skimpole

Actor 1. Humphrey Bogart, Casablanca (1942) 2. Charles Chaplin, Modern Times (1936) (and City Lights [1931], The Gold Rush [1925], The Great Dictator [1940], The Circus [1928] and The Kid [1921]) 3. James Stewart, Vertigo (1958) 4. Cary Grant, North by Northwest (1959) 5. Peter O'Toole, Lawrence of Arabia (1962) 6. Paul Scofield, A Man for all Seasons (1966) 7. Fred Astaire, Top Hat (1935) 8. Albert Finney, Murder on the Orient Express (1974) 9. Al Pacino, The Godfather (1972) (and The Godfather, Part II [1974] and The Godfather, Part III [1990]) 10. Ben Kingsley, Gandhi (1982) 11. Burt Lancaster, The Leopard (1963) 12. Groucho Marx, Duck Soup (1933) Actress 1. Liv Ullmann, Persona (1966) 2. Arletty, Children of Paradise (1945) 3. Judy Garland, The Wizard of Oz (1939) 4. Ingrid Bergman, Journey to Italy (1954) 5. Madhabi Mukherjee, Charulata (1965) 6. Nina Pens Rode, Gertrud (1964) 7. Setsuko Hara, Late Spring (1949) 8. Natassja Kinski, Tess (1979) 9. Gloria Swanson, Sunset Blvd. (1950) 10. Katharine Hepburn, The Philadelphia Story (1940) 11. Bette Davis, All About Eve (1950) 12. Mara Wilson, Matilda (1996) But my real #1 is Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc Supporting Actor 1. Claude Rains, Casablanca (1942) 2. Leo McKern, A Man for all Seasons (1966) 3. Kevin Kline, A Fish Called Wanda (1988) 4, Kevin Spacey, The Usual Suspects (1995) 5. Robert Duvall, The Godfather (1972) 6. Orson Welles, Touch of Evil (1958) 7. Chico Marx, Duck Soup (1933) 8. James Stewart, Rope (1948) 9. James Mason, North by Northwest (1959) 10. Erland Josephson, Fanny and Alexander (1982) 11. Robert Mitchum, Night of the Hunter (1955) 12. Donald O'Connor, Singin' in the Rain (1952) Supporting Actress 1. Gunn Wallgren, Fanny and Alexander (1982) 2. Anne Wiazemsky, Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) 3. Ingrid Thulin, Cries and Whispers (1972) 4. Francoise Dorleac, The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) 5. Margaret O'Brien, Meet me in St. Louis (1944) 6. Barbara bel Geddes, Vertigo (1958) 7. Sharmilla Tagore, The World of Apu (1959) 8. Lea Seydoux, Blue is the Warmest Color (2013) 9. Margaret Dumont, Duck Soup (1933) 10. Nanette Fabray, The Band Wagon (1953) 11. Mieko Harada, Ran (1985) 12. Kinuyo Tanaka, Sansho the Bailiff (1954) Juvenile Performance 1. Mara Wilson, Matilda (1996) 2. Ana Torrent, The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) 3. Julie Bataille, C'est la Vie (1990) 4. Peter Guve, Fanny and Alexander (1982) 5. Joel Haley Osment, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001) 6. Jean Pierre Leaud, The 400 Blows (1959) 7. Kathryn Beaumont, Alice in Wonderland (1951) 8. Patricia Walters, The River (1951) 9. Margaret O'Brien, Meet me in St. Louis (1944) 10. Sharmilla Tagore, The World of Apu (1959) 11. Uma Das Gupta, Pather Panchali (1955) 12. Babek Ahmed Pour, Where is the Friend's Home? (1987)

We're considering Garland a juvenile performance? I thought you had to be under 16. Garland was born in June 1922, and filming, according to Wikipedia at least, started in October 1938.

I saw six movies this week, and all of them had their virtues, if none of them were good enough to make a ten best list. The Beguiled, or more precisely the Sofia Coppola remake, is beautifully shot. It is quite competent, with all the actors doing the job they're supposed to do. One does wonder whether something more thoughtful should be said about the original concept, of sexual fantasy turned to sexual nightmare. Spiderman: Homecoming is an unnecessary reboot which can be defended on its own terms. I found it took some time to warm up, since the character here is a couple of years younger than his counterpart in the original comic books. He's also eager to be an Avenger, again not a major theme of the original comic books. But the movie does develop some wit and adventure. The Westerner is generally considered a slight Wyler. It does have excellent Toland photography. It has a more complex character played by Brennan, even if Brennan's performance itself isn't really Best Supporting Actor It has Gary Cooper giving a typical Gary Cooper performance, which is tolerable if you like that sort of thing. As it happens I do. Ride in the Whirlwind is a taut, austere western if which Jack Nicholson and an actor who didn't become famous four years later face a lynch mob interested in executing people first and not asking questions at all. It's also intelligent and engaging, if not ultimately substantial enough for more. No, of the Vainglory of Command is a Portuguese movie which deals with an army squad in Angola. As they go off to battle a war that they are in fact destined to lose, they ruminate about other famous defeats in Portuguese history. It's an interesting movie, with a strangely magical sequence in the middle of the movie. Cameraperson is an engaging documentary about a female cinematographer as she travels all over the world. She films a boxing match in Brooklyn as well as a midwife in Nigeria. She discusses war crimes in the former Yugoslavia while filming her two small twins.

My final list of movies for 2016, saving the best for last, including three of my award winners. Love & Friendship is based, not on one of Austen's six novels, but on some juvenile work. Kate Beckinsale plays Lady Susan, the manipulative amoral schemer who places herself among the good (incredibly upper class, absurdly respectable) people who populate Austen's fiction. I am neither a fan of Austen nor that of Whit Stillman, and one might think that the solution would be fairly moralistic. Fortunately, for once, this is not the case. Tom Bennett got my best supporting actor as the upper-class twit who Beckinsale uses in her plans. To quote Richard Brody, "The movie’s most effervescent dialogue is given to Sir James, a good-hearted fool whom Bennett plays with a wide-eyed simplicity and otter-like yelps of oblivious self-satisfaction that turn every verbal misstep into a glorious mental pratfall. Though the movie has only been out for a few days, Sir James’s naïvely delighted exclamation on seeing peas for the first time ('tiny green balls!') is already a meme. He makes his appearance with the malaprop assumption that Churchill is Church Hill,' and he squeezes the last drop of embarrassment out of this blunder and all those to come. Sir James’s every moment onscreen makes for a giddy series of comic interludes." Paterson was my favorite movie of last year. It is the name of a city in New Jersey, now for several decades the product of our neoliberal masters glorious deindustrialization plans. It is also the name of a bus driver, played by Adam Driver, who occupies his spare time while on his route thinking of poems. Those poems are not unlike those of William Carlos Williams, who came from Paterson. Directed by Jim Jarmusch, it also contains one of the loveliest marriages seen in years. Farahani won my best supporting actress award as Laura Paterson. She is very slightly eccentric, with a fixation on black polka dots, which she makes dresses and charming cupcakes. (She also makes something based on cheese and broccoli, which Paterson is less enamored of.) To quote Glenn Kenny: "But if the movie were merely an exercise in Jarmusch’s fancy, it would be a pleasurable thing. It is a meticulously composed movie, shot beautifully by Frederick Elmes; every frame is a beauty. 'Paterson' is ultimately more than a whim. It is a movie that actually grows more enigmatic on a second viewing. Asked at one point why he doesn’t carry a smart phone, Paterson responds that it would feel like a leash. And yet he hardly seems a person who would stray. At one point in the movie, Paterson, who maintains a stoic countenance in most circumstances, is forced to intervene before an act of violence is committed. His bearing in the aftermath is odd; he laughs, with a kind of horror. His calm surface disturbed, he reveals he’s fighting something within himself in order to maintain his equanimity. After that, we are shown a photograph of Paterson bearing military medals (the shot is a real picture of Driver during his time in the Marines). The film feels like one in which nothing is happening, but it’s not happening beautifully, and then there finally is a galvanic event that’s both heartbreaking and comical. And what happens after that is moving, and instructive." A Quiet Passion was directed by Terence Davies, and Cynthia Nixon won my Best Actress award playing Emily Dickinson. Catherine Bailey got a supporting actress nomination as her adventurous friend, while Carradine, Duncan and Ehle were runner-ups playing her father, brother and sister respectively. To quote Stuart Klawans on Nixon's performance which might get recognized this year: As for the way Dickinson becomes increasingly compelling, some credit must go to Davies, who has proved himself over the years to be one of the great directors of actresses, but most is emphatically due to the extraordinary Cynthia Nixon. Like any good performer, Nixon knows how to play a subtext. Unlike all but the very best, she can show you layer upon translucent layer, until her character’s states of mind take on the clarity and complexity of a polyphonic texture. When she shouts at the servants, you feel Dickinson’s impatience at their clumsiness, recognize her terror at her own sudden infirmity, and see how she blames herself for being physically weak, all at once. When she dares to put one of her little sewn books into the hands of the Rev. Charles Wadsworth, you sense her deep need for intellectual companionship and respect, mingled with fear of being dismissed, reserves of anger (held ready in case of dismissal), and semi-suppressed sexual longing. Nixon gives as detailed, and yet as unaffected, a performance as you could hope to see, even when the words drop away and her acting is entirely physical. During Dickinson’s final illness, when she’s shaking uncontrollably in bed, it’s undecidable whether Nixon is wearing the expression of someone staring in horror or caught up in ecstasy. This is how materialism and doubt may triumph in poetry, and do triumph in A Quiet Passion. You see Nixon’s face framed in the crack of a shadowed door—Dickinson is listening with misgivings to a soiree in the parlor below—and the word “stricken” comes to mind, as if to sum up what you’re seeing and so allow you to move on. But as Davies holds the shot, and Nixon holds the pose, it becomes obvious that those two explanatory syllables fail the facts that are before you: the skin’s pallor, the neck’s cords, the grooves running down either side of the nose, the unblinking eyes that stare into nothing. “Stricken” cannot cover all that. You realize, as you do again and again in A Quiet Passion, that only the particulars matter—the pebbles and bleached bones, laid out (as they are here) in an order that’s made just for them and is just right for this moment.

My choices for the decade Actor Philip Seymour Hoffmann, The Master Actress Adele Exarchopoulos, Blue is the Warmest Colour Supporting Actor Adriano Luz, Mysteries of Lisbon Supporting Actress Lea Seydoux, Blue is the Warmest Colour Juvenile Performance Thomas Doret, Kid with a Bike

Creepy is a Japanese serial killer movie, and the last 2016 movie I've seen, The protagonist is a former detective who resigned after being injured in a hostage situation gone wrong. Working at a university he learns about a missing persons case and encounters a new neighbor played by Kagawa who rubs him the wrong way. Kagawa will probably rub most viewers the wrong way (he reminded me of a more unpleasant Jerry Lewis character). While not especially brilliant, it's certainly competent and watchable as we find out the truth behind the ultimate villain. There's no question the title is accurate. Kagawa is the one in black. Pouring the wine is Hidetoshi Nishijima as the detective protagonist. The woman in blue is Yuko Takeuchi, the detective's wife. The young woman by the detective is Kagawa's teenage daughter, played by Ryoko Fujina. But not everything is as it seems. The Handmaiden was one of my favorite movies of last year, and I gave Kim Tae-Ri got an actress nomination from me. The movie is the latest from Park Chan-wook, whose Oldboy I mentioned earlier. Although based on a Welsh novel the movie takes place in colonial Korea with several Koreans pretending to be Japanese. Kim plays a young thief who is recruited by a conman pretending to be a Japanese aristocrat. He plans to worry an heiress, and Kim will play her handmaiden in a plot to steal her fortune. But we soon encounter several twists in this beautifully shot and elaborately set movie, with, I should note, considerable sex, and some violence. Indignation is based on a Philip Roth novel about the Jewish Marcus Messner (played by Logan Lerman) who attends a Christian college as the Korean War begins. His character is not, for once, an autobiographical one, as we will see in the movie. He has an awkward relationship with a gentile girl, played by Sarah Gadon, who appears sexually frank, and we learn is somewhat unstable. Perhaps the high point of the movie is when Messner has a tense confrontation with the dean of the college. Letts came in sixth among supporting actors for his portrayal of a smarmy, passive-aggressive manipulator who bullies Lerman over his atheist refusal to conform.

Quite a lot of movies to talk about. This may take several entries. Certain Women, or as I call it, "Four Women in Search of an Epiphany," is basically a triptych about four women in an underpopulated landlocked western state. In the first, Laura Dern plays a lawyer whose mid-life issues are interrupted by a client angry that he signed away his right to sue the company who cheated him. In the second Williams is an unhappy marriage (we see her husband Matthew Broderick in an unhappy affair with Dern in the first story) who with Broderick tries to get the old Auberjonois to give up some her property. In the final story Gladstone is attending a night school class where Stewart is the teacher. Gladstone soon has a crush on Stewart, but the commuting time is impossible for Stewart and she soon quits. The performances are all good, and many critics liked it. I, however, am not that overwhelmed by Kelly Reichardt, and wondered at the point of it, hence my sardonic alternative title. It's arguably understated to the vanishing point. But, I repeat, the performances are good. . The Childhood of a Leader is inspired by a story with the same name by Sartre. Unlike the original story, the central characters are Americans. Sweet is the young, sinister, sociopath child who is learning how to manipulate people around him. Bejo plays his French-born mother. Cunningham plays his much older father, a diplomat helping with the Treaty of Versailles. I liked it Colossal has a striking premise. Anne Hathaway plays a mixed up woman who has trouble working and who had just broken up with her boyfriend. She had a drinking problem and goes back to her old home town. Back there she meets an old friend who runs a bar. Could there be romance in the air? And then she realizes that when she walks by the old playground somewhat drunkenly at around eight in the morning, a giant monster appears at exactly the same time in downtown Seoul, mimicking her every movement. Hathaway certainly gives a richer and funnier performance than many more respectable nominees. If you liked her performance in Les Miserables you'll love this. And if you hated Les Miserables, like I did, you'll still like her performance.

Past my top five they're also in preferential order. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

This time last year I hadn't seen of my top 10 of 2016, or any of my runner-ups. So there isn't much point doing a list at this time of the year. But here's my obviously incomplete, patently preliminary list. Actress Rooney Mara, Song to Song Cara Delevinge, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets Supporting Actress Holly Hunter, The Big Sick Lily James, Baby Driver

Quotes from 2016 Love & Friendship (On encountering peas for the first time) "Tiny green balls! How jolly!" A Quiet Passion Poems are my solace for the eternity which surrounds us all. Manchester by the Sea I can't beat it. I can't beat it. I'm sorry. Randi Chandler: I said a lot of terrible things to you. Lee Chandler: No... Randi Chandler: But I... I know you never... Maybe you don't wanna talk to me. Lee Chandler: It's not that... Randi Chandler: Let... let me finish. However... My heart was broken - cause it's always gonna be broken, and I know yours is broken, too - but I don't have to carry it. I said things that... I should ****' burn in hell for what I said to you. Lee Chandler: No. No-no. No, no, no-no-no. Randi, no. Randi Chandler: I'm just sorry. Lee Chandler: It's... it's... I... I can't expl... I can't... Randi Chandler: I love you! Maybe I shouldn't say that. Lee Chandler: No, you can say that. I'm sorry, I've gotta go. Randi Chandler: I just... We couldn't have lunch? Lee Chandler: I'm really sorry, I don't think so, but thank you for saying everything. It's just said... Randi Chandler: You can't just die! Lee Chandler: I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. And I'm... I... I want you to be happy, and I'm... Randi Chandler: Honey... I see you walking around here, and I just wanna tell you... Lee Chandler: I would want to talk... I would want to talk to you, Randi. Please, I-I-I... I'm... I'm... Randi Chandler: Lee, Lee, you've gotta... gotta know what... Okay, I don't wanna torture you. Lee Chandler: This is not... You're not... You're not torturing me. Randi Chandler: I just wanna tell you... that I was wrong. Lee Chandler: No. No. Nope. You don't understand, there's nothin'... there's nothin' there. There's nothin' there. Randi Chandler: That's not true. That's not true. Lee Chandler: You don't understand. Randi Chandler: Yes, I do. Lee Chandler: You don't see it. And I don't know what to s... I know you understand me. I-I-I gotta go. Sorry. Randi Chandler: [after he walks away] I'm sorry.

I saw three movies last week. Oblivion had an interesting set-up, but in the end little payoff. When your sci-fi protagonist admits that his memory has been conveniently erased at the beginning of the movie, that's a red flag right there. And that Olga Kurylenko has surprisingly little to do suggests that the director had little faith in her. The Panic in Needle Park was the movie that showed that Al Pacino was a talent worth watching. It is a good performance, and so is that of his co-star Kitty Winn. Of course part of the effectiveness of their performances as drug addicts is that they are often lethargic and show little insight and initiative. So on the one hand this is a realistic portrayal, on the other hand it's not the most enjoyable or exciting movie. Its achievement lays elsewhere. Creepy is a Japanese movie about the search for a serial killer. And it certainly is that, which puts it ahead of many movies that deal with this often exhausted theme. The villain is certainly good, and if there's a flaw in the movie, it's that the villain is too easily overconfident that it doesn't entirely hold up.

Incidentally, for those updating their lists of movies they haven't seen, I added a new movie I saw last night for my supporting actor runner-ups.

Actor Shahab Hosseini, The Salesman Casey Affleck, Manchester by the Sea Adam Driver, Paterson Ryan Gosling, La La Land Dave Johns, I, Daniel Blake Runner-ups: Andrew Garfield (Silence), Hugh Grant (Florence Foster Jenkins), Ha Jung-woo (The Handmaiden), Dwayne Johnson (Moana), Peter Simonischek (Toni Erdmann), Charlie Hunnam (The Lost City of Z), Kwak Do-won (The Wailing), Denzel Washington (Fences), Luis Gnecco (Neruda), Tom Hanks (Sully), Jason Baterman (Zootopia), Tom Sweet (The Childhood of a Leader), Logan Lerman (Indignation), Gael Garcia Bernal (Neruda), Art Parkinson (Kubo and the Two Strings), Benedict Cumberbatch (Doctor Strange), Gaspard Schlatter (My Life as a Zucchini), Blake Jenner (Everybody Wants Some!!) Actress Cynthia Nixon, A Quiet Passion Isabelle Huppert, Elle Sasha Lane, American Honey Emma Stone, La La Land Kim Tae-Ri, The Handmaiden Runner-ups: Anne Hathaway (Colossal), Kristen Stewart (Personal Shopper), Kim Min-hee (The Handmaiden), Natalie Portman (Jackie), Auli'i Cravalho (Moana),* Ellen DeGeneres (Finding Dory), Kate Beckinsale (Love & Friendship), Ginnifer Goodwin (Zootopia), Sandra Huller (Toni Erdmann), Meryl Streep (Florence Foster Jenkins), Lin Yun (The Mermaid), Taraji P. Henson (Hidden Figures), Berenice Bejo (The Childhood of a Leader), Samantha Robinson (The Love Witch), Sarah Gadon (Indignation), Ruth Negga (Loving), Charlize Theron (Kubo and the Two Strings), *Juvenile Performance of the Year Supporting Actor Tom Bennett, Love & Friendship Mahershala Ali, Moonlight Lucas Hedges, Manchester by the Sea Farid Sajadhosseini, The Salesman Issey Ogata, Silence Runner-ups: Tracy Letts (Indignation), Adam Driver (Silence), Michael Shannon (Nocturnal Animals), Alex Hibbert (Moonlight), Teruyuki Kagawa (Creepy), Liam Neeson (Silence), Shia LaBeouf (American Honey), Shinya Tsukamoto (Silence), Jun Kuniwura (The Wailing), Chin Joo-woong (The Handmaiden), Ashton Sanders (Moonlight), Sunny Pawar (Lion), Albert Brooks (Finding Dory), Liam Cunningham (Childhood of a Leader), Kema Sikazwe (I, Daniel Blake), Keith Carradine (A Quiet Passion), Patrick Decile (Moonlight), John Hurt (Jackie), Kevin Costner (Hidden Figures), Duncan Duff (A Quiet Passion), Aaron Eckhart (Sully), Jeff Bridges (Hell or High Water), Rene Auberjonois (Certain Women), Kim Eui-sung (Train to Busan), Robert Pattinson (The Lost City of Z), Paulin Jaccound (My Life as a Zucchini), Supporting Actress Golshifteh Farahani, Paterson Hayley Squires, I, Daniel Blake Michelle Williams, Manchester by the Sea Taranah Alidoosti, The Salesman Catherine Bailey, A Quiet Passion Runner-ups: Anne Consigny (Elle), Viola Davis (Fences), Laura Dern (Certain Women), Jennifer Ehle (A Quiet Passion), Kristen Stewart (Certain Women), Janelle Monae (Moonlight), Lily Gladstone (Certain Women), Tilda Swinton (Doctor Strange), Octavia Spencer (Hidden Figures), Riley Keough (American Honey), Chloe Sevigny (Love & Friendship), Michelle Williams (Certain Women), Naomie Harris (Moonlight) -----And I've seen all twenty acting nominees for this year.

Chi-Raq is a Spike Lee film which plays on the theme of "Lysistrata." But instead of the Peloponnesian war, it's Chicago gang violence that the sex strike is supposed to stop. I thought it audacious in parts, and unconvincing in others. Notwithstanding that, I liked Jackson's role as the chorus of the movie, while Cusack plays a Catholic priest who gives a barnburning sermon on gun violence. Cosmos was the last movie of Andrzej Zulawski, best known for the 1981 Sam Neill/Isabelle Adjani movie Possession. Although not a movie about demonic possession, this movie two young men staying at a bed and breakfast is still disturbing. It's based on a novel by Witold Gombrowicz, the leading Polish novelist of the 20th century. Whereas much of Polish political culture memorializes its stalwart Catholic resistance to totalitarianism, Gombrowicz was a provocative and disturbing modernist. From Scott Tafoya's review: "At once everything is wrong. A bird hangs from a small noose in the garden outside the inn. Bugs crawl over every morsel of food. Every time Witold [the nominal protagnist] catches sight of Lena [the apparent love interest] he looses his composure in the most percussive fashion possible. Fuchs [Witold's friend] disappears for short stretches of time and comes back with increasingly flamboyant signs of injury. No one gets along, but they can't get quit of each other. There seems to be something keeping them in each other's orbit. The confluence of symbols ­(an axe, lips, hanged animals, a ladder)­ seem to hint that these disparate figures must destroy some part of their connection to one another in order to escape the prison of their imperfections. Witold's existence becomes a merry-­go-­round and he can't decide if he wants off. A merry­-go-­round might be the best way to describe the experience of watching the whole of Żuławski's cinema. His camera certainly does plenty of spinning and twirling. A merry-­go-­round operated by a cackling, drunken carny who thinks kids could stand the scare. So you go round and round and so much cinema gets into your eyes and open mouth you think you might throw up. Do you want to get off? This kind of exhilaration could never be recreated by a responsible entertainer. You're implicated in the madness as surely as he is." Knight of Cups is the second of Terrence Malick's "weightless" trilogy. Christian Bale plays a screenwriter who has a major mid-life crisis. Whereas Malick's previous movies more or less proceeded in chronological order, this movie takes a more radical narrative structure, dealing with his relationships with various people, mostly the women in his life, and using a tarot deck for its section. To quote from the review by Richard Brody: "For Malick, the cinema is also a matter of the unconscious, of indeterminacy, of tension between decision and accident. Most of the movie’s images are done with a handheld camera, and most of them involve so much motion, on the part of the actors and the camera alike, that they would defy, in the rapidity of their complexity, any attempt to calibrate them in advance to the exact framing and composition. Malick creates the circumstances under which Lubezki can make these images; Lubezki, untethered to storyboards, roaming freely around and past the action, collects images that embody Malick’s ideas and emotions without being overdetermined by his intentions. "These images, brilliant and radiant with a love of light, rapturous with a love of motion, bring to the cinema a big and great idea: the overcoming of the distinction between subject and object, between recording and imagination. The images are both of and from Rick, showing the practicalities of his experience, his sensory apprehension of them, and his inward visual projection of them at the same time, in the same shot. "No less important than the images is the freedom with which Malick edits them. Recognizing that the memorable things that people say aren’t necessarily memorable moments of life, Malick separates the image and the sound, including snippets of synchronized dialogue along with snippets of voice-overs, turning the words themselves into images. He separates scenes into nodules of dramas that unleash their implications in flashes packed with imaginative potential. The full version of “Knight of Cups,” unfolded in the familiar styles of dialogue-centered dramatic scenes in chronological order, would be a multivolume monster. "Yet, in another sublime paradox, this very dramatic compression and abstraction renders the remarkable cast’s performances all the more powerful. Malick moves them into a middle ground between the theatrical and the existential. The actors are neither leached of expression in undefined situations nor composing continuously psychological characterizations. Rather, Malick creates an acting style that’s in between, filled with dramatic power but rooted in how they move, how they talk, how their glances flash. Malick’s incisively fragmented and recomposed editing emphasizes the actors’ strongest and most emblematic moments. He turns the fluid frames into mnemonic spaces of movement, gesture, and inflection that burn them into consciousness exactly as they’re burned into Rick’s, and into Malick’s own." My Golden Days is a sort of prequel to Arnaud Desplanchin's My Sex Life...or how I got into an Argument. The french title actually means "Three memories of my Youth." The first deals with the suicide of the protagonist's mother, the second deals with an incident in the late eighties where he deliberately lost his passport on a trip to the Soviet Union so that a refusenik could have it. The last ninety minutes deals with his relationship with Lou-Roy LeCollinet.my choice for best supporting actress. From Simon Abrams' review: "These protagonists' motives are transparent. They have no reservations about their actions: Paul and Esther frequently develop relationships outside of their own, and insist that their satellite hook-ups are purely sexual. But you can see cracks in their cool facades when they joke and tease each other, like when Paul brushes off a girl by flatly insisting 'You're drunk. You deserve better.' Her flirtatious, matter-of-fact rejoinder is priceless: 'You're wrong. I'm not drunk.'" Sunset Song is based on a 1932 novel and deals with the life of a young woman in rural Scotland, played by nominee Agyness Deyn, whose intellectual ambitions are thwarted by her intolerant father. When he dies she marries, only for that relationship to be threatened by the first world war. Directed by Terrence Davies, To quote from Matthew Zoller Seitz's review: "Her narration suggests that she one day escaped the grinding life depicted here and became the writer and teacher you always figure she could become. But there's no undue self-awareness or condescension in Deyn's acting, or in Davies' presentation of her character, and the supporting cast contains not a single bad performance or false note. Among the standouts are Ewan Tavendale as Deyn's suitor and later husband, Kevin Guthrie, who is clearly too kind to emerge from this maelstrom of misfortune unscathed; and Peter Mullan, the poster boy for toxic manhood, as Deyn's father, a scowling King of the Castle-type whose power resides in his propensity for violence and his society's sanctioning of it, not in moral authority. (In its deft illustration of how macho values oppress men as well as women, 'Sunset Song is one of the most eloquent feminist statements of the screen year; that its statements mostly emerge organically from Davies' portrait of a time and place make them resonate more strongly.)" Seitz goes on to discuss the movie's visual qualities: "Davies and cinematographer McDonough capture the splendor of late-night dinners and wedding receptions, sunlight and moonlight streaming through windows and the way a field trembles as a breeze strokes the grass. The wind, the birds, the bleating livestock and whirring insects provide another sort of music on the soundtrack. The dialogue and voice-over make a point of reminding us of these squabbling humans' smallness in relation to the land on which they work, love, reproduce, age and die. The film has an awareness of the eternal that's rare in Western cinema. People come and go but the land remains. The ethereal nature of human relationships (and humans, period) gives the entire movie a stoic quality: we do the best with what we have, and try to be thankful to be alive, and take pleasure in moments that begin to fade the second we realize that we're in them." Finally Victoria almost made my top ten list, and Laia Costa almost made my Best Actress List. The most striking thing is that the 138 movie is all shot in one take. Costa plays a tourist in Berlin who leaves the club late night with four guys and they all find themselves bullied by gangsters into a desperate and dangerous act. From Nigel N. Smith's Guardian review: "Shot continuously for over two hours in 22 locations, from 4:30am onwards, Victoria asks a lot of its cast, who improvised all of the dialogue based on a bare-bones script. They all tear into the experiment with abandon. Costa, especially, is remarkable: going from carefree to shellshocked over the course of one life-altering morning, she doesn’t strike a false note, serving as the eyes and ears of the audience on the hellish journey. She also lends the project enormous heart, particularly when the devastating conclusion comes into play." As a technical feat, it's certainly more remarkable than films with twenty or fifty times more money to play with. Laia Costa and Frederick Lau in a quiet moment that won't last.

If she had been a little older, perhaps Catherine Deneuve could have replaced Tippi Hedren.

More great quotes from 2015 Knight of Cups You're still the love of my life. Shall I tell you that? The Big Short Short everything he touches. The Hateful Eight Now Daisy, I want us to work out a signal system of communication. When I elbow you real hard in the face, that means "shut up"! Inside Out Anger: So that's how you want to play it, old man? No dessert? [the top of his head begins to glow with embers] Oh sure, we'll eat our dinner, right after YOU eat THIS! [pushes a couple levers and screams while his head erupts like Hades from Hercules, making Little Riley scream and throw a tantrum and adding an angry memory] Bill: Riley, Riley! Here comes an airplane! [imitates airplane, bringing the broccoli closer to her as she calms down] Anger: AAAAH...! [instantly calms down] Oh, airplane. We've got an airplane, everybody. Emotions: Oooooohh...

SPOILERS abound. I disagree. Washington isn't simply better known than Davis. He dominates the movie much more than the comparable relationships in La La Land, Loving, and Florence Foster Jenkins. For the first two hours he's almost always on screen and Davis only has a couple of minutes alone or without Washington. Then he dies and the last twenty minutes is about his funeral. The movie is about him, and only secondarily his marriage. It's basically "Death of a Salesman," as "Life and Death of an African-American Sanitation Worker." I personally think Bridges coasts through Hell or High Water. Pine and Foster are the characters who have all the action, the moral dilemma and make almost all of the risks. I don't think anyone, even those who didn't like the movie, thought that Hedges was a co-lead. His being orphaned is the dilemma for Affleck. The movie isn't about his growth or development. It's clearly about Affleck. The movie stands or falls on Affleck's life. Hedges is a somewhat selfish teenager whose father died. There's no reason why that event would dramatically change him, (he's not responsible in any way for his father's death) or stop him chasing girls, and it doesn't. There isn't a part of his character that's separate from Affleck having to deal with it. By contrast, Hedges has little or nothing to do with Affleck's relationship with his ex-wife, the often contemptuous view of the other townspeople towards him or the central tragedy of Affleck's life. I forget when Patel's character actually appears in Lion. Is it 40% or 50% of the way in? Henson is clearly the lead. She's the character with the big love story, the one who interacts with Costner and Parsons, and the one whose scientific knowledge leads to the dramatic NASA incident. The other two's role is distinctly less.

I saw three movies this week. Baby Driver was this summer's cool action movie, or one of them at least. How was it? OK, I guess. The opening getaway is in obvious contrast with Drive, a movie only six years old. The comparison doesn't do the new kid much credit. On the other hand, the love story does give it some heart, and if more attention and interest had been paid to the love interest, the movie would be even better. Interestingly, the protagonist, in his difficult struggle to go clean and go away with his girl, faces a vindictive enemy angry that the protagonist's actions have indirectly led to the death of his love. Star Trek III: the Search for Spock can't have the effect it had at the time, when Nimoy would play Spock for a quarter of a century, and would appear about a century later on The Next Generation series. Evolution was the movie of the week for me. Not the 2001 David Duchovny comedy, this movie is the follow-up to the enigmatic Innocence. Once again it has young children (in this case boys), isolated in a strange location (an isolated and almost abandoned island), and watched over by adults (mothers who tend to look alike and also look vaguely like a young Tilda Swinton). Something very strange is going on to the young boys, worthy of Cronenberg in its upsetting, but not explicitly spelled out.

Actor Michael Fassbender, Steve Jobs Christian Bale, Knight of Cups Chang Chen, The Assassin Samuel L. Jackson, The Hateful Eight Leonardo DiCaprio, The Revenant Runner-ups: Anthonthasan Jesuthasan (Dheepan), Jonathan Genet (Cosmos), Quentin Delmaire (My Golden Days), Tom Hiddleston (High-Rise), Max Brebant (Evolution), Geza Rohrig (Son of Saul), Christopher Abbott (James White), Frederick Lau (Victoria), George Clooney (Tomorrowland), Bill Hader (Trainwreck), Paul Rudd (Ant-Man), Matt Damon (The Martian), Peter Sarsgaard (Experimenter), Colin Farrell (The Lobster), David Thewlis (Anomalisa), Matthias Schoenaerts (A Bigger Splash), Michael Keaton (Spotlight), Tom Courtenay (45 Years), Jacob Tremblay (Room), Michael Fassbender (Macbeth), Actress Rooney Mara, Carol Shu Qi, The Assassin Agyness Deyn, Sunset Song Cate Blanchett, Carol Kalieaswari Srinivasan, Dheepan Runner-ups: Laia Coste (Victoria), Amy Poehler (Inside Out), Greta Gerwig (Mistress America), Phyllis Smith (Inside Out), Saoirse Ronan (Brooklyn), Blythe Danner (I'll See You in My Dreams), Amy Schumer (Trainwreck), Elisabeth Moss (Queen of Earth), Tilda Swinton (A Bigger Splash), Teyonah Parris (Chi-Raq), Sandra Bullock (Minions), Charlotte Rampling (45 Years), Lola Kirke (Mistress America), Zhao Tao (Mountains May Depart), Brie Larson (Room), Katherine Waterson (Queen of Earth), Charlize Theron (Mad Max: Fury Road), Britt Robertson (Tomorrowland), Alicia Vikander (Ex-Machina), Marion Cotillard (Macbeth), Jenjira Pongpas (Cemetery of Splendour) Supporting Actor Steve Carell, The Big Short Mark Rylance, Bridge of Spies Ralph Fiennes, A Bigger Splash Samuel L. Jackson, Chi-Raq John Cusack, Chi-Raq Runner-ups: Mathieu Amalric (My Golden Days), Nilbio Torres (Embrace of the Serpent), Ryan Gosling (The Big Short), Lewis Black (Inside Out), Antonio Bolivar (Embrace of the Serpent), Tom Noonan (Anomolisa), Jan Bijvoet (Embrace of the Serpent), Luke Evans (High-Rise), Kurt Russell (The Hateful Eight), Christian Bale (The Big Short), Sam Elliott (I'll See You in My Dreams),Peter Mullan (Sunset Song), Mathieu Amalric (The Forbidden Room), Brian Dennehy (Knight of Cups), Nick Cannon (Chi-Raq), Mark Ruffalo (Spotlight), Kevin Guthrie (Sunset Song), Colin Quinn (Trainwreck), Raphael Cohen (My Golden Days), Benicio del Toro (Sicario), Oscar Isaac (Ex-Machina), Jeremy Irons (High-Rise), Brad Pitt (The Big Short), Michael Douglas (Ant-Man) Supporting Actress Lou Roy-Lecollinet, My Golden Days Claudine Vinasithamby, Dheepan* Cate Blanchett, Knight of Cups Cynthia Nixon, James White Winona Ryder, Experimenter Runner-ups: Kate Winslet (Steve Jobs), Mindy Kaling (Inside Out), Victoria Guerra (Cosmos), Jennifer Jason Leigh (Anomalisa), Sabine Azema (Cosmos), Paulina Chapko (11 Minutes), Sienna Miller (High-Rise), Natalie Portman (Knight of Cups), Jennifer Jason Leigh (The Hateful Eight), Rachel Weisz (The Lobster), Lily Taieb (My Golden Days), Salma Hayek (Tale of Tales), Rachel McAdams (Spotlight), Lea Seydoux (The Lobster), Tilda Swinton (Trainwreck), Dakota Johnson (A Bigger Splash), Rhea Perlman (I'll See You in My Dreams) *Juvenile Performance of the Year Not seen: Trumbo, The Danish Girl, Joy, Creed -------My list of recommended movies is longer than usual this year, so it's striking that neither my Best Actor choice nor any of my Supporting Actor nominees are on the list. ------Ten years after I first nominated Shu Qi, she's back again with her co-star, her director, only this time in the Tang dynasty!

2012 To the Wonder Moonrise Kingdom Holy Motors Like Someone in Love An Oversimplification of Her Beauty The Master Lincoln Django Unchained Skyfall Tabu Runner-ups: Cosmpolis, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Night Across the Street 2013 Blue is the Warmest Color Hard to be a God The Wolf of Wall Street Her The Wind Rises The Grandmaster The Zero Theorem The Act of Killing A Touch of Sin Under the Skin Runner-ups: Nymph()maniac, The Past, 12 Years a Slave, Blue Jasmine, Only Lovers Left alive, Snowpiercer, Bastards, Upstream Color, All is Lost, The Missing Picture, The Hobbit: the Desolation of Smaug 2014 The Tale of the Princess Kaguya Phoenix The Grand Budapest Hotel Two Days, One Night Inherent Vice National Gallery Mr. Turner Leviathan Girlhood Goodbye to Language Runner-ups: Selma, Maps to the Stars, Boyhood, Winter Sleep, Gone Girl, A Most Violent Year, Wild Canaries 2015 Inside Out Knight of Cups When Marnie Was There Francofonia Sunset Song My Golden Days The Assassin Carol The Look of Silence The Forbidden Room Runner-ups: Victoria, Dheepan, The Hateful Eight, The Embrace of the Serpent, The Revenant, In Jackson Heights, High-Rise, Tomorrowland, Cosmos, Jafar Panahi's Taxi, Mistress America, The Boy and the Beast, Cemetery of Splendor 2016 Paterson A Quiet Passion The Salesman Manchester by the Sea American Honey The Handmaiden Moonlight La La Land Moana Jackie Runner-ups: I, Daniel Blake, Colossal, Personal Shopper, Silence, Finding Dory, Love and Friendship, The Lost City of Z, The Wailing, Childhood of a Leader

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a better than expected example of the Marvel franchise, with a better than average screenplay and good action sequences. Evans gets Captain America right: he's steadfast but also principled and thoughtful: unlike some superheroes, he's not a dangerous megalomaniac. I gave Redford a supporting actor nomination as the quasi-fascist villain Girlhood came out the same year as Boyhood, and is in my view the better movie. Not an elaborate exercise by Richard Linklater, the movie stars Karidja Toure as a member of the Franco-African working class (the movie starts with her by shafted into vocational school). Sylla got a supporting nomination from me as the head of the quartet, also black, that Toure hangs out with. (We later learn there's a vacancy because a former member got pregnant). The French title reads as "Band of Girls." Director Celine Sciamma, who is white, was interviewed about how she chose the actresses: For the Vic character [Toure], we were looking for the Holy Grail. It’s a very challenging role and the performance had to be solid, with the character going through so many identities. We did street casting and with Karidja she wasn’t trying to show me who she was, she really became the character. I thought to myself “I can work with this girl and build this character together.” The camera loves her and she just has that beautiful face that you can forgive, which is so important. Lady [sylla] is the leader of the group and I wanted to cast a non-leader in real life that could play a leader with a weakness she’s trying to hide. Assa just gave it her all; when the cameras stopped rolling, she was this really shy and sweet girl. She was very committed to the role. You pick the actors, but they also pick you. That played a huge role in the casting. You can read The Guardian's review here: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/may/10/girlhood-gritty-teen-life-review-mark-kermode The Tale of the Princess Kaguya is actually my favorite movie of 2014. It was nominated for best animated film of the year. It was directed by Isao Takahata, best known for Grave of the Fireflies, not to mention Only Yesterday. It tells an old Japanese fairy tale, about a tiny baby girl discovered in a bamboo shoot, who then quickly grows up to be the titular princess. It has its own unique animated style, based on charcoal sketches and watercolours. To quote from Glenn Kenny's review: "Even if you have trouble hooking into the scenario’s cultural idiosyncrasies—the concerns of this movie, while not ]Japanese] in and of themselves, are addressed in a very specifically Japanese way—every frame of 'Princess Kaguya' is astonishingly beautiful. What looks rather rudimentary at the film’s opening is revealed to have a depth that never stops yielding beauty; check out the shadows that fall over the bamboo cutter as he runs from the forest with his discovery cradled in his arms. The movement animation of the baby 'L’il Bamboo' is some of the best depiction of infant development ever in any medium: so much study, care, and artistry. Creatures both found in nature (insects, birds) and not (storm clouds that become dragons) are drawn with remarkable sensitivity."

More great quotes from 2014 Captain America: The Winter Soldier Black Widow: You doing anything fun Saturday night? Captain America: Well, all the guys from my barbershop quartet are dead, so…no, not really. Gone Girl (spoilers alert) Want to test your marriage for weak spots? Add one recession, subtract two jobs. It's surprisingly effective Nick loved a girl I was pretending to be. "Cool girl". Men always use that, don't they? As their defining compliment: "She's a cool girl". Cool girl is hot. Cool girl is game. Cool girl is fun. Cool girl never gets angry at her man. She only smiles in a chagrined, loving manner. And then presents her mouth for ****. She likes what he likes, so evidently he's a vinyl hipster who loves fetish Manga. If he likes girls gone wild, she's a mall babe who talks for football and endures buffalo wings at Hooters. When I met Nick Dunne I knew he wanted "Cool girl". And for him, I'll admit: I was willing to try. I wax-stripped my **** raw. I drank canned beer watching Adam Sandler movies. I ate cold pizza and remained a size two. I blew him, semi-regularly. I lived in the moment. I was **** game. I can't say I didn't enjoy some of it. Nick teased out in me things I didn't know existed...But Nick got lazy. He became someone I did not agree to marry. He actually expected me to love him unconditionally. Then he dragged me, penniless, to the navel of this great country and found himself a newer, younger, bouncier cool girl. You think I'd let him destroy me and end up happier than ever? No **** way. He doesn't get to win. My cute, charming, salt-of-the-earth Missouri guy. He needed to learn. Grown-ups work for things. Grown-ups pay. Grown-ups suffer consequences. The Grand Budapest Hotel [to Mme. Celine's corpse] You're looking so well, darling, you really are... they've done a marvelous job. I don't know what sort of cream they've put on you down at the morgue, but... I want some. M. Gustave: [Of Mme. Celine] She was dynamite in the sack, by the way. Zero: ...She was 84, Monsieur Gustave. M. Gustave: Mmm, I've had older.

This week I saw six movies for the first time. Into the Woods starts off well, with the stories neatly intersecting and Sondheim's lyrics working well. But the second, less happy half shows Marshall's lack of inspiration. Streep got an oscar nomination, but she's not the best player and the ultimate result is underwhelming. Mr and Mrs Bridge is the less honored Merchant/Ivory film before Howard's End and The Remains of the Day. It has many virtues. It's well acted, it's candid but not unempathic, to quote one critic, it's sympathetic and nuanced, as Mr. Bridge is shown as taciturn but loving. One problem is that its series of anecdotes are about two people who don't have an epiphany, so it's not surprising I suppose that viewers preferred the next two movies. Ruby Gentry stars the never impressive Jennifer Jones as a more sinned against than sinning hellcat who goes through a number of men with unfortunate results. It's more a sign of Vidor's nuances than Jones' talents. The Coward is the movie of the week, a short film about an apparent second chance told with Chekovian grace and economy, with Madhabi Mukherjee as beautiful in an especially enigmatic role. What are the virtues of The L-Shaped Room? There's Lesilie Caron's excellent performance, almost worthy of being nominated for an Academy Award, and clearly the best of the four choices I saw that year. There is the considerable effort to try to produce a genuine love story, without the convenient easy outs. (The contrast with one of Caron's Academy competitors that year, the Natalie Wood Love with the Proper Stranger is all to this movie's benefit.) And it has the scene that is quoted at the beginning of the Smiths' "The Queen is Dead." What are the vices? Well there are some awkward camera placements which do it little credit. That Brahms leimotif was a poor choice. And there's the awkwardness the "English New Wave," in which middle class British cinema met people outside its comfort zone. Caron is comparatively subtle and understated, but Tom Bell is less so and not entirely convincing in that not entirely convincing Angry Young Man way. The Fits is a strange, rather short feature. It's about a girl in what appears to be junior high or lower who decides to enter her school's dance class. Since her characters are several years younger than say Bring it On, we don't get much of the sex appeal or competitive rivalry. We don't see much dancing, since the movie is about a girl learning to dance. Instead for some reason the girls on the dance troupe start going into what appear to be seizures, the fits of the title. What they actually are is not entirely clear, even at the end of the movie. But it an interesting way to end it.

Actor Ralph Fiennes, The Grand Budapest Hotel Timothy Spall, Mr. Turner David Oyelowo, Selma Joaquin Phoenix, Inherent Vice Aleksei Serebryakov, Leviathan Runner-ups: Roman Zehrfeld (Phoenix), Haluk Bilginer (Winter Sleep), Oscar Isaac (A Most Violent Year), Michael Keaton (Birdman or [The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance]), Brendan Gleeson (Cavalry), Chris Evans (Captain America: The Winter Soldier), Colin Firth (Magic in the Moonlight), Ben Affleck (Gone Girl), Lawrence Michael Levine (Wild Canaries), Philip Seymour Hoffman (A Most Wanted Man), Noah Wiseman (The Babadook)*, Ellar Coltrane (Boyhood), Benedict Cumberbatch (The Imitation Game), Paul Dano (Love & Mercy), Jason Schwartzman (Listen up Philip), Tom Cruise (Edge of Tomorrow), Bill Hader (The Skeleton Twins), Chris Pratt (The Lego Movie), James Corden (Into the Woods) *Juvenile Performance of the Year Actress Nina Hoss, Phoenix Marion Cotillard, Two Days, One Night Karidja Toure, Girlhood Juliette Binoche, The Clouds of Sils Maria Elizabeth Banks, Love & Mercy Runner-ups: Aki Asakura (The Tale of the Princess Kaguya), Scarlett Johansson (Lucy), Mia Wasikowska (Maps to the Stars), Elena Lyadova (Leviathan), Demet Akbag (Winter Sleep), Melisa Sozen (Winter Sleep), Sophia Takal (Wild Canaries), Essie Davis (The Babadook), Rosamund Pike (Gone Girl), Bridey Elliot (Fort Tilden), Claire McNulty (Fort Tilden), Anelle Holmes (Heaven Knows What), Sheila Vand (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night), Emma Stone (Magic in the Moonlight), Kristen Wiig (The Skeleton Twins), Jennifer Connelly (Noah), Sabine Azema (Life of Riley), Maika Monroe (It Follows) Supporting Actor Edward Norton, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), The Grand Budapest Hotel Vladimir Vdovichenkov, Leviathan Josh Brolin, Inherent Vice John Cusack, Maps to the Stars, Love & Mercy Robert Redford, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Runner-ups: J.K. Simmons (Whiplash), Tony Revolori (The Grand Budapest Hotel), Fabrizio Rongione (Two Days, One Night), Roman Madyanov (Leviathan), Olivier Gourmet (Two Days, One Night), Adrien Brody (The Grand Budapest Hotel), Evan Bird (Maps to the Stars), Jonathan Pryce (Listen up Philip), Willem Dafoe (The Grand Budapest Hotel), Ricardo Darin (Wild Tales), Bradley Cooper (Guardians of the Galaxy), Ethan Hawke (Boyhood), Owen Wilson (Inherent Vice), Martin Short (Inherent Vice), Ibrahim Ahmed dit Pino (Timbuktu) Supporting Actress Kristen Stewart, The Clouds of Sils Maria Patricia Arquette, Boyhood Julianne Moore, Maps to the Stars Assa Sylla, Girlhood Emma Stone, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) Runner-ups: Katherine Waterson (Inherent Vice), Scarlett Johansson (Captain America: The Winter Soldier), Carrie **** (Gone Girl), Carmen Ejogo (Selma), Reese Witherspoon (Inherent Vice), Rene Russo (Nightcrawler), Lorelei Linklater (Boyhood), Kim Dickens (Gone Girl), Lilla Crawford (Into the Woods), Dorothy Atkinson (Mr. Turner), Tina Fey (Muppets Most Wanted), Saoirse Ronan (The Grand Budapest Hotel), Olivia Williams (Maps to the Stars), Heloise Godet (Goodbye to Language), Keira Knightley (The Imitation Game), Emma Watson (Noah), Not seen: Still Alice, Wild, The Judge -----In my view girlhood beats boyhood, while Julianne Moore was nominated for the wrong award.

The Grandmaster is the most recent movie of Wong-Kar Wei. It stars Tony Leung as Ip Man, the martial arts master best known for training Bruce Lee. This really isn't about that relationship. Both Leung and Zhang Ziyi got acting nominations from me. To quote Andrew O'Hehir from Salon: "But for Wong, the film’s action sequences really aren’t the point, or not in the same way as in ordinary martial-arts movies. They’re plot devices or punctuation marks, or tools for extending the essentially poetic and aesthetic manner of 'The Grandmaster' into physical space. Martial-arts cinema has always had a lot in common with ballet, and this film almost erases the distinction by deliberately smashing the genre’s veneer of masculinity. Of the three most important fights in 'The Grandmaster,' only one ends in conventional fashion, with a dastardly villain lying battered and broken on the ground. In two of the three, the victor is a woman – the unflappable Gong Er (Zhang), heir to an esoteric North China martial-arts tradition. One is an intensely romantic pas de deux, which ends with Gong Er and Ip Man (Leung) barely avoiding a passionate kiss...But there’s no meaningful sense in which 'The Grandmaster; could be called realistic. It takes place in a Wong-specific dream-China, the China of thousands of movies shot on Hong Kong soundstages, rendered even more abstract. Ip’s South China home city of Foshan is divided between rainy streetscapes and the ornate and decadent interiors of a brothel (whose fixtures and furniture keep being destroyed in kung-fu throwdowns), while Gong Er’s homeland in the north is a permanently snow-covered steppe, just waiting for Genghis Khan and the Mongols to come riding through." Hard to be a God may be, in critic Glenn Kenny's words, "one of the most consistently disgusting movies ever made." It is also one of the greatest movies of 2013. One of the few films Russian director Alexei German (also spelled Gherman) ever managed to complete. Actually after spending a dozen years making it he died before he could finish post-production. Again, quoting Kenny again: "The movie is adapted from a novel by Russian sci-fi masters Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (whose “Roadside Picnic” inspired Tarkovsky’s visionary, disagreeable 'Stalker'). “Sci-fi? But didn’t you mention a ‘medieval’ setting?” is maybe what you’re asking. Indeed I did. The conceit of 'God' is a rather pointedly allegorical one: Earth scientists have been secreted on a planet much like our own, one that is going through its own Middle Ages, and the movie tells the story of one such scientist who is powerless to stop the ruling class wipeout of what’s called the intelligentsia—that is, anyone among the population who can read or write. The focus of German’s movie is one such scientist, Don Rumata, played with admirable diligence and droll irony by Leonid Yarmolnik. He’s “disguised” as a nobleman who some inhabitants believe to be descended from a god. And in his real-life capacity as something close to a god, he’s appalled by the power plays going on around him, but helpless to stop it. Described by Jonathan Romney as "art house cinema at its most heroically extreme," Peter Bradshaw writes on its unique misc-en-scene: "It really is authentically and awe-inspiringly insane, an unspooling nightmare of dismay, with long takes opening up a seamless surreal panorama. German appears to have overdubbed the dialogue (a little like Alexandr Sokurov) so that wherever they are spoken, lines sound like they are being intoned from within – which makes it all even more like a bad dream. There is a great deal of that Kafkaesque anxiety and wounded humour of the kind that German brought to the satires of the Stalin era from earlier in his career. Each shot is a vision of pandemonium: a depthless chiaroscuro composition in which dogs, chickens, owls and hedgehogs appear on virtually equal terms with the bewildered humans, who themselves are semi-****. The camera ranges lightly over this panorama of bedlam, and characters both important and unimportant will occasionally peer stunned into the camera lens, like passersby in some documentary." Nymph()maniac is the most recent movie of Lars von Trier. Clocking in at five hours it consists of Charlotte Gainsbourg telling Stellan Skarsgard of how she has dealt with the trauma of her life by engaging in promiscuous sex. Gainsboirg is very good, though the movie, to put it mildly, is not for everyone. Thurman gives what may be her best performance as the wife of one of the men Gainsbourg's character is having an affair. When she finds out she had what amounts to an epic meltdown: A Touch of Sin is perhaps the most commercial film of Chinese director Jia Zhangke, known for more modernist takes on post-Maoist China such as Platform, 24 City and Still Life. The movie basically consists of four stories of people caught up in the wealth and corruption of modern China. In the first story Wu Jiang, who I chose for best supporting actor, plays a man outraged at local corruption of Party and Capital and after having little success, resorts to drastic action. In the third story, Zhao Tao got a supporting actress nomination from me playing a woman who works at a massage parlor who suffers unwanted attention from the friends of the wife of the man she is having an affair with. She also has problems with her customers. In the fourth story Lanshan Luo was a runner-up as a young man who has to flee from his factory to avoid paying a fine. He finds work at an upscale brothel and has a crush on one of the employees there. From top to bottom, Wu Jiang, Zhao Tao and Lanshan Luo with Meng Li