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For over a quarter century Joel and Ethan Coen have quietly become one of the most dependable forces in American cinema. Their last four films came out less than a year apart, and each is within in its own right a sprawling odyssey, completely dissimilar from anything else in the Coen brother’s already considerable body of work. True Grit fits comfortably into this pattern.

True Grit follows the story of Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), a young girl dealing with the aftermath of her father’s murder. She doggedly recruits Deputy U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) to pursue her father’s killer into Choctaw territory. They are soon joined by Texas Ranger La Boeuf (Matt Damon) and the merry trio sets off on a finely tuned adventure.

Mattie carries herself with an exaggerated maturity, and the Coen’s screenplay develops her with an effortless mix of desperate determination and comic seriousness. Bridges plays Cogburn with an exaggerated loutishness, and the Coens harness this energy to great effect. Whereas it would have been easy to fall back on writing a simple “badass with a heart of gold” character, this iteration of Cogburn is completely sincere in his sociopathic boorishness. However when Cogburn does show compassion, it is not a departure from the character as much as a manifestation of morality through a vehicle still riddled with tragic character flaws.

Rather than approaching True Grit as a remake of the 1969 original, the Coen brothers have combined elements from the original film, the original novel and many of their own inventions. The result beckons no comparison to the original, it is a re-imagining, and merely tells a similar story in a distinctively Coen manner.

-Paul Brinnel

A timid ballerina grows into an artist. Regardless of how complicated Black Swan tries to be, that is the essential struggle it depicts. The arguable issues with the film come in the distorting themes layered upon this otherwise familiar tragedy.

Much in line with his previous film, The Wrestler, director Darren Aronofsky has set out to traumatize his audience with a visceral and violent depiction of a traditionally sterile art-form. Drawing much from Michael Powell’s The Red Shoes, Arronofsky and cinematographer Matthew Libatique have turned Swan Lake into a sensuous Danse Macabre.

The two main characters, Nina and Lily (Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis) are constructed as foils to the point of a classical fable. One precise, one passionate; one paranoid, one carefree; one virginal, one wanton; one wears white, one wears black. The theme of explicit opposites is displayed so prominently that at many points it begins to grow a bit desensitizing.

As Nina grows less and less stable, her perceptions morph into those of a paranoid schizophrenic. Unfortunately, Aronofsky chooses to portray her unwinding with the tact of a typical slasher film. Suspenseful music and horror movie tricks dominate the last act of the film, making it less about representing our heroine’s tragic demise and more about depicting a series of abstract climaxes. It might have been more effective for Aronofsky to take a note from Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, and realize that a paranoid descent into madness is most terrifying when it’s implicitly felt rather than scared into the viewer.

Grievances aside, Aronofsky has endeavored to make a complex film that doesn’t spoon feed the audience its exposition. There are many issues, but none of them are due to a lack of ambition.

-Paul Brinnel

Film pioneer Dziga Vertov once said: “I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, I am showing you a world, the likes of which only I can see;” writer-director Gaspar Noé has taken Vertov’s concept of “Kino-Glaz” (Cine-Eye) to it’s logical culmination. Enter the Void takes place entirely from the perspective of its main character, Oscar (Nathaniel Brown). Between Noé and cinematographer Benoît Debie, the camera becomes a transient spectre, drifting untethered around, over, and through the skyline of contemporary Tokyo. The viewer isn’t just made to see what Oscar sees; incredibly, anyone watching is forced to feel all of the natural and synthetic highs that distort Oscar’s perceptions. It’s impossible to convey the level of trance that watching this film induces. Each visual distortion, each optic trick, draws in and arrests the viewer to a level I’d previously imagined impossible.

Its visual mastery alone makes Enter the Void a great film. This said, the actual narrative story does have some serious flaws- Oscar is a drug dealer and his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta) is a stripper; an abundance of flashbacks make it quite clear that both have led very tragic lives. Linda’s codependence issues are romanticized rather than confronted and neither character has any clear purpose or ambition in any of their actions. Each character seems completely numb to their surroundings and none aim to find any purpose amid their existence. While the interactions between the characters are very dramatic, there’s a very apparent lack of complexity. Even in private the characters refuse to exude any sort of personality. As they meander around Tokyo, these traumatized drugged-out patsies react to many things, but seldom act when not provoked to do so.

-Paul Brinnel

9 years and 1,048 minutes of cinema later we’ve finally reached the penultimate installment of the Harry Potter film saga. Pity it’s unbearably boring. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 is little more than a chain of nauseatingly confusing climaxes broken up by the occasional joke or somber hug. This is especially disappointing considering the last installment in the series (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) was such a genuinely fun movie.

By pandering to the Michael Bay crowd, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 discards all sense of coherent structure. Whereas Half Blood Prince had it’s best moments when depicting the microcosm of schoolboy crushes and perceived popularity that is Hogwarts, Deathly Hallows: Part 1 wastes every other moment reminding you just how epic Harry’s ongoing tribulations are. The plot of the film is more like a video game than that of a fantasy film. On top of that, the only actors that get any sustained dramatic screen time are Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rubert Grint). None of these three are strong enough actors to maintain any sort of apparent chemistry, and most of their extended dramatic scenes are downright painful to watch. In one particularly disappointing scene Harry coaxes Hermione into dancing in order to help distract her from the painful reality that everyone they know is being murdered. This scene is meant to serve as a key dramatic turning point- one where we are reminded that the real strength of Harry’s character isn’t his mastery of magic but his compassion. Unfortunately though, a quick montage of smirking and waltzing doesn’t accomplish any of that. Instead it offers only a brief boring respite between two prolonged and desensitizing battles between Harry and the forces of evil.

-Paul Brinnel

Director Charles Ferguson has possibly made the scariest film of the year. It has no monsters, no twists, an incredibly linear narrative and a PG-13 rating. This withstanding, Ferguson’s new documentary, Inside Job, is truly terrifying. Its simple tagline tries to prepare its viewers: “The global economic crisis of 2008 cost tens of millions of people their savings, their jobs, and their homes. This is how it happened.” The film itself fulfills its promises, offering an unabashed and often absurd account of how systematic incompetency has hurt such a vast number of human beings. That said, this is not a Michael Moore approach to muckraking. Ferguson is clear that his film isn’t about pitying victims; it is an exposé focusing solely on the perpetrators of this unprecedented villainy.

The film opens, oddly enough, with a sort of case study: Iceland’s recent experiment with the privatization and deregulation of their financial sector are highlighted. Ferguson has chosen to start his film with an inarguable case of cause and effect; one where a series of familiar poor choices has led to directly observable problems. This eases viewer into understanding specific policy problems, and establishes a base-line before Ferguson breaks out the real nitty-gritty; it’s this kind of prowess in translation where Inside Job really shines. Essentially, it’s no more than a two-hour seminar on applied macroeconomics, but because of its effective presentation, any layman can fully understand and absorb everything as it is presented.

Over the course of the film Ferguson interviews financial executives, academics, journalists, courtesans, and many key consultants to private banks and the federal reserve. Each interview starts with a friendly tone, Ferguson probing for objective explanations to complex problems. As the film progresses, there are several moments where Ferguson surprises his subjects by forcing them to account for their own moral lapses. Some scramble to end the interview, others gape at the camera grasping for words. It’s easy to get the sense that those most responsible feel that they (just like all of us) are ultimately “just along for the ride.” It is truly terrifying when the architects of our most powerful international financial institutions begin sounding like Adolf Eichmann.

Of course Inside Job is not without its lulls. Smartly though, Ferguson embraces them; there’s never a sense that the director has omitted anything important simply because it isn’t guaranteed to excite viewers. The most exciting points in the film are when Ferguson occasionally jumps from playing the interviewer to the interrogator. His questions hit hard and often leave established experts choosing between admitting to gross incompetence and unbridled corruption.

Inside Job isn’t necessarily a great film, but it has the power to be an important one. Chronicling decades we can only see in hindsight as tumultuous, it instills in its viewers a certain incredulousness necessary for mankind’s continued well-being. In a soft-spoken manner, Ferguson quietly presents revelation to his viewers- without constant supervision the greedy will sell our future just like they’ve sold our present (for cocaine and prostitutes).

-Paul Brinnel

Conviction is the real life story of how Betty Anne Waters (Hilary Swank) earned a law degree to get her brother, Kenny (Sam Rockwell), out of prison for a crime he didn’t commit. What could have easily been an uninteresting magazine article has been stretched out into a painfully boring feature film.

Director Tony Goldwyn had his directorial career in 1999 with the drama and box office flop, A Walk on the Moon, followed two years later with a mainstream comedy that barely broke even, Someone Like You. Since then he’s been busy directing pop TV shows. It’s no wonder Conviction feels like a painfully long episode of Law & Order, considering Goldwyn’s resume includes stints on Damages, Without a Trace and Law & Order itself.

The structure of the film breaks down pretty simply: Betty Anne Waters wants to get her brother out of prison, but there’s an obstacle, but then she meets a character introduced for the sole purpose of helping her over that particular hurdle. Each scene starts with everyone looking like they’re about to cry, then a bit of hugging, then everyone goes right back to looking like they’re about to cry.

Swank’s face is frozen throughout the movie in an unsympathetic scowl- one of a bored actor trying to inhabit a terribly conceived character trying to carry an embarrassingly ill-conceived narrative. Rockwell plays crazy well, and he’s proven that before. The issue is that his character is never given anything to do except act crazy and hug his sister.

The development of Rockwell’s character never actually makes any sense. At one point in the film we see his character take his newborn daughter into a bar, attack another man with a glass bottle, then start stripping. After events like this, the audience is meant to still sympathize for Kenny, rooting for his sister as she neglects her own children to get this psychopath out of prison. Screenwriter Pamela Gray tries to explain Betty Anne’s dedication to her brother with series of flashbacks where a young Kenny is depicted caring for his sister amid a tumultuous home life. Even if these scenes do hypothetically come across, there’s still no sense that this side of Kenny still exists within Rockwell’s segments.

Minnie Driver makes a valiant attempt with her portrayal of Abra Rice, Betty Anne’s similarly aged peer in law school. Unfortunately Gray never really treats her character seriously. Approaching Betty Anne at a point when the main plot line is at its most stagnant, Abra simply says: “We’re gonna be friends because we’re the only ones in class that’ve gone through puberty.” And with that, they are best friends. The saddest part is that this is one of the most well thought out character introductions in the movie. Betty Anne excluded, all of the characters pop in and out of scenes with no attempts at development or any interactions that aren’t purely to fuel the story of how Betty Anne got her brother out of prison (oops, I spoiled the ending).

As children wrestle in hay underscored by an unmemorable string quartet, one can faintly see the words “oscar bait” appear onscreen. At an estimated cost of over $12 million, I can only hope that most of Conviction’s budget was embezzled. Unfortunately, that’s probably not the case and this 107 minute piece of shit really dropped $12 million that could have gone towards financing two or three features with less overpriced talent.

-Paul Brinnel

I have a strong desire to see Shutter Island again. I’m hoping, in desperation, that something will be there to validate this film. I’m going to resist this urge to prevent further disappointment. If Martin Scorsese did not direct this film than this desire would not exist; I’d have written the film off as trivial fun and moved on with my day. Yet there are some directors we hold dear to our heart, and want every new film they make to be important. We desperately try to inflate meaning into what is ultimately amusing, second-tier work. This fondness I hold for one of America’s greatest directors has elsewhere translated into adoration or derision. Those who like the film are over praising it precisely because it is Scorsese, and those who don’t care for the film are severely panning it, which often happens when a great filmmaker does not make a great film (see Spielberg).

Unfortunately the film is pointless. (To continue with this review I need to decide whether or not to reveal specific surprises in the plot that could be considered tantamount to twists. Revelation of plot is irrelevant in a work of serious intent. This begs the question: is this a work of serious intent? I certainly hope not. I’ll split the difference and speak in revealing ambiguity.) The film takes place at a mental institute and its principal theme deals with psychosis. U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) is looking for a missing patient. What is real in both the present and the past becomes questionable as the film progresses. This is a familiar theme for Scorsese, except he has always dealt with it more subtly and interesting, most famously in Taxi Driver. Travis Bickle is psychotic, to say the least, but he lives in the real world, in Manhattan no less. Bickle is frightening because he is alone, loose among a society that he deems more worthless than himself. In Shutter Island the psychotics are as alienated from society as possible. They are at a mental institute, under the care of doctors, on an island. Unlike Travis Bickle they pose no real threat, so we watch them with amusement instead of wonderment.

To state the extraordinary level of craft, both technical and in the performances, is a redundancy, since I have already stated that this is a film by Martin Scorsese. In Shutter Island the collaboration with cinematographer Robert Richardson doesn’t quite equal their prior work (Casino, Bringing Out the Dead, and The Aviator, which is probably Scorsese’s most stunning work in color), but they do manage to create an intriguing palette of dark tones in the present day sequences and a more lively mixture of contrasting colors in the memory/dream sequences depicting Daniels’ family and wartime experiences. These flashbacks, mostly without dialogue, are in fact more intriguing and sustaining than the principal story. Scorsese has always been a director of action and movement. The flashbacks, particularly a stunning tracking shot of the mass extinction of a group of Nazis, affords him the opportunity to exercise his talent. Most of what happens on Shutter Island is a series of plot driven conversations. Not to say that Scorsese cannot direct a conversation. His first film, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, has one of the most originally edited conversations, between Harvey Keitel and Zina Bethune on the Staten Island ferry, which opens the film and sets the tone for the remainder of the film. And of course Raging Bull has some of the most intense, frightening conversations imaginable. Except those were conversations built upon improvisation and human naturalism, creating an energy upon which Scorsese feeds. These conversations are just an endless series of interviews concerning the missing patient and then a long revelation scene at the end. Ultimately the high level of craft and the very fine performance by DiCaprio cannot hide the fact that this is a thematically hollow genre exercise by a great filmmaker.

-Jason Bardin

Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg is a movie devoid of ambition.  Little happens, and anything that does is superficial and non-challenging.  The real tragedy is that the film so readily embraces this nonchalance and seems to excuse it as a statement about society.

Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) is house-sitting for his brother Phillip (Chris Messina), after being treated for a nervous breakdown.  Rather than pushing himself to do something worthwhile, he leads his own personal crusade against initiative.  Somehow all of his whining catches the eye of his brother’s drugged out P.A., Florence Marr (Greta Gerwig).  Roger re-unites with an old friend, Ivan (Rhys Ifans), and their interactions are wholly uninteresting.  As Roger and Florence bring Phillip’s dog to the vet and back, they form a bond out of their shared low standards and sexual frustration.  They fight and get back together, then the movie ends.  There are a couple of missed moments and shallow tangents, but at heart, nothing happens.

The few highlights of the movie were slight jokes that, albeit hysterical, would have been equally hysterical within any story.  One such line was used to describe an old fling: “If you worked with her in an office you’d have a crush on her, but outside of that you’d start to wonder if she really was as cute as you’d thought.” While this is a slightly insightful comment about office crushes, its inclusion in this particular movie feels rather arbitrary. The best jokes in Baumbach’s masterpiece, The Squid and the Whale, were equally rib-tickling, but actually served a purpose within the story (i.e. the left-handed desk).

This past decade (and this past year in particular) have been rather dismal for motion pictures, but every year has its gems and they are worth noting. So I present the ten best films of the year followed by those of the decade. If there are any complaints we can schedule an appointment and discuss these picks in fifty years and see who is right.

Note: Number ten under decade refers to Werner Herzog’s 2001 film, not the Mark Whalberg football movie.

Best films of the year:

1. 1. Antichrist
2. 2. A Serious Man
3. 3. Ponyo
4. 4. Two Lovers
5. 5. Up in the Air
6. 6. Sugar
7. 7. Tulpan
8. 8. Still Walking
9. 9. My Son, My Son What Have Ye Done
10. 10. Fantastic Mr. Fox

Best Films of the Decade:

1. 1. Synecdoche, New York
2. 2. There Will Be Blood
3. 3. A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
4. 4. Finding Nemo
5. 5. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
6. 6. City of God
7. 7. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
8. 8. The New World
9. 9. Antichrist
10. 10. Invincible

-Jason Bardin

In Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, the flighty American girl Patricia reads William Faulkner’s anti-nihilist statement from The Wild Palms that, “Between grief and nothing I will take grief.” Michel, the happy-go-lucky gangster, responds, “I will take nothing–grief is a compromise.” Lars von Trier’s latest controversial drama, Antichrist, is like a response to Michel, as if to say: grief is hardly a compromise and nothing is not even an option. In von Trier’s film grief is the subject at hand, along with pain and despair, collectively referred to as the three beggars. Von Trier has crafted a reinterpretation of the beginning of Genesis. He continues where Ingmar Bergman left off in dealing with humankind’s relations with both God and the opposite sex. While Bergman dealt with the silence of God in films like Winter Light and The Silence, von Trier suggests that in our moments of greatest pain and agony not only is God silent, but Satan is very present and joyfully active.

In the film, this theme of suffering is expressed through the only two characters: a man (Willem Defoe) and his wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg); they are nameless in the film, but appropriately referred to as He and She in the credits. In the beginning, they are having sex, which brings about their son, as this act often does. They are still fornicating passionately well after he is born. They do this in super slow motion, black and white, where the cascading droplets in the shower are indistinguishable from the falling snow outside. While the lovers swoon, their son Nic, a toddler, falls out of the window, crashing, along with his teddy bear, to an immediate death. The parents will grieve, the mother in particular, who has a mental collapse at the funeral, blaming herself for her son’s death. But perhaps it wasn’t her fault. Nic sees his parents in coitus; the same two people, performing the same action that led to his own birth and life, and perhaps actively decides to leave this world. He climbs a table, knocking down statues of the three beggars as if to pronounce his escape from a world run by cruelty and misery where even an act of creation seems unnecessarily violent, and triumphantly takes his life, escaping the pain of misfortune that will soon overcome his lusty parents.

He is a therapist and at odds with his wife’s medical doctor’s insistence on pills to cure her depression. Instead he asks her to reveal what she fears the most, and she says the forest where they have a cottage. In his least wise decision, he forces her to return to the cottage. The forest is named Eden and it is here where Satan rules, where the trees produce not fruit but hailing acorns. Von Trier begins to distort reality almost immediately upon their arrival. Standard, well-balanced, medium shots are intercut with distant, shaky, hand held shots as if to suggest they are being watched. The frame distorts from time to time, suggesting a hallucinatory state; depression has taken over and paranoia has been firmly established. In the biblical Eden, God gives to man and woman dominance over the animals and plants. In von Trier’s Eden those animals and plants retaliate against their lords. The ground burns her feet and she fears the tall grass and a stream. While he is trying to sooth her at the hospital, the camera looms slowly over a plant in a water vase, which seems to encapsulate a world of terror and madness, foreshadowing everything to come. He has surreal interactions with animals; they seem to be both in cahoots and at war with each other. In one shot an army of militant ants devour a dead bird, yet in another it is revealed that a talking fox, a deer carrying a half delivered still born, and a violent raven all seem to be working together against the man, standing by each other staring menacingly at him. This talking fox says precisely two words: “Chaos reigns.” It’s not unusual in parabolic fiction for a fox to talk. Foxes appear throughout Aesop’s Fables and later in Medieval literature, most notable in the tales of Reynard the fox, who makes his most famous appearance as a character in Chaucer’s “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.” Friedrich Nietzsche, in Twilight of the Idols, refers Reynard as a dialectician, in his discussion on Socrates. It is therefore appropriate that a fox should pronounce the mantra of life’s pain.

Most critics have casually dismissed Antichrist. They call the talking fox ridiculous and the sexual violence of the movie unpleasant and unnecessary. It seems that once a year the major critics band together to take down one challenging, prestigious film. This mode of action seems to be a way of proving to the general public that they have a common bond, that they too don’t like artsy films like Antichrist, which are about the meaning of life, and instead sell the public on easily digestible, but vapid and manipulating films like Slumdog Millionaire or this year’s Precious. Last year they cruelly took down Charlie Kaufman’s magnum opus Synecdoche, New York. This year they have their targets set on von Trier. A.O. Scott writes in the New York Times, “The scandal of ‘Antichrist’ is not that it is grisly or upsetting but that it is so ponderous, so conceptually thin and so dull.” Dull? Appreciate the film or despise it, it is anything but dull. Here we have a film that deals with the problem of biblical interpretations of woman, violent sexual mutilation, wild passionate sex, all of which are playing off themes concerning life in depression, in grief, in a state of nothing, where life has no meaning. Scott is using a common ploy. By calling a film that one does not like as thin and dull is an attempt to strip it of its power. This can often be embarrassing. In his review for the release of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther wrote, “This one is so thoroughly mystifying that we wonder whether Mr. Bergman himself knew what he was trying to say.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky writes in The Brothers Karamazov that, “If God does not exist everything would be possible,” which is proven by the mass circulation of A.O. Scott’s premature review. However, von Trier objects to Dostoevsky’s theory and instead marks that in the absence of God there is depression, desperation, and insanity, and without a guiding force outside that of the knowledge of men, of a therapist’s Freudian logic, there is not nothing; we are left to grieve.

-Jason Bardin