paul, and Sigourney Weaver on board to boot.

5. The Wind Rises

February 21 — I hit on this in my Godzilla preview, but the most important filmmaking in the post-World War 2 era was done in Japan. It was a country possessed by regret and a national shame for blindly following its fascist leaders into war, and traumatized by the dropping of two atomic bombs. Hayao Miyazaki is the director responsible for Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. His animated worlds are evocative and emotional, but in his swan song, he trades in the fantasy genre to tell the story of an idealistic dreamer, a Japanese airplane designer, whose creations are used for war. The Wind Rises is currently up for an Oscar as Best Animated Film. Watch the trailer here.

4. Lawless & Knight of Cups

No date set — Terrence Malick is one of the most enigmatic directors in history. He made only three films in 30 years, each more lauded than the last, and now he’s made four films in the last four years. Both Lawless and Knight of Cups star Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, and Natalie Portman. Knight of Cups is about a man’s celebrity and excess in Hollywood. Lawless, which will likely be retitled, is about two intersecting love triangles in the Austin, TX music scene. It’s the higher profile of the two and also stars Angela Bettis, Michael Fassbender, Ryan Gosling, Holly Hunter, Val Kilmer, and Rooney Mara. These aren’t to be confused with Voyage of Time, which is Malick’s upcoming film about…the universe?…and was filmed in Kenya, and may not arrive this year. Heck, it’s Malick, we might not see any of these films until 2029, but chances are we’ll get the Bale pairing this year.

3. Serena

No date set — Susanne Bier’s After the Wedding was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in 2007. Her In a Better World won it in 2011. Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper are both nominated in acting categories this year for American Hustle. It’s Lawrence’s third nomination. She won Best Actress last year.

In Serena, Lawrence is Serena Pemberton, a depression-era Lady MacBeth to Cooper’s timber baron George. Serena is the single role I’m most excited to witness in the coming year. Based on its pedigree, if a man had directed this, it’d be on everyone’s top 10 lists. As is, it’s virtually nonexistent.

2. The Raid 2

March 28 — The usual answer to, “What is the best action movie ever made?” is Die Hard. This is wrong. The correct answer is Raiders of the Lost Ark. Well, it was. In 2011, The Raid: Redemption complicated that answer. It was an Indonesian film by a Welsh director about an ill-fated police raid, and it combined the best of martial arts, gangster, horror, and Western action movies. The action was brutal, fast, emotional, and intelligent, but the tension that gave it its context was unparalleled. It wasn’t just a superb action movie, it was a superb movie, period. The sequel looks every bit as artful and intense while broadening the scope of its story. Watch the trailer here.

1. Interstellar

November 7 — Little is known about director Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to The Dark Knight trilogy. It’s about space travel and the discovery of a wormhole. A mysterious, heartbreaking, and inspirational trailer is our only clue, yet it doesn’t give a shred of plot away. The cast is a you-pick-’em of top flight actors – Anne Hathaway, Matthew McConaughey, Casey Affleck, Wes Bentley, Ellen Burstyn, Michael Caine, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, John Lithgow. Nolan’s last standalone film was Inception, and that was worth the wait. Interstellar is the movie event of the year. Watch the trailer here. It’s worth it.