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Fark It!1. A History of Violence
Directed by David Cronenberg
The best movie of the year. Why? Because it stays with you the longest, stands up to repeat viewings and shoots out exciting ideas with a velocity and power no gun could match. Thank David Cronenberg for that, and for turning a genre film about a small-town husband and father (Viggo Mortensen), who may be a stone killer, into a study of how we wrap our jones for violence in God, country, family and any other excuse that's handy. You know the drill. So does George Bush. Mortensen is so good that you don't fully appreciate the gravitational pull of his performance until you take it home and let it live inside your head. Maria Bello is a force of nature as his lawyer wife, who is both frightened and turned on by the stranger she finds in the man she married. The acting is flawless, with a special nod to the mesmerizing, mind-bending William Hurt for a demonically funny portrait of evil. You won't forget the words "Jesus, Joey" once you hear Hurt say them. What Cronenberg offers here is a master class in directing. The slaughter in the front yard is a scene for the time capsule. The man with a genius for locating what festers beneath fragile flesh in films such as The Fly, Dead Ringers, The Brood, Videodrome and Spider has never won an Oscar, or even been nominated for one. Jesus, Joey.
2. Brokeback Mountain
Directed by Ang Lee
Two Wyoming cowboys, played with piercing emotional honesty by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, meet in 1963 and spend the next twenty years hiding their passion from their wives and an intolerant society. For those who find no current relevance to Ang Lee's stunning visualization of Annie Proulx's short story, try counting the number of states in which gay marriage is legal. Or better yet, just settle into the year's most trenchant and deeply affecting love story.
3. Syriana
Directed by Stephen Gaghan
George Clooney, as actor and executive producer of this political fireball, has had to endure rave reviews that complain about how complicated it is to follow the hairpin turns of the plot. "Should a movie be this much work?" asked one critic. Wow, we've reached an age where even reviewers have to apologize to audiences for a movie that asks them to use their brains instead of just sitting back and letting Hollywood formula work them over. Director Stephen Gaghan has written a corrosive, many-tentacled script that actually lets you see the links between the oil crisis in the Middle East, Islamic fundamentalism, terrorism and the collusion of the White House with business interests whose main concern -- to quote a great Gaghan line -- is providing "the illusion of due diligence."
4. Good Night, and Good Luck
Directed by George Clooney
George Clooney, as actor, director and co-writer of this riveting look at TV news, has some people asking what's the point of dredging up a fifty-year-old battle between TV newsman Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn in a performance that deserves to be legendary) and the infamous commie-hunter Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Everyone knows that TV news is impervious to bullying from advertisers and political opportunists. Everyone knows that Murrow's fear about television was ungrounded -- the box would never be used as an instrument to "distract, delude, amuse and insulate." Clooney merits credit for the uniformly strong acting, notably from Frank Langella as the wittily imperious CBS chairman, Bill Paley, and Patricia Clarkson as Shirley Wershba, a reporter coping with working in a world of men. Clooney's direction is so assured that only in hindsight do you realize the extent of his achievement. Shooting in black-and-white (cheers to cinematographer Robert Elswit) to evoke the Fifties, Clooney eases us smoothly through the hermetic world of the newsroom until we can almost inhale the cigarette smoke and the creative energy of journalists doing their best work under siege. As a piece of direction, it's a tour de force.
5. Munich
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Another chunk of history, this time dealing with the revenge that was ignited when eleven Israeli athletes were massacred at the 1972 Olympics by a group of Palestinian terrorists known as Black September. This mournful masterpiece is Steven Spielberg's harshest film yet, which is saying something, given Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan. Working from a script co-written in a spirit of ethical inquiry and unforced compassion by Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner, Spielberg focuses on an Israeli hit squad, led by former Mossad agent Avner Kauffman (Eric Bana). They're sanctioned by Prime Minister Golda Meir (a forceful Lynn Cohen) but given no official standing as they go about their vengeance business, with only one contact (Geoffrey Rush, all steel and given a last line that could freeze blood) to bark orders. The other members of the team are played by Daniel Craig (guns), Mathieu Kassovitz (bombs), Hanns Zischler (forger) and Ciaran Hinds (cleanup). As an operative who works both sides of the fence, Michael Lonsdale slyly steals every scene he's in. The film moves like a thriller, and a tremendously exciting one, as the men travel to London, Paris, Athens and Beirut to eliminate the names they take on faith as the architects of the Munich massacre. There's a lock-step feeling that seeps into the killings, but the cumulative effect is devastating, which is precisely the point. There is never a moment when Spielberg and Kushner are not also measuring the human toll these executions are taking on the executioners. Though Spielberg insists his $70 million film is "inspired by real events" and not historical fact, controversy is already dogging him, with some Israelis objecting to what they see as a sympathetic portrait of the Palestinians, and vice versa. It's a long-standing conflict that this movie (or any other) won't solve. But a movie can illuminate, and Munich writes its most compelling passages on the face of Avner -- Bana is magnificent in the role, a man at war with his own conscience who hides his wife and child away in Brooklyn but can never escape his bad dreams. Spielberg saves the graphic sequence of the Munich slaughter for a climactic flashback, reminding us of a wrong that cannot be undone and of the self-perpetuating futility of vengeance. No easy answers, no happy ending, no hero who can lead by example. This is new territory for Spielberg, and he completes the journey with honor.
6. Capote
Directed by Bennett Miller
Philip Seymour Hoffman's colossal performance as gadfly author Truman Capote is a show in itself. But he's not the whole show. First-time feature director Bennett Miller, working from a first-rate script by Dan Futterman, creates a movie that digs deep into an enigma and emerges as a striking meditation on the intersection of art and life. Capote leaves the cocoon of his Manhattan social life in 1959 and travels to Kansas to research and write In Cold Blood, a nonfiction novel about the murder of a local family by two drifters. The work crowned his career and brought out all his demons. Hoffman takes you in close, and Miller doesn't flinch.
7. The Squid and the Whale
Directed by Noah Baumbach
The battleground here isn't in a war zone, it's at home -- and though the wounds are emotional, they leave bruises. Writer-director Noah Baumbach puts us in the crossfire of his parents' divorce. Dad (a never-better Jeff Daniels) is an academic. Mom (Laura Linney) is a writer. Their twelve-year-old son (the remarkable Owen Kline) is a serial masturbator. His sixteen-year-old brother (Jesse Eisenberg) -- Baumbach's surrogate -- hits on a student (Anna Paquin) who's sleeping with his dad. Forgive the laughs for sticking in the throat. The film is set in Brooklyn in the Eighties, but most children of divorce won't have trouble acclimating. If there's a braver, better acted, more brutally honest film about family life this year, I haven't seen it.
8. The Constant Gardener
Directed by Fernando Meirelles
Rachel Weisz is extraordinary as a hell-raiser who gets killed trying to find out who's using innocent Africans as guinea pigs for drug testing. And Ralph Fiennes is indelibly moving as her husband, a timid British diplomat who toughens up to search for her killer and finds hard truths that bring him closer to her and to Africa. It's a love story between a man and a ghost. Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles (City of God) provides a political and emotional resonance that's hard to shake.
9. Crash
Directed by Paul Haggis
Even when this ambitious drama about racism in Los Angeles flies off the rails, it's more alive than the play-it-safe hogwash (North Country) that passes for profundity in Hollywood. Director and co-writer Paul Haggis keeps the tension bristling and handles a large cast with an expertise rare in a first-time director. Sandra Bullock is shockingly effective as a DA's wife who shows her ugly side when two black men carjack her at gunpoint. And try not to cringe when a white cop (Matt Dillon) gropes a black woman (Thandie Newton) to humiliate her husband (Terrence Howard). Dillon has never done anything this powerful. Long after seeing Crash, you will still feel whiplash.
10. Wedding Crashers
Directed by David Dobkin
King Kong
Directed by Peter Jackson
Tenth place traditionally goes to the movie that gave me the most escapist fun. This year it's a tie. Wedding Crashers, with Owen Wilson and the pricelessly funny Vince Vaughn, qualifies as comic heaven. And there is no resisting King Kong, not with Peter Jackson turning on the thrills full-throttle and Naomi Watts turning on everything else, including the ape and the audience.
- Portions of Album Content Provided by All Music Guide © 2009 All Media Guide, LLC.
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