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Ryan’s Top 20 of 2011: Picks 10-1
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.”
Ryan’s Top 20 of 2011: Picks 20-11
The best movies of the year came from the elder classmen, the cinephile household names: Herzog, Malick, Scorsese, Almodovar, Skolimowski. Hopefully, some promising freshman will start to emerge in 2012.
Review: The Iron Lady
"Streep is lively, precise, and inventive in her mimicry (much like Kenneth Branagh, the lone standout in the torturous ‘Marilyn,’ was with his take on Olivier) but ultimately The Company’s entertainment commodity finds its joys only in cheap sentiment, broad laughs, and packaged triumphs. Scenes are not constructed to explore the complex inner contradictions of a woman of power and strength, but only to illustrate simplistic feminist bromides and to repeat fatiguingly familiar melodrama tropes."
The Iron Lady | Review
Streep’s re-invention of Margaret Thatcher can’t overcome Weinstein Co. interference
Review: A Separation
"Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s deeply involving A Separation manages to absorb the audience in a tangled domestic whodunit sparked by the break-up of a 14-year marriage, while also engaging them in a conscious dialogue about the thorny moral choices the characters are forced to make. Perfect consonance between the art and camera departments allows Farhadi and cinematographer Mahmood Kalari to shoot family members through windows, doorways, and marbled glass dividers, spatially emphasizing their internal disconnect. Lack of a musical score highlights Farhadi’s resistance to passing any kind of verdict on the characters, who are all angled against each other for their own, often concealed, motives."
