Author name: Blake Williams

*Click on the ‘Lists & Logs’ tab to see lists from previous years.

This is a dynamic list, so it’ll be updated each time I see a film which had its world premiere in 2012 that is better than at least one of the films already on the list.

1. Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel)
2. Blankets for Indians (Ken Jacobs)
3. Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami)
4. The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson)
5. Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine)
6. Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg)
7. Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach)
8. Beyond the Hills (Cristian Mungiu)
9. A Month in Thailand (Paul Negoescu)
10. Tchoupitoulas (Bill Ross IV & Turner Ross)

 

Polls Top 10 (My favourites of the titles that appear here; will only update this until I turn in my Skandie ballot at the end of January 2013)

1. Holy Motors (2012, Leos Carax)
2. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011, Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
3. The Master (2012, Paul Thomas Anderson)
4. Crazy Horse (2011, Frederick Wiseman)
5. The Deep Blue Sea (2011, Terence Davies)
6. Cosmopolis (2012, David Cronenberg)
7. You Are Here (2010, Daniel Cockburn)
8. Tchoupitoulas (2012, Bill Ross IV & Turner Ross)
9. Elena (2011, Andrei Zvyagintsev)
10. The Turin Horse (2011, Béla Tarr)

 

My Top 10 Discoveries During 2012 (only first-time viewings of films made before 2000 are eligible)

1. Woman in the Dunes (1964, Hiroshi Teshigahara)
2. Meet Me in St. Louis (1944, Vincente Minnelli)
3. Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971, Robert Bresson)
4. Some Like it Hot (1959, Billy Wilder)
5. Stormy Waters [Remorques] (1941, Jean Grémillon)
6. Our Hospitality (1923, John G. Blystone & Buster Keaton)
7. Touch of Evil (1958, Orson Welles)
8. The Last Picture Show (1971, Peter Bogdanovich)
9. Solaris (1972, Andrei Tarkovsky)
10. The Game (1997, David Fincher)

 

Other 2012 films I’ve seen

• Viola (Matías Piñeiro) – 7.2
• You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet! (Alain Resnais) – 7.1
• To the Wonder (Terrence Malick) – 7.0
• The Imposter (Bart Layton) – 7.0
• Amour (Michael Haneke) – 7.0
• Laurence Anyways (Xavier Dolan) – 6.9
• Drug War (Johnnie To) – 6.9
• Somebody Up There Likes Me (Bob Byington) – 6.9
• People’s Park (Libbie Dina Cohn & J.P. Sniadecki) – 6.8
• Eat Sleep Die (Gabriela Pichler) – 6.8
• Tower (Kazik Radwanski) – 6.8
• Room 237 (Rodney Ascher) – 6.7
• In Another Country (Hong Sang-soo) – 6.7
• Sister (Ursula Meier) – 6.7
• Holy Motors (Leos Carax) – 6.6
• East Hastings Pharmacy (Antoine Bourges) – 6.6
• It’s Such a Beautiful Day (Don Hertzfeldt) – 6.6
• The Great North Korean Picture Show (James Leong & Lynn Lee) – 6.6
• A Hijacking (Tobias Lindholm) – 6.6
• Killing Them Softly (Andrew Dominik) – 6.6
• Tabu (Miguel Gomes) – 6.5
• The Unspeakable Act (Dan Sallitt) – 6.5
• Blankets for Indians (Ken Jacobs) – 6.5
• Sightseers (Ben Wheatley) – 6.5
• Augustine (Alice Winocour) – 6.5
• Looper (Rian Johnson) – 6.4
• No (Pablo Larraín) – 6.4
• Neighboring Sounds (Kleber Mendonça Filho) – 6.4
• Sleepless Night (Jang Kun-Jae) – 6.4
• Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino) – 6.4
• Sun Don’t Shine (Amy Seimetz) – 6.4
• Barbara (Christian Petzold) – 6.4
• Life of Pi (Ang Lee) – 6.3
• Bestiaire (Denis Côté) – 6.3
• Only The Young (Elizabeth Mims & Jason Tippet) – 6.3
• The Extravagant Shadows (David Gatten) – 6.3
• Man at War (Jacek Bławut) – 6.3
• Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland) – 6.3
• How to Survive a Plague (David France) – 6.3
• Gebo and the Shadow (Manoel de Oliveira) – 6.2
• Vamps (Amy Heckerling) – 6.2
• When Night Falls (Ying Liang) – 6.2
• Tricked (Paul Verhoeven) – 6.1
• The Last Time I Saw Macao (João Pedro Rodrigues & João Rui Guerra Da Mata) – 6.1
• Atomic Age (Héléna Klotz) – 6.1
• Post Tenebras Lux (Carlos Reygadas) – 6.1
• Greatest Hits (Nicolás Pereda) – 6.1
• Fragments of Kubelka (Martina Kudlácek) – 6.1
• The Queen of Versailles (Lauren Greenfield) – 6.1
• First Cousin Once Removed (Alan Berliner) – 6.1
• Keep the Lights On (Ira Sachs) – 6.1
• The Angels’ Share (Ken Loach) – 6.1
• The Comedy (Rick Alverson) – 6.0
• Stemple Pass (James Benning) – 6.0
• differently, Molussia (Nicolas Rey) – 6.0
• the war (James Benning) – 6.0
• Reality (Matteo Garrone) – 6.0
• Aliyah (Elie Wajeman) – 6.0
• Argo (Ben Affleck) – 6.0
• 38 Witnesses (Lucas Belvaux) – 6.0
• This is 40 (Judd Apatow) – 6.0
• Paradise: Faith (Ulrich Seidl) – 6.0
• Red Hook Summer (Spike Lee) – 5.9
• It’s a Disaster (Todd Berger) – 5.9
• The Dead Man and Being Happy (Javier Robollo) – 5.9
• Skyfall (Sam Mendes) – 5.9
• West of Memphis (Amy Berg) – 5.9
• 21 Jump Street (Phil Lord & Chris Miller) – 5.9
• Much Ado About Nothing (Joss Whedon) – 5.8
• The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg) – 5.8
• Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (Lav Diaz) – 5.8
• The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (Sophie Fiennes) – 5.8
• Starlet (Sean Baker) – 5.8
• Compliance (Craig Zobel) – 5.8
• Passion (Brian De Palma) – 5.7
• Leones (Jazmín López) – 5.7
• Another Night on Earth (David Muñoz) – 5.7
• Not Fade Away (David Chase) – 5.7
• Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow) – 5.7
• Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell) – 5.7
• Jayne Mansfield’s Car (Billy Bob Thornton) – 5.7
• Thursday till Sunday (Dominga Sotomayor Castillo) – 5.7
• Everybody in Our Family (Radu Jude) – 5.7
• Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley) – 5.7
• Paradise: Love (Ulrich Seidl) – 5.6
• The Central Park Five (Ken Burns, David McMahon & Sarah Burns) – 5.6
• Camp 14: Total Control Zone (Marc Wiese) – 5.6
• The Great Cinema Party (Raya Martin) – 5.6
• Wanderlust (David Wain) – 5.6
• United in Anger: A History of ACT UP (Jim Hubbard) – 5.6
• 3 (Pablo Stoll Ward) – 5.6
• The Sheik and I (Caveh Zahedi) – 5.5
• Circle in the Sand (Michael Robinson) – 5.5
• Just the Wind (Benedek Fliegauf) – 5.5
• Fuck for Forest (Michał Marczak) – 5.5
• Memories Look at Me (Song Fang) – 5.5
• Gimme the Loot (Adam Leon) – 5.5
• Caesar Must Die (Paolo & Vittorio Taviani) – 5.5
• The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan) – 5.5
• Detropia (Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady) – 5.5
• Soldier/Citizen (Silvina Landesman) – 5.5
• Night Across the Street (Raúl Ruiz) – 5.4
• Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari (Aleksei Fedorchenko) – 5.4
• Magic Mike (Steven Soderbergh) – 5.4
• Dredd (Pete Travis) – 5.4
• Flight of the Butterflies (Mike Slee) – 5.4
• Student (Darezhan Omirbaev) – 5.4
• Danube Hospital (Nikolaus Geyrhalter) – 5.4
• Broken (Rufus Norris) – 5.4
• Maintenance (Adele Horne) – 5.4
• The Three Stooges (Peter & Bobby Farrelly) – 5.4
• Gone Fishing (Carlos Sorin) – 5.4
• I Declare War (Jason Lapeyre & Robert Wilson) – 5.3
• Perret in France and Algeria (Heinz Emigholz) – 5.3
• Centro Histórico (Aki Kaurismäki, Pedro Costa, Víctor Erice, & Manoel de Oliveira) – 5.3
• Winter, Go Away! (Sofia Rodkevich, Anton Seregin, Madina Mustafina, Elena Khoreva, Anna Moiseenko, Dmitry Kubasov, Askold Kurov, Nadezhda Leonteva, Alexey Zhirayakov, & Denis Klebleev) – 5.3
• Brave (Mark Andrews & Brenda Chapman) – 5.3
• Elena (Petra Costa) – 5.3
• Fly with the Crane (Li Ruijun) – 5.3
• A Liar’s Autobiography – The Untrue Story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman (Ben Timlett, Bill Jones, & Jeff Simpson) – 5.3
• Mystery (Lou Ye) – 5.3
• Museum Hours (Jem Cohen) – 5.2
• The Gatekeepers (Dror Moreh) – 5.2
• Savages (Oliver Stone) – 5.2
• Mud (Jeff Nichols) – 5.2
• The Pirogue (Moussa Toure) – 5.1
• Pursuit of Loneliness (Laurence Thrush) – 5.1
• Farewell, My Queen (Benoît Jacquot) – 5.1
• All That You Possess (Bernard Émond) – 5.1
• Marina Ambramovic: The Artist is Present (Matthew Akers) – 5.1
• Project X (Nima Nourizadeh) – 5.1
• Jackie (Antoinette Beumer) – 5.1
• Araf – Somewhere In Between (Yeşim Ustaoğlu) – 5.0
• Low Tide (Roberto Minervini) – 5.0
• Simon Killer (Antonio Campos) – 5.0
• Anna Karenina (Joe Wright) – 5.0
• Les Invisibles (Sébastien Lifshitz) – 5.0
• Byzantium (Neil Jordan) – 5.0
• The Last Station (Catalina Vergara & Cristian Soto) – 5.0
• Final Cut – Ladies & Gentlemen (György Pálfi) – 5.0
• The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn, & Anonymous) – 5.0
• Clip (Maja Miloš) – 5.0
• The Iceman (Ariel Vromen) – 5.0
• Ernest and Celestine (Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, & Benjamin Renner) – 4.9
• The We and the I (Michel Gondry) – 4.9
• Blackbird (Jason Buxton) – 4.9
• Journal de France (Claudine Nougaret & Raymond Depardon) – 4.9
• Future My Love (Maja Borg) – 4.9
• Miss Lovely (Ashim Ahluwalia) – 4.9
• Blancanieves (Pablo Berger) – 4.9
• Ginger and Rosa (Sally Potter) – 4.9
• Jeff (Chris James Thompson) – 4.9
• Marley (Kevin McDonald) – 4.9
• Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson) – 4.8
• Dormant Beauty (Marco Bellocchio) – 4.8
• Camille Rewinds (Noémie Lvovsky) – 4.8
• Lore (Cate Shortland) – 4.8
• Once Upon a Time Was I, Verônica (Marcelo Gomes) – 4.8
• Ship of Theseus (Anand Gandhi) – 4.8
• Fill the Void (Rama Burshtein) – 4.8
• Chronicle (Josh Trank) – 4.8
• Shut Up and Play the Hits (Will Lovelace & Dylan Southern) – 4.8
• Bullet to the Head (Walter Hill) – 4.7
• Our Children (Joachim Lafosse) – 4.7
• Confession of a Child of the Century (Sylvie Verheyde) – 4.7
• Once Every Day (Richard Foreman) – 4.7
• In the Fog (Sergei Loznitsa) – 4.7
• White Epilepsy (Philippe Grandrieux) – 4.7
• No, I am Not a Toad, I am a Turtle! (Elke Marhöfer) – 4.7
• The Legend of Kaspar Hauser (Davide Manuli) – 4.7
• Nights with Theodore (Sébastien Betbeder) – 4.6
• Age Is… (Stephen Dwoskin) – 4.6
• Lincoln (Steven Spielberg) – 4.6
• The Lebanese Rocket Society (Joana Hadji Thomas & Khalil Joreige) – 4.6
• Three Worlds (Catherine Corsini) – 4.6
• On the Road (Walter Salles) – 4.6
• War Witch (Kim Nguyen) – 4.6
• The Paperboy (Lee Daniels) – 4.5
• Something in the Air (Olivier Assayas) – 4.5
• Flight (Robert Zemeckis) – 4.5
• Katy Perry: Part of Me (Dan Cutforth & Jane Lipsitz) – 4.5
• The Company You Keep (Robert Redford) – 4.5
• Blondie (Jesper Ganslandt) – 4.5
• In the House (François Ozon) – 4.4
• Cloud Atlas (Tom Tykwer & Lana & Andy Wachowski) – 4.4
• 31st Haul (Denis Klebleev) – 4.4
• Rust and Bone (Jacques Audiard) – 4.4
• La Sirga (William Vega) – 4.4
• Motorway (Soi Cheang) – 4.3
• Imagine (Andrzej Jakimowski) – 4.3
• Aquí y allá (Antonio Méndez Esparza) – 4.3
• Capital (Costa-Gavras) – 4.3
• Lawless (John Hillcoat) – 4.3
• Inori (Pedro González-Rubio) – 4.2
• Beyond the Hill (Emin Alper) – 4.2
• Promised Land (Gus Van Sant) – 4.2
• The Secret Disco Revolution (Jamie Kastner) – 4.2
• Children of Sarajevo (Aida Begic) – 4.1
• Patience (After Sebald) (Grant Gee) – 4.1
• Marvel’s The Avengers (Joss Whedon) – 4.1
• Pieta (Ki-duk Kim) – 4.1
• Three Sisters (Wang Bing) – 4.0
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky) – 4.0
• Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (Laurent Cantet) – 4.0
• The Cremator (Peng Tao) – 3.9
• Pusher (Luis Prieto) – 3.9
• Antiviral (Brandon Cronenberg) – 3.9
• Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin) – 3.8
• Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (Alison Klayman) – 3.7
• The End of Time (Peter Mettler) – 3.6
• Lines of Wellington (Valeria Sarmiento) – 3.6
• Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie (Tim Heidecker & Eric Wareheim) – 3.6
• Ethel (Rory Kennedy) – 3.5
• The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Peter Jackson) – 3.4
• Wildness (Wu Tsang) – 3.4
• Hyde Park on Hudson (Roger Michell) – 3.4
• Yellow (Nick Cassavetes) – 3.4
• 7 Days in Havana (Benicio del Toro, Pablo Trapero, Julio Medem, Elia Suleiman, Gaspar Noé, Juan Carlos Tabio, & Laurent Cantet) – 3.4
• After the Battle (Yousry Nasrallah) – 3.3
• The Suicide Shop (Patrice Leconte) – 3.2
• Dangerous Liaisons (Hur Jin-Ho) – 3.1
• Bwakaw (Jun Robles Lana) – 3.0
• An Oversimplification of Her Beauty (Terence Nance) – 3.0
• London – The Modern Babylon (Julien Temple) – 2.9
• The Place Beyond the Pines (Derek Cianfrance) – 2.8
• Nobody Walks (Ry Russo-Young) – 2.7
• At Any Price (Ramin Bahrani) – 2.6
• Mekong Hotel (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) – 2.6
• L (Babis Makridis) – 2.5
• Jump (Kieron J. Walsh) – 2.4
• Kinshasa Kids (Marc-Henri Wajnberg) – 2.3
• The Dream and the Silence (Jaime Rosales) – 2.3
• The Taste of Money (Im Sang-soo) – 2.0
• After Lucía (Michel Franco) – 1.7

Here’s a ranking of all of the feature films (40+ min.) I have seen that played in TIFF 2012. Many of them I saw during TIFF (Sept. 6-16), and many more I saw at pre-festival press screenings, on Festival Scope, or somewhere else.

Key
– Saw at TIFF Proper (between Sept. 6-16)
– Saw at Cannes
– Saw at TIFF pre-festival press screening
– Saw a screener of some kind

Tier 0 (A & A+)
–

Tier 1 (A-)
►Leviathan – Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel
   For all the talk about consciousness, environment, and labour that is getting tossed around with this one – all of which, don’t get me wrong, are among the major themes here – the project seems to be first and foremost an attempt at recalibrating viewers’ sense of gravity. Functioning as a quasi-sequel to Michael Snow’s landmark (pun kind of intended) La région centrale, Leviathan thrashes the camera erratically in any and every which direction; space is spun, flipped, and exploded to often vertiginous effect, to the point where I felt like I was going to fall out of my seat on a few occasions (oh how I would kill for an IMAX screening). One could even say that Castaing-Taylor and Paravel one-up Snow by allowing the apparatus to puncture the surface below (the ocean), revealing an entirely new, mirrored space to be whisked through. The connection between the two films is underlined when the camera sits inside the boat at night time, the moon visible through a small window, ping-ponging off the perimeter of the frame-within-the-frame, virtually dwarfing Snow’s film by relegating it to a tiny region of its own composition. There’s also a stark difference in how we perceive mobility in the two films. Snow creates motion despite stasis (the camera is anchored to the desert ground); in Leviathan, successive shots take place potentially tens or hundreds of miles from where the previous one was taken, yet we still feel uncannily fixed for the entire 85 minutes, essentially locked in the single location that is ‘at sea.’ Even the shot of the man watching TV for five straight minutes has its own sense of instability thanks to the soundscape of thrashing waves and whistling wind, creating yet another scenario of moving and not moving simultaneously. There will be decades-worth of imitators.

►Like Someone in Love – Abbas Kiarostami
   From Cannes: “When the screening first ended, I went out on a limb and called that this would be the most divisive film at Cannes this year, having heard no reactions yet. I was right! Playing off of Certified Copy’s interests in what makes us love another person, and the way the behaviours of loving someone are ingrained in our DNA, this is a minimal, sorrowful and absurdist package that contains dozens of breathtakingly serene car rides and blissfully drawn-out conversations. One I keep coming back to is what could be called the film’s second scene – ‘could be’ because the first one is so fractured, and reveals itself so mysteriously, that it feels like an entire Act in retrospect – where Akiko is chauffeured through downtown Tokyo at night and scans through voicemail after voicemail from her grandmother and the look on her face, as well as the following superfluous replay trek around a roundabout, means nothing but implies so much. Kiarostami is practically confrontational in his challenge for us to add it all up to something, only refusing to easily define it for us (in contrast to the new Carlos Reygadas film, it is apparent that further digging will actually yield substance). I thought of Chantal Akerman’s News From Home on occasion while watching [*edit – in retrospect, I should have been thinking of her Les rendez-vous d’Anna instead, specifically the final scene, though I think the emotions are more in line with News], but really it’s unlike anything I’ve seen or experienced in quite some time – a truly weird film. I’ll need another look, or twenty, before I can make perfect sense of this, but it refuses to exit my mind.”
   Second viewing: Pretty much the same, though I’d change the last line about needing twenty more looks; I think I’ve got it all now. And the trek around the round-about is different now because I honestly had no idea the first time that the person in the center of it was Akiko’s grandmother (I thought it was just some random old man, actually). I’ll blame it on the fact I was soaked and sitting in the nosebleed section of the Debussy. The ending was baffling the first time, and now it’s just right.

Tier 2 (B+)
►Beyond the Hills – Cristian Mungiu
   From Cannes: “I was no lover of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, but this all but cleaned the floor with me; had it had a less Romanian ending (think Aurora), I’d have probably needed to ask for tissues when it ended. It details the tragic rejection of compromise between three parties that is so intense I often could not believe what I was seeing. The second half of the film in particular is just crescendo after crescendo of pure emotion that’s as visceral as in any recent film I can recall. Many intelligent persons are calling this film boring, and I do not know what film they were watching.”
   Second viewing: Not as emotionally devastating this time, mostly because I knew where it was going, and I think the film would’ve been more effective if everyone had spoilersurvivedspoiler (there’s nothing more anticlimactic than setting up a conflict and then spoilerkilling off a key player before things work themselves outspoiler; feels like a cop out). Still unbelievably intense, if not “as visceral as [any recent film] I can recall.”

►Viola – Matías Piñeiro
   Need to rewatch ASAP (have a screener so should be soon, at which point I’ll update this post), but basically I didn’t catch on to what Piñeiro was doing (layering multiple Shakespeare comedies on top of each other) until there were 30 minutes left (it’s only a little over an hour). Beautiful and lovely and dizzying from that point on. Outlook promising for this one.
   Second viewing: TK

►To the Wonder – Terrence Malick
   I’m not going to pretend that there isn’t a lot to cringe at in this one. What I will pretend is that there is an entire facet of Malick’s heavily-scorned new film that is being ignored by the critic-verse that seems to be the key to appreciating it, and that facet is a scathing indictment of American suburbia. For some reason, people think that Malick is presenting these airy, personality-vacant figures for the sake of creating a rhapsodic and universal romance picture. But those images of cubic, cookie-cutter suburban neighbourhoods, fluorescent grocery stores, Sunday worship services, and dinners at Sonic aren’t just there because this is Malick’s first film set entirely in present-day America; they’re direct links into understanding the soullessness of Neil (Ben Affleck) and why his life has been entirely bleached of idiosyncrasy and genuine emotion.

►Frances Ha – Noah Baumbach
   I have been on Team Lena Dunham ever since I watched the first episode of her HBO show Girls; I intended to watch only that single half-hour pilot, yet I immediately downloaded the entire season upon its completion and then watched the other nine episodes straight through. This is relevant because Girls and Frances Ha have a lot in common (not least of which is the presence of Adam Driver), and I think that Baumbach’s film, while great, is a bit inferior in most aspects to Dunham’s series. They both deal with a central female character stuck in post collegiate, barely-employed purgatory; both portray the nomadic NYC lifestyle that sees individuals changing addresses left and right, settled without ever really settling; and both sympathize with an increasingly ubiquitous brand of guilt found in twenty-somethings who leave their hometowns and never return. I’m not entirely sure if my preference for Girls is attributable to there being more of it – which allowed for more fully fleshed-out scenarios and characters – or if Dunham is just more in tune with how people that age feel than Baumbach is (makes sense, given her age). Which is all to say I wasn’t as blown away by Frances Ha as I wanted to be, or should have been; still a great film, though, not least thanks to Greta Gerwig’s singular and alive portrayal of Frances, probably my favourite character of the year so far.

►Amour – Michael Haneke
   From Cannes: “Turns out I already saw the new Haneke film a year ago in the Director’s Fortnight; an unfortunate coincidence, it’s almost identical to the Icelandic film, Volcano. Moment-to-moment it’s incredibly straightforward considering its maker, and starkly ‘what it is’. We wait for each progressed stage of deterioration in order to arrive at the same defeating and inevitable exit that we know – and are told in the very first scene – will come. For the first time, it felt to me like Haneke has made a film for his own cathartic therapy; no scolding or lessons to teach the audience. Getting old sucks, and that is primarily true because you have to watch loved ones do it, too. A devastating film, in its own modest, not-earth-shattering way.”

Tier 3 (B)
►Laurence Anyways – Xavier Dolan
   From Cannes: “OK, fine. I still think Dolan is light on ideas, and he’s far too young to hold steadfast to a fixed theme (that being ‘impossible love’; I mean, this guy wants so hard to be taken seriously as a wunderkind auteur that he risks suffocating himself, which he did in his previous film, Heartbeats), but the filmmaking is really superb for most of this, and for the first time, it feels more ‘Dolan’ than anyone else (Wong, Almodovar, Allen….). Not sure what’s changed since his last film actually, but it’s just more genuine and honestly exuberant in its youthfulness and naïveté.”

►Spring Breakers – Harmony Korine
   As much as I wanted to give up on Harmony Korine after Trash Humpers, he’s too in-tune with the cultural zeitgeist to ignore his work, and Spring Breakers underlines this claim. Essentially the same film as Humpers, Korine improves on that film here by correcting one essential trait: what was grotesquely hideous, grating, and ostentatiously low-grade is now euphoric and drenched in a gorgeous, neon HD glow. The central trio of girls form a Feuilladian gang of misfits who cheat, steal, and kill in order to attain their aspired state of permanent orgasm and bling. There’s also James Franco, whose auto-critical performance pretty much steals the show as a Riff Raff-esque character named Alien, who is by all turns embarrassing, riotous, and strangely poignant. More than anything, though, the film works because of Korine’s ability to convey his general (albeit unsubtle) sentiment that Generation X is a defiled lot of violence and pop-obsessed hedonists.

►Eat Sleep Die – Gabriela Pichler
   I got a bit nervous at the beginning with Pichler set this up as the year’s nth Dardennes knockoff, but settled when I realized that she’s putting her film is direct conversation with Rosetta for the sake of showing that a character need not be miserable and dispirited when wading through this scenario. As strong as it is, it felt kind of minor until the last ten-fifteen minutes, at which point Pichler created a truly bittersweet farewell, using whirling carnival rides and sad clown faces to infuse the realism with an almost subversive attempt at abstraction.

►Tower – Kazik Radwanski
   Works so well for mainly (perhaps only) two reasons: Derek Bogart and Serani’s ‘No Games.’ I actually have a bit of trouble articulating what it is that’s so affecting about Bogart’s character (also named Derek), partially because I can relate to him so well (the scene where he shows his parents’ friends his 14-second video is easily the best, both hilarious and plangent), but also I think because Radwanksi doesn’t really know what to do with him (thus the film’s primary flaw: the unsatisfactory non-ending). There’s certainly much to do with a particular feeling of stasis and complacency that becomes palpable right after college; Derek – being about 10 years passed that point – exhibits a sense of doom from having sat on that indeterminacy for a decade, allowing it to turn rancid and discolour his entire lifestyle. He’s clearly intelligent, yet he’s too cynical to properly function in any sort of social circle or working environment. A mighty impressive debut, in any case.

►Room 237 – Rodney Ascher
   From Cannes: “Practically a comedy, offering up a string of straight-faced observations, theories, exposés, and analyses by OCD cinephiles who latch on to what they perceive to be subliminal messages hidden in The Shining. Because Kubrick’s a genius, of course he slyly inserted all of this devastating and subversive conspiracy theory nonsense on purpose, right?! Most of what these guys propose is so insane/absurd – but genuine – that I felt ashamed of the fact that, as a passionate cinephile myself, I often do the very same thing all the time. Films are playgrounds for us to insert ourselves and our experiences into, and we manufacture statements that reflect us so that we can understand a film just as much as we wish to be understood by others. Many will see this film as a curio that introduces interesting ideas on what The Shining is about, but what it actually accomplishes is more ambitious: showing exactly how cinephilia has been transformed by the home video era of movie-(re)(re)(re)(re)watching.”

►In Another Country – Hong Sang-soo
   From Cannes: “Since this was ‘only’ my seventh Hong film, it still felt fresh to me. Huppert had me giggling the entire time, even when I didn’t know what I was laughing at. Those familiar enough with Hong (i.e. if you’ve seen more than two) will note that this is yet another auto-critique, this one regarding the fact that pretty much all of his films have the same script and casting aesthetic. The 1st act is the funniest, but for the rest I was coasting on the subtle differences in each Anne (Huppert plays three different characters, all with the same name, naturally), and the treatment toward her by others.”
   Second Third viewing: I’ve seen this three times now, and I think that’s probably enough. Very funny.

►A Hijacking – Tobias Lindholm
   One of my wild card picks this year, pretty much just because it played in the Venice Film Festival. There’s not too much that should be, or needs to be, said about it. It details the corporate negotiations that take place after a freighter is hijacked by some Somali pirates, who demand a $15M ransom or else they’ll kill the crew. Despite the fact that the bargaining of this ransom is thrilling and tense and takes up about 90% percent of the running time, it almost feels like a MacGuffin when a single action that takes place five minutes before the end of the film re-routes the film’s destination toward a profoundly moving portrayal of insurmountable guilt; a lightning-quick turn on par with the mid-film rift in last year’s The Loneliest Planet.

►Tabu – Miguel Gomes
   From Cannes: “How anyone claims to have properly digested this on a single viewing is a mystery to me, but its second half sure lived up to the vague memory of hype I seem to recall it having, which is to say: I was floored by its singularity and the fact I cared so much. Bifurcation is like so ‘in’ right now and I guess now that I see the hints of connections between the halves I can start to appreciate it next time, but in the act of watching this I wished that the first hour would up and disappear altogether.”

►Sightseers – Ben Wheatley
   From Cannes: “A pretty solid mix of Mike Leigh’s naturalism and Edgar Wright’s absurdly casual genre injections; humor works about half the time – mostly because you can see many jokes coming from a mile away – but its simple yet accurate observations of a couple who’ve reached a romantic plateau in their relationship and must invent new ways of staying interested in each other is often piercing despite the laughter.”

►Augustine – Alice Winocour
   Slowly builds to a climax that may or may not confirm a suspicion I’d had for the entire film. In the end, though, it’s not so important to discern whether or not Augustine is putting on a show, but sensing out the wallop buried in her final gesture, essentially saving a career and ending a romance in a single, spastic performance.

►Looper – Rian Johnson
   Want to see it again, but basically, love it when it’s a time travel movie, not so much when it’s The Omen.

►No – Pablo Larraín
   From Cannes: “Aesthetically, conceptually, and thematically bold, not to mention that I laughed more at this film than anything else other than the new Hong. I just wish its political purpose resonated as much as the ironies and kitsch do.”

►Barbara – Christian Petzold
   More elliptical than I was expecting it to be, masterfully retaining a particular mood and rhythm that gripped me even when I was losing interest in the narrative.

►Bestiaire – Denis Côté
   Saw this last February and only remember the images, rather than ideas. The images are spectacular.

►Berberian Sound Studio – Peter Strickland
   Figured I was losing interest in this while watching it, zoning out here and there, to the detriment of the film. What I think it’s doing though, by repeating itself over and again and developing a certain monotony, is developing a distance between the viewer and the material so that certain crucial changes in behaviour and plot aren’t immediately recognizable.

►Gebo and the Shadow – Manoel de Oliveira
   Minor, but still a treat. Loved the ending – sacrificial gesture, freeze frame, roll credits – which sucked the wind out of me as only the best Iranian directors are prone to.

►When Night Falls – Ying Liang
   So freakin’ sad. (Seriously)

Tier 4 (B-)
►The Master – Paul Thomas Anderson
   Couldn’t stop thinking of A Clockwork Orange, even if I hate the ‘which film/director is PTA making/being this time?’ tradition. The best compliment I can give it right now is that I felt the exact same way about it when it ended as I did when I first saw There Will Be Blood (As my friend said, “I knew it was a masterpiece, and I knew I was disappointed”). I had the impression that Anderson really was burdened by having to follow up a film so immediately canonized; even the last scene with Hoffman and Phoenix together is essentially TWBB’s between Plainview and H.W.: the two of them seated in a grand office, the father-figure swearing the son-figure off as his sworn enemy from here on out. Dern confirmed as my favourite living actress.

►Post Tenebras Lux – Carlos Reygadas
   From Cannes: “One of the most pretentious films I have seen in a very long time. In the interviews I’ve read since the film premiered, Reygadas’ one defense is basically ‘all you guys want your movies spoon-fed to you! my movie is challenging and doesn’t give answers! you have to think for yourself!’, which basically confirms what the film indicates: the guy doesn’t know what his movie is saying, but he desperately wants it to say something profound. On its surface – and this is making it sound far more interesting than it is – one could almost call this Satan’s telling of The Tree of Life. The difference is that Malick actually knew what he wanted to do with his film. Example of head-smacking, go-for-broke grasps at profundity: the two main characters are at a swingers bath house where there is copious anus-pounding happening all around them; they walk into a room and ask the four or five naked patrons inside “is this the Duchamp room?” One of them replies “No, sorry, this is the Hegel room.” Puh-lease. However, if a film that has this kind of nonsense (<--clickable) going on around the edges of the frame for more than half the running time looks like your idea of a stunningly visionary breakthrough in how we see the world, perhaps you can disregard everything else in this capsule."    Second viewing: Despite the fact that all of the above complaints more or less still stand, this revisitation was somewhat of a breakthrough where much of it fell into place – everything suffocatingly obtuse became obvious, if not heavy-handed. Part of my path to enlightenment is thanks to Michael Sicinski’s take on the film as “a rather conservative film about the need to defend the family against all potential threats, foreign and domestic,” which is certainly a big part of it. Further, it’s evident that PTL is primarily concerned with the huge classist and racist divides in Mexico, the wealthy whites and the poor dark-skinneds, and how this particular family’s wealth both offers them a form of protection and makes them more vulnerable to theft and violence. To underline this theme, Reygadas inserted what I’d like to think are a couple of nods to Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman, a film that is essentially about the same thing. Starting about fifteen minutes before the end, Seven (the man who chops down [family] trees), is riding in the back of a pickup. The truck races down a dirt road, hits a dog, and continues; Seven looks back apathetically for a moment, then resumes thinking about whatever it was he was thinking about before, pointedly lacking the remorse and guilt of Martel’s heroine, Vero. Then there’s Seven’s fate, which makes the Martel connection pretty damn literal if you ask me. So, in light of having something to grab on to, suddenly every scene became more meaningful and cohesive to the whole. Even the Duchamp/Hegel thing became more attributable to the central couple’s yuppie pretentions than Reygadas’ own. Still unnecessarily butt ugly and too willfully obscure, in my opinion.

►The Last Time I Saw Macao – João Pedro Rodrigues & João Rui Guerra da Mata
   A hybrid of several genres – essay film, city symphony, queer noir – and has varying degrees of success with the lot of them. The worst – and unfortunately most prominent – would be the noir – a diaristic search for a transvestite-in-trouble named Candy by her Portuguese friend (played and narrated by Guerra da Mata). The acting and rhythm in these parts feels undercooked and doesn’t adequately tie in to the rest of the film’s concerns with Portuguese-occupied Macao and the present-day state of the Chinese region. The best thing here is the photography, which is HD video that appears at first to be repellently murky and muddy, until I realized that all of the medium-toned greys and browns where supplemented by slivers and panels of shimmering neon and sparkling hot spots from nearby cars, commercial buildings, and other electronic devices littered throughout the city. In a film about the disappearance of history and culture (Macao was a Portuguese colony for 4 centuries, ending in 1999, so the filmmakers are playing with their own genuine and personal nostalgia from its past), these little bursts of light were moving respites from the off-putting narrative.

►differently, Molussia – Nicolas Rey
   A rigorous, shag carpet confrontation with tyranny, technique, and machines. For one thing, it is at least noteworthy for its bold formalist stroke that ensures that every audience will have a unique experience with it: comprised of nine 16mm reels, the order in which the reels are projected is randomly chosen by the projectionist using a kind of lottery system. As if to underline the non-narrativity of it, that the film could still work in the 362,000+ possible configurations is an indication of what you’re in for (a few in the audience at my AGO Jackman Hall screening were clearly frustrated, perhaps even provoked by the 9 different title sequences that popped up). Not even Benning’s RR or 13 Lakes/Ten Skies would be quite as stunning if the shots were randomized. I’d kill to be in the screening of this film that assigns the ‘Interlude’ to the beginning of the film, for the sheer WTF absurdity of it. Part of my problem, though, is that I can’t find anything to really hang on to. Rey introduced the film by telling us that it was really a very simple film, yet what I saw felt too complex to parse it on a single look.

►Reality – Matteo Garrone
   From Cannes: “An inversion of The Truman Show, but more like a remake of Sara Goldfarb’s cracked-out descent in Requiem for a Dream. Garrone’s significant addition to these premises, though, is an (perhaps unsubtle and single-note) analogy of Catholic hypocrisy. It’s scathing & visually dizzying, but also feels familiar. I thought it got a little too goofy in its second half. Anyone who tells you that this is just a movie about television obsession is missing the point.”

►West of Memphis – Amy Berg
   I won’t feel comfortable tackling this one until I’ve seen the Paradise Lost trilogy, solely because I don’t know if the things I found amazing here were already covered in those. I went into this knowing nothing about the case except that they were all freed a year ago, so holy cow in that regard.

►Much Ado About Nothing – Joss Whedon
   Like Resnais and the Tavianis’ films this year (and in retrospect, the Piñeiro), this is another solid, experimental theatre adaptation. Funnier and more entertaining than Caesar Must Die, but not as complex and original as You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet!

►The Hunt – Thomas Vinterberg
   From Cannes: “Well-made, compelling but unsurprising in its view of how something out of our control can reshape our lives for the worse (this being a Vinterberg film and all). The Best Actor Prize was earned (even if this performance doesn’t hold a candle to Lavant’s all-time great turn in Holy Motors). Probably his best film since The Celebration.

►The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology – Sophie Fiennes
   Liked it well enough from anecdote to anecdote, but didn’t grab on to any cumulative thread, so it just seemed to end arbitrarily.

►Silver Linings Playbook – David O. Russell
   As fresh and funny as any Russell film (and the best People’s Choice winner in years), but it just got a little too standard rom-commy by the end. Jennifer Lawrence brilliant in her role as Juliette Lewis.

►Jayne Mansfield’s Car – Billy Bob Thornton
   Individual scenes are killers (not least of which the last one, I mean damn), but it deflates as quickly as it inflates.

►Paradise: Love – Ulrich Seidl
   From Cannes: “One, two, three strikes and she still gets tricked by those pesky Kenyans! Seidl could direct a film with his eyes closed and it’d be deeply felt and sharply observed, but this feels padded out (the third scammer is entirely superfluous), and the statement it’s making is too simplistic and obvious to justify the two-hour running time. I still look forward to the other two of this trilogy, Faith and Hope.”

►The Central Park Five – Ken Burns, David McMahon & Sarah Burns
   Watched this pretty soon after West of Memphis, so it unfortunately got a ‘been there, done that’ reaction from me. Pretty staggering material (yet again), in any case.

►3 – Pablo Stoll Ward
   I might’ve just been impressed by what this is compared to my expectations (I saw the poster, and it’s clearly being sold as a rollicking family comedy). Doesn’t add up to much (powerful final image aside), but the characters are all real humans, and it evolved naturally, so what the hell, B-.

►Just the Wind – Bence Fliegauf
   Refreshingly not the film it should be, considering that a film with this premise is always the film it should be. Never not brooding and pretty to look at, just seemed like it wasn’t interested in leaving any sort of lasting impression.

►Student – Darezhan Omirbaev
   From Cannes: “So Omirbayev is a Bresson fan. Pretty much every decision is either inspired by or, more often, a replica of his cinema: the protagonist’s walk is a direct pull of Jacques’ slacked strut in Four Nights of a Dreamer; the ending is a reshoot of Pickpocket’s ending; elsewhere, it’s L’Argent galore. Calling attention to the Poet of Precision doesn’t mean your movie is good, though. I didn’t think a ‘Crime & Punishment’ adaptation could be this comatose, and even the very De Oliveirian modernism couldn’t liven the mood. Many will praise – and by now, have praised – this for the Bressonian-ness of it, but I still think I’d prefer to see Omirbayev make an Omirbayev film.”
   Second viewing: Wasn’t bored to tears this time, and the Bresson references now feel more tongue-in-cheek than cheap homages, especially the bit with the donkey, which made me laugh out loud to my surprise.

►Night Across the Street – Raúl Ruiz
   From Cannes: “I’m happy that Ruiz went out in a bit of a whimsical mode, since on paper this looked like Mysteries of Lisbon: The Epilogue. It doesn’t have the impact I think it should, likely because it feels too long (I know, the more Ruiz the better!, but not really, here) and its stream-of-consciousness is intentionally mind-numbing in large doses. Mostly delightful, though, & its use of DV is unlike any Ive seen.”

►Gone Fishing – Carlos Sorin
   From Cinema Scope Online: “Carlos Sorin has made a career out of departing and returning to Patagonia. Setting essentially every other one of his films there for the last decade, he’s laid out a trajectory that, in retrospect, is probably less motivated by a self-designated auteurist narrative and more due to an ambivalence he has toward the kind of films he wants to be making. Sorin’s recent films set in the shared Argentinean-Chilean region, which includes his new Gone Fishing, are steeped in a melancholic sentimentality and tend to be critically lauded as “small” and “beautiful”; his films made elsewhere (The Road to San Diego [2006], The Cat Vanishes [2011]) garner adjectives like “abstract,” “stylish,” and “bizarre,” and are ultimately deemed as failures.
   Gone Fishing, a lulling drama that episodically chronicles a 50-year-old man’s return to Patagonia, is a continuation of Sorin’s artistic stasis, but could also register as a despairing critique on his back-and-forth pattern. There isn’t a mean-spirited or offensive bone in its body, yet there are several Sorinian interludes that occasionally drop in to clear the air: a pause on a female boxer’s gruesomely swollen face after a brutal match; a show-stopping aria performed live at the dinner table with a swelling, non-diegetic orchestral accompaniment that stands off enough so that it still somehow registers as a cappella; and a boating trip that turns rocky and causes a man to vomit up something resembling custard. Singular as these moments are, there isn’t enough of them to balance out the overall placidity of it all; worse, there is hardly any suggestion that Sorin is fed up enough with this movie to ensure that he’ll never make it again.”

Tier 5 (C+)
I Declare War – Jason Lapeyre & Robert Wilson
   Liked how dedicated these guys were to this idea, which is basically a feature-length movie about some kids playing capture the flag. The game is typical enough (with some pre-pubescent angst thrown in there), yet it’s filmed as if it were an R-rated war epic. I wish it didn’t become so fixed on the chubby bully kid’s ‘why won’t you be my friend?!?!’ issues; made the whole thing lame.

►Fly With the Crane – Li Ruijun
   If I told you there is a film in TIFF about two ~six year-old children who bury their grandfather alive, you might immediately think Midnight Madness. However, this is a sweet little Chinese film in which the actual burial is an endearing gesture and meant to be incredibly sentimental, which is kind of awesome.

►A Liar’s Autobiography – The Untrue Story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman – Ben Timlett, Bill Jones, & Jeff Simpson
   I might have liked this more than I should considering it was 3D and the characters were sometimes paper dolls. Too many penis jokes, not enough flatulence.

►Museum Hours – Jem Cohen
   Perfectly pleasant, nicely shot, etc., just doesn’t have any life to it. Felt like a Guérin film, only without his knack for engaging the hell out of me. The whole aunt subplot was unnecessary.

►The Gatekeepers – Dror Moreh
   I think it’d be a good idea – since digital has officially taken the torch and set celluloid ablaze with it – if filmmakers could learn what ‘aspect ratio’ means, because it’s much easier to fuck that up now than it was on film. This doc is mostly archival footage (when it isn’t talking heads), and most, if not all, of that footage is shown stretched to fill the screen. Zoom in, letterbox, pillarbox, or gtfo.

►All That You Possess – Bernard Émond
   If you’re going to overlay voiceover readings of a character’s poetry for a good chunk of your film, please make sure the poetry isn’t the poetry that this guy writes.

►Jackie – Antoinette Beumer
   From Cinema Scope Online: “Jackie is a hammy and altogether unlikable film that gets by on some charming, probably unintentional absurdities. The narrative involves Dutch twins Sofie and Daan (played by real-life sisters Carice and Jelka Van Houten) who venture all the way over to New Mexico so that they can reunite with their estranged mother (Holly Hunter) and drive her to rehab (those familiar with Hunter’s particular brand of stinkface will be relieved to know that this movie is essentially 100 minutes of it; if not literally, then at least tonally). Once the sisters have the crippled and cranky Jackie loaded up in a run-down mobile home, the film becomes a variation on the Alexander Payne travelogue, where geographically-specific misfortunes and kitschy Americana initiate a range of dramatic and comedic hijinks (Daan’s affinity for bluegrass would certainly count as the latter). As the trio treks ever so slowly across the state, Beumer underlines the ways communication and distance (physical and emotional) impact each other; the twins interchangeably speak Dutch and English depending on their desired level of privacy from their mother, while Sofie’s Skype calls to her colleagues back home cut out at the worst possible times (a complication that arises as they stray too far from the network signal). Though intended as a testament to the human capacity for reconnection and familial reconciliation, the characters’ emotional transitions are ultimately too rushed and their motivations too disingenuous for Jackie to be more than a weird and mildly amusing Holly Hunter showcase.”

►The Act of Killing – Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn, & Anonymous
   I’m trying to understand the near-unanimous gushing over this, since I had, and still have, a hard time seeing it as anything other than an elaborate ploy to allow this man to cry and upchuck his sins away in front of a wide audience. He even watches ‘the crucial scene’ twice; since it didn’t do the trick the first time, we have to see him view it again, now with two kids on his lap watching with him so that he really feels the burn. It’s readymade catharsis for a man I don’t think deserves it (He’s not vomiting for himself, but for us). Intriguing idea, but turned out as I feared; also, no thank you on the kitschy musical interludes.

►Clip – Maja Milos
   Don’t remember why I found this decent. Kind of awful thinking about it now.

►Anna Karenina – Joe Wright
   In which her fate functions as audience wish-fulfillment. Aaron Johnson as Count Vronsky is one of the worst casting decisions of the year; Jude Law as Alexei Karenin one of my favourite.

►The Iceman – Ariel Vromen
   Ray Liotta is in everything this year, isn’t he.

►Ernest & Celestine – Benjamin Renner, Vincent Patar, & Stéphane Aubier
   Less over-the-top than A Town Called Panic, yet more obnoxious and less charming. Not sure how that happened.

►Blackbird – Jason Buxton
   A little too derivative of the Dardennes (good God) and Campos to ever have a chance at greatness, but I liked that it didn’t go where it looked like it was going to go, and was at least competent in most areas. For the most part it’s West of Memphis: The Movie.

►Blancanieves – Pablo Berger
   The Artist, but with bullfighting. A silent film revival looks to officially be a thing, but I don’t see how it can ever be more than pastiche if guys keep being so earnest about it (see Maddin as someone who builds from silent film language instead of just hoisting it up as a beacon of ‘a better time.’). The epilogue was the only inspired thing here, a film otherwise only commendable for being a pretty good representation.

►Ginger and Rosa – Sally Potter
   Africa? Really?

►Miss Lovely – Ashim Ahluwalia
   From Cannes: “Love the look of the movie, which is close to a vintage giallo film when it’s really on, but the narrative is wack and mostly a chore.”

►The We and the I – Michel Gondry
   From Cannes: “Like a Spike Lee take on The Breakfast Club; sporadically enthralling, but seriously lopsided – since the film starts with the full cast on the bus and then whittles its focus as characters depart the bus over the 90-minute running time, Gondry should have been more careful so that he didn’t leave the least interesting characters left at the end. A late scene in particular, with the only good acting in the movie, feels far too weighty to be included.”

►Dormant Beauty – Marco Bellocchio
   My first Bellocchio, not sure what the big deal is.

►Once Upon a Time Was I, Verônica – Marcelo Gomes
   Best part about this is that it’s apparent that Karim Aïnouz was involved with the production, so I got to think back fondly to The Silver Cliff for a good chunk of the running time.

►Ship of Theseus – Anand Gandhi
   Promising in its first act until it became an Indian Babel.

►Fill the Void – Rama Burshtein
   Filled.

►Lore – Cate Shortland
   Pronounced ‘Laura,’ kind of.

►Passion – Brian De Palma
   The most recent De Palma film I’ve seen is Snake Eyes, which pretty much means I’m without the necessary vocabulary that would allow me to see how this film is good, let alone a masterpiece. I had a great time watching it, laughed a lot, but if I hadn’t I’d probably have trouble not putting it at the bottom of this page.

►In the Fog – Sergei Loznitsa
   From Cannes: “More like ‘Slog in the Fog,’ amirite? I thought this was a step down from My Joy, which was intermittently brilliant. Time is distended passed its breaking point here, and I just did not think this Catch 22 narrative needed to be this boldly anti-kinetic.”

►The Lebanese Rocket Society – Joana Hadji Thomas & Khalil Joreige
   Pretty middle-of-the-road formally, and as interesting as its subject matter is, the homogeneity of the history of the titular society doesn’t lend itself well to the feature-length format; it’s all too same-y and becomes a muddle. Great animated epilogue, though.

►Nights with Theodore – Sébastien Betbeder
   Too undercooked to leave any impression. The comparisons to Four Nights of a Dreamer (my favourite Bresson) don’t it any favours, either.

►Three Worlds – Catherine Corsini
   From Cinema Scope Online: “Three years after Leaving, Catherine Corsini’s hit melodrama from the 2009 festival circuit, it appears as though she has yet to return. Already dissolving from memory as the credits roll, Trois mondes’ worst offence is that its basic premise is too much in conversation with Lucrecia Martel’s masterful and elusive The Headless Woman. Both films are centred upon a hit-and-run accident, after which the driver loses grip on reality and unveils a suppressed classism and nationalism. In Corsini’s film, however, it’s never a question whether the roadkill is man or canine; Alan, the driver and protagonist, is explicitly shown hitting a man, who we later learn is an immigrant construction worker.
   Trois mondes is a film where all of the subtext resides squarely on its surface. Early scenes tell us that Alan is the son of a maid; she cleans the house of a car salesman, Testard, who completes the circle by being Alan’s employer (not to be outdone, the woman Alan plans to marry is Testard’s daughter). Once the immigrant comes into the picture, we have before us every rung of the socio-economic ladder, wobbling and swaying in precise motions. Flat and broad as its attempt at humanism is, it’s Trois mondes’ carefully convoluted and contrived narrative that’s most off-putting; Alan behaves irrationally for the sake of setting up the next twist, like he knows this can’t go anywhere good if he does what he should. So when the resolution finally comes, it isn’t nearly as cathartic or satisfying as Corsini hopes because she ensures that Alan—and we—are never unaware of the stakes he’s up against and how he came to be up against them. It’s a dependence on tangibility that Martel wisely resisted.”

►On The Road – Walter Salles
   From Cannes: “Better than I was expecting but still mostly useless.”

Tier 6 (C)
►The Paperboy – Lee Daniels
   From Cannes: “Often ridiculously bad, yet still a step up from Precious, if only because so much of it works as camp that I kind of had a lot of fun with it. Highlight is Efron getting his face pissed on by a ferocious Nicole Kidman.”

►Something in the Air – Olivier Assayas
   I have no idea why this movie needed to be made; just completely lifeless, which is stunning, considering the material. Revolution-obsessed hip kids acting all revolutionary; couldn’t wait to get away from them.

►The Company You Keep – Robert Redford
   Entirely forgettable, thus forgotten. I didn’t even remember that Lebeouf is in this until I searched for a synopsis just now.

►Blondie – Jesper Ganslandt
   Disappointingly Deborah Harry-less.

►La Sirga – William Vega
   I’m beginning to think that it’s impossible to make a good film about sleepwalking, unless there’s an obvious title I’m blanking on.

►In the House – François Ozon
   A film about a high school kid who is pretty good at creative writing for his age, until his ideas become a convoluted and cliched mess. Unfortunately, his writing is also the film itself, so as his story takes a turn for the worse, the film must go down with it, even if it is a cute idea. The critique of the upper-middle class isn’t particularly keen, either.

►Rust and Bone – Jacques Audiard
   From Cannes: “Feels like watching an Adult Contemporary radio station for 2 hours. Given the fetishistically charged developments in the plot (a woman loses both of her legs, gets prosthetic ones, struggles to regain confidence in her sexual life) I kept hoping it would evolve into a Cronenbergian mania, if only so it would detour the proceedings away from the ultra-schematic premise. Alas, it stays on the straight & narrow, heal-each-other path the whole way through. Some have argued that the film is interesting because it is actually more focused on the malfunctional personality who hasn’t lost his limbs (coincidentally, a kickboxer!), but I still see this film as having a dual focus, healing one, and then the other. On the bright side, it certainly had the best CGI of the festival.”

►Motorway – Soi Cheang
   Was hoping for something a little more Drive, a little less The Karate Kid.

►Capital – Costa-Gavras
   Capitalism means rich people rob from the poor and give to the rich.

►Imagine – Andrzej Jakimowski
   From Cinema Scope Online: “In a year in which an ostensible documentary about a fishing boat can reinforce our faith in cinema’s phenomenological potential, it’s disconcerting to find a contemporaneous film—one that grapples very literally with our reliance on sensorial experience—that is so indifferent to the way images (or lack thereof) make us think and feel. Andrzej Jakimowski’s Imagine, about a Brit named Ian (Edward Hogg) arrives to be an instructor at a Lisbon clinic for the visually impaired, starts off with a moody and impressionistic out-of-focus shot, but the formal risks end there. The majority of the film is a high-contrast, golden-hued depiction of institutionalism as authorial handcuffing. Ian, blind himself, faces an oppressive resistance in his attempt to introduce the clinic’s curriculum to echolocation (a biosonar technique common in the animal kingdom, accomplished by humans via tongue clicks). The film’s central scene plays like the extended stalking segment in In the City of Sylvia (2007), yet here the soundscape of the city is so two-dimensional, and the mapping of the trek so spatially matter-of-fact, that we have no investment in what we’re watching except on a plot point-by-plot point level. Imagine says something about the human desire to blend in with the world around us, but it’s a theme that is stated and never felt. Its imperative title, not the least bit concerned with Mr. Lennon or living life in peace, is picked from the candied rhetoric Ian uses to motivate his young students. “You can’t see it, but you can try to imagine it.” We’d love to.”

►The Secret Disco Revolution – Jamie Kastner
   Disco happened and then ended.

►Children of Sarajevo – Aida Begic
   From Cannes: “More heavy-handed miserablism hiding under a veil of exotic topicality. Pity porn with eye-roll-worthy ‘uplift.’ A step down from Snow.”

►Pieta – Kim Ki-duk
   From Cinema Scope Online: “There’s something undeniably à propos about Kim Ki-duk shooting a significant portion of his Golden Lion-winning Pieta (let’s say, oh, about a quarter of it) on a camera that had a dead pixel in its sensor. Let’s entertain for a moment the possibility that he intentionally didn’t remove it, which would have been a fairly simple process with modern technology. Stuck in the lower-left quadrant of the frame lies a magenta smudge (the crisp dot likely blurred due to heavy compression), periodically stealing our gaze from the goings-on. Offering more of a respite than vexation, it watches us watch it watch us, and almost certainly stands as some kind of harbinger for the death of cinema; first Kim’s, then everyone else’s.
   I’d love to go into Kim’s dramaturgical singularities, his editing rhythms, the synopsis, et al to set up a more all-encompassing idea of what Pieta does right and (more often) wrong, but the truth is I couldn’t stop staring at that fucking pixel—or at least the zone of the pixel in its absence, each cut promising its Christ-like re-emergence from the murk of his mise en scène—long enough to follow whatever the hell motivated this incest. It begs consideration with regards to how attuned Kim is to his aesthetics—a question on everyone’s mind since we were optically and aurally assaulted by last year’s Un Certain Regard-winning Arirang. Regarding this new aesthetic shift, he enters into dialogue with the school of pixel painters like T. Marie, whose images democratically designate pixels with individual value, thereby making them all important and idiosyncratic. Which is all to suggest that, in setting up a scenario that activates viewer-awareness of the apparatus as well as specific pixels in the frame, Kim might have made the most structural and materialist film of the year.”

►Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang – Laurent Cantet
   Someone needs to be in charge of making sure that Laurent Cantet only makes movies in Europe. There isn’t a single recognizable trait in the film to suggest he made it instead of some random, for-hire Canadian hack.

►The Perks of Being a Wallflower – Stephen Chbosky
   Noxiously twee and cloying, like a Garden State for an even younger audience, yet still irritatingly moving in the end.

►Three Sisters – Wang Bing
   It took me almost two hours to finally get on Bing’s wavelength, which meant I could stop peeling my skin off and kind of enjoy the last thirty minutes, in which the three young girls (who I only knew were girls because of the title) continue to live out their daily lives of rice-eating and hill-roaming.

►The Cremator – Peng Tao
   I decided 45 minutes in, ‘Okay, I’m going to pay really close attention to this next scene to see if I can finally tell what these people are doing, and what they’re trying to communicate to each other, and why.’ Didn’t work. Something finally worth paying attention to showed up about twenty minutes later when the characters discuss a plot to marry their dead siblings’ ghosts to each other, but even that quickly fizzled.

►Pusher – Luis Prieto
   Bad Guy Ritchie.

►Antiviral – Brandon Cronenberg
   From Cannes: “A straight-to-video terrible horror film, yet sans any fun whatsoever (i.e. the only thing that this type of film is good for). And I do not get why a director would ever want to do the exact same thing his/her parent does. Brandon’s contribution to the apparently hereditary brand of body horror is clinicality, & that (+ general amateurishness) does not do well here.”

Tier 7 (C-)
►The End of Time – Peter Mettler
   Would be better served by the title Intro to Time given it’s rudimentary and positively naive inquisition into the grand question of “What. Is. Time?” Since the theme is so large and broad, the film aspires to same, and therefore – more often than – focuses on subjects that really have little to do with Time (sidetracks include LSD, circles, the Hadron Collider, and a rave). The footage is TV grade polish and sparkle, ripe for an evening air on the Discovery HD channel (where many of Mettler’s films belong, to be honest); the exception, naturally, is a climactic descent into avant-garde trippiness, harkening back to 2001: A Space Odyssey to spark a most unflattering comparison of ambition vs. accomplishment. The film closes with a borderline non-sequitur in which Mettler’s mother, upon being asked ‘What time is it?”, says, “May 9, 2010, Mother’s Day in fact,” thus finally concluding the film’s endless sequence of epilogues.

►Lines of Wellington – Valeria Sarmiento
   This is not a Raúl Ruiz film.

►Yellow – Nick Cassavetes
   Television. This is what happens when you tell someone with no original ideas in their head, ‘Be creative.’ (I did love the opera ‘Fuck you!’ though)

►Hyde Park on Hudson – Roger Michell
   Give Bill Murray the Oscar. Please.

►After the Battle – Yousry Nasrallah
   From Cannes: “Nasrallah exposes how artificial and flaccid his vision of the revolution is when, towards the end, he flips quickly from an actual viral video of the riots to his fictional reenactment of the same event; one is enthralling, the other plastic. Also problematic is the construction of the universe as strictly ‘politically aware,’ meaning that politics are all anyone speaks about, anywhere, ever. In reality, even when we are in the throes of major events, we retain our abilities to be interested in, and have discussions about, other aspects of our lives that aren’t related to said major event.”

►Dangerous Liaisons – Hur Jin-ho
   From Cannes: “More like Im’s The Housemaid remake than Wong’s In the Mood for Love, though it thinks it’s in line with the latter. I was in a stupor for pretty much the entirety.”

Tier 8 (D+)
►London — The Modern Babylon – Julien Temple
   In the last century, things have happened in London, a city that exists. This film corroborates that fact.

►The Place Beyond the Pines – Derek Cianfrance
   An epic disappointment. From the very first shot, it’s clear that Cianfrance is putting his film in conversation with the Dardennes brothers (who isn’t, this year?), mirroring the famous opening long take from Rosetta. The rest of the film, though, plays more in the territory of The Son than any of the French brothers’ other films, going through great strains to set up an operatic tragedy among fathers and sons. The film is filled with twists and turns (only the first hour is anything like what I had expected), but all of it feels off – false, even. Emory Cohen’s character (his Long Island accent, and overall persona) is but one example of someone who doesn’t make a lick of sense in the film’s universe other than as a plot device. Character’s behave irrationally (stupidly might be the best adjective) so that every dramatic conflict that arises (and there are many) elicits a face palm. I should add that the ultimate theme of the film is forgiveness, which is perhaps my favourite theme in all of cinema (the only one that can get me close to the point of tears, anyway), so the fact that Cianfrance fumbles his attempt at it in such a go-for-broke fashion likely has much to do with the immediate, vitriolic reaction I had.

►At Any Price – Ramin Bahrani
   I think I’m underrating this ever-so-slightly, because for all of the inanity on display, it did start to work something on me towards the end. I doubt I’ll ever know for sure.

►Mekong Hotel – Apichatpong Weerasethakul
   From Cannes: “As Arirang showed us all last year, there are some things that a director just doesn’t need the public to see. Not as grating as Kim’s film was, but this really does feel ‘casual’ as Apichatpong put it when he introduced the film, almost like a parody of his work.” [Giving this another chance when it’s released in Canada next year, since I’m beginning to sense that this is merely a forgettable film rather than an outright terrible one [*Edit on Oct. 12, 2012 – Saw it again at Views from the Avant-garde in New York, and nope, it’s terrible]]

►Jump – Kieron J. Walsh
   Too dumb for words.

►Kinshasa Kids – Marc-Henri Wajnberg
   In its first ten minutes, the tired question ‘fact or fiction?’ arises when a mother from the highly impoverished city of Kinshasa argues with the cameraman, yelling “the white man is filming us!” she then proceeds to argue and scream as usual as if the camera weren’t present. Certain scenes feel more acted out than others, but the ambiguity becomes increasingly problematic as the stakes are raised for the eponymous children. How do you justify, for instance, a scene where a young girl is captured by a group of men and dragged away (presumably to be raped), and the ‘white filmmaker’ stands and films it happening without intervening? ‘Filmmakers’ Distance’ etc., sure, but if the best interests were truly in mind for these kids, Marc-Henri Wajnberg wouldn’t have laid back for the pitiful cut to the after-burn, a raped girl sitting, moping pensively by herself. Then there’s the music, which is supposedly the mode of escape for these kids, yet it gets edited over with showy cutting, such as a scene that remixes one of their jam sessions so that it transforms into a music video for Nina Simone’s ‘Sinnerman’. Poverty porn only scratches the surface of the offenses on display here.

Tier 9 (D, D-, F)
–

This post will be updated with each new announcement.

Key:

16mm, 35mm, 70mm - this movie will be screened from a film print (as per the festival website programme guide)
★ - I have seen this film.
C - this film is Canadian. If it's any good, Torontonians can catch it in Canada's Top Ten in January.
FS - this film is available for me to watch on Festival Scope.

[the following colors trump each other hierarchically, so e.g. a film that plays both Cannes and NYFF will be purple, unless e.g. it is set for a limited US release on December 14 in which case it will be gray]

COMING SOON TO A THEATRE NEAR YOU - Firm US and/or non-Québécois Canadian theatrical release date set for 2012.
NYFF - Titles from the Main Selection only (sans Opening, Closing, Centerpiece films).
SUNDANCE - I'm not entirely sure what this festival did to earn its own category.
BERLINALE - Where the jury chose differently this year than the "intelligent critics."
CANNES - Films that worked at the Pyramid.
LOCARNO - Poor Quinzaine.
VENICE - Finally cutting back on all those pesky Italian films. 
BIGGIES - Anticipated titles by name directors; films with raves from smaller festivals (Rotterdam, BAFICI, SxSW, Tribeca, etc.).

Special Presentations (70)
Anna Karenina (Joe Wright) – International Premiere ★
Antiviral (Brandon Cronenberg) – North American Premiere C ★
Arthur Newman (Dante Ariola) World Premiere
At Any Price (Ramin Bahrani) – North American Premiere ★
The Attack (Ziad Doueiri) – World Premiere
Bad 25 (Spike Lee) – North American Premiere
Byzantium (Neil Jordan) – World Premiere
Capital (Costa-Gavras) – World Premiere
Caught in the Web (Chen Kaige) – International Premiere 35mm
Cloud Atlas (Tom Tykwer and Andy & Lana Wachowski) – World Premiere
The Deep (Baltasar Kormákur) – World Premiere
Disconnect (Henry Alex Rubin) North American Premiere
Do Not Disturb (Yvan Attal) – World Premiere
Dormant Beauty (Marco Bellocchio) – International Premiere
Dreams for Sale (Nishikawa Miwa) – World Premiere 35mm
End of Watch (David Ayer) – World Premiere
Everybody Has A Plan (Ana Piterbarg) – International Premiere 35mm
A Few Hours of Spring (Stéphane Brizé) – North American Premiere
Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (Laurent Cantet) – World Premiere ★
Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach) – World Premiere
Ginger and Rosa (Sally Potter) – World Premiere
Greetings from Tim Buckley (Dan Algrant) World Premiere 35mm
Hannah Arendt (Margarethe von Trotta) – World Premiere
The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg) – North American Premiere ★
The Iceman (Ariel Vromen) – North American Premiere ★
Imogene (Robert Pulcini & Shari Springer Berman) – World Premiere
The Impossible (J.A. Bayona) – World Premiere
In the House (François Ozon) – World Premiere ★
Inch’Allah (Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette) – World Premiere C
It Was the Son (Daniele Ciprì) – North American Premiere
Kon-Tiki (Joachim Roenning & Espen Sandberg) – International Premiere
The Last Supper (Lu Chuan) – World Premiere
A Late Quartet (Yaron Zilberman) – World Premiere 35mm
Laurence Anyways (Xavier Dolan) – Toronto Premiere C 35mm ★
A Liar’s Autobiography – The Untrue Story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman (Ben Timlett, Bill Jones, & Jeff Simpson) – World Premiere ★
Lines of Wellington (Valeria Sarmiento) North American Premiere
Liverpool (Manon Briand) – Toronto Premiere C
Lore (Cate Shortland) – North American Premiere ★
Love is All You Need (Susanne Bier) North American Premiere
The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson) – North American Premiere 70mm
Mr. Pip (Andrew Adamson) – World Premiere
Much Ado About Nothing (Joss Whedon) – World Premiere
No (Pablo Larraín) – North American Premiere ★
On The Road (Walter Salles) North American Premiere ★
Outrage Beyond (Takeshi Kitano) – North American Premiere 35mm
The Paperboy (Lee Daniels) – North American Premiere ★
Passion (Brian De Palma) – North American Premiere
The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky) – World Premiere ★
The Place Beyond the Pines (Derek Cianfrance) – World Premiere
Quartet (Dustin Hoffman) – World Premiere
Reality (Matteo Garrone) – North American Premiere ★
Rhino Season (Bahman Ghobadi) – World Premiere
Rust and Bone (Jacques Audiard) – North American Premiere ★
The Sapphires (Wayne Blair) – North American Premiere
The Sessions (Ben Lewin) – International Premiere
Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine) – North American Premiere
Still (Michael McGowan) – World Premiere C
Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley) – North American Premiere C 35mm
The Suicide Shop (Patrice Leconte) – International Premiere
Tai Chi 0 (Stephen Fung) – North American Premiere
Thanks for Sharing (Stuart Blumberg) – World Premiere
Thérèse Desqueyroux (Claude Miller) – International Premiere
The Time Being Nenad (Cicin-Sain) – World Premiere
To the Wonder (Terrence Malick) – North American Premiere
Venus & Serena (Maiken Baird) – World Premiere
War Witch (Kim Nguyen) – Toronto Premiere C
White Elephant (Pablo Trapero) – North American Premiere
Writers (Josh Boone) – World Premiere
Yellow (Nick Cassavetes) – World Premiere
Zaytoun (Eran Riklis) – World Premiere

Contemporary World Cinema (61)
After the Battle (Yousry Nasrallah) – North American Premiere ★
All That Matters is Past (Sara Johnsen) – World Premiere
Baby Blues (Kasia Rosłaniec) – World Premiere
Barbara (Christian Petzold) – North American Premiere 35mm
Bwakaw (Jun Robles Lana) – International Premiere
Camion (Rafaël Ouellet) – Toronto Premiere C
Children of Sarajevo (Aida Begic) – North American Premiere 35mm ★
Clandestine Childhood (Benjamín Ávila) – North American Premiere FS
Comrade Kim Goes Flying (Anja Daelemans, Nicholas Bonner & Gwang Hun Kim) – World Premiere
The Cowards Who Looked to the Sky (Yuki Tanada) – World Premiere
The Cremator (Peng Tao) – World Premiere
The Crimes of Mike Recket (Bruce Sweeney) – World Premiere C
Dead Europe (Tony Krawitz) – International Premiere
Dust (Julio Hernández Cordón) – North American Premiere FS
Eagles (Dror Sabo) – World Premiere
The End (Jorge Torregrossa) – World Premiere 35mm
The Fitzgerald Family Christmas {Edward Burns) – World Premiere
Fly With the Crane (Li Ruijun) – North American Premiere
Ghost Graduation (Javier Ruiz Caldera) – International Premiere 35mm
God Loves Caviar (Iannis Smaragdis) World Premiere
Gone Fishing (Carlos Sorin) – World Premiere ★
The Great Kilapy (Zézé Gamboa) – World Premiere
A Hijacking (Tobias Lindholm) – North American Premiere
Him, Here, After (Asoka Handagama) – North American Premiere
The Holy Quaternity (Jan Hřebejk) – World Premiere
Home Again (Sudz Sutherland) – World Premiere C
Imagine (Andrzej Jakimowski) – World Premiere 35mm ★
In the Fog (Sergei Loznitsa) – North American Premiere 35mm ★
In the Name of Love (Luu Huynh) – World Premiere 35mm
Jackie (Antoinette Beumer) – International Premiere ★
Jump (Kieron J. Walsh) – International Premiere ★
Just the Wind (Bence Fliegauf) – North American Premiere 35mm
Juvenile Offender (Yikwan Kang) – World Premiere
Key of Life (Kenji Uchida) – North American Premiere
Kinshasa Kids (Marc-Henri Wajnberg) – North American Premiere
The Land of Hope (Sion Sono) – World Premiere
The Lesser Blessed (Anita Doron) – World Premiere
Middle of Nowhere (Ava DuVernay) – International Premiere
Museum Hours (Jem Cohen) – North American Premiere
My Awkward Sexual Adventure (Sean Garrity) – World Premiere C
Once Upon a Time Was I, Verônica (Marcelo Gomes) – World Premiere 35mm
Paradise: Love (Ulrich Seidl) – North American Premiere ★
The Patience Stone (Atiq Rahimi) – World Premiere
Penance (Kioshi Kurosawa) – North American Premiere
Road North (Mika Kaurismäki) – International Premiere
Shores of Hope (Toke Constantin Hebbeln) – International Premiere
Sleeper’s Wake (Barry Berk) -International Premiere
Smashed (James Ponsoldt) – International Premiere
The Thieves (Choi Dong-hoon) – North American Premiere
3 (Pablo Stoll Ward) – North American Premiere FS 35mm
Three Kids (Jonas d’Adesky) – World Premiere + Peripeteia (John Akomfrah) – World Premiere [short]
Three Worlds (Catherine Corsini) – North American Premiere 35mm ★
Thy Womb (Brillante Mendoza) – North American Premiere
The Tortoise, An Incarnation (Girish Kasaravalli) – International Premiere 35mm
Underground (Robert Connolly) World Premiere
Virgin Margarida (Licinio Azevedo) – World Premiere
Watchtower (Pelin Esmer) – World Premiere
A Werewolf Boy (Jo Sung-hee) – World Premiere
What Richard Did (Lenny Abrahamson) – World Premiere
When I Saw You (Annemarie Jacir) – World Premiere 35mm
Zabana! (Saïd Ould-Khelifa) – World Premiere

TIFF Docs (29)
The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer) – World Premiere
Artifact (Bartholomew Cubbins) – World Premiere
As if We Were Catching a Cobra (Hala Alabdalla) – World Premiere
Camp 14: Total Control Zone (Marc Wiese) – North American Premiere
The Central Park Five (Ken Burns, David McMahon, & Sarah Burns) – North American Premiere ★
Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story (Brad Bernstein) – North American Premiere
Fidaï (Damien Ounouri) – World Premiere
The Gatekeepers (Dror Moreh) – International Premiere ★
First Comes Love (Nina Davenport) – World Premiere
The Girl from the South (José Luis García) – International Premiere
How to Make Money Selling Drugs (Matthew Cooke) – World Premiere
Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp (Jorge Hinojosa) – World Premiere
The Last White Knight (Paul Saltzman) – World Premiere
London – The Modern Babylon (Julien Temple) – International Premiere ★
Lunarcy! (Simon Ennis) – World Premiere C
Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God (Alex Gibney) – World Premiere
Men At Lunch (Seán Ó Cualáin) – International Premiere
More Than Honey (Markus Imhoof) – North American Premiere 35mm
9.79* (Daniel Gordon) – World Premiere
No Place on Earth (Janet Tobias) – World Premiere
Reincarnated (Andrew Capper) – World Premiere
Revolution (Rob Stewart) – World Premiere C
Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out (Marina Zenovich) – World Premiere
The Secret Disco Revolution (Jamie Kastner) – World Premiere C 35mm ★
Shepard & Dark (Treva Wurmfeld) – World Premiere
Show Stopper: The Theatrical Life of Garth Drabinsky (Barry Avrich) – World Premiere C
State 194 (Dan Setton) – World Premiere
Storm Surfers 3D (Christopher Nelius & Justin McMillan) – World Premiere
The Walls of Dakar (Abdoul Aziz Cissé) – International Premiere
A World Not Ours (Mahdi Fleifel) – World Premiere

Discovery (27)
Augustine (Alice Winocour) – International Premiere
Blackbird (Jason Buxton) – World Premiere C ★
Blancanieves (Pablo Berger) – World Premiere 35mm
Boy Eating the Bird’s Food (Ektoras Lygizos) – North American Premiere
The Brass Teapot (Ramaa Mosley) – World Premiere
Burn It Up Djassa (Lonesome Solo) – World Premiere
Call Girl (Mikael Marcimain) – World Premiere
Clip (Maja Milos) – North American Premiere FS ★
The Color of the Chameleon (Emil Christov) – World Premiere 35mm
The Deflowering of Eva van End (Michiel ten Horn) – World Premiere
Detroit Unleaded (Rola Nashef) – World Premiere
Eat Sleep Die (Gabriela Pichler) – North American Premiere
Fill the Void (Rama Burshtein) – North American Premiere
The Interval (Leonardo Di Costanzo) – North American Premiere 35mm
Janeane from Des Moines (Grace Lee) – World Premiere
Krivina (Igor Drljaca) – World Premiere C
La Sirga (William Vega) – North American Premiere
The Land of Eb (Andrew Williamson) – World Premiere
Nights with Theodore (Sébastien Betbeder) – World Premiere
Mushrooming (Toomas Hussar) – North American Premiere
Our Little Differences (Sylvie Michel) – International Premiere 35mm
Out in the Dark (Michael Mayer) – World Premiere
Picture Day (Kate Mellville) – World Premiere C
Satellite Boy (Catriona McKenzie) – World Premiere
7 Boxes (Juan Carlos Maneglia & Tana Schémbori) – International Premiere
Tower (Kazik Radwanski) – North American Premiere C FS ★
Wasteland (Rowan Athale) – World Premiere

Gala Presentations (20)
Argo (Ben Affleck) – World Premiere
The Company You Keep (Robert Redford) – North American Premiere ★
Dangerous Liaisons (Hur Jin-ho) – North American Premiere ★
Emperor (Peter Webber) – World Premiere
English Vinglish (Gauri Shinde) – World Premiere
Free Angela & All Political Prisoners (Shola Lynch) – World Premiere
Great Expectations (Mike Newell) – World Premiere
Hyde Park on Hudson (Roger Michell) – World Premiere ★
Inescapable (Ruba Nadda) – World Premiere C
Jayne Mansfield’s Car (Billy Bob Thornton) – North American Premiere
Looper (Rian Johnson) – World Premiere [Opening Night Film] ★
Love, Marilyn (Liz Garbus) – World Premiere
Midnight’s Children (Deepa Mehta) – World Premiere C
The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Mira Nair) – North American Premiere
A Royal Affair (Nikolai Arcel) – North American Premiere
Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell) – World Premiere ★
Song for Marion (Paul Andrew Williams) – World Premiere
Thermae Romae (Hideki Takeuchi) – North American Premiere
Twice Born (Sergio Castellitto) – World Premiere
What Maisie Knew (Scott McGehee & David Siegel) – World Premiere

Wavelengths (19)
Bestiaire (Denis Côté) – Toronto Premiere C FS ★
Big in Vietnam (Mati Diop) [short] FS ★ + Mekong Hotel (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) ★
Birds Aristophanes Play (Gabriel Abrantes) [short] + Viola (Matías Piñeiro)
The Capsule (Athina Rachel Tsangari) [short] + Walker (Tsai-Ming Liang) [short] ★
differently, Molussia (Nicolas Rey) – Canadian Premiere 16mm
Far from Afghanistan (John Gianvito, Jon Jost, Minda Martin, Soon-mi Yoo, & Travis Wilkerson)
The Fifth Season (Peter Brosens & Jessica Woodworth) – North American Premiere
The Last Time I Saw Macao (João Pedro Rodrigues & João Rui Guerra Da Mata) – North American Premiere
The Lebanese Rocket Society (Joana Hadji Thomas & Khalil Joreige) – World Premiere
Leviathan (Véréna Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor) – North American Premiere FS ★
Perret in France and Algeria (Heinz Emigholz) – North American Premiere
Post Tenebras Lux (Carlos Reygadas) – North American Premiere ★
Tabu (Miguel Gomes) – North American Premiere 35mm ★
Three Sisters (Wang Bing) – North American Premiere
When Night Falls (Ying Liang) – North American Premiere FS ★
Wavelengths 1: Under a Pacific Sun:
  – Pacific Sun (Thomas Demand)
  – 21 Chitrakoot (Shambhavi Kaul)
  – Many a Swan (Blake Williams)
  – Concrete Parlay (Fern Silva) 16mm
  – Departure (Ernie Gehr)
  – Auto-Collider XV (Ernie Gehr)
Wavelengths 2: Documenta:
  – Handmade 35mm Glass Slides (Luther Price) 35mm
  – Phantoms of a Libertine (Ben Rivers) 16mm
  – A Minimal Difference (Jean-Paul Kelly)
  – Shoot Don’t Shoot (William E. Jones)
  – Sorry-Horns (Luther Price) 16mm
  – Orpheus (Outtakes) (Mary Helena Clark) 16mm
  – Pipe Dreams (Ali Cherri)
  – UFOs (Lillian Schwartz) 16mm
Wavelengths 3: I am micro:
  – I Am Micro (Shumona Goel & Shai Heredia) 35mm
  – Class Picture (Tito & Tito) 35mm
  – Francesca Woodman: Selected Video Works (Francesca Woodman)
  – Me too, too, me too (Friedl vom Gröller) 16mm
  – Waiting Room (Vincent Grenier)
  – Transit of Venus I (Nicky Hamlyn) 16mm
  – Transit of Venus II (Nicky Hamlyn) 16mm
  – August and After (Nathaniel Dorsky) 16mm
Wavelengths 4: From the Inside Out:
  – Black TV (Aldo Tambellini) 16mm
  – Burning Star (Josh Solondz)
  – When Bodies Touch (Paolo Gioli) 16mm
  – Ritournelle (Peter Miller & Christopher Becks) 16mm
  – Watch the Closing Doors (Jim Jennings)
  – View from the Acropolis (Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebran de Haan) 35mm
  – The mutability of all things and the possibility of changing some (Anna Marziano)
  – Reconnaissance (Johann Lurf)

Vanguard (15)
Beijing Flickers (Zhang Yuan) – World Premiere
Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland) – North American Premiere 35mm ★
Blondie (Jesper Ganslandt) – North American Premiere
Here Comes the Devil (Adrian Garcia Bogliano) – World Premiere
I Declare War (Jason Lapeyre & Robert Wilson) – World Premiere C ★
iLL Manors (Ben Drew) – International Premiere
Motorway (Soi Cheang) – North American Premiere 35mm ★
90 Minutes (Eva Sørhaug) – World Premiere
Painless (Juan Carlos Medina) – World Premiere
Peaches Does Herself (Peaches) – World Premiere
Pusher (Luis Prieto) – North American Premiere ★
Room 237 (Rodney Ascher) – Canadian Premiere ★
Sightseers (Ben Wheatley) – North American Premiere ★
Thale (Aleksander Nordaas) – Canadian Premiere
The We and the I (Michel Gondry) – North American Premiere ★

Masters (14)
All That You Possess (Bernard Émond) – World Premiere C ★
Amour (Michael Haneke) – North American Premiere ★
Beyond the Hills (Cristian Mungiu) – North American Premiere ★
The End of Time (Peter Mettler) – International Premiere C
Everyday (Michael Winterbottom) – World Premiere
Gebo and the Shadow (Manoel de Oliveira) – North American Premiere
In Another Country (Hong Sang-soo) – North American Premiere 35mm ★
Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami) – North American Premiere ★
Me and You (Bernardo Bertolucci) – North American Premiere 35mm
Night Across the Street (Raúl Ruiz) – Toronto Premiere FS ★
Pieta (Kim Ki-duk) – North American Premiere
Something in the Air (Olivier Assayas) – North American Premiere
Student (Darezhan Omirbaev) – North American Premiere ★
When Day Breaks (Goran Paskaljevic) – World Premiere 35mm

City to City: Mumbai (10)
The Bright Day (Mohit Takalkar) – World Premiere
Gangs of Wasseypur – Part One (Anurag Kashyap) – North American Premiere 35mm
Gangs of Wasseypur – Part Two (Anurag Kashyap) – North American Premiere 35mm
Ishaqzaade (Habib Faisal) – Canadian Premiere
Miss Lovely (Ashim Ahluwalia) – North American Premiere ★
Mumbai’s King (Manjeet Singh) – World Premiere
Peddlers (Vasan Bala) – North American Premiere
Shahid (Hansal Mehta) – World Premiere
Shanghai (Dibakar Banerjee) – North American Premiere
Ship of Theseus (Anand Gandhi) – World Premiere ★

Midnight Madness (10)
The ABCs of Death (Kaare Andrews, Angela Bettis, Adrián García Bogliano, Bruno Forzani & Hélène Cattet, Ernesto Díaz Espinoza, Jason Eisener, Xavier Gens, Jorge Michel Grau, Lee Hardcastle, Noboru Iguchi, Thomas Cappelen Malling, Anders Morgenthaler, Yoshihiro Nishimura, Banjong Pisanthanakun, Simon Rumley, Marcel Sarmiento, Jon Schnepp, Srdjan Spasojevic, Timo Tjahjanto, Andrew Traucki, Nacho Vigalondo, Jake West, Ti West, Ben Wheatley, Adam Wingard, & Yûdai Yamaguchi) – World Premiere
Aftershock (Nicolás López) – World Premiere
The Bay (Barry Levinson) – World Premiere
Come Out and Play (Makinov) – World Premiere
Dredd 3D (Pete Travis) – World Premiere
Hellbenders (JT Petty) – World Premiere
John Dies at the End (Don Coscarelli) – Canadian Premiere
The Lords of Salem (Rob Zombie) – World Premiere
No One Lives (Ryuhei Kitamura) – World Premiere
Seven Psychopaths (Martin McDonagh) – World Festival Premiere

Future Projections (8)
1. Ming Wong: Making Chinatown – September 6 to 16
2. Kelly Richardson: Mariner 9 – September 6 to 16
3. Jeroen Eisinga: Springtime – August 24 to September 16
4. Callum Cooper: The Constant and the Flux – September 6 to 16
5. Luther Price: Number 9 and Number 9 II – September 6 to October 6
6. Liang Yue: The Quiet Room – September 6 to 16
7. Sook-Yin Lee: We Are Light Rays – September 6 to 16
8. Peaches, in collaboration with Vice Cooler: Peaches Does the Drake – September 6 to 16

Mavericks (7)
Casting By (Tom Donahue) – World Premiere
Graydon Sheppard and Kyle Humphrey (Shit Girls Say)
In Conversation With… Jackie Chan
Inventing David Geffen (Susan Lacy) – World Premiere
Sons of the Clouds: The Last Colony (Álvaro Longoria) – North American Premiere
The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (Sophie Fiennes) – World Premiere
West of Memphis (Amy Berg) – Canadian Premiere ★

Cinematheque (7)
The Bitter Ash (1963, Larry Kent)
The Cloud-Capped Star (1960, Ritwik Ghatak) ★
Dial M for Murder [3D] (1954, Alfred Hitchcock)
Loin du Viêtnam [Far from Vietnam] (1967, Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker & Alain Resnais) 35mm
Sans Soleil (1983, Chris Marker) ★
Stromboli (1950, Roberto Rossellini)
Tess (1979, Roman Polanski)

TIFF Kids (5)
Ernest & Célestine (Benjamin Renner, Vincent Patar, & Stéphane Aubier) – North American Premiere
Finding Nemo 3D (Andrew Stanton & Lee Unkrich) – World Premiere
Hotel Transylvania (Genndy Tartakovsky) – World Premiere
Igor & the Cranes’ Journey (Evgeny Ruman) – World Premiere
Nono, The Zigzag Kid (Vincent Bal) – World Premiere

Short Cuts Canada
I’m not even going to list these this year. Go to the festival website if you want to know what’s playing in this section.

Tier 1
Holy Motors (Leos Carax) – So singularly weird and exhilaratingly cinematic that, really, it doesn’t even need to mean anything (though it clearly does mean many things). It’s captial ‘S’ Surrealism as it pertains to the disappearance of cinema and humanity as we know them. Very telling anecdote: Carax hates digital cinema, and this film was shot digitally (among other things, Holy Motors may be the only Cannes Main Competition film that will ever have the screen intentionally datamosh). But there’s so much more, relating to online avatars, Georges Franju, as well as the confusion of our own personas and identities in the face of virtual existences (video games, cinema, the internet). The fact that all of these broad themes are packed into such an entertaining, euphoric presentation is just icing. Had the film walloped me the way I think it should have at the end, I might already be calling it one of the greatest films ever made.

Beyond the Hills (Cristian Mungiu) – I was no lover of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, but this all but cleaned the floor with me; had it had a less Romanian ending (think Aurora), I’d have probably needed to ask for tissues when it ended. It details the tragic rejection of compromise between three parties that is so intense I often could not believe what I was seeing. The second half of the film in particular is just crescendo after crescendo of pure emotion that’s as visceral as in any recent film I can recall. Many intelligent persons are calling this film boring, and I do not know what film they were watching.

Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami) – When the screening first ended, I went out on a limb and called that this would be the most divisive film at Cannes this year, having heard no reactions yet. I was right! Playing off of Certified Copy’s interests in what makes us love another person, and the way the behaviours of loving someone are ingrained in our DNA, this is a minimal, sorrowful and absurdist package that contains dozens of breathtakingly serene car rides and blissfully drawn-out conversations. One I keep coming back to is what could be called the film’s second scene – ‘could be’ because the first one is so fractured, and reveals itself so mysteriously, that it feels like an entire Act in retrospect – where Akiko is chauffeured through downtown Tokyo at night and scans through voicemail after voicemail from her grandmother and the look on her face, as well as the following superfluous replay trek around a roundabout, means nothing but implies so much. Kiarostami is practically confrontational in his challenge for us to add it all up to something, only refusing to easily define it for us (in contrast to the new Carlos Reygadas film (see Tier 5), it is apparent that further digging will actually yield substance). I thought of Chantal Akerman’s News From Home on occasion while watching [*edit – in retrospect, I should have been thinking of her Les rendez-vous d’Anna instead, specifically the final scene, though I think the emotions are more in line with News], but really it’s unlike anything I’ve seen or experienced in quite some time – a truly weird film. I’ll need another look, or twenty, before I can make perfect sense of this, but it refuses to exit my mind.

Tier 2
Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg) – radically stylized & inhuman, it actually took me a while to realize that Robert Pattinson wasn’t in fact giving one of the worst screen performances I’d ever seen, but was, conversely, giving a pretty amazing portrayal of a man who’s forgotten how to be human. Once it picks up steam, ideas fly at you like data in a detached but riveting stream, perfectly complimenting its theme (which pairs nicely with A Dangerous Method): the way our minds can repress the humanity of our mannerisms, behaviours, and interactions.

You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet! (Alain Resnais) – I saw this one twice, and I’m so glad I did, because what was a tedious and disappointing chore on first watch cleared itself up nicely on another viewing, though I don’t think everyone will require a second look to fall for it. Basically, there is a very heady, clever, and playful conceit at the heart of this film, and I fixated on it too much the first time. The key to appreciating this film lies in its source material: Eurydice. Pay attention to the play – it’s really lovely, intelligent, and bittersweet – and don’t get hung up on the wacky set-up, and you should be good to go.

Amour (Michael Haneke) – Turns out I already saw the new Haneke film a year ago in the Director’s Fortnight; an unfortunate coincidence, it’s almost identical to the Icelandic film, Volcano. Moment-to-moment it’s incredibly straightforward considering its maker, and starkly ‘what it is’. We wait for each progressed stage of deterioration in order to arrive at the same defeating and inevitable exit that we know – and are told in the very first scene – will come. For the first time, it felt to me like Haneke has made a film for his own cathartic therapy; no scolding or lessons to teach the audience. Getting old sucks, and that is primarily true because you have to watch loved ones do it, too. A devastating film, in its own modest, not-earth-shattering way.

Laurence Anyways (Xavier Dolan) – OK, fine. I still think Dolan is light on ideas, and he’s far too young to hold steadfast to a fixed theme (that being ‘impossible love’; I mean, this guy wants so hard to be taken seriously as a wunderkind auteur that he risks suffocating himself, which he did in his previous film, Heartbeats), but the filmmaking is really superb for most of this, and for the first time, it feels more ‘Dolan’ than anyone else (Wong, Almodovar, Allen….). Not sure what’s changed since his last film actually, but it’s just more genuine and honestly exuberant in its youthfulness and naïveté.

Room 237 (Rodney Ascher) – It’s practically a comedy, offering up a string of straight-faced observations, theories, exposés, and analyses by OCD cinephiles who latch on to what they perceive to be subliminal messages hidden in The Shining. Because Kubrick’s a genius, of course he slyly inserted all of this devastating and subversive conspiracy theory nonsense on purpose, right?! Most of what these guys propose is so insane/absurd – but genuine – that I felt ashamed of the fact that, as a passionate cinephile myself, I often do the very same thing all the time. Films are playgrounds for us to insert ourselves and our experiences into, and we manufacture statements that reflect us so that we can understand a film just as much as we wish to be understood by others. Many will see this film as a curio that introduces interesting ideas on what The Shining is about, but what it actually accomplishes is more ambitious: showing exactly how cinephilia has been transformed by the home video era of movie-(re)(re)(re)(re)watching.

In Another Country (Hong Sang-soo) – since this was ‘only’ my seventh Hong film, it still felt fresh to me. Huppert had me giggling the entire time, even when I didn’t know what I was laughing at. Those familiar enough with Hong (i.e. if you’ve seen more than two) will note that this is yet another auto-critique, this one regarding the fact that pretty much all of his films have the same script and casting aesthetic. The 1st act is the funniest, but for the rest I was coasting on the subtle differences in each Anne (Huppert plays three different characters, all with the same name, naturally), and the treatment toward her by others.

Sister (Ursula Meier) – Ursula Meier is one talented lady. I wish the twist came about a little more naturally than it did (actually, I think the film would have improved if the audience had been in on it from the get-go), and I’ve yet to get more out of the film than just seeing it as a really well-done inversion of the absent parental guardian picture, but really is good at that. It’s a popular comment, but this really is a very Dardennes-ian film, though I missed the quasi-surrealism from her last film, Home, which was no doubt lifted in order to better serve the ultra-realistic tone.

Killing Them Softly (Andrew Dominik) – No doubting what Dominik wants you to take away from this (hint – Obama may not like this movie), but it’s still an exceptional, dialogue-heavy thriller that is boldly non-commercial. It is impressive that such a movie was made without ever feeling Tarantino-esque. I loved Gandolfini and Liotta.

Tabu (Miguel Gomes) – how anyone claims to have properly digested this on a single viewing is a mystery to me, but its second half sure lived up to the vague memory of hype I seem to recall it having, which is to say: I was floored by its singularity and the fact I cared so much. Bifurcation is like so ‘in’ right now and I guess now that I see the hints of connections between the halves I can start to appreciate it next time, but in the act of watching this I wished that the first hour would up and disappear altogether.

Sightseers (Ben Wheatley) – a pretty solid mix of Mike Leigh’s naturalism and Edgar Wright’s absurdly casual genre injections; humor works about half the time – mostly because you can see many jokes coming from a mile away – but its simple yet accurate observations of a couple who’ve reached a romantic plateau in their relationship and must invent new ways of staying interested in each other is often piercing despite the laughter.

No (Pablo Larraín) – aesthetically, conceptually, and thematically bold, not to mention that I laughed more at this film than anything else other than the new Hong. I just wish its political purpose resonated as much as the ironies and kitsch do.

Tier 3
The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg) – well-made, compelling but unsurprising in its view of how something out of our control can reshape our lives for the worse (this being a Vinterberg film and all). The Best Actor Prize was earned (even if this performance doesn’t hold a candle to Lavant’s all-time great turn in Holy Motors). Probably his best film since The Celebration.

Reality (Matteo Garrone) – an inversion of The Truman Show, but more like a remake of Sara Goldfarb’s cracked-out descent in Requiem for a Dream. Garrone’s significant addition to these premises, though, is an (perhaps unsubtle and single-note) analogy of Catholic hypocrisy. It’s scathing & visually dizzying, but also feels familiar. I thought it got a little too goofy in its second half. Anyone who tells you that this is just a movie about television obsession is missing the point.

38 Witnesses (Lucas Belvaux) – cleanly calibrated to maximize the impact of the last 5 min, which are ridiculously effective; I just wish the rest were as distinctive. Not as good as most of his films, which are criminally underappreciated.

The Angels’ Share (Ken Loach) – as pure, schematic entertainment, I had a lot of fun with this, which was helped by the fact that I’ve been pulled into a semi-recent whiskey fascination. Sure, it’s a well-made version of a kind of film that has existed for years, but it does have a palpable, beating heart inside. Could be called Loach’s Sideways, for sure. Or his Ocean’s Eleven.

Everybody in Our Family (Radu Jude) – ultra-realistic distention of a single familial conflict (sound Romanian?). Acting is spotty, especially in the overlong first reel. Jude feels like a bit of a weak link in Romanian cinema, though at least he dropped the tiresome and overly repetitive structural gimmick from his last one, The Happiest Girl in the World.

Paradise: Love (Ulrich Seidl) – One, two, three strikes and she still gets tricked by those pesky Kenyans! Seidl could direct a film with his eyes closed and it’d be deeply felt and sharply observed, but this feels padded out (the third scammer is entirely superfluous), and the statement it’s making is too simplistic and obvious to justify the two-hour running time. I still look forward to the other two of this trilogy, Faith and Hope.

Caesar Must Die (Paolo Taviani & Taviani) – Alarmingly similar to the new Resnais film, actually. The Tavianis do something a tad more complex on a conceptual level, adding some documentary fuzziness and a humanist element, but my thinking that Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar isn’t that great a play kept me from loving this.

Gimme the Loot (Adam Leon) – the direction is awkward at best, but the loose narrative is weirdly compelling; a scene set to the Mosby Family Singers’ “The Lord is My Shepherd” is this film’s raison d’être, a truly beautiful thing to watch and listen to.

La Noche de enfrente (Raúl Ruiz) – I’m happy that Ruiz went out in off-the-rocker , whimsical mode, since on paper this looked like Mysteries of Lisbon: The Epilogue. It doesn’t have the impact I think it should, likely because it feels too long (I know, the more Ruiz the better!, but not really, here) and its stream-of-consciousness is intentionally mind-numbing in large doses. Mostly delightful, though, & its use of DV is unlike any Ive seen.

Mystery (Lou Ye) – considering how much I hated Lou’s previous two films, I found this to be a remarkably gripping noir. It’s still problematic in a very Lou Ye kind of way (pointless, provocative rape and general violence toward females), but the familiar premise felt invigorated, and invigorating, this time. Many have called this a return to his Suzhou River ways, which is meaningless to me since I haven’t seen that, but it must be promising.

Mud (Jeff Nichols) – I’ll admit this snuck up on me at the end, but take the strong concept, Michael Shannon, & Jessica Chastain away from Nichols and he struggles – there’s not much here that’s distinctive from any other southern-set coming-of-ager. Not to mention, it’s contrived beyond my tolerance level. Shrugs across the board for me.

The Pirogue (Moussa Touré) – a modest but impacting bit of didactic self-deprecation; like Rabbit-Proof Fence reconfigured for Senegal. I can’t say I was in the proper mood for appreciating this one.

Les Invisibles (Sebastien Lifshitz) – A documentary focusing on a handful of octogenarian French gays and lesbians; sweet, but largely a tired ‘look how far we’ve come’ treatment of the material.

Final Cut – Ladies & Gentlemen (György Pálfi) – nobody told me there was a Christian Marclay film in the festival! Pálfi attempts to create grand objective narrative of films across 115-year history as celebration of classic conventions, but it therefore asks us to sit through an entirely cliché-ridden film strung together with an unoriginal gimmick. Oh, and SPOILERS!!!

Tier 4
The We and the I (Michel Gondry) – like a Spike Lee take on The Breakfast Club; sporadically enthralling, but seriously lopsided – since the film starts with the full cast on the bus and then whittles its focus as characters depart the bus over the 90-minute running time, Gondry should have been more careful so that he didn’t leave the least interesting characters left at the end. A late scene in particular, with the only good acting in the movie, feels far too weighty to be included.

Journal de France (Claudine Nougaret & Raymond Depardon) – I like Depardon’s work a lot, but constructing a film out of the unused material that he’s kept throughout his career and adding expository voiceover on top of it is as bland as it sounds/not as awesome as it sounds (depends on who I’m talking to). I should add that this will play differently for those who’ve seen his early work, since much of it is outtakes from those films. Could easily have been titled Journal de The Last 60 Years of European History, but that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue…

Miss Lovely (Ashim Ahluwalia) – love the look of the movie, which is close to a vintage giallo film when it’s really on, but the narrative is wack and mostly a chore.

Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson) – works just fine as a concept – parts vs. group in color, music, and characters – but Anderson’s deadpan kitsch has never been more stilted and affectless. Murray and McDormand’s melancholic non-relationship is the heart of the film and the only thing that worked for me. Most of all, it reminded me why Fantastic Mr. Fox worked so well: Animation, especially stop-motion, has to be tightly controlled, so I was able to ignore the suffocated actions of the characters.

Student (Darezhan Omirbayev) – so Omirbayev is a Bresson fan. Pretty much every decision is either inspired by or, more often, a replica of his cinema: the protagonist’s walk is a direct pull of Jacques’ slacked strut in Four Nights of a Dreamer; the ending is a reshoot of Pickpocket’s ending; elsewhere, it’s L’Argent galore. Calling attention to the Poet of Precision doesn’t mean your movie is good, though. I didn’t think a Crime & Punishment adaptation could be this comatose, and even the very De Oliveirian modernism couldn’t liven the mood. Many will praise – and by now, have praised – this for the Bressonian-ness of it, but I still think I’d prefer to see Omirbayev make an Omirbayev film.

Confession of a Child of the Century (Sylvie Verheyde) – the score was great, but the ’emos in decadent garb’ thing grew tiresome pretty early. I forgot it before it even ended.

Our Children (Joachim Lafosse) – a simplistic, miserablist tale of a woman who does something horrible because the two men in her life have no souls. Well done, in its own way, but characters have to be treated badly for a believable reason, in my opinion.

In the Fog (Sergei Loznitsa) – more like Slog in the Fog, amirite? I thought this was a step down from My Joy, which was intermittently brilliant. Time is distended passed its breaking point here, and I just did not think this Catch 22 narrative needed to be this boldly anti-kinetic.

Three Worlds (Catherine Corsini) – imagine Martel’s The Headless Woman, with a man run over instead of a dog, made by someone who isn’t interested in creating art, but rather a convoluted thriller.

The Paperboy (Lee Daniels) – often ridiculously bad, yet still a step up from Precious, if only because so much of it works as camp that I kind of had a lot of fun with it. Highlight is Efron getting his face pissed on by a ferocious Nicole Kidman.

Rust and Bone (Jacques Audiard) – Feels like watching an Adult Contemporary radio station for 2 hours. Given the fetishistically charged developments in the plot (a woman loses both of her legs, gets prosthetic ones, struggles to regain confidence in her sexual life) I kept hoping it would evolve into a Cronenbergian mania, if only so it would detour the proceedings away from the ultra-schematic premise. Alas, it stays on the straight & narrow, heal-each-other path the whole way through. Some have argued that the film is interesting because it is actually more focused on the malfunctional personality who hasn’t lost his limbs (coincidentally, a kickboxer!), but I still see this film as having a dual focus, healing one, and then the other. On the bright side, it certainly had the best CGI of the festival.

On the Road (Walter Salles) – better than I was expecting but still mostly useless.

Lawless (John Hillcoat) – phony gothic western that inserts bloodbaths & twangy accents as shorthand for grit. Pearce’s Dino-haircut is intimidating, but he is not. I think this filmmaker is a fraud.

Aquí y allá (Antonio Méndez Esparza) – ethnographic slice-of-life realism that gets by on looking & feeling like just the kind of film that would win Cannes’ Critics Week. So it did. Nothing distinctive about this, just ‘nice’ and ‘competent’.

Children of Sarajevo (Aida Begic) – more heavy-handed miserablism hiding under a veil of exotic topicality. Pity porn with eye-roll-worthy ‘uplift.’ A step down from Snow.

Tier 5
Antiviral (Brandon Cronenberg) – a straight-to-video terrible horror film, yet sans any fun whatsoever (i.e. the only thing that this type of film is good for). And I do not get why a director would ever want to do the exact same thing his/her parent does. Brandon’s contribution to the apparently hereditary brand of body horror is clinicality, & that (+ general amateurishness) does not do well here.

Post Tenebras Lux (Carlos Reygadas) – One of the most pretentious films I have seen in a very long time. In the interviews I’ve read since the film premiered, Reygadas’ one defense is basically ‘all you guys want your movies spoon-fed to you! my movie is challenging and doesn’t give answers! you have to think for yourself!’, which basically confirms what the film indicates: the guy doesn’t know what his movie is saying, but he desperately wants it to say something profound. On its surface – and this is making it sound far more interesting than it is – one could almost call this Satan’s telling of The Tree of Life. The difference is that Malick actually knew what he wanted to do with his film. Example of head-smacking, go-for-broke grasps at profundity: two characters who we have never seen before and never see again (*Edit: jk…it’s the main couple that the rest of the film focuses on. That it doesn’t really make that much of a difference either way is telling) are at a swingers bath house where there is copious anus-pounding happening all around them; they walk into a room and ask the four or five naked patrons inside “is this the Duchamp room?” One of them replies “No, sorry, this is the Hegel room.” Puh-lease. However, if a film that has this kind of nonsense (<--clickable) going on around the edges of the frame for more than half the running time looks like your idea of a stunningly visionary breakthrough in how we see the world, perhaps you can disregard everything else in this capsule. 7 Days in Havana (Benicio del Toro, Pablo Trapero, Julio Medem, Elia Suleiman, Juan Carlos Tabio, Gaspar Noé, & Laurent Cantet) – Gaspar Noe’s and Elia Suleiman are predicably good; Julio Medem’s is an embarrassment to cinema; the rest are forgettable. Now can we please stop making these city-centric omnibus films.

After the Battle (Yousry Nasrallah) – Nasrallah exposes how artificial and flaccid his vision of the revolution is when, towards the end, he flips quickly from an actual viral video of the riots to his fictional reenactment of the same event; one is enthralling, the other plastic. Also problematic is the construction of the universe as strictly ‘politically aware,’ meaning that politics are all anyone speaks about, anywhere, ever. In reality, even when we are in the throes of major events, we retain our abilities to be interested in, and have discussions about, other aspects of our lives that aren’t related to said major event.

Tier 6
Dangerous Liaisons (Hur Jin-ho) – more like Im’s The Housemaid remake than Wong’s In the Mood for Love, though it thinks it’s in line with the latter. I was in a stupor for pretty much the entirety.

Mekong Hotel (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) – as Arirang showed us all last year, there are some things that a director just doesn’t need the public to see. Not as grating as Kim’s film was, but this really does feel ‘casual’ as Apichatpong put it when he introduced the film, almost like a parody of his work.

The Dream and the Silence (Jaime Rosales) – Good grief was this movie boring. That Rosales made it so intentionally opaque for its own sake ticked me off even more. The film is in black & white (very good-looking, actually), yet two random scenes are in colour. Why? Just cuz.

Tier 7
The Taste of Money (Im Sang-soo) – I remember enjoying The Housemaid on some level; that Im followed that up with something this inept is somewhat baffling. A truly horrible film with zero redeeming qualities.

After Lucía (Michel Franco) – a girl is fed shit, pissed on, raped, and subjected to numerous other hateful provocations solely for the sake of getting into a film festival. This director wants so much to be bold and visionary, a Mexican Haneke, and it’s just sad watching him try so hard, fail so miserably.

Past Logs

2011 Film Log
2010 Film Log
2009 Film Log
2007 Film Log

*8mm/16mm/35mm/70mm denotes that what I saw was a film print.
*DP denotes that what I saw was a Digital Projection in a theatre, either because the film doesn’t exist on celluloid, or the theatre where I saw it is run by incompetent penny pinchers.
*3D denotes that I saw it in 3D, obvi.
*All others were either from DVDs, downloads, or television.
*Only films that are at least 40 minutes long (the Academy’s minimum for a feature film) are logged.
*A grade of “Inc.” denotes that I don’t think that this screening was an accurate enough presentation of the film for me to make a value judgment, either because their weren’t English subtitles for a foreign language film, or the projector broke/sound cut out/the print burned, or an ass in the theatre distracted me with too much talking/popcorn eating, or, like the incident with 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, MA, the reels are shown out of order.
*Regarding W/Os, I almost always finish what I start, and what I don’t, I don’t log.
*A ‘+’ at the beginning of a line means that I had seen this film before.

And that translates to:

A+	9.4 - 10.0	[Top 10 of All Time consideration]
A	8.6 - 9.3	[Masterpiece]
A-	7.8 - 8.5	[Near-masterpiece]
B+	7.0 - 7.7	[Great]
B	6.2 - 6.9	[Something special]
B-	5.4 - 6.1	[Admirable, at least]
C+	4.6 - 5.3	[Decent, but nothing special]
C	3.8 - 4.5	[Forgettable mediocrity]
C-	3.0 - 3.7	[What a failure]
D+	2.2 - 2.9	[What-a-failure with cheese]
D	1.4 - 2.1	[How did I get duped into seeing this?]
D-	0.6 - 1.3	[You have got to be kidding me]
F	0.0 - 0.5	[Worst of All Time consideration]

January

127 Hours (2010, Danny Boyle) – 6.0

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946, Frank Capra) – 7.2

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011, David Fincher) DP – 4.9

Monsieur Lazhar (2011, Philippe Falardeau) DP – 5.0

Young Adult (2011, Jason Reitman) DP – 5.3

+Keyhole (2011, Guy Maddin) 35mm – 6.1 [up from 5.9]

Carnage (2011, Roman Polanski) DP – 4.0

Hobo with a Shotgun (2011, Jason Eisener) 35mm – 4.5

Yol (1982, Serif Gören & Yilmaz Güney) 35mm – 5.6

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011, Tomas Alfredson) DP – 4.7

Starbuck (2011, Ken Scott) DP – 3.8

Life During Wartime (2009, Todd Solondz) – 4.4

Wetlands (2011, Guy Édoin) 35mm – 5.7

+A Dangerous Method (2011, David Cronenberg) DP – 5.9 [up from 5.5]

Lula, Son of Brazil (2009, Fábio Barreto & Marcelo Santiago) – 3.2

Scream 4 (2011, Wes Craven) – 5.6

+Café de flore (2011, Jean-Marc Vallée) DP – 5.0 [same]

The Salesman (2011, Sébastien Pilote) DP – 6.2

Paranormal Activity 3 (2011, Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman) – 6.0

Print Generation (1974, J.J. Murphy) 16mm – 7.0

+By the Law [Franz Reisecker score] (1926, Lev Kuleshov) – 8.8 [up from 7.0]

The Time That Remains (2009, Elia Suleiman) – 5.3

Daïnah la métisse (1932, Jean Grémillon) – 8.0

Walkover (1965, Jerzy Skolimowski) 35mm – 4.4

+Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes (1969, Jean Eustache) 35mm – 6.8 [up from ~4.5]

In the Dust of the Stars (1976, Gottfried Kolditz) 35mm – 3.1

Living Together (1973, Anna Karina) 35mm – 5.7

The Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel (1979, Grigori Kromanov) 35mm – 3.4

An Oversimplification of Her Beauty (2012, Terence Nance) – 3.0

Pilot Pirx’s Inquest (1979, Marek Piestrak) 35mm – 4.5

Senna (2010, Asif Kapadia) – 6.2

Dancing in the Dark (1986, Leon Marr) 35mm – 6.1

Hope (1970, Yilmaz Güney) 35mm – 6.2

Moscow-Cassiopeia (1975, Richard Viktorov) DP – 5.2

Teens in the Universe (1974, Richard Viktorov) DP – 5.4

Father (2010, José María de Orbe) – 4.4

The Herd (1979, Zeki Ökten) 35mm – 4.9

Ferat Vampire (1982, Juraj Herz) 35mm – 3.9

Solaris (1972, Andrei Tarkovsky) 35mm – 7.8

The Poor (1975, Yilmaz Güney & Atif Yilmaz) 35mm – 4.5

+Aurora (2010, Cristi Puiu) – 4.7 [same]

The Big Space Travel (1974, Valentin Selivanov) DP – 3.8

February

Elegy (1972, Yilmaz Güney) 35mm – 4.1

The Innkeepers (2011, Ti West) DP – 4.8

Bride of the Earth (1968, Yilmaz Güney) 35mm – 6.5

Who Wants to Kill Jessie? (1966, Václav Vorlícek) 35mm – 6.0

The Hungry Wolves (1969, Yilmaz Güney) 35mm – 5.1

Johnny Guitar (1954, Nicholas Ray) 35mm – 7.6

Better Mus’ Come (2010, Storm Saulter) DP – 3.3

Friend (1975, Yilmaz Güney) 35mm – 4.2

L (2012, Babis Makridis) – 2.5

Clip (2012, Maja Miloš) – 5.0

Felicia’s Journey (1999, Atom Egoyan) 35mm – 5.3

+Sans Soleil (1983, Chris Marker) – 5.6 [up from ~3.5]

Harvest (2011, Benjamin Cantu) – 5.5

Babette’s Feast (1987, Gabriel Axel) 35mm – 4.9

Thursday till Sunday (2012, Dominga Sotomayor Castillo) – 5.7

+Black Venus (2010, Abdellatif Kechiche) – 6.4 [down from 6.8]

Pursuit of Loneliness (2012, Laurence Thrush) – 5.1

+A Man Escaped (1956, Robert Bresson) 35mm – 8.1 [up from ~7.5]

+Stalker (1979, Andrei Tarkovsky) 35mm – 6.2 [down from ~9.5]

+Mouchette (1967, Robert Bresson) 35mm – 5.6 [up from ~4.0]

+Wild at Heart (1990, David Lynch) 35mm – 5.8 [down from ~6.5]

The True Story of Jesse James (1957, Nicholas Ray) 35mm – 4.3

Diary of a Country Priest (1951, Robert Bresson) 35mm – 5.0

Angels of the Streets (1943, Robert Bresson) 35mm – 4.4

The Legend Of Kaspar Hauser (2012, Davide Manuli) – 4.7

Zero for Conduct (1933, Jean Vigo) – 7.3

King of Kings (1961, Nicholas Ray) 35mm – 3.5

Buenas noches, España (2011, Raya Martin) – 7.5

Bestiaire (2012, Denis Côté) – 6.3

Coeur fidèle (1923, Jean Epstein) – 4.8

Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945, Robert Bresson) 35mm – 5.2

Gerhard Richter Painting (2011, Corinna Belz) Reel Artists, DP – 6.7

Thomas Ruff (2011, Ralph Goertz) Reel Artists, DP – 3.2

Mark Lewis: Nowhere Land (2011, Reinhard Wulf) Reel Artists, DP – 5.9

+Raising Arizona (1987, Joel Coen) 35mm – 6.9 [up from ~5.5]

Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present (2012, Matthew Akers) Reel Artists, DP – 5.1

Affliction (1997, Paul Schrader) 35mm – 4.4

March

Beyond the Hill (2012, Emin Alper) – 4.2

+Au Hasard Balthazar (1966, Robert Bresson) 35mm – 6.2 [up from ~4.5]

+Pickpocket (1959, Robert Bresson) 35mm – 5.7 [down from 5.9]

The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962, Robert Bresson) 35mm – 5.0

Modern Times (1936, Charles Chaplin) – 6.5

It’s the Earth Not the Moon (2011, Gonçalo Tocha) – 6.4

Neighboring Sounds (2012, Kleber Mendonça Filho) – 6.4

+Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011, Nuri Bilge Ceylan) 35mm – 7.7 [down from 7.9]

Knock on Any Door (1949, Nicholas Ray) 35mm – 5.8

Lancelot of the Lake (1974, Robert Bresson) 35mm – Inc. (~4.7) [frequent disruptions from drunk man]

The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967, Jacques Demy) 35mm – 6.6

A Gentle Woman (1969, Robert Bresson) 35mm – 6.8

A Woman’s Secret (1949, Nicholas Ray) 35mm – 4.9

Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971, Robert Bresson) 35mm – 7.1

Only Yesterday (1991, Isao Takahata) 35mm – 6.1

Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie (2012, Tim Heidecker & Eric Wareheim) – 3.6

+Kinatay (2009, Brillante Mendoza) – 5.7 [same]

+About Elly (2009, Asghar Farhadi) – 7.0 [same]

Whisper of the Heart (1995, Yoshifumi Kondô) 35mm – 5.8

The Grey (2011, Joe Carnahan) – 4.5

My Neighbor Totoro (1988, Hayao Miyazaki) 35mm – 5.2

Atomic Age (2012, Héléna Klotz) – 6.1

The Devil, Probably (1977, Robert Bresson) 35mm – 3.9

Woman in the Dunes (1964, Hiroshi Teshigahara) 35mm – 8.9

The Savage Innocents (1960, Nicholas Ray) 35mm – 6.9

L’Argent (1983, Robert Bresson) 35mm – 6.3

Porco Rosso (1992, Hayao Miyazaki) 35mm – 4.3

Detropia (2012, Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady) – 5.5

The Lusty Men (1952, Nicholas Ray) 35mm – 6.8

Nana (2011, Valérie Massadian) – 5.4

Jane Eyre (2011, Cary Fukunaga) 35mm – 5.1

Our Dancing Daughters (1928, Harry Beaumont) Toronto Silent, 16mm – 5.0

Blood and Sand (1922, Fred Niblo) Toronto Silent, 16mm – 3.6

The Last Picture Show (1971, Peter Bogdanovich) DP – 7.9

April

Flying Leathernecks (1951, Nicholas Ray) 35mm – 5.0

Edward II (1991, Derek Jarman) 35mm – 3.1

+House of Tolerance (2011, Bertrand Bonello) – 8.5 [same]

Variety [US Cut] (1925, Ewald André Dupont) Toronto Silent, 16mm – 5.2

+Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971, Robert Bresson) 35mm – 8.3 [up from 7.1]

Lilies (1996, John Greyson) 35mm – 5.5

Princess Mononoke (1997, Hayao Miyazaki) 35mm – 5.6

Fireworks Wednesday (2006, Asghar Farhadi) 35mm – 4.8

The South (1983, Victor Erice) 35mm – Inc. (~6.0) [sound problem]

Ruggles of Red Gap (1935, Leo McCarey) 35mm – 7.3

+Killer of Sheep (1979, Charles Burnett) 35mm – 8.6 [up from ~6.0]

+The Pettifogger (2011, Lewis Klahr) Images, DP – 9.1 [up from 7.3]

Planet of Snail (2011, Seung-jun Yi) – 4.6

The Observers (2011, Jacqueline Goss) Images, DP – 5.1

What Is It? (2005, Crispin Glover) 35mm – 5.0

+Two Years at Sea (2011, Ben Rivers) Images, 35mm – 5.1 [same]

Death in Venice (1971, Luchino Visconti) 35mm – 7.0

The Queen of Versailles (2012, Lauren Greenfield) DP – 6.1

Wildness (2012, Wu Tsang) DP – 3.4

No, I am Not a Toad, I am a Turtle! (2012, Elke Marhöfer) Images, DP – 4.7

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (2010, Dmitry Vasyukov & Werner Herzog) DP – 4.5

The Strawberry Tree (2011, Simone Rapisarda Casanova) Images, DP – 5.3

Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (2012, Lav Diaz) Images, DP – 5.8

Bottle Rocket (1996, Wes Anderson) – 6.3

A Town Called Panic (2009, Stéphane Aubier & Vincent Patar) – 5.8

Daniel & Ana (2009, Michel Franco) – 3.9

Chronicle (2012, Josh Trank) – 4.8

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (2012, Alison Klayman) Hot Docs, DP – 3.7

Ethel (2012, Rory Kennedy) Hot Docs, DP – 3.5

A.K. (1985, Chris Marker) Hot Docs, DP – 5.1

The Imposter (2012, Bart Layton) Hot Docs, DP – 6.6

All Divided Selves (2011, Luke Fowler) Hot Docs, DP – 4.2

There Is No Sexual Rapport (2011, Raphaël Siboni) Hot Docs, DP – 5.2

Jeff (2012, Chris James Thompson) Hot Docs, DP – 4.9

Soldier/Citizen (2012, Silvina Landesman) Hot Docs, DP – 5.5

Summer of Giacomo (2011, Alessandro Comodin) Hot Docs, DP – 6.2

May

Only The Young (2012, Elizabeth Mims & Jason Tippet) Hot Docs, DP – 6.3

Marley (2012, Kevin McDonald) Hot Docs, DP – 4.9

For Those Who Will Follow (1963, Michel Brault & Pierre Perrault) Hot Docs, DP – 4.7

Papirosen (2011, Gastón Solnicki) – 4.6

¡Vivan las Antipodas! (2011, Victor Kossakovsky) Hot Docs, DP – 4.5

The Law in These Parts (2011, Ra’anan Alexandrowicz) Hot Docs, DP – 2.3

Shut Up and Play the Hits (2012, Will Lovelace & Dylan Southern) Hot Docs, DP – 4.8

Tchoupitoulas (2012, Bill Ross IV & Turner Ross) Hot Docs, DP – 7.0

The Lovers on the Bridge (1991, Leos Carax) – 5.2

That Has Been (1984, Nicky Hamlyn) 16mm – 5.6

Frenzy (1972, Alfred Hitchcock) 35mm – 6.0

Moonrise Kingdom (2012, Wes Anderson) Cannes, DP – 4.8

After the Battle (2012, Yousry Nasrallah) Cannes, DP – 3.3

Rust and Bone (2012, Jacques Audiard) Cannes, DP – 4.4

Mystery (2012, Lou Ye) Cannes, DP – 5.3

Sister (2012, Ursula Meier) Cannes Marché du Film, DP – 6.7

Paradise: Love (2012, Ulrich Seidl) Cannes, DP – 5.6

The We and the I (2012, Michel Gondry) Cannes, DP – 4.9

Student (2012, Darezhan Omirbaev) Cannes, 35mm – 4.7

Reality (2012, Matteo Garrone) Cannes, 35mm – 6.0

Tabu (2012, Miguel Gomes) Cannes Marché du Film, DP – 6.5

Mekong Hotel (2012, Apichatpong Weerasethakul) Cannes, DP – 2.6

Beyond the Hills (2012, Cristian Mungiu) Cannes, DP – 8.2

Laurence Anyways (2012, Xavier Dolan) Cannes, 35mm – 6.9

Lawless (2012, John Hillcoat) Cannes, DP – 4.3

Antiviral (2012, Brandon Cronenberg) Cannes, DP – 3.9

38 Witnesses (2012, Lucas Belvaux) Cannes Marché du Film, DP – 6.0

Night Across the Street (2012, Raúl Ruiz) Cannes, DP – 5.4

Amour (2012, Michael Haneke) Cannes, DP – 6.6

In Another Country (2012, Hong Sang-soo) Cannes, 35mm – 6.3

The Invisible Ones (2012, Sébastien Lifshitz) Cannes, DP – 5.0

Like Someone in Love (2012, Abbas Kiarostami) Cannes, DP – 7.9

Confession of a Child of the Century (2012, Sylvie Verheyde) Cannes, DP – 4.8

You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet! (2012, Alain Resnais) Cannes, DP – 5.3

The Pirogue (2012, Moussa Toure) Cannes, DP – 5.1

The Hunt (2012, Thomas Vinterberg) Cannes, DP – 5.8

The Angels’ Share (2012, Ken Loach) Cannes, 35mm – 6.1

Room 237 (2012, Rodney Ascher) Cannes, DP – 6.7

Killing Them Softly (2012, Andrew Dominik) Cannes, DP – 6.6

Journal de France (2012, Claudine Nougaret & Raymond Depardon) Cannes, DP – 4.9

Everybody in Our Family (2012, Radu Jude) Cannes Marché du Film, 35mm – 5.7

Holy Motors (2012, Leos Carax) Cannes, DP – 8.5

Our Children (2012, Joachim Lafosse) Cannes, DP – 4.7

Caesar Must Die (2012, Paolo & Vittorio Taviani) Cannes Marché du Film, DP – 5.5

The Dream and the Silence (2012, Jaime Rosales) Cannes, 35mm – 2.3

Children of Sarajevo (2012, Aida Begic) Cannes, 35mm – 4.1

Post Tenebras Lux (2012, Carlos Reygadas) Cannes, DP – 3.5

7 Days in Havana (2012, Benicio del Toro, Pablo Trapero, Julio Medem, Elia Suleiman, Juan Carlos Tabio, Gaspar Noé, & Laurent Cantet) Cannes, DP – 3.4

The Paperboy (2012, Lee Daniels) Cannes, DP – 4.5

Dangerous Liaisons (2012, Hur Jin-Ho) Cannes, DP – 3.1

Three Worlds (2012, Catherine Corsini) Cannes, DP – 4.6

In the Fog (2012, Sergei Loznitsa) Cannes, 35mm – 4.7

Sightseers (2012, Ben Wheatley) Cannes, DP – 6.5

Cosmopolis (2012, David Cronenberg) Cannes, DP – 7.1

Miss Lovely (2012, Ashim Ahluwalia) Cannes, DP – 4.9

After Lucía (2012, Michel Franco) Cannes, DP – 1.7

Aquí y allá (2012, Antonio Méndez Esparza) Cannes, DP – 4.3

+Holy Motors (2012, Leos Carax) Cannes, DP – 8.5 [same]

Mud (2012, Jeff Nichols) Cannes, DP – 5.2

Final Cut – Ladies & Gentlemen (2012, György Pálfi) Cannes, DP – 5.0

Gimme the Loot (2012, Adam Leon) Cannes, DP – 5.5

No (2012, Pablo Larraín) Cannes, DP – 6.4

On the Road (2012, Walter Salles) Cannes, DP – 4.6

+You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet! (2012, Alain Resnais) Cannes, DP – 7.1 [up from 5.3]

+Amour (2012, Michael Haneke) Cannes, DP – 7.0 [up from 6.6]

+In Another Country (2012, Hong Sang-soo) Cannes, 35mm – 6.7 [up from 6.3]

The Taste of Money (2012, Im Sang-soo) Cannes, DP – 2.0

Quixote (1965, Bruce Baillie) 16mm – 6.8

June

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953, Howard Hawks) 35mm – 5.8

Tokyo! (2008, Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, & Bong Joon-ho) – 5.2

In the Family (2011, Patrick Wang) 35mm – 4.7

Flaming Creatures (1963, Jack Smith) Luminato, 16mm – 4.9

+Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957, Frank Tashlin) 35mm – 6.1 [up from 5.7]

Le Confessional (1995, Robert Lepage) Luminato, 35mm – 4.8

Some Like it Hot (1959, Billy Wilder) DP – 8.1

Wanderlust (2012, David Wain) – 5.6

Kiss Me Deadly (1955, Robert Aldrich) – 7.4

River of No Return (1954, Otto Preminger) 35mm – 4.8

Howards End (1992, James Ivory) 70mm – 5.9

The Remains of the Day (1993, James Ivory) 35mm – 6.8

+Rebecca (1940, Alfred Hitchcock) 35mm – 6.9 [up from ~5.0]

+Tabloid (2010, Errol Morris) – 6.5 [down from 7.1]

+Daïnah la métisse (1932, Jean Grémillon) – 7.6 [down from 8.0]

+Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1988, Todd Haynes) – 7.8 [down from 8.3]

Nanook of the North [live score by Tanya Tagaq] (1922, Robert J. Flaherty) 35mm – 5.0

Polytechnique [French version] (2009, Denis Villeneuve) – 4.3

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001, Zacharias Kunuk) 35mm – 5.3

Port of Shadows (1938, Marcel Carné) DP – 5.7

+Cosmopolis (2012, David Cronenberg) DP – 7.2 [up from 7.1]

The Militant Suffragette (1913, Urban Gad) – 6.2

The ABC of Love (1916, Magnus Stifter) – 5.4

The Eskimo Baby (1918, Heinz Schall) – 4.3

The Queen of the Stock Exchange (1918, Edmund Edel) – 4.9

+Two Lovers (2008, James Gray) – 7.0 [up from ~5.5]

July

How to Marry a Millionaire (1953, Jean Negulesco) 35mm – 5.5

Bombay Talkie (1970, James Ivory) 35mm – 3.9

Project X (2012, Nima Nourizadeh) – 5.1

Out of Sight (1998, Steven Soderbergh) – 6.4

Dances with Wolves (1990, Kevin Costner) 35mm – 4.6

+Jaws (1975, Steven Spielberg) DP – 6.5 [~same]

Brave (2012, Mark Andrews & Brenda Chapman) 3D – 5.3

Your Sister’s Sister (2011, Lynn Shelton) DP – 4.9

Magic Mike (2012, Steven Soderbergh) 35mm – 5.4

The Exiles (1961, Kent Mackenzie) 35mm – 6.3

Picnic (1955, Joshua Logan) 35mm – 6.9

Shakespeare Wallah (1965, James Ivory) 35mm – 4.9

Charulata: The Lonely Wife (1964, Satyajit Ray) 35mm – 6.0

+Margaret [Extended Cut] (2011, Kenneth Lonergan) – 8.8 [Theatrical Cut: 7.5]

Danube Hospital (2012, Nikolaus Geyrhalter) – 5.4

Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012, Benh Zeitlin) DP – 3.8

Grand Illusion (1937, Jean Renoir) DP – 5.8

+The Rules of the Game (1939, Jean Renoir) 35mm – 7.4 [up from 6.9]

French Cancan (1954, Jean Renoir) DP – 4.4

+Tchoupitoulas (2012, Bill Ross IV & Turner Ross) – 7.0 [same]

Touch of Evil [Reconstructed Version] (1958, Orson Welles) 35mm – 7.9

+’Rameau’s Nephew’ by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1974, Michael Snow) – 8.2 [same]

Army of Shadows (1969, Jean-Pierre Melville) 35mm – 5.5

Stormy Waters (1941, Jean Grémillon) 35mm – 8.1

Lumière d’été (1943, Jean Grémillon) 35mm – 5.3

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010, David Yates) – 5.2

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011, David Yates) – 5.0

The Dark Knight Rises (2012, Christopher Nolan) 70mm – 5.5

Savages (2012, Oliver Stone) DP – 5.2

August

Bernie (2011, Richard Linklater) DP – 6.0

The Unfaithful Wife (1969, Claude Chabrol) – 6.2

Imitation of Life (1959, Douglas Sirk) 35mm – 7.0

+Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974, Jacques Rivette) 35mm – 8.3 [~same]

Inori (2012, Pedro González-Rubio) – 4.2

+Breathless (1960, Jean-Luc Godard) 35mm – 5.9 [~same]

Compliance (2012, Craig Zobel) DP – 5.8

2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967, Jean-Luc Godard) 35mm – 6.6

The Europeans (1979, James Ivory) 35mm – 3.7

The Age of Innocence (1993, Martin Scorsese) 35mm – 6.0

The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012, Stephen Chbosky) DP – 4.0

All That You Possess (2012, Bernard Émond) DP – 5.1

Tower (2012, Kazik Radwanski) – 6.8

A Liar’s Autobiography – The Untrue Story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman (2012, Bill Jones, Jeff Simpson, & Ben Timlett) 3D – 5.3

+Weekend (1967, Jean-Luc Godard) 35mm – 6.5 [up from 5.8]

Memories Look at Me (2012, Fang Song) – 5.5

+Muriel, or The Time of Return (1963, Alain Resnais) 35mm – 5.6 [same]

The Inner Scar (1972, Philippe Garrel) – 6.9

When Night Falls (2012, Ying Liang) – 6.2

Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962, Agnès Varda) 35mm – 7.0

Anna Karenina (2012, Joe Wright) DP – 5.0

Looper (2012, Rian Johnson) DP – 6.4

Pusher (2012, Luis Prieto) DP – 3.9

In the House (2012, François Ozon) DP – 4.4

Hyde Park on Hudson (2012, Roger Michell) DP – 3.4

+All is Forgiven (2007, Mia Hansen-Løve) 35mm – 6.7 [up from ~5.5]

West of Memphis (2012, Amy Berg) DP – 5.9

The Cloud-Capped Star (1960, Ritwik Ghatak) DP – 4.7

+The Father of My Children (2009, Mia Hansen-Løve) 35mm – 6.2 [up from 5.5]

A Child in the Crowd (1976, Gérard Blain) 35mm – 6.1

Van Gogh (1991, Maurice Pialat) 35mm – 6.6

Motorway (2012, Soi Cheang) – 4.3

The Green Ray (1986, Eric Rohmer) 35mm – 7.5

The Mother and the Whore (1973, Jean Eustache) 35mm – 7.6

Jackie (2012, Antoinette Beumer) DP – 5.1

Leviathan (2012, Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel) DP – 8.1

The Secret Disco Revolution (2012, Jamie Kastner) 35mm – 4.2

Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (2012, Laurent Cantet) DP – 4.0

Jump (2012, Kieron J. Walsh) DP – 2.4

I Declare War (2012, Jason Lapeyre & Robert Wilson) DP – 5.3

Imagine (2012, Andrzej Jakimowski) 35mm – 4.3

Berberian Sound Studio (2012, Peter Strickland) 35mm – 6.3

Blackbird (2012, Jason Buxton) DP – 4.9

London – The Modern Babylon (2012, Julien Temple) DP – 2.9

At Any Price (2012, Ramin Bahrani) DP – 2.6

Lore (2012, Cate Shortland) DP – 4.8

Gone Fishing (2012, Carlos Sorin) DP – 5.4

Thomas the Imposter (1965, Georges Franju) 35mm – 4.9

Mademoiselle (1966, Tony Richardson) 35mm – 5.8

The Gatekeepers (2012, Dror Moreh) DP – 5.2

Ship of Theseus (2012, Anand Gandhi) DP – 4.8

The Central Park Five (2012, Ken Burns, David McMahon & Sarah Burns) DP – 5.6

+Play Time (1967, Jacques Tati) 70mm – 9.5 [same]

September

Therese (1962, Georges Franju) 35mm – 4.7

Elevator to the Gallows (1958, Louis Malle) 35mm – 6.5

The Iceman (2012, Ariel Vromen) DP – 5.0

The Company You Keep (2012, Robert Redford) DP – 4.5

Silver Linings Playbook (2012, David O. Russell) DP – 5.7

+In Another Country (2012, Hong Sang-soo) TIFF, 35mm – 6.7 [same]

Kinshasa Kids (2012, Marc-Henri Wajnberg) TIFF, DP – 2.3

+Like Someone in Love (2012, Abbas Kiarostami) TIFF, DP – 7.9 [same]

Pieta (2012, Kim Ki-duk) TIFF, DP – 4.1

The End of Time (2012, Peter Mettler) TIFF, DP – 3.6

Spring Breakers (2012, Harmony Korine) TIFF, DP – 6.9

Ernest & Celestine (2012, Benjamin Renner, Vincent Patar, & Stéphane Aubier) TIFF, DP – 4.9

Something in the Air (2012, Olivier Assayas) TIFF, DP – 4.5

The Place Beyond the Pines (2012, Derek Cianfrance) TIFF, DP – 2.8

Lines of Wellington (2012, Valeria Sarmiento) TIFF, DP – 3.6

differently, Molussia (2012, Nicolas Rey) TIFF, 16mm – 6.0

The Lebanese Rocket Society (2012, Joana Hadji Thomas & Khalil Joreige) TIFF, DP – 4.6

Much Ado About Nothing (2012, Joss Whedon) TIFF, DP – 5.8

The Act of Killing (2012, Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn, & Anonymous) TIFF, DP – 5.0

Passion (2012, Brian De Palma) TIFF, DP – 4.7

Museum Hours (2012, Jem Cohen) TIFF, DP – 5.2

The Master (2012, Paul Thomas Anderson) TIFF, 70mm – 6.1

Once Upon a Time Was I, Verônica (2012, Marcelo Gomes) TIFF, 35mm – 4.8

Viola (2012, Matías Piñeiro) TIFF, DP – 5.9

Capital (2012, Costa-Gavras) TIFF, DP – 4.3

Blancanieves (2012, Pablo Berger) TIFF, DP – 4.9

Ginger and Rosa (2012, Sally Potter) TIFF, DP – 4.9

The Last Time I Saw Macao (2012, João Pedro Rodrigues & João Rui Guerra da Mata) TIFF, DP – 6.1

Augustine (2012, Alice Winocour) TIFF, DP – 6.5

To the Wonder (2012, Terrence Malick) TIFF, DP – 7.1

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012, Sophie Fiennes) TIFF, DP – 5.8

Three Sisters (2012, Wang Bing) TIFF, DP – 4.0

+Beyond the Hills (2012, Cristian Mungiu) TIFF, DP – 7.4 [down from 8.2]

+Leviathan (2012, Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel) TIFF, DP – 8.1 [same]

Fill the Void (2012, Rama Burshtein) TIFF, DP – 4.8

A Hijacking (2012, Tobias Lindholm) TIFF, DP – 6.6

Dormant Beauty (2012, Marco Bellocchio) TIFF, DP – 4.8

+Student (2012, Darezhan Omirbayev) TIFF, DP – 5.4 [up from 4.7]

Fly With the Crane (2012, Li Ruijun) TIFF, DP – 5.3

Barbara (2012, Christian Petzold) TIFF, 35mm – 6.4

Blondie (2012, Jesper Ganslandt) TIFF, DP – 4.5

La Sirga (2012, William Vega) TIFF, DP – 4.4

3 (2012, Pablo Stoll Ward) TIFF, 35mm – 5.6

Jayne Mansfield’s Car (2012, Billy Bob Thornton) TIFF, DP – 5.7

Eat Sleep Die (2012, Gabriela Pichler) TIFF, DP – 6.8

Frances Ha (2012, Noah Baumbach) TIFF, DP – 7.0

The Cremator (2012, Peng Tao) TIFF, DP – 3.9

Just the Wind (2012, Bence Fliegauf) TIFF, 35mm – 5.5

Nights with Theodore (2012, Sébastien Betbeder) TIFF, DP – 4.6

Yellow (2012, Nick Cassavetes) TIFF, DP – 3.4

+Post Tenebras Lux [TIFF cut] (2012, Carlos Reygadas) TIFF, DP – 6.1 [Cannes cut: 3.5]

Gebo and the Shadow (2012, Manoel de Oliveira) TIFF, DP – 6.2

+Viola (2012, Matías Piñeiro) – 7.2 [up from 5.9]

+Laurence Anyways (2012, Xavier Dolan) DP – 6.9 [same]

+Tabu (2012, Miguel Gomes) DP – 6.5 [same]

The Dead Man and Being Happy (2012, Javier Rebollo) – 5.9

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927, Alfred Hitchcock) – 6.8

War Witch (2012, Kim Nguyen) DP – 4.6

Lifeboat (1944, Alfred Hitchcock) – 6.6

Meet Me in St. Louis (1944, Vincente Minnelli) – 8.5

The Unknown (1927, Tod Browning) 35mm – 6.0

Somebody Up There Likes Me (2012, Bob Byington) – 6.9

+A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001, Steven Spielberg) – 8.4 [~same]

Our Hospitality (1923, John G. Blystone & Buster Keaton) – 8.0

October

+The Elephant Man (1980, David Lynch) – 7.3 [~same]

Nobody Walks (2012, Ry Russo-Young) DP – 2.7

+The Master (2012, Paul Thomas Anderson) 70mm – 7.6 [up from 6.1]

John Cassavetes (1969, Hubert Knapp & André S. Labarthe) NYFF, 35mm – 5.6

Araf – Somewhere in Between (2012, Yeşim Ustaoğlu) NYFF, DP – 5.0

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970, Elio Petri) DP – 5.4

“EMPIRE” (2008, Phil Solomon) NYFF, DP – 6.5

Age Is… (2012, Stephen Dwoskin) NYFF, DP – 4.6

The Blind Owl (1990, Raúl Ruiz) NYFF, 16mm – 7.1

Circle in the Sand (2012, Michael Robinson) NYFF, DP – 5.5

The Extravagant Shadows (2012, David Gatten) NYFF, DP – 6.3

+Passion (2012, Brian De Palma) NYFF, DP – 5.7 [up from 4.7]

+Mekong Hotel (2012, Apichatpong Weerasethakul) NYFF, DP – 2.6 [same]

Once Every Day (2012, Richard Foreman) NYFF, DP – 4.7

small roads (2011, James Benning) NYFF, DP – 7.5

Bwakaw (2012, Jun Robles Lana) NYFF, DP – 3.0

Fragments of Kubelka (2012, Martina Kudlácek) NYFF, DP – 6.1

Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman (1997, Chantal Akerman) NYFF, DP – 4.4

Philippe Garrel, Artist (1999, Françoise Etchegaray) NYFF, DP – 3.5

+Eraserhead (1977, David Lynch) 35mm – 9.0 [up from ~8.0]

The Forgiveness of Blood (2011, Joshua Marston) – 5.3

Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948, Max Ophüls) – 6.8

+Dial M for Murder (1954, Alfred Hitchcock) 3D – 8.1 [down from 8.4]

Marvel’s The Avengers (2012, Joss Whedon) – 4.1

La Promesse (1996, Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne) – 7.3

Cloud Atlas (2012, Andy & Lana Wachowski & Tom Tykwer) DP – 4.4

Lonesome (1928, Paul Fejos) – 5.5

+The Mist (2007, Frank Darabont) – 5.2 [~same]

November

Broadway (1929, Paul Fejos) – 4.3

The Last Performance (1929, Paul Fejos) – 5.1

The Game (1997, David Fincher) – 7.8

Flight (2012, Robert Zemeckis) DP – 4.5

Vamps (2012, Amy Heckerling) – 6.2

It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve: Masao Adachi (2011, Philippe Grandrieux) DP – 4.0

The Three Stooges (2012, Peter & Bobby Farrelly) – 5.4

Greatest Hits (2012, Nicolás Pereda) DP – 6.1

The Rose King (1986, Werner Schroeter) 35mm – 6.4

Malina (1991, Werner Schroeter) 35mm – 4.7

+Holy Motors (2012, Leos Carax) – 8.5 [same]

Eika Katappa (1969, Werner Schroeter) 35mm – 5.6

+Vertigo (1958, Alfred Hitchcock) – 8.8 [same]

Titicut Follies (1967, Frederick Wiseman) 16mm – 7.7

+Dogtooth (2009, Giorgos Lanthimos) – 8.2 [same]

Palermo or Wolfsburg (1980, Werner Schroeter) 35mm – 5.8

The Light of Asia (1925, Franz Osten) 35mm – 3.6

The Blue Angel (1930, Josef von Sternberg) 35mm – 6.5

+Gummo (1997, Harmony Korine) – 6.3 [~same]

Julien Donkey-Boy (1999, Harmony Korine) – 5.9

the war (2012, James Benning) – 6.0

Dress Rehearsal (1980, Werner Schroeter) DP – 5.2

Carriage Trade (1971, Warren Sonbert) 16mm – 5.7

+Trash Humpers (2009, Harmony Korine) – 4.6 [up from 2.5]

Where the Boys Are (1960, Henry Levin) – 4.9

The Ipcress File (1965, Sidney J. Furie) 35mm – 5.4

All Things Were Now Overtaken by Silence (2010, Nicolás Pereda) DP – 3.3

The Corridor (1995, Sharunas Bartas) 35mm – 6.5

The Death of Maria Malibran (1972, Werner Schroeter) 35mm – 5.5

Great Expectations (1946, David Lean) 35mm – 5.9

+La moustache (2005, Emmanuel Carrère) – 7.6 [up from 7.5]

Day of the Idiots (1981, Werner Schroeter) DP – 2.8

The Great Cinema Party (2012, Raya Martin) – 5.6

December

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper) DP – 7.4

Goldflocken (1976, Werner Schroeter) DP – 4.3

Promised Land (2012, Gus Van Sant) DP – 4.2

Lincoln (2012, Steven Spielberg) DP – 4.6

It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012, Don Hertzfeldt) – 6.6

Blood of My Blood [Extended Cut] (2011, João Canijo) – 5.1

Audrey the Trainwreck (2010, Frank V. Ross) – 5.7

Goon (2011, Michael Dowse) – 5.5

Generation P (2011, Victor Ginzburg) – 4.6

Django (1966, Sergio Corbucci) DP – Inc. (~4.4) [‘Accidentally’ projected w/English dub track at press screening]

Life of Pi (2012, Ang Lee) 3D – 6.3

Willow Springs (1973, Werner Schroeter) DP – 5.0

The Suicide Shop (2012, Patrice Leconte) 3D – 3.2

Django Unchained (2012, Quentin Tarantino) DP – 6.4

The Cabin in the Woods (2011, Drew Goddard) – 4.7

Zero Dark Thirty (2012, Kathryn Bigelow) DP – 5.7

The Sheik and I (2012, Caveh Zahedi) – 5.5

+The Loneliest Planet (2011, Julia Loktev) – 6.6 [down from 7.2]

Haywire (2011, Steven Soderbergh) – 5.8

+Elena (2011, Andrey Zvyagintsev) – 7.1 [same]

+This is Not a Film (2011, Jafar Panahi & Mojtaba Mirtahmasb) – 6.9 [same]

+The Imposter (2012, Bart Layton) – 7.0 [up from 6.6]

Red Hook Summer (2012, Spike Lee) – 5.9

+The Day He Arrives (2011, Hong Sang-soo) – 6.5 [down from 7.0]

+Cinderella (1950, Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, & Hamilton Luske) – 4.4 [down ~6.5]

El Valley Centro (1999, James Benning) – 6.8

+Los (2001, James Benning) – 6.3 [same]

Sogobi (2002, James Benning) – 5.8

 

Béla Tarr’s Prologue from Visions of Europe (2004, omnibus)

 

Necrology (1971, Standish Lawder)

 

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Stanley Kubrick)

Toronto’s TD Centre in 1966

Toronto’s TD Centre in 2008

So, first, there are occasional small moments that I just find either endearing or cute or funny, and this helps with the film’s flow and momentum. Humour is like the most subjective thing, though, so sure, The Future will not make everyone giddy in that department.

But. What I really respond to is what I now realize to be the central theme of the movie, which is the fragility of our connections to people and ideas, and how the world outside of our own agendas is a harrowing, terrifying abyss. July’s character Sophie states early on how something like keeping up with the news is a task that she’s “so behind” on that she’s long since succumbed to not caring about it. She wants to keep track of current events, but she’s given up on that field altogether. “Why bother?” (this sentiment is repeated later on, on a global rather than personal level, in reference to the environment. We’ve ‘fallen behind on’ our maintenance of it, and people respond by not even bothering to fight for it anymore; Sophie’s bf Jason sells not one tree to anyone that isn’t Sophie).

Then, there’s the world Sophie has with Jason that encompasses her routines and schedules involving her life with him, which is the premiere responsibility of her daily life as they rely on each other for intimacy and companionship. As well, there are her career ambitions – gaining some sort of notoriety as a dancer – and her reliance on the internet, which is shown to be almost entirely superfluous to her as she struggles to think of anything necessary to research in the brief moments before her connection is shut off. All of these aspects of her life make up her own, readymade bubble, and her relationship to each is shown, one-by-one, to be incredibly fragile, irredeemably disrupted with only the slightest neglect.

Sophie’s attempt to start a hit youtube series of 30 Dances in 30 Days sees her giving herself an exciting (for her, anyway) utility of her artistic abilities that also relates to close quarters outside of her sphere (that plastic girl behind the counter). When Sophie struggles to come up with a first dance, she immediately falls behind schedule, gets frustrated, and, in a moment of feeling incompetent as an artist, channels her frustration in sex with a sleazy stranger (which dominos into her responsibilities toward her boyfriend Jason, the most impacting one).

She tumbles away from her responsibilities and into a void of unfamiliar routines (as a suburban mistress, as a non-artist, as a non-hipster), and this is portrayed emotionally in the film (as opposed to realistically or literally) via an onslaught of magic realist happenings, e.g. the talking moon, paused time, and people who age years and then decades right before her very eyes (one of a few instances that recalls Synecdoche, New York). Her detachment from any recognizable trait of the life she knows is made to be felt in us (the viewer) by detaching us from the flow and rhythms of the film’s first half (which was a portrait of complacent, harmless hipsters set within the rules of reality – albeit a twee reality that is situated on quirky gestures and actions. Significantly, and a bit heavy-handedly, this is shown in Jason’s dual attempts at stopping time; the first time it’s a cutesy pretend game in which the world resumes while he and Sophie pause, and then he later he stops time ‘for real,’ as he resumes amidst a paused world).

When Jason is destabilized from his life by Sophie’s 3:14am revelation, he likewise is detached from his schedules and responsibilities and falls into an abyss. His response is to not deal with it…to, as mentioned before, stop time. It’s an act that is initially meant to allow himself to gather his thoughts and relish his last few moments of ignorance before he learns of his girlfriend’s affair, annihilating the world he’s built for himself. He let’s it linger – for hours, then days, then weeks. The point where the film’s theme is most resonant is when he is told (by the moon…the quirk never completely goes away) that while he has effectively stopped time for himself, the world was still going, so when he ‘resumes’ time, he will pick up where he would have been had he not stopped time at all. He will already be without his girlfriend, and he also will have fallen irreparably behind in his other responsibilities (i.e. saving the planet, and caring for an unwell cat named Paw Paw, whose adoption day passes while Jason worries about his own emotional well-being, and results in the cat being put to sleep – the death of a life that was dependent on him).

So really, in the guise of an obnoxious twee, “high class mumblecore” film (as my friend David labeled it), it’s essentially a film about losing a grasp on what is inside and outside our respective bubbles, agendas, routines, etc. Things typically fall back in line over time, but the damages depicted in The Future are of magnitudes that preclude healing. This molds July’s sternly pessimistic vision as a response to the disengaged optimism exemplified in the first 45 minutes. I thought July was erring toward the end by suggesting a reconciliation for Jason and Sophie (she actually may have very well done that), but I’m pleased when the credits finally begin to roll – before too much hopes sets in, leaving the two in their lonely and alienated outer spaces, even within what used to be their one private space. Their precious ‘secret signal’ (Peggy Lee’s “Where or When”) doesn’t even work as intended, failing to put them back where they were.

 
I Am Guilty (2005, Christoph Hochhäusler) – 6.8

I’ve yet to be blown away by any of Hochhäusler’s films (the others being This Very Moment, The City Below, and his Dreileben wrap-up, One Minute of Darkness), but I don’t think I’d hesitate in calling him my favourite active German filmmaker (if you’re reading this Maren, know that I still like both of your films more than any of these). I’ll quickly surmise that whyever that may be probably has to do with how terrorized I am by the palpable dread laced throughout his mise en scène, whether that’s placed in a rural (Moment), urban (City), or suburban (Guilty) environment. They also all have the remarkable ability of skirting comprehensible critiques of middle and upper-middle class lifestyles, while still remains cryptic as all hell; that said, I don’t think any of Herr Hochhäusler’s four features so far have been as elusive of easy answers as this sophomore film has (the ending of The City Below actually makes perfect conceptual sense in retrospect). Which is to say, Armin’s motivations, behaviours, and – uh – urges, are so sketchily drawn that they can never really be interpreted or rationalized in a finite, or even meaningful, way. For instance, I have no explanation for why he fantasizes about doing (or does?) submissive sexual favours for the – very male – biker gang vandals, nor whether it actually ‘happens’ in the reality of the film. Nor do I think deciding one way or another would do me or anyone else any good. It almost begs to be left alone as an effectively unsettling mood piece, albeit one that likely has a very valuable sensibility to the ‘coming-of-age experience’ found in this particular (quite common) social context.
 
 
Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock) – 7.6

I didn’t fully realize how awesome Hitchcock is until this catching up (long overdue) with some of these classics in the Fall season at the Lightbox. I took a course on his cinema in undergrad, but that didn’t leave much of an impression for some reason (if there is anything in print from me in which I mention Rebecca, Notorious, Spellbound, or North by Northwest, please disregard it). I have a pretty unorthodox history with Psycho, though it’s probably somewhat common with my generation: my first encounter was with, egad, Van Sant’s remake. Whoever it was I was in the theatre watching it with had seen the Hitchcock version, and obnoxiously leaned over to me 15 minutes before the end and said (and if you’ve not seen it, don’t read, and why are you this far into this paragraph already anyway?) “I bet he’s his mother.” Not even able to process the line of thinking that could have led someone to tell me that, I was, at that moment, dumbfounded and amazed at this unbelievably clever twist ending. Flash forward to my undergrad years when I finally see Hitchcock’s original, and I was dumbfounded and amazed that I hadn’t figured it out from the beginning when I saw it the first time; typical of most revisitations of films with twists, it all seemed so overstated.

Watching it now (second time for Hitchcock’s, third time total), no longer viewing the movie as one long buildup to a wicked twist ending, focusing more on everything else that Hitchcock is doing, I see it as the masterpiece that it is…until the damn ending. I’m not just thinking the idiotic exposition where the guy stands there and provides us with a psychoanalytic reading of the film we’d just seen, but also, and especially, the climax of the film, when Norman Bates stumbles into the basement dressed up as his mother. Essentially perfect until this point, I’ve struggled to figure out what feels so wrong here. I like everything about this scene on paper, but what I remember as being shocking, terrifying, disturbing etc. now just seems lame and almost funny – tonally the opposite of what it should be. Going back and looking at how this scene was handled in Van Sant’s version, which I only saw that one time during its release (aside – holy shit, Julianne Moore is in this? holy shit pt. 2: Vince Vaughn gets paid to act?), and I’m surprised to find that I actually do think that Van Sant’s take on the ending works far better for me, and it comes down to a single element: Bates’ face. Sacrilegious for sure, and likely wrong, but for the time being, I’m certain that Hitchcock over-directed Mr. Perkins here (of course, until this point, he is utterly remarkable). Sure, Van Sant didn’t need to turn the basement into Damien Hirst’s production studio, nor extend the reveal into a fight scene with broken furniture and several cuts to additional points of view; but, he seems to understand that it’s not the crazy look on Bates’ face when he enters the basement that is so chilling, but rather the ideas behind what we learn in this moment.

Original:

 
Remake (skip to about 3/4 through the timeline to get to the scene I’m talking about, or watch the whole thing to be reminded of how bad this movie is):

 
 
Twelve Monkeys (1995, Terry Gilliam) – 6.9

Such a haunting film – more so for me than Marker’s. It loses me a bit with a saggy middle act and some annoying logic holes that every time travel movie suffers from – it’s their varying degrees of toying with these holes that make them more or less obtrusive. The last half hour feels like those dreams I have where I’m being chased by someone and can only move as if I’m wading through quicksand. It’s so clear what’s coming, and so irritatingly futile to hope for a positive outcome. I still don’t know if ‘the deed’ is done when David Morse – creepier than ever – opens the tube for the security guard, or if Bruce Willis getting shot down really is as tragic for mankind as it appears. In fact, there’s a lot I don’t have a firm grasp on in regards to what actually happens in this movie. I’m okay keeping it that way, too.

Third viewing, and it’s pretty much settled that this is in a virtual three-way tie with Synecdoche, NY and The Swamp for ‘Best debut film of the millennium’. Strangely enough, I don’t find myself raving about Campos that much, and I can’t say I’m salivating to see where he goes from here (not to say I’m not very much looking forward to Simon Killer, which was passed up by TIFF, will be premiering at Sundance in January, and is apparently very good). It’s just that what he pulled off here feels like it’s beside pure talent – like a miracle happened that allowed a lot of superb ideas to coalesce and be creepy as hell. This feeling is almost certainly a product of my never being all that impressed with any individual element of its production (the direction, performances, and script hardly stand out as ‘masterful’); it’s more that I think Campos has an exemplary understanding of where we are, technologically, as a society – more so than almost any artist working in any medium right now. Frankly, I’d probably more enjoy having a three-hour conversation with him than seeing whatever film he does next. The moment that stood out to me the most this time, and is a good example of a scene that I don’t think is in any way ‘amazing’, but resonates entirely as an idea, is when – near the beginning – Rob is in the bathroom playing with the motion-activated faucet. He waves his hand beneath the little laser, water comes out, and he then drenches his head in the water, perhaps to make up for the loss of touch required to release the water. It sets up his autistic persona, yes, but more, it underlines the depreciation of haptic experiences in the developed world. As a film about ‘feeling’, or really the lack thereof, it’s a potent, almost dystopian, moment. Maybe Campos is a genius for throwing in something like this, but it seems more like the kind of smarts that I wouldn’t necessarily associate with ‘gifted’ filmmaking. I hope Simon Killer proves me wrong.