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. There are certainly a few more from the old hands to look forward to: As an alternative to Lars von Trier’s self-castrating, simplistically nihilistic ‘Melancholia,’ Abel Ferrara’s ‘4:44: Last Day on Earth’ treats the apocalypse as a celebratory wake, an acknowledgement that life is always lived — joyfully, angrily, dolefully, dependently — in the specter of impending mortality.

There’s also the supposed final work by one of the era’s masters: Bela Tarr’s act of cinematic sorcery, ‘The Turin Horse,’ put almost everything else at this year’s NYFF to shame (including the atrocious ‘Shame’). Tarr makes movies as Dreyer would — out of time, out of culture, outside all trivial contexts. The opening shot alone, a ragged horse charging ahead against the blistering barrenness of the world, brands it as a cinematic landmark. But words, wonderfully, fall well short of Tarr. This would have been Samuel Beckett’s favorite movie. What else is there to be said? Maybe one thing — it might be the only work of art this year to match PJ Harvey’s ‘Let England Shake’ as a bleakly beautiful death reverie. “Cruel nature has won again …” 

20) Of Gods and Men
Select sequences are almost worthy of comparison to Bresson, including head monk Lambert Wilson’s conflicted hike into nature, or the monks’ final, close-up filled suppertime farewell. The film needed a more ruthless editor, however — many scenes come across as mundane and unnecessary. Could easily be an hour shorter, and better for it.

19) Le Quattro Volte
A film that proves that the protagonist of a film need not be a human being, or even be animate. At times, however, its resistance to traditional storytelling feels more like a cop-out than a radicalism. The possibility of an inanimate object being a fully realized character is never fully explored. Still, an absorbing and unusual two hours in the movie theater.

18) R
An intense and disarming first-person prison movie from Denmark. Visceral, doc-style film undercuts genre clichés. An unheralded surprise. (Reviewed)

17) The Guard
Brendan Gleeson gives one of the year’s best performances as a Falstaff-ian Irish cop-as-priest navigating the rough waters of humanity’s myriad channels of sin. A true Catholic, he spends equal time with his mother, and whores. No movie made this year has as sharp and smart a wit. (Reviewed)

16) Take Shelter
Daddy may not know best in this B-movie apocalypse noir meets blue-collar horror flick. It’s tight and taut, with a captivating performance by Michael Shannon at the center as a man descending into a paranoid panic. Doesn’t know how to choose its ending, though, and settles disappointingly for patriarchal reprimand.

15) Amigo
Legendary independent John Sayles returns with one of his signature “well-made” films; it’s ‘Deadwood’ meets the Phillipine-American war (a conflict not depicted in film, according to Sayles, since the ‘30s). Showing tough compassion for both sides, the movie powerfully depicts the impossible choices people — occupiers and occupied alike — have to make when trapped in the machine of war. (Reviewed)

14) Go Go Tales
Outsider cinema poet Abel Ferrara’s surrogate is Willem Dafoe’s hustling, hopeless, hope-addicted strip club impresario, fast-talking the customers, flim-flamming the financiers, just trying to put on a quality show for an ever-dwindling audience. A pleasant reminder of, though certainly no match to, its obvious inspiration, John Cassavetes’ revolutionary ‘The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.’ Cassavetes’ film might be the ‘70s-era’s most original and challenging revision of the American gangster movie, akin to Lattuada’s ‘Mafioso,’ refusing the easy, box office-baiting glorifications of mafia criminals. Ferrara’s movie is uneven, but full of rewards, not the least of which is the brassy Sylvia Miles, who memorably pays the price for giving a lackluster hand job in Tobe Hooper’s classic ‘80s horror, ‘The Funhouse.’

13) 13 Assassins
Rousing, old-fashioned samurai craft at its finest. Watching this movie will make you feel like you’re 12 years old again, stirred by the elemental power of the cinema. Miike’s numerous fight sequences all exhibit a rare, Kurosawa-esque spatial coherence mixed with velocity. Moral complexity, multiple decapitations, and an elaborate, bravura final fight sequence that will go down in the all-time movie climax annals.

12) A Separation
A domestic divorce drama — and mystery — that takes for granted its characters’ (competing, shifting) moral imperatives. Will keep you as riveted with twists and turns as if it were top-grade Agatha Christie, but with more universal reverberations, and no easy resolutions. (Reviewed)

11) Attack the Block

A rare movie with the genuine spirit of an early Spielberg movie. Recalling Romero in the way it incorporates racial and class tensions into the horror genre, the movie’s main characters are a thuggish gang of kids who are sympathetic, but not always likable (they’re introduced to us mugging a teacher!). The enemy aliens are ink-black voids, literally shadows, nightmare projections impossible not to connect back to the psyches of the characters themselves.