1. Desplechin's "A Christmas Tale" brings together a bitterly divided family in the uncharismatic northern French city of Roubaix (the director's hometown), and tell me it's not a masterpiece. Comedy, tragedy, madness, sex, religion, a musical score ranging from baroque to house music to Cecil Taylor, and an amazing cast headed by Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric, Chiara Mastroianni and the wonderful Jean-Paul Roussillon. This blend of Bergman, film noir, philosophy and romantic comedy tries to capture all the possibilities of cinema in one movie.
4. "Encounters at the End of the World" As with all Werner Herzog's movies, the legendary German-born eccentric traveled to Antarctica without quite knowing what he was looking for. What he came back with was a troubling, gorgeous and sometimes hilarious meditation on, quite literally, the last place in the world, which turns out to be a refuge for oddballs from all continents ideally suited to Herzog's exploratory method. "Encounters" is the strangest and most profound of all global-crisis movies to date, and we'll soon find out whether it's also the movie that breaks through the Academy's long-running Herzog-phobia.
6. "The Secret of the Grain" an intimate saga of a tight -- and tightly-wound -- Arab-French immigrant family in a Mediterranean port city. Writer-director Abdellatif Kechiche swept the César awards (the French Oscars) and while that partly reflects the recent French effort to wrestle with a multicultural nation, the movie itself is wonderful. Habib Boufares plays the laconic hero, a laid-off shipyard worker who has an ex-wife, a mistress, feuding daughters, stepdaughters and daughters-in-law and a philandering son to deal with, all while his dream of a shipboard couscous restaurant runs afoul of institutional racism and domestic disorder.
8. "Man on Wire" Watching this highly entertaining documentary about one of the century's great artistic crimes -- Philippe Petit's 1974 wire-walk between the twin towers -- at last year's Tribeca Film Festival was a genuinely magical experience. Partly because we were seeing those buildings resurrected in a context of wonder and adventure, and partly because Petit's death-defying act (it's unfair to call it a stunt) even at the time seemed like a paradoxical and marvelous achievement. Director James Marsh does a terrific job of distilling Petit as a contradictory, larger-than-life figure, and telling his story with a brio worthy of Truffaut.
Looking forward to 2009...
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks so much for your response...