Chris Knipp's 2013 MOVIE BEST LISTS

[Chris Knipp]

MY 2013 LISTS

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J.C. Chandor and Robert Redford

It's annoying to discuss this year by listing last year's best movies, but there didn't seem to be a roster in 2013 that could match Holy Motors (Leos Carax), Amour (Michael Haneke), Oslo, Aug. 31st (Joachim Trier), Sister (Ursula Meier), Rust and Bone (Jacques Audiard),The Kid with the Bike (Dardennes), The Deep Blue Sea (Terrance Davies), in my non-US list, or Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson), The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson), and Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino) in my US list. However I was riveted by All Is Lost. It's a crime that it was badly promoted and distributed and Redford didn't get an Oscar nomination. Nebraska is a real auteur film. Upstream Color is as delightfully mystifying as Caruth's Primer but adds great visual dazzle. Computer Chess is a mind-boggler, with its retro-style meditation on how nerdy were the beginnings of the world that we all live in now. And The Selfish Giant is immensely real, simple, and touching. So that's pretty good, and The Great Beauty is a dazzling epic of ennui, a triumph of the long collaboration of Toni Servillo and Paolo Sorrentino, and Reality is a panorama of naivete in the great Italian tradition: funny how we lament the total decline of Italian cinema and yet they still make great ones. I am happy with the whole "Foreign" list, and several of the shortlisted items are just as good. It seems Miles Teller's clear promise in The Spectacular Now is borne out in this year's Whiplash, debuted at 2014 Sundance, and he may become a star. In the documentary list, several are quite notable politically, like The Gatekeepers, Dirty Wars, and We Steal Secrets (different levels as films), but The Square is in a class by itself as a film, a record of the Egyptian youth revolution of 25 January 2011 that's not only moving but now tragic in the light of how Egypt has degenerated back into dictatorship: this is a record of a short period of nearly ecstatic revolutionary hope. Maybe 2013 wasn't a bad year at all.

BEST ENGLISH LANGUAGE FILM:
ALL IS LOST (J.C. Chandor)
NEBRASKA (Alexander Payne)
UPSTREAM COLOR (Shane Carruth)
COMPUTER CHESS (Andrew Bujalski)
THE SELFISH GIANT (Clio Bernard)
THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES (Derek Cianfrance)
MUD (Jeff Nichols)
BEFORE MIDNIGHT (Richard Linklater)
SPRINGBREAKERS (Harmony Korine)
THE OVERSIMPLIFICATION OF HER BEAUTY (Terence Nance)

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Connor Chapman in The Selfish Giant

BEST FOREIGN FILMS (Including non-US-release)
THE GREAT BEAUTY (Paolo Sorrentino)
BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR (Abdellatif Kechiche0
REALITY (Matteo Garrone)
BASTARDS (Claire Denis)
A HIJACKING (Tobias Lindholm)
WADJDA (Haifaa Al-Mansour)
ALYAH (Elie Wajeman)
THEY'LL COME BACK (Marcelo Lordell)
THE CLEANER (Adrián Saba)
CLUB SANDWICH (Fernando Eimbcke)
ABUSE OF WEAKNESS (Catherine Breillat)
THE STRANGER BY THE LAKE (Alain Guiraudie)
DRUG WAR (Johnnie To)
ALI BLUE EYES (Claudio Giovannesi)
THE HUNT (Thomas Vinterrberg)
THE DANCE OF REALITY (Alejandro Jodorovsky)

BEST BLOCKBUSTERS:
MAN OF STEEL (Zack Snyder)
FAST & FURIOUS 6 (Jason Lin)

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Ahmad Hassan in The Square

BEST DOCUMENTARIES (alphabetical)
56 UP (Michael Apted)
AMY WINEHOUSE: THE DAY SHE CAME TO DINGLE (Maurice Linnane)
DIRTY WARS (Rick Rowley)
FIRST COUSIN ONCE REMOVED (Alan Berliner)
THE GATEKEEPERS (Dror Moreh)
GIDEON'S ARMY (Dawn Porter 2012)
THE SQUARE (Jehane Noujaim)
JOE PAPP IN FIVE ACTS (K. Thorsen, T. Holder)
LEVIATHON (Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Verena Paravel)
MUSEUM HOURS (Jem Cohen) (semi-documentary feature)
WE STEAL SECRETS: THE STORY OF WIKILEAKS (Alex Gibney)

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Gael Garcia Bernal in No

SHORTLISTED, ALL CATEGORIES
THE SPECTACULAR NOW (James Ponsoldt)
NO (Pablo Laraín)
BEHIND THE CANDELABRA (Steven Soderergh) (TV)
IN THE HOUSE (François Ozon)
SHORT TERM 12 (Destin Cretton)
SOME VELVET MORNING (Neil LaBute)
BLUE CAPRICE (Alexandre Moors)
TWENTY FEET FROM STARDOM (Morgan Neville)

NOT YET SEEN:
CAMILLE CLAUDEL 1915 (Bruno Dumont) - very limited release NYC Oct.
NARCO CULTURA (Shaul Schwarz) - doc showing in NYC
INEQUALITY FOR ALL - (Jacob Kornbluth) doc about Robert Reich

[oscar jubis]

I am catching up on films from your list that I've missed, Mud and The Oversimplification of her Beauty most recently. I haven't posted a top-10 list yet although I'm getting close to feeling I've seen enough of the potential candidates to do so. By the way, I've seen 7 of the 9 Best Picture nominees and I like all of them. However, none of them will be in my top 10. Most of what I really like is fringe stuff to most people, except perhaps Before Midnight.

[Chris Knipp]

I also wasn't as excited about this year's most favored titles compared to other recent years. Nothing maybe quite up to HOLY MOTORS and AMOUR. Still, plenty of good films.

[oscar jubis]

Yeah, plenty of good films, and good films are good for you. I always say that there is (on average) one new movie playing in my town every week that it's really worth seeing. That's about 50 films every year! And that does not include several excellent made-for-TV documentaries and a few outstanding made-for-TV films or series often left out of film critics' Top 10 lists. The titles listed below will not make my list but I understand why they won awards and/or critical approval. I really enjoyed them.

Gloria, 12 Years a Slave, Gravity, 56 Up, Mother of George, After Lucia, The Great Beauty, Nebraska, Blancanieves, No, Mud, Frozen, The Broken Circle Breakdown, Inside Llewyn Davis, An Oversimplification of her Beauty, Philomena, All is Lost, Behind the Candelabra, Violeta Went to Heaven, The Gatekeepers, War Witch, Room 237.

[Chris Knipp]

I more or less intentionally missed War Witch and Room 237. I have not heard of Violeta Went to Heaven and also was put off by some reviews of Blancanieves so didn't go to see it. It got very good reviews in France though (as well as the US). AO Scott for instance: "[Blancanieves] communicates the delights of pastiche rather than the thrill of original creation, a secondhand movie love that is seductive but not entirely satisfying." I could watch it later. I did not enjoy 12 Years a Slave; how can you enjoy it? or Gravity. Have not seen Frozen. Everybody likes it. An oversight.

[oscar jubis]

Violeta Went to Heaven is the biopic of Chilean leftist folk singer, artist, and activist Violeta Parra, directed by Andres Wood (Machuca) and winner of the Jury Prize (World Cinema) at 2012 Sundance.

[Chris Knipp]

Yeah, plenty of good films, and good films are good for you. I always say that there is (on average) one new movie playing in my town every week that it's really worth seeing. That's about 50 films every year! And that does not include several excellent made-for-TV documentaries and a few outstanding made-for-TV films or series often left out of film critics' Top 10 lists. The titles listed below will not make my list but I understand why they won awards and/or critical approval. I really enjoyed them.

Gloria, 12 Years a Slave, Gravity, 56 Up, Mother of George, After Lucia, The Great Beauty, Nebraska, Blancanieves, No, Mud, Frozen, The Broken Circle Breakdown, Inside Llewyn Davis, An Oversimplification of her Beauty, Philomena, All is Lost, Behind the Candelabra, Violeta Went to Heaven, The Gatekeepers, War Witch, Room 237.

Those are good choices I guess, except that I've missed some of them, a few by choice, others I just never even heard of. I'm not sure I'd say I "enjoyed" 12 Years a Slave or Gravity even, but of course, I know why they were approved and praised. The others I liked very much too, particularly Nebrasca tand The Great Beauty, No, Mud, The Oversimplification of Her Beauty, Behind the Candelabra, The Gatekeepers, and most of all, All Is Lost. I had looked up what Violeta was before your explanation came up.

[Chris Knipp]

I saw my dentist, a movie fan, to get a crown today and he told me he'd seen BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR at my recommendation and been blown away by it. He also liked NEBRASKA and ALL IS LOST. I reminded him that the previous time I'd had to get a crown from him (he's been my dentist a long time) was in 1992 and the reason I can remember the date is that I broke out a big filling, requiring the crown, munching excitedly on popcorn before watching PULP FICTION for the first time. He liked that a lot too; he likes the way Tarantino writes dialogue. He said it's been a while since Tarantino made a movie -- I guess to him, DJANGO UNCHAINED was too long ago.

[oscar jubis]

Isn't Matt Damon awesome in Behind the Candelabra?
Did you watch Drug War? (I did last night) That's an easy film to recommend to fans of action films and police procedurals.

[Chris Knipp]

Yes, DRUG WAR is in my Best Foreign list starting this thread. A very well made film that I liked so much I watched twice. I think the mise-en-scène is even better than the acting in BEHIND THE CANDELABRA but the acting is good. Most memorable is the hilarious turn by Rob Lowe as the plastic surgeon who's had himself worked on quite a bit.

BEHIND THE CANDELABRA (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3609-PARIS-MOVIE-REPORT-October-2013&p=31118#post31118)

DRUG WAR (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3572-DRUG-WAR-%28Johnnie-To-2012%29)

[oscar jubis]

Thanks for the links. We discussed The Act of Killing before, at a time when I was questioning its ethics of discourse (pardon me if it sounds too academic), but I have come around after another viewing and discussion with colleagues.

2013 BEST DOCUMENTARIES (alphabetical order)

The Act of Killing (Denmark/Norway)
At Berkeley (USA)
Leviathan (USA)
Stories We Tell (Canada)

[Chris Knipp]

I hope you see or have seen my other doc recommendations, the political ones, DIRTY WARS, WE STEAL SECRETS, THE GATEKEEPERS, THE SQUARE, and you would surely like the doc-fiction mix of MUSEUM HOURS? I guess I forgot STORIES WE TELL. I was not as fond of it as others I saw it with at New Directors. What about FIRST COUSIN ONCE REMOVED? GIDEON'S ARMY and AMY WINEHOUSE for some reason were in the SF Jewish Film Festival and very good.

[oscar jubis]

I have missed several docs, no doubt, there are many others.I take note of the ones you recommend. I've seen The Gatekeepers and a couple of others listed earlier in this thread.
For listing purposes, I decided to include Museum Hours in my regular (fiction) list of favorites, which I will finally post in a couple of days. I don't remember if I mentioned it earlier in a post.