Tag: Martin Scorsese

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Now Playing: Love, Magic, and Kung Fu Panda

Katy O'Brian and Kristen Stewart get pumped in Love Lies Bleeding. (Courtesy A24)

Here’s your weekly guide to what’s new and worth your time on the big screen in Memphis.

The movie with the buzz this weekend is Love Lies Bleeding. Kristen Stewart stars in this erotic thriller from director Rose Glass and A24. Stewart is Lou, a gym manager in the steroid jungle of Las Vegas in the 1980s. Her life is upended when Jackie (Katy O’Brian from The Mandalorian) starts training at her gym, and spending the night in her bed. When Lou’s mob boss dad (Ed Harris) gets involved, bodies start to hit the floor. 

The second film opening this weekend which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival is The American Society of Magical Negroes from first-time helmer Kobi Libii. The magical negro, a stock Black character who shows up in stories to make white people feel better about themselves, is a long tradition in American fiction. David Alan Grier stars as a trainer for the secret society, designed to keep on a lid on race relations, who bites off more than he can chew with his hapless new recruit Justice Smith. 

The Malco Summer Drive-In is reopening for spring, and Time Warp Drive-In is back with Night In The City: The Deadly Urban Worlds of Martin Scorsese. The first of the triple feature is a favorite of Marty heads everywhere. Goodfellas is a flawless film about the lure of the underworld and the consequences of the lifestyle. Early in the film, Scorsese drops one of the all-time great long takes, called a “oner” in movie parlance. Watch as Marty simultaneously introduces Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco’s characters Henry and Karen Hill and paints the world around them in a single tracking shot that lasts a little over three minutes.

Taxi Driver is where the legend of Marty really got rolling. Robert De Niro stars as Travis Bickle, a cabbie with a violent streak who develops a crush on a campaign worker played by Memphian Cybill Shepherd. On set, De Niro served as a mentor to Jodi Foster, who was twelve years old when she was cast as a child prostitute who Bickle tries to rescue from a life on the street.

I’m just going to say it: Oppenheimer was mid. Killers of the Flower Moon should have won the Best Picture Oscar. It’s now my favorite Scorsese joint. Anyway, here’s the trailer to my now second-favorite Scorsese, and the third film on the Time Warps’ killer triple bill, which rolls on Saturday at dusk, After Hours.

Credit where it’s due, Kung Fu Panda, the animated series of furry wuxia parodies is way better than it has any business being. That’s mostly thanks to the flawless voice work of human cartoon character Jack Black, but you gotta give the inventive animators props, too. The fourth one in the series is currently the number one movie at the American box office.

If you haven’t caught Dune: Part Two yet, the sci fi epic is worth seeing on the biggest screen you can find. If you have seen it, maybe go again. 

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Killers of the Flower Moon

Leonardo diCaprio and Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon.

When I asked Craig Brewer why people love Hustle & Flow, he attributed the film’s success to DJay, memorably portrayed by Terrence Howard. DJay is a pimp and low-level drug dealer, but he’s also an aspiring rapper who loves Shug (Taraji P. Henson). DJay veers back and forth between doing good — creating music, building community, and giving Shug hope — and doing bad — exploiting women and hurting people. The audience roots for DJay to do the right thing, and the drama is whether or not he will transcend his circumstances and emerge a more complete person. 

Martin Scorsese’s new masterpiece, Killers of the Flower Moon, is animated by the same moral tug of war. Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a veteran returning to his hometown of Gray Horse, Oklahoma, after serving as a cook in the Army during World War I. The not-exactly-war-hero is taken in by his uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro, in rare form), who insists on being called by his middle name, King. Things have changed since Ernest went away. Oil was discovered on land belonging to the Osage tribe, upending the racial hierarchy to which the white Oklahoma establishment was accustomed. Scorsese deftly demonstrates the new power dynamic in a sweeping tour of the town, ending with a white car dealer on his knees begging a well heeled Osage couple to buy one more luxury automobile so he could feed his family. 

King Hale (Robert De Niro) advises his nephew Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio) in Killers of the Flower Moon.

The exception to the ever-present racial tension is King Hale, who has earned the Osages’ admiration with his generosity and fair dealing. In public, he treats them like any other rich landowners. He even pushes Ernest into courting an Osage woman named Mollie (Lily Gladstone). Ernest, a simple man who just wants a woman who “smells good,” goes along with the plan, first becoming Mollie’s driver, then worming his way into her bed. 

Ernest courts Mollie as her driver in Killers of the Flower Moon.

Onscreen chemistry is a delicate and elusive thing; I daresay there has never been an onscreen couple like Gladstone and DiCaprio. Mollie is impassive and reserved. Ernest is twitchy and clingy, always looking for the right lie to fit the situation. His come-ons to Mollie are transparently lame, but he eventually wears down her defenses. Gladstone reveals Mollie’s shifting, layered  motivations with an uncanny subtlety. She and her sisters, like many of the newly flush Osage women, take trophy white guys for husbands. But while her family is rich on paper, she is in a state-ordered conservatorship, because she has been declared “incompetent” on the basis that she’s not a rich white guy, so why should she have money? Marrying a white man means that her children will be the masters of their own financial fates — assuming she and the family fortune live that long. For one thing, the Osage are plagued by diabetes, which Dr. James Shoun (Steve Whitting) tells Mollie is caused by trying to eat like white people. For another, the wealthy Osage are being murdered for their money and the mineral rights to their oil fields. 

Mollie (Lilly Gladstone) and Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio) are married by King Hale (Robert DeNiro) in Killers of the Flower Moon.

Scorsese spends the first part of this 206-minute epic methodically doling out the beats of Ernest and Mollie’s weird romance. He paints Ernest as a kind of thick schlub who lucked into a supportive family and the love of a good woman. Mollie thinks she can trust Ernest because his lies are so transparent. Then, the director casually reveals that Ernest is also a bushwhacker and bank robber. In fact, the man orchestrating the murder of the Osage is their biggest champion, King Hale. He’s methodically killing off Mollie’s sisters while waiting for her elderly mother Lizzie Q (Tantoo Cardinal) to join the ancestors. Once Mollie is the sole heir of the family fortune, Ernest will kill her with tainted insulin, thus bringing her oil rights under King’s control. 

Cara Jade Myers, Lilly Gladstone, JaNae Collins, and Jillian Dion as the four wealthy Osage sisters targeted for murder in Killers of the Flower Moon.

Killers of the Flower Moon is based on a 2017 nonfiction book by David Gann, subtitled The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. After the Osage organize a trip to Washington D.C. to plead their case to President Calvin Coolidge, the newly formed FBI shows up in the form of Agent Tom White (Jesse Plemons) and starts digging into the locals’ secrets. Scorsese brings all of his thematic threads together in a jaw-dropping scene where White meets with his investigators on a lonely Oklahoma hilltop. As they piece together King Hale’s genocidal plot, they see in the distance men fighting a grass fire, their forms shimmering through the heat and flame like souls condemned to hell.

Scorsese’s complete mastery of form allows him to shift tones and genres at will. At various times, Scorsese invokes the grandeur of Kurosawa and Lynch’s interior visions. What starts as a frontier epic becomes a period romance, then a howcatchem murder mystery. When John Lithgow shows up as a federal prosecutor, we’re in a courtroom drama. Many of Scorsese’s recurring themes are here — organized crime, toxic masculinity, mystic spirituality, polite society’s constant undertone of violence — but changing the setting from familiar environment of the Northeastern urban centers to the Oklahoma plains has provided new perspective, and a wider canvas. Killers of the Flower Moon is an exceedingly rare gem: A late-career breakthrough from one of America’s greatest artists.

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Scorsese’s Forgotten Gem After Hours

Griffin Dunne and Rosanna Arquette in After Hours.

In 1983, after directing a string of classics including Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The King of Comedy — and kicking a bad cocaine habit — Martin Scorsese set out to adapt Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel The Last Temptation of Christ into a feature film. It didn’t go well. Just as everything was coming together, Paramount Pictures pulled the plug, citing pressure from Christian groups in the United States who promised to picket theaters if the story of Jesus’ inner struggles with divinity was ever released. The despondent director decided to do a quickie, low-budget comedy to lighten his mood and keep his name out there while his biblical epic was in turnaround. Maybe that’s why After Hours is such a strange bird — its a great director trying to be funny while he’s really pissed off.

Scorsese was a notorious New York party animal in the 1970s, so he understood the world of After Hours intimately. Griffin Dunne stars as Paul, a hopelessly square data entry worker who meets a cute girl named Marcy, played by Rosanna Arquette in one of her best roles ever, in a late-night diner. From the beginning, Paul is smitten, but Marcy — well, let’s just say she’s going through some stuff.

Marcy invites him to her SoHo apartment under the pretense of Paul buying a bagel-shaped paperweight from her sculptor roomie Kiki. But once he wanders into the wilds of 1980s New York, the going gets weird. Finally, after meeting the baffling Kiki, he makes it as far as Marcy’s bedroom, which is practically littered with red flags.

From there, things go from weird to extremely weird to life-threateningly weird. The comedy stems from Paul being a big fish out of water. Everyone he meets in late-night SoHo (including Cheech and Chong) is a freak by Reagan ’80s standards, but this is their world, and here, Paul is the freak. He never knows what set of rules he’s playing by — or if there are any rules at all.

Scorsese finally got to make The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988, after earning Paul Newman an Oscar with The Color of Money, and After Hours was mostly a forgotten curiosity. But the strange, circular fever dream of a film slowly developed its own cult through repeated reruns on late night television. It’s screening tonight, Thursday, August 26, at 7:30 p.m. as part of the Crosstown Arthouse series. Admission is $5 at the door.

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The Irishman

I need to begin this review with a confession: I’m sick of mob movies. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather is, of course, a great film. I was reminded of this fact recently as I drifted off to sleep with the BBC America Godfather marathon on in the background. Before he became scourge of the Marvel Universe, Martin Scorsese made some incredible films about organized crime and the Italian-American immigrant community, starting with Mean Streets, which was also his first team-up with The Godfather: Part II star Robert De Niro. Goodfellas, Casino, Gangs of New York, and The Departed are all great examples of the genre from Marty.

Somewhere along the way, Scorsese became a brand-name synonymous in some circles with mob pictures. Never mind that the vast majority of his film output has nothing to do with New York mobsters. Taxi Driver, arguably his masterpiece, is an irony-soaked story about a lonely PTSD-suffering vet’s descent into political assassination. The Aviator, one of my favorites, is a biography of Howard Hughes. And have you watched The Last Temptation of Christ lately? I’d argue that film was his real masterpiece, except that I think he’s entitled to more than one.

Al Pacino (right) plays Jimmy Hoffa in Martin Scorsese’s newest mob movie, The Irishman.

But for a couple of generations of filmmakers, “Scorsese” plus “mob picture” equalled “good cinema,” and, boy, did they lean into it. From The Sopranos to Good Time, there’s no shortage of films about male bonding over crime, violence, and honor culture starring a bunch of identical-looking guys mumbling in thick accents. Haven’t we seen enough of this?

The Irishman, though, that’s different, right? This is Scorsese’s long-gestating dream project, the story of the rise and fall of Teamsters Union President Jimmy Hoffa, detailing the intersection of politics and crime, spanning the American Century. It’s got De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci — the mob film trifecta! The director and star tried to get it made for more than a decade, before Netflix agreed to commit a $150 million chunk of their venture capital. That allowed the director to use cutting-edge CGI to de-age De Niro, who was in his mid-70s when the film was shot, so he could play mob enforcer and Teamsters Union official Frank Sheeran at different stages of his life. The fact that it was ultimately destined to end up on Netflix, which values raw engagement time, meant that Scorsese could go as long he wanted — which turns out to be a whopping 209 minutes.

I saw The Irishman in a packed theater during its recent, one-night Indie Memphis screening at the Paradiso. It felt like a long movie, but it didn’t feel like three and a half hours. Scorsese and his band of friends and collaborators haven’t lost their touch. Virtually every scene is good to great in and of itself. Scorsese and his longtime ace editor Thelma Schoonmaker simply avoided having to make the hard choices of cutting stuff that works. No one will ever accuse this film of feeling chopped up.

(l-r) Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Ray Romano star in Martin Scorsese’s mob movie opus.

When the story sprawls, it’s always in the direction of character development. De Niro is absolutely masterful. Even though we get a good sense of Sheeran’s inner life from the voiceover narration he provides as the story jumps back and forth in time, it’s clear that self-awareness was never his strong suit. Looking back from his nursing home wheelchair at his life’s parade of murders, assaults, and corruption, regret slowly starts to seep through his matter-of-fact recounting. That remorseful thread culminates in a wrenching memory of a phone call Sheeran never thought he would have to make.

Sheeran’s perspective is narrow and naturally regressive, as you would expect from a hardened combat veteran turned mob soldier. One of Scorsese’s most interesting moves is how he reveals what the women in Sheeran’s life think about him, first with a subtle scene of a power struggle over his wife Irene’s (Stephanie Kurtzuba) desire to smoke in mob capo Russell Bufalino’s (Joe Pesci) car, then by tracing the deterioration of his relationship with his daughter Peggy, played at different ages by the fabulously expressive Lucy Gallina and Anna Paquin.

As Jimmy Hoffa, Pacino matches De Niro’s brilliance. Scorsese channels the actor’s late-career bombast into the labor leader’s outsized persona. While Sheeran is the film’s blunted emotional core, Hoffa’s story represents Scorsese’s bigger ambitions, tracing the pendulum swing of corruption and virtue through American society. The Irishman reminds me of The Godfather: Part II more than any of Scorsese’s Cosa Nostra sagas. Its grand scope provides a sense of closure to a 40-year cycle of mob movies.

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Silence

If God is good, and everything he does is good, then why is man doomed to a lifetime of suffering? That’s a problem that has bedeviled every philosopher since Plato put stylus to goatskin. All religions must address it at some point, even if it is just to wave it away. It’s also the central question around which Martin Scorsese built his epic, Silence.

It’s 1633, and the age of colonialism is in full swing. Jesuit missionaries, Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver), find out that their mentor, Cristóvão Ferreria (Liam Neeson), has gone missing in Nagasaki, Japan, amidst a crackdown by the shogunate on the country’s small but fervent Christian population. Worse still, the last word on Ferreria was that he had denounced Christianity before meeting his uncertain fate. Rodrigues and Garupe can’t believe that and ask permission to sneak into Japan and clear their teacher’s name. Reluctantly, their superiors agree, and they book passage with smugglers from Macau to Japan. Their guide, the only Japanese person they can find, is a drunken lout named Kichijiro (Yôsuke Kubozuka), who takes them to a tiny fishing village on the Japanese coast. There, they find a population terrified by the Inquisitor Inoue Masashige (Issei Ogata), a ruthless hunter of Christians.

Jesuits have a reputation as something like Christian ninjas, so laying low in the neighborhood priest hole is no big deal for Rodrigues and Garupe. As word spreads through the Christian underground, Rodrigues, whose internal monologue provides the narration for the early part of Silence, finds himself amazed at the hardscrabble faith of the downtrodden fisher people who brave the shogun’s patrols to come to confession. When he sneaks off to a neighboring village, he converts hundreds of souls. Maybe the difficulties of Japan have been overstated, he thinks, and his simple faith will be enough to save a country.

He is completely wrong. The Inquistor’s men catch wind of the presence of the priests and descend on the village, forcing Rodrigues and Garupe to flee as the villagers sacrifice themselves on their behalf. Watching three villagers suffer for days as they are crucified in the ocean is just the first of the unimaginable spiritual and physical torments that await the priests, and the audience, as the 161-minute film rolls on.

There is much to admire about Silence. In his skill as an image composer, Scorsese has few, if any, peers. Working again with The Wolf of Wall Street cinematographer, Rodrigo Prieto, he creates one stunning tableau after another, beginning with the opening sequence in a misty hot spring that recalls Kurosawa’s “Mt. Fuji in Red” segment from Dreams. Garfield, only two years removed from hanging up his Spider-Man tights, gives it all in the portrayal of a priest whose worldview slowly crumbles around him. Driver is, as usual, fantastically physical. In one breathtaking long shot on a beach, an emaciated and filthy Driver towers over his captors, communicating his fear and defiance with only his gait. Ogata, a Japanese comedian, is a revelation as the surprisingly hospitable Inquisitor. And it’s good to see Neeson getting some meaty roles to chew on where he doesn’t have to rescue any kidnapped girls.

Scorsese has been trying to get this film through development since 1990. In the ensuing decades, he seems to have identified a little too strongly with his protagonists. Silence doesn’t so much question suffering as wallow around in it. The priests’ mission is difficult, but frankly, they don’t seem to be very good at their jobs. Instead of bringing peace to their flock, they bring only misery, and their famed Jesuit spy craft leaves much to be desired, as they are are easily flushed out by the authorities’ superior knowledge of the land and culture. When Rodrigues is being ferried in secret to a village by a grumpy boat captain, he has a moment of clarity: “I’m just a foreigner bringing trouble to these people.” Indeed, when he reaches his destination, it has already been destroyed by troops looking for him.

Scorsese has been in these theological waters before, helming the vastly superior The Last Temptation of Christ. Garfield is good, but he’s no Willem Dafoe. The controversial 1988 film found transcendence in the material world, while the message of Silence seems to be “Suffering sucks. Get used to it.”

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Time Warp Drive-In 2016

“Staying at home and watching a movie is great, but there’s another way to do it,” Matt Martin says. The Black Lodge Video owner, together with Memphis underground movie guru Mike McCarthy, is gearing up for the third season of the Time Warp Drive-in. Once a month, the Malco Summer Drive-in will play host to an all-night extravaganza of classic (if you define “classic” loosely) movies.

“There’s been a resurgence in interest in retro-cinema, especially among millennials,” Martin says. “The drive-in allows people to go back in time and see some great movies they might never have heard of. At the same time there’s this cinema-drenched environment. Mike likes to call it ‘free-range cinema.’ We invite the audience to be part of a night that’s not just about the movies. You can get out under the stars, interact with people, have a picnic with cinema all around you.”

Robert De Niro and Ray Liota in Goodfellas

This year’s series begins Saturday with Dark Urban Worlds: The Films of Martin Scorsese. For one ticket, audiences will get four films: Scorsese’s 1990 organized-crime epic Goodfellas; then The Departed, which tackled the story of gangster Whitey Bulger a decade before Johnny Depp’s Black Mass; Taxi Driver, the 1976 masterpiece that made Scorsese and Robert De Niro legends; and After Hours, the 1985 comedy where straight-laced Griffin Dunne tries to escape from bohemian New York.

“The drive-in always was a home for the bizarre,” Martin says. “It’s been synonymous with weirdo genre movies, exploitation, and strange horrors. I wanted to get a couple that represent that theme — for example Goodfellas takes inspiration from exploitation — but then throw some more obscure stuff in there, like After Hours, because so few people have ever seen it. The drive-in audience is tricky. It’s not like a regular movie theater, because attention doesn’t work the same way. The environment is more conducive to hanging out and interactivity and fun. We tried to pick things that have a certain pace, a certain energy to them. The drive-in is more about the entire experience than about the individual storylines.”

Other programs in the 2015 Time Warp series includes Sing Along Cinema!, the April set of musicals including the contrasting 1980 films The Blues Brothers and Xanadu; Comic Book Hardcore! in May, with Sin City and The Crow; Return of the Burn with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Half Baked; Martial Arts Mayhem in July, with Enter the Dragon and Kung Fu Hustle; Paranoid Visions, a tribute to John Carpenter with They Live and The Thing; and Bride of Shocktober!, horror comedies including Young Frankenstein and Shaun of the Dead.

On another front, Martin says Black Lodge Video has been without a physical building for more than a year, but that is about to change. “We’ve finally found what we think is the new and best home for Black Lodge, and our enormous collection, and we can hopefully make some announcements at the end of the month about where that will be. We’re going to take it up a notch, and hopefully we’ll be able to branch out into other directions, like theme nights and workshops. My hope is that the Lodge will be, by summer, ready to reclaim its position as Memphis’ leading film archive.”

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Throwback August: Casino

Robert De Niro as Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein

Casino (1995; dir. Martin Scorsese)—Heavily edited, poorly dubbed, grotesquely commercial-breaked TV versions of Casino sadden me. I’m happy that Scorsese’s best film continues to rumble across the basic cable landscape in various shapes and sizes at various times of day because exhibition and syndication play a major role in pop-cultural canon formation. But a sanitized version of Casino makes little sense because indiscretion and tastelessness are two of its cardinal virtues.

Trade secrets about the gaming industry and the workings of the Midwestern mob, violent confrontations involving power tools and baseball bats, an endless parade of pastel-colored custom suits so gaudy they threaten to burn out your rods and cones —there’s simply too much in this vulgar American epic to absorb in one sitting. Add in the dueling voiceover narrations, the hold-your-breath instances when the camera rushes at characters like an attack dog, and the car-bomb explosions of raunchy absurdist wit, and you’re likely to feel lost.

Sharon Stone as Ginger McKenna

The soundtrack does its best to disorient you, too; Casino’s nonstop music (62 songs are listed in its closing credits) is analogous to the constant electronic chatter of slots and video poker machines cluttering nearly every real casino floors. Given so many opportunities to choreograph miniature music videos within the frame of his story, Scorsese engineers perhaps his greatest pop epiphany—a long sequence where a pair of card cheats get taken down as Jeff Beck’s “I Ain’t Superstitious” wails in the background.

But give the movie the time and attention it needs and you’ll start to get it. Then you might start to love it. Casino is Scorsese’s Physical Graffiti, his 2666, his three-hour, thirty-course tasting menu that will set you back an entire paycheck if you add the beverage pairings, which you might as well because you’ve come this far. It is also a vision of craps-table capitalism unfolding in a multicultural American frontier where mobsters, bookies, cowboys, Italians, Jews, Arabs, Irishmen and anyone else who wants a piece of the pie can get in on the action if they’re willing to play.

Joe Pesci as Nicky Santoro

Although the three principal characters—gambler/casino boss Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro), mobster/hellspawn Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) and hustler/addict Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone)—are assholes, their long, painful falls from grace matter because their bosses are much, much worse. Which is why Casino now plays as an apt and timeless statement about the apparently untouchable gangsters responsible for the current (and no doubt future) financial crises bilking us out of our money whether we like it or not. “It’s a pity in this state that we have such hypocrisy,” says Rothstein late in the film. “Some people can do whatever they want; other people have to pay through the nose. But such is life.”

Grade: A+

Throwback August: Casino

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The Sweet Thereafter

In honor of the 25th anniversary of the Memphis Flyer (our first quarter quell, as it were), I have chosen my personal favorite film from each year since the Flyer began publication. Then, for each of those films, I unearthed and have excerpted some quotes from the review we ran at the time. — Greg Akers

1989: #1 Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch (#2 Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee)

“While all the scenes in Mystery Train are identifiable by anyone living west of Goodlett, their geographical relationship gets altered to a point where we start to trust Jarmusch more than our own memories.” — Jim Newcomb, March 8, 1990

“Filmed primarily at the downtown corner of South Main and Calhoun, Jarmusch does not use the Peabody Hotel, the Mississippi River, Graceland, or most of the other locations that the Chamber of Commerce would thrust before any visiting filmmaker. His domain concerns exactly that territory which is not regularly tread by the masses, and his treatment of Memphis is likely to open a few eyes.”
— Robert Gordon, March 8, 1990

1990: #1 Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese (#2 Reversal of Fortune, Barbet Schroeder)

“This may not be De Niro’s best-ever performance, but he’s got that gangster thang down pat. His accent is flawless, his stature is perfect, and, boy, does he give Sansabelt slacks new meaning.”
— The Cinema Sisters, September 27, 1990

1991: #1 Terminator 2: Judgment Day, James Cameron (#2 The Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme)

“Terminator 2 is an Alfa Romeo of a movie: pricey, sleek, fast, and loaded with horsepower. By comparison, the first Terminator was a Volkswagen. On the whole, I’d rather have a Volkswagen — they’re cheap and reliable. But, hey, Alfas can be fun too.” — Ed Weathers, July 11, 1993

1992: #1 Glengarry Glen Ross, James Foley (#2 The Last of the Mohicans, Michael Mann)

“Mamet’s brilliantly stylized look at the American Dream’s brutality as practiced by low-rent real estate salesmen who would put the screws to their mothers to keep their own tawdry jobs doesn’t relax its hard muscle for a moment. In the hands of this extraordinary cast, it is like a male chorus on amphetamines singing a desparate, feverish ode to capitalism and testosterone run amuck.”
— Hadley Hury, October 15, 1992

1993: #1 Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater (#2 Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg)

“Dazed and Confused is a brief trip down memory lane. The characters are not just protagonists and antagonists. They are clear representations of the folks we once knew, and their feelings are those we had years and years ago. Linklater doesn’t, however, urge us to get mushy. He is just asking us to remember.”
— Susan Ellis, November 4, 1993

1994: #1 Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino (#2 Ed Wood, Tim Burton)

“Even though Tarantino is known for his bratty insistence on being shocking by way of gratuitous violence and ethnic slurs, it’s the little things that mean so much in a Tarantino film — camera play, dialogue, performances, and music.”
— Susan Ellis, October 20, 1994

1995: #1 Heat, Michael Mann
(#2 Toy Story, John Lasseter)

“I’m sick of lowlifes and I’m sick of being told to find them fascinating by writers and directors who get a perverse testosterone rush in exalting these lives to a larger-than-life heroism with slow-motion, lovingly lingered-over mayhem and death, expertly photographed and disturbingly dehumanizing.”
— Hadley Hury, December 21, 1995

1996: #1 Lone Star, John Sayles
(#2 Fargo, Joel and Ethan Coen)

“Although Lone Star takes place in a dusty Texas border town, it comes into view like a welcome oasis on the landscape of dog-day action films … Chris Cooper and Sayles’ sensitive framing of the performance produce an arresting character who inhabits a world somewhere between Dostoevsky and Larry McMurtry.”
— Hadley Hury, August 8, 1996

1997: #1 L.A. Confidential, Curtis Hanson (#2 The Apostle, Robert Duvall)

L.A. Confidential

“L.A. Confidential takes us with it on a descent, and not one frame of this remarkable film tips its hand as to whether we’ll go to hell or, if we do, whether we’ll come back. We end up on the edge of our seat, yearning for two protagonists, both anti-heroes … to gun their way to a compromised moral victory, to make us believe again in at least the possibility of trust.”

— Hadley Hury, October 2, 1997

1998: #1 Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg (#2 The Big Lebowski, Joel and Ethan Coen)

“Spielberg is finishing the job he began with Schindler’s List. He’s already shown us why World War II was fought; now he shows us how. … Spielberg’s message is that war is horrifying yet sometimes necessary. And that may be true. But I still prefer the message gleaned from Peter Weir’s 1981 masterpiece, Gallipoli: War is stupid.” — Debbie Gilbert, July 30, 1998

1999: #1 Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson (#2 The End of the Affair, Neil Jordan)

“Magnolia is a film in motion; there’s a cyclical nature where paths are set that will be taken. It’s about fate, not will, where the bad will hurt and good will be redeemed.”
— Susan Ellis, January 13, 2000

2000: #1 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee (#2 You Can Count On Me, Kenneth Lonergan)

“Thrilling as art and entertainment, as simple movie pleasure, and as Oscar-baiting ‘prestige’ cinema. Early hype has the film being compared to Star Wars. … An even more apt comparison might be Singin’ in the Rain, a genre celebration that Crouching Tiger at least approaches in its lightness, joy, and the sheer kinetic wonder of its fight/dance set pieces.”
— Chris Herrington, February 1, 2001

A.I. Artificial Intelligence

2001: #1 A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg (#2 Amélie,
Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

“What happens when Eyes Wide Shut meets E.T.? What does the audience do? And who is the audience?”
— Chris Herrington, June 28, 2001

2002: #1 City of God, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund
(#2 Adaptation., Spike Jonze)

“The mise-en-scène of the film is neorealist, but the cinematography, editing, and effects are hyper-stylized, as if The Bicycle Thief had been reimagined through the post-CGI lens of Fight Club or The Matrix.”

— Chris Herrington, April 3, 2003

Lost in Translation

2003: #1 Lost in Translation, Sofia
Coppola (#2 Mystic River, Clint Eastwood)

“Lost in Translation is a film short on plot but rich with incident; nothing much happens, yet every frame is crammed with life and nuance and emotion. … What Coppola seems to be going for here is an ode to human connection that is bigger than (or perhaps just apart from) sex and romance.”
— Chris Herrington, October 2, 2003

2004: #1 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Michel Gondry
(#2 Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino)

“This is the best film I’ve seen this year and one of the best in recent memory. Funny, witty, charming, and wise, it runs the gamut from comedy to tragedy without falling into either farce or melodrama. Its insights into human loss and redemption are complicated and difficult, well thought out but with the illusion and feel of absolute spontaneity and authentic in its construction — and then deconstruction — of human feelings and memory.”
— Bo List, March 25, 2004

2005: #1 Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee (#2 Hustle & Flow, Craig Brewer)

“The film is a triumph because it creates characters of humanity and anguish, in a setup that could easily become a target for homophobic ridicule. Jack and Ennis are a brave challenge to the stereotyped image of homosexuals in mainstream films, their relations to their families and to each other are truthful and beautifully captured.” — Ben Popper, January 12, 2006

2006: #1 Children of Men,
Alfonso Cuarón (#2 The Proposition, John Hillcoat)

“As aggressively bleak as Children of Men is, it’s ultimately a movie about hope. It’s a nativity story of sort, complete with a manger. And from city to forest to war zone to a lone boat in the sea, it’s a journey you won’t want to miss.”
— Chris Herrington, January 11, 2007

2007 #1 Zodiac, David Fincher
(#2 There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson)

“[Zodiac is] termite art, too busy burrowing into its story and characters to bother with what you think.”
— Chris Herrington, March 8, 2007

2008: #1 Frozen River, Courtney Hunt (#2 The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan)

“Frozen River is full of observations of those who are living less than paycheck to paycheck: digging through the couch for lunch money for the kids; buying exactly as much gas as you have change in your pocket; popcorn and Tang for dinner. The American Dream is sought after by the dispossessed, the repossessed, and the pissed off.”
— Greg Akers, August 28, 2008

2009: #1 Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze (#2 Julie & Julia, Nora Ephron)

“I know how ridiculous it is to say something like, ‘Where the Wild Things Are is one of the best kids’ movies in the 70 years since The Wizard of Oz.’ So I won’t. But I’m thinking it.”
— Greg Akers, October 15, 2009

2010: #1 Inception, Christopher Nolan (#2 The Social Network,
David Fincher)

“Nolan has created a complex, challenging cinematic world but one that is thought through and whose rules are well-communicated. But the ingenuity of the film’s concept never supersedes an emotional underpinning that pays off mightily.”
— Chris Herrington, July 15, 2010

2011: #1 The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick (#2 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Tomas Alfredson)

“The Tree of Life encompasses a level of artistic ambition increasingly rare in modern American movies — Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood might be the closest recent comparison, and I’m not sure it’s all that close. This is a massive achievement. An imperfect film, perhaps, but an utterly essential one.”
— Chris Herrington, June 23, 2011

2012: #1 Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow (#2 Lincoln, Steven Spielberg)

“Zero Dark Thirty is essentially an investigative procedural about an obsessive search for knowledge, not unlike such touchstones as Zodiac or All the President’s Men. And it has an impressive, immersive experiential heft, making much better use of its nearly three-hour running time than any competing award-season behemoth.”
— Chris Herrington, January 10, 2013 

2013: #1 12 Years a Slave, Steve
McQueen (#2 Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón)

“Slavery bent human beings into grotesque shapes, on both sides of the whip. But 12 Years a Slave is more concerned with the end of it. McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley are black. It’s one of those things that shouldn’t be notable but is. If you consider 12 Years a Slave with The Butler and Fruitvale Station, you can see a by-God trend of black filmmakers making mainstream movies about the black experience, something else that shouldn’t be worth mentioning but is.”
— Greg Akers, October 31, 2013