Ryan’s Top 20 of 2011: Picks 10-1

10) The Sleeping Beauty
Perverse, bizarre, sexy, funny, provocative. In other words, signature Catherine Breillat. More scattered than her superior ‘Bluebeard,’ but still fearless and fun. Challenging, uncompromised insights into the female psyche and sexuality, without any pat prescriptions or audience pandering.

9) Rise of the Planet of the Apes
A pop-art plea for the primal rebirth of mankind. Rebel ape Caesar — tamed but intemperate, savage but sedated, a beast who experiences self-awakening not through a celestial’s arrow but a technician’s syringe — is one of the great Hollywood protagonists of our time. Andy Serkis is riveting as Caesar, giving a great silent-movie performance, all (almost) without words. Spielberg fell disappointingly short of making ‘War Horse’ his ‘Au Hazard Balthazar’ (though perhaps he already has done so, with the Bresson-ian ‘E.T.’), leaving director Rupert Wyatt as the only director this year to truly make a non-human his protagonist. (Serkis’ unguarded performance stands vastly superior to George Clooney’s flaccid pandering in the intolerable ‘The Descendants.’ Whereas Wyatt enables Serkis to create rich subtlety without words, the painfully overrated Payne drowns the first act of his two-hour TV pilot in nothing BUT words, in the form Clooney’s droning book-on-tape voice-over.)

‘Rise’ represents the best use to date of motion-capture effects, opening a new horizon to the possibilities of merging performance with CGI. It is a genuinely stirring story of resistance — personal, social, and political — to oppressive forces of control. James Franco is a dull actor, but he is perfectly cast here as the embodiment of the 21st century’s (per)version of Dr. Frankenstein: now an anti-Romantic corporate stooge, morally dim, complacent, a hipster- and industry-endorsed bureaucrat. My biggest complaint with the movie is that Caesar didn’t throttle Franco’s head like a vise, and squeeze out his screen-saver brains like a cannonball. Maybe in the sequel?

8) Essential Killing
Famished Taliban refugee Vincent Gallo suckles on the enormous lactating teet of an unsuspecting female Polish bicyclist. Vive le cinema! A thrilling survival adventure and a cryptic hallucination: Only Jerzy Skolimowski could pull this off. After a long departure from filmmaking, Skolimowski graced us with ‘Four Nights with Anna,’ a disconcerting, heart-wrenching movie that is one of the ten best from the previous decade, but which confoundingly never received U.S. distribution. The VOD fate of ‘Essential Killing’ was equally underwhelming. It so completely avoids political agendas of any kind that it might as well have been made by an alien from another planet. Is there any actor in film more captivating than the great Vincent Gallo?

7) Pina
Wim Wenders engages in some of his best film directing in years in this documentary focusing on the works of brilliant dance choreographer, Pina Bausch. The audience is not burdened by facile interviews, but instead is exposed to Bausch’s powerful works, in absorbing 3D. An elevating, emotionally profound experience, with Wenders’ camera often creating a kineticism worthy of ‘West Side Story’ or ‘The Red Shoes.’

6) The Skin I Live In
Plastic surgery meets spiritual rebirth in Pedro Almodovar’s latest masterpiece, maybe his most radical and unclassifiable. The mad scientist horror genre is refracted through fairy tale lore; magic spells for physical transformation are now performed through genetic tinkering and reconstructive surgery. Hints at the next stage for humanity’s spiritual, cultural and physical evolution.

5) Certified Copy
“I don’t deserve to be tested like this.” So protests slick pedant James Miller in the final scene of Kiarostami’s deceptively deep incrimination of Western culture’s status quo. As enchanting as ever, Juliette Binoche’s beauty is less ethereal here than earthy. Her performance, one of the best of her career, is made up of small, momentary fragments of impulse and urge. She doesn’t worry about what it all adds up to, but is willing to “meander with no goal.” But no matter what her character tries, she cannot break through the arch evasions of Miller, a man defined by his refusals. Is Miller Kiarostami’s scarecrow symbol of Western culture as a whole: self-absorbed, overly groomed, intellectually frivolous, spiritually razed … a manicured corpse? And the final death twitch: the hand absently re-staging the hair, as church bells toll his doom.

4) Hugo
Every shot is its own small masterpiece in Scorsese’s personal and moving story about an outsider’s search for a community to belong to. Even the simplest scene — for instance, two people separating in a crowded train station — reverberates with larger meaning. An awestruck tribute not only to the great Michael Powell, but to the power of cinema itself. Poof! go the dancing skeletons — can cinema banish even death? Unlike ‘Harry Potter’ and its offspring, this is a kids’ movie that refuses to offer a trendy bourgeois messiah allegory to feed the monstrous narcissisms of younger generations.

3) Miral
Criminally unappreciated. Schnabel’s moving, sensual film embodies humanism at its most vital and elevating. The Romeo-and-Juliet tale revels in the difficult art of merging aesthetics with didacticism, a style easily misread as “unrealistic” by audience sensibilities degraded equally by mumblecore inanities, Aaron Sorkin-esque vapid verbosity, and TV’s faddish elevation of inflection over content. This is a movie that operates outside of propaganda or political agenda, whose guileless hypothesis is that human life is valuable and should not be taken lightly or sacrificed for incestuously knotted nationalisms. How does mainstream opinion greet this universal expression of compassion? Predictably — with derision and/or indifference. Welcome to the 21st century! (Added Schnabel bonus: there are two (!) Tom Waits songs on the closing credits.)

2) The Tree of Life
Leathery Sean Penn finds himself trapped in an inhuman, over-engineered environment, echoing the mutant alligator returning our stares at the end of Herzog’s ‘Cave.’ Malick is more hopeful, maybe … he finishes with Penn’s bemused, Buddhistic smile of acceptance. The urban world is filmed as if it weren’t real, just a projection of modern Man’s inner repression. Malick liberates cinema, as only few have done before him, from all conventional film grammar. The movie follows the fractured, associative logic of memory — mesmerizingly, both personal and cosmic. When one of the neighborhood boys ties a frog to a rocket and blasts it off, is it Malick’s commentary — “It’s an experiment!” — on the 21st century’s vehement secular worship of science? The final shot of the bridge chimes beautifully with what might be 2011’s greatest cross-medium work of art: R.E.M.’s epic, all-encompassing album ‘Collapse Into Now,’ on which Michael Stipe assures us that, musically and figuratively, “I’ve got a bridge for you …”

1) Cave of Forgotten Dreams
In its simple, humble way, Herzog’s movie dares to redefine mankind from homo sapien to homo spiritualis (“We don’t know much,” says a sheepish paleontologist.) A unique film in that the main characters are purely imaginary; our prehistoric ancestors are created afresh in the imagination of each viewer. Making a claim that earliest man dreamt in motion pictures, Herzog discovers “proto-cinema” in the undulating figures drawn on white rock 30,000 years ago, amplified by the play of light and human shadow. Herzog likewise reduces cinema to its most basic expressive formula: using the medium of the camera to transform the literal, untouched reality before us into something estranging and miraculous.

‘Cave’ accomplishes what all great art strives to do: wrench us from out of the entrenched armor of our mundane solipsisms and give us a glimpse of the eternal. The mutated albino alligator writhing aimlessly in a vast, expensive simulation, its natural impulses irrelevant and forgotten, is the perfect symbol for contemporary humanity. Herzog ominously warns us all: “The site is expanding.”