Tag Archives: Best films of 2011

REVIEW: A Dangerous Method

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A Dangerous Method
Directed by: David Cronenberg
Written by: Christopher Hampton (screenplay & play), John Kerr (book)
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley, Viggo Mortensen and Vincent Cassel

David Cronenberg is a director obsessed with the crossroads of violence and sex.  His films vary greatly in both tone and narrative structure.  For proof (since we are soon talking about science) lay down the science fiction horror show Videodrome next to his more recent pulpy small-town thriller A History of Violence.

It makes since, then, that a film about the birth of psychoanalysis, revolving around the violent sexual relationship between Dr. Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and his patient Sabina Spielren (Keira Knightley), would be a work best fit for someone like Cronenberg.  A Dangerous Method is not a straight-forward exercise in period filmmaking like its costumes and curiously English-speaking Europeans suggest, though.  The film begins intent on dispelling that rumor, as Spielren howls with bursts of rage and laughter in the claustrophobic confines of a horse carriage.  She is dragged out by a group of men and taken into Dr. Jung’s care in Switzerland.

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REVIEW: Melancholia

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Melancholia
Directed by: Lars von Trier
Written by: Lars von Trier (screenplay)
Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland and Alexander Skarsgard

When Lars von Trier announced “No more happy endings,” after the premiere of his last film, Antichrist, people were a little dismayed.  Had any of his movies actually had a happy ending in the traditional sense?  Bjork dangling from a rope at the end of Dancer in the Dark, an entire village (and America by extension) facing a woman scorned at the end of Dogville, a man walking through the woods and then being overcome by persecuted female ghosts (or something like that) in Antichrist- he’s not exactly Disney material.

His latest, Melancholia, certainly contains a grim conclusion whether or not you subscribe to the “more” part of his proclamation.  This is a film in which the world ends and everyone on it perishes, but not before a young woman succumbs to crippling depression during her wedding.

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REVIEW: Poetry

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Poetry
Directed by: Lee Chang-dong
Written by: Lee Chang-dong (screenplay)
Starring: Yun Jeong-hie, Ahn Nae-song, Lee Da-wit, and Hira Kim

What good are our memories to us if one day they can evaporate like river water?  What good is a younger generation that grows increasingly dehumanized?

The initial shots of Poetry set up the movie to answer these questions.  We watch as a couple of young children stand by the river, and then we follow what we eventually pick out as the body of a young girl float up to them.  For the rest of the movie, that murder will reverberate through the life of Mija (Yun Jeong-hie) in a blur.

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REVIEW: Win Win

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Win Win
Directed by: Tom McCarthy
Written by: Tom McCarthy (screenplay)
Starring: Paul Giamatti, Amy Ryan, Alex Shaffer, and Melanie Lynskey

Tom McCarthy’s Win Win reminds you that even a genre labeled “independent” can succumb to endless cliches.  This is not because it is predictable, but because you are lead to believe that it will be from the beginning.

Armed with a mordant wit (what successful indie comedy filmmaker isn’t?) and a sly sense for what a movie with Paul Giamatti is supposed to be like, McCarthy dismantles the sports genre and the midlife crisis movie from the inside out.  We follow Mike Flaherty (Giamatti) a down-on-his luck New Jersey lawyer with a tough-but-loving wife (Amy Ryan, who else?) and two children.

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REVIEW: The Tree of Life

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The Tree of Life
Directed by: Terrence Malick
Written by: Terrence Malick
Starring: Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Hunter McCracken, and Sean Penn

You always look at nature a little differently after you see a Terrence Malick film.  This is a man that you suspect has spent a great deal of time wandering through its various forms, envisioning ways to capture its essence.  Of course, all of us outside his friends, family and colleagues can ever do is suspect.  Malick creates his films, and then stays out of the spotlight.

The Tree of Life, his latest meditation on nature by way of the Big Bang, won the Palme D’or at the Cannes Film Festival this year, and the one who was there promoting it was Brad Pitt.  In a way this is fitting since he and Sean Penn are all the marketing team behind this movie will have to promote it with.  It’s likely that countless Americans will attend this film to see Pitt and then be outraged.

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REVIEW: Midnight in Paris

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Midnight in Paris
Directed by: Woody Allen
Written by: Woody Allen
Starring: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, and Corey Stoll

Finally, the first movie of the summer that deserves the label “art.”  Woody Allen continues his stroll through Europe with this weird, touching, and hilarious trip through the streets of Paris.  Midnight in Paris was the opener of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, mostly because it’s everything the French love: funny, beautiful, and set in France.

Allen’s career has been an almost definitive representation of the “on-again, off-again” method of filmmaking.  He cranks out movies like nobody’s business, and many of them are masterpieces.  Some of them, especially recently, have been almost universal flops.  He is at his best when he takes the usual characters- neurotic artist, muse, pretentious academic- and puts them in something that isn’t about them.

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