Top 5 Domestic Films

“The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan

“Che,” Steven Soderbergh

“Paranoid Park,” Gus Van Sant

“Rachel Getting Married,” Jonathan Demme

“Ballast,” Lance Hammer

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Foreign Films

“Man on Wire,” James Marsh

“Reprise,” Joachim Trier

“Happy-Go-Lucky,” Mike Leigh

“Slumdog Millionaire,” Danny Boyle

“A Christmas Tale,” Arnaud Desplechin

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Films

“Slumdog Millionaire,” Danny Boyle

“Ballast,” Lance Hammer

“Hunger,” Steve McQueen

“The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan

“In The City of Sylvia,” Jose Luis Guerin

—Bill Stamets

Top 5 Films

“Milk,” Gus Vant Sant

“The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan

“Man on Wire,” James Marsh

“Let the Right One In,” Tomas Alfredson

“Rachel Getting Married,” Jonathan Demme

—Tom Lynch

Top 5 Performances - Female

Sally Hawkins, “Happy-Go-Lucky”

Melissa Leo, “Frozen River”

Kristin Scott Thomas, “I’ve Loved You So Long”

Kate Winslet, “Revolutionary Road”

Kat Dennings, “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Performances - Male

Benicio Del Toro, “Che”

Sean Penn, “Milk”

Mathieu Amalric, “A Christmas Tale”

Michel Blanc, “The Witnesses”

Ben Kingsley, “Elegy”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Supporting Performances – Female

Ann Savage, “My Winnipeg”

Nurgul Yesilcay, “The Edge of Heaven”

Viola Davis, “Doubt”

Penelope Cruz, “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”

Zoe Kazan, “Revolutionary Road”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Supporting Performances - Male

Michael Shannon, “Revolutionary Road,” “Shotgun Stories”

Danny McBride, “Pineapple Express”

Richard Dreyfuss, “W.”

Toby Jones, “W.”

Anil Kapoor, “Slumdog Millionaire”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Directors

Mike Leigh, “Happy-Go-Lucky”

Joachim Trier, “Reprise”

Danny Boyle, “Slumdog Millionaire”

Tomas Alfredson, “Let the Right One In”

James Marsh, “Man on Wire”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Screenplays

Fatih Akin, “The Edge Of Heaven”

Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt, “Reprise”

Simon Beaufoy, “Slumdog Millionaire”

Charlie Kaufman, “Synecdoche, New York”

Martin McDonagh, “In Bruges”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Domestic Documentaries

“Encounters at the End of the World,” Werner Herzog

“The Order of Myths,” Margaret Brown

“At The Death House Door,” Steve James, Peter Gilbert

“The Unforeseen,” Laura Dunn

“Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father,” Kurt Kuenne

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Foreign Documentaries

“Man On Wire,” James Marsh

“Of Time and the City,” Terence Davies

“Waltz With Bashir,” Ari Folman

“Up the Yangtze,” Yung Chang

“Young@Heart,” Stephen Walker

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Follies

“Speed Racer,” The Wachowski brothers

“The Fall,” Tarsem

“Adam Resurrected,” Paul Schrader

“Australia,” Baz Luhrmann

“My Blueberry Nights,” Wong Kar-wai

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Films You Can’t See Yet

“24 City,” Jia Zhang-Ke

“35 Shots Of Rum,” Claire Denis

“The English Surgeon,” Geoffrey Smith

“Liverpool,” Lisandro Alonso

“Voy a Explotar (I’m Going to Explode),” Gerardo Naranjo

—Ray Pride

 

By Ray Pride

Greater love hath no movie reviewer than for his or her year-end listmaking.

Listen to the bite-sized litanies zipping across the Internet and you’d be convinced the best movie you can see this holiday season would be “Slumdog Millionaire,” with its essentially despairing content—as in Dickens, children will be well and truly endangered—ennobled and made shiny-good by bright, bold Danny Boyle adrenaline.

But tragedy for tragedy’s sake is on the front burner. It’s nothing new, releasing dead-serious pictures at the dead of Christmas. For instance, Michael Phillips recently wrote in the Tribune about his least Christmasy Christmas Day attraction, which I’m pretty sure I also saw on that day as a young, young moviegoer: “Looking for Mr. Goodbar.” Another note: the December 8 New Yorker had a cartoon that cuts to the taste. Under a “CINEMA” marquee, the title, “A LUMP OF COAL,” recommended, of course, as “This season’s feel-bad movie.”

An old sentiment, but not uncommon, nor undeserved. For instance, six films since the last holiday and through the awards-driven movie season before the Oscar nominations are announced could also take on the old, terrible pun, “There’s no business like Shoah business.” “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas”: innocence in the concentration camps. “Defiance”: in the Russian woods, three brothers battle Nazis for revenge. “Adam Resurrected”: an ex-circus performer (Jeff Goldblum) leads the parade in an asylum for survivors of the Holocaust. “Good”: Viggo Mortensen tries to hold onto virtue as Nazism sweeps Germany. “The Reader”: an adaptation of a German bestseller about a teenage boy coming to sexual knowledge at the fine hands of a woman (Kate Winslet) who bears guilt from crimes she committed in World War II. “Valkyrie”: Tom Cruise in the role of a not-a-Nazi who got almost close enough to Hitler to assassinate him. (Am I leaving any out?) The Soviets no longer suffice as villains and Iraq war-set pictures die the death of a thousand silent screens.

After a November mostly spent traveling during a long weekend catching up on movies, a rude, loud sound from my teenage years kept coming to mind. Not a raspberry, not a fart, but something more galvanic. That’s how I felt at one of these double-features, starting with “Australia,” which I was rooting for until the first iteration of “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” where big bad Baz goes all BOOM-bastic and jumps the wombat in bold yet largely inert fashion, dumping a steamer trunk bursting with unrealized potential. “Milk”’s good, and “Milk”’s got cinematic language to spare in its understated portrait of a martyr-in-the-making who is conscious of historical moment. The terrible irony of historical awareness is to think that any latter-day American audience would consider foreknowledge of the fate of the first openly gay elected official in San Francisco to be a “spoiler” of the movie. It is a feel-great, feel-bad, feel-hopeful movie. But, coming after the electoral shenanigans in California regarding Proposition 8, it carried its own pronounced intimate “thud.”

The same sound comes to mind about the implosions in the film industry, as in the greater economy, with contractions in production and every other level, with unexpected suddenness and speed. The same with magazines and newspapers. What just happened? The simplest rationalization is that too much money has been thrown at unsustainable industrial and economic models. All that aside, still, aren’t movies still storytelling? A plot or an explosion, a rupture or a riff, whether about splendid beauty or traumatic ugliness, mere mirrors of the smoke of impulse and nascent desire? What stories can we tell ourselves in the echo and reflected light of auditorium, flat screen, laptop, iPod, cell phone, PS3?

The neatest feat of adaptation from a holiday picture is one of the most shattering. Here’s a perfectly sour, sourly perfect passage from its source novel: “Nowhere in these plans had he foreseen the weight and shock of reality; nothing had warned him that he might be overwhelmed by the swaying, shining vision of a girl he hadn’t seen in years, a girl whose every glance and gesture could make his throat fill up with longing (”Wouldn’t you like to be loved by me?”), and that then before his very eyes she would dissolve and change into the graceless, suffering creature whose existence he tried every day of his life to deny but whom he knew as well and as painfully as he knew himself, a gaunt constricted woman whose red eyes flashed reproach, whose false smile in the curtain call was as homely as his own sore feet, his own damp climbing underwear and his own sour smell.” This graceful, downwardly spiraling sentence is typical of Richard Yates’ novel, “Revolutionary Road,” and the adaptation, directed by  and written by Justin Haythe, draws from its source with startling fidelity, the moving result as fine-sliced as translucent prosciutto. There’s much more to say about it when it opens in early January, but the only other movie this season that will seem to prompt delicious conversations for hours afterwards is Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino,” which engages so many social issues with such headlong shamefacedness that it made me giddy with girlish glee [see Film Feature].

There’s even more do-I-not-bleed: “Seven Pounds” is a movie that perhaps only the last movie star could sell to financiers and to audiences, that only Will Smith would want to make, a feel-good tragedy that opens with a suicide threat and dances for its duration around the meaning of its title with its knowing allusion to one of the most known phrases from Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice.” One of the production’s greatest strokes, beyond a moving, mature performance by Rosario Dawson, is the hiring of “Pursuit of Happyness” director Gabriele Muccino, inescapably Italian in almost every creative choice, from editing to pitch of dramatic performance.

“Doubt,” of course, is about dark doings behind the skirts of the Church, and any amount of actorly flamboyance does not mask the fact that it’s also about child endangerment.

Junk tossed for yards about. And silence. The metaphor knocks again and again in near-gone 2008, and not just at, say, My Bloody Valentine’s Aragon concert, with its wall of infernal industrial churn, but with politics, economics, movies, especially in the not-silly season of the holidays. What happens when bottom falls out of bottom? (CRASH). Sarah Palin. (CRASH). Newspaper bankruptcies? (CRASH). The $165 million-plus investment in “Australia”? (CRASH). The suddenness of it all… But, as Jonah Nolan, Christopher Nolan and The Joker might well inquire, why so serious?

That movie’s inching toward a billion-dollar worldwide theatrical gross (not even accounting for the bucks from the three-million-plus units shifted on its first day of DVD release). Come January, there’ll be a reissue of “The Dark Knight.” The studio’s interested in crossing that epic threshold, no matter what it costs. But larger still, Nolan felt a mood and forged a dark and sufficiently ambiguous series of metaphors for contemporary ills that pro- and anti-vigilante interpretations are equally convincing. Even though everyone’s seen it, it may be the most apt holiday movie. (CRASH).

Films take months and years to make, even simple ones, and especially the ones that are in the multiplexes. Scripts like the Wachowski brothers’ “The Matrix” and David Webb Peoples’ “Unforgiven” kicked around for eons before getting produced. But come January, when some of these dour pictures will be reflecting off screens, the world outside will be different: they’ll be read through the emerging zeitgeist. An optimistic post-Bush world paying down unfathomable debt. Laugh or cry? Musicals or dramas of lost legacy? Make your list and check it twice: There’s always sorrow.

By Ray Pride

Nobody knows anything.

Veteran screenwriter and rackety curmudgeon William Goldman wrote “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “All the President’s Men,” among many other movies, but he wound up being most remembered for reducing his life’s experience in the screen trade down to that single epigram: “Nobody knows anything.” “The Dark Knight” has become the second highest-grossing film of all time in North America, passing the half-billion-dollar mark, and equally compelling arguments have been made that Christopher Nolan’s ambivalent work is in fact liberal, is in fact conservative, is in fact fascist. Who knew?

Over the weekend, while the media was distracted by Hurricane Gustav and the rich tapestry of character unfolding behind the nomination of the Republican vice-presidential candidate, local and federal authorities have been rounding up potential protesters in Minneapolis-St. Paul with mass arrests for obstruction, unlawful assembly, conspiracy to riot and rioting, numbering about 300 as of this writing. Why are there images of this? Partly through half-palm-size Flip video cameras and Qik technology, which live-streams cell-phone images. The pictures aren’t pretty. It’s not a liberal or conservative concern: if authoritarian behavior isn’t covered by mass media, who knows?

Looking back and forward, as the British Film Institute turns 75, they asked seventy-five figures to comment on “Visions for the Future.” There’s a rangy bunch of notions floating through the videos where a largely male assemblage answers two questions: What one film would you wish to share with future generations? And “What excites you about the future of the moving image?” Untethered from the necessities of finance and distribution, optimism reigns in the 150 brief videos, with contributors ranging from musician Nitin Sawnhey’s words on “Pather Panchali”; Ken Russell on “Metropolis”; Gurinder Chadha on Ozu’s “Tokyo Story”; Patrick Marber (”Closer”) on “The Red Shoes”; and Sir Roger Moore (Bond, James Bond) on “Lawrence of Arabia.” Robert Altman liked to say that he was never inspired by a good movie, only the bad ones that showed him what never to do in his own work, yet the litany of titles is like having the 400-plus titles of the Criterion Collection fall on your head: with all the crises crashing around the world in the world of film today, isn’t it amazing that this many remarkable movies have been made despite the complacency and corruption often visited upon the form? (Or, as a Romanian director once said to me, “We are just a little planet with little insects, but what beautiful insects we are.”)

Artist Pierre Bismuth, Oscar winner for co-writing “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” asserts that “with digital technology we have entered into a transitional period in the history of the moving image.” Digital technology, Bismuth argues, “has made us exit the domain of photography. Cinema’s no longer a matter of recording reality but of the pure creation of a synthetic image. In a way, we are returning to painting, but today we’re making animated paintings, and I think that what excites people today is imaginative possibilities opened up by technology.” It’s not for him, he says, “since I don’t have a lot of imagination and am always surprised by what reality produces, but I believe that the future of cinema will be the synthetic moving image.”

Composer Michael Nyman goes for Carlos Reygadas’ amazing “Silent Light,” without U.S. distribution, for being “an extraordinary, transcendent meditation on love and religion.” A frame from its opening shot, a glorious six-minute sunrise that encompasses the stars, the sky, animals and man, is pictured above. A work of obstinacy and vision, it holds rare beauty. Here’s a condensation of Nyman’s comments: “What excites me is that filmmaking is accessible to anybody and everybody. There’s obviously the same danger that there is with very accessible music technology—synthesizers and computer programs—that you can equally come up with crap as you can come up with a masterpiece. That’s the danger. Whether it breaks down the studio system or it breaks down the hegemony of studios and big producers, conditioning the way we see images, and the way that narratives are put together and the way that specific subjects are dealt with, I think—I hope—Hollywood is in a terminal stage. Maybe this almost free cinema will be the future. Visual education on the Internet, even with YouTube, I think will increase and make these Hollywood dinosaurs into what they are, relics of nineteenth-century theater.”

<I>You can see the opening scene of “Silent Light” at http://hk.youtube.com/watch?v=gHTkxYz2cMQ; on a proper screen, you see neither the past nor the future but an eternal present.

By Ray Pride

On Tuesday, the L.A. Times started the tom-toms going, gauging if “The Dark Knight” is on the mark to become the highest-grossing movie in the U.S. of all time, rising beneath “Titanic”’s substantial and seemingly unstoppable total that surpasses $600 million. Then again, Christopher Nolan’s dark, conflicted tale has gone above $314 million in a mere ten days, and most of the devoted moviegoers I know who have been dying to see it have faced nothing but sell-outs. (They’re still adamant, and most of them about the IMAX version.)

There are critiques as riotously conflicted as the movie’s politics—which presents, but does not necessarily endorse, the “dark knight”’s apparent turn to the “dark side” in the choices he makes throughout the movie. This is a good thing, I think: ambivalence and ambiguity just shy of notional incoherence make for the kind of movies that make it possible just to watch the zeitgeist burn. (See under: Robert Zemeckis in mid-career movies like “Back to the Future” and “Forrest Gump.”) If the world’s all hopped-up over the relative virtues or failings of “The Dark Knight,” they cannot help but engage with its suggestive political text, can they?

I’m most surprised by the fistful of reviews I’ve read where the portrayal of the city—the City—Gotham—Chicago—never enters into the appreciation. Even without knowing the corners being turned, the buildings just-glimpsed then cut away from, “The Dark Knight” is a city symphony of the hardly planned architectural heap that encircles Daniel Burnham’s 1909 plan for this patch of prairie, this City Beautiful.

The best movie you can readily see this week traffics in the same approach to drama, in a calmer, steadier fashion, and the likenesses were even more apparent last week when I watched Christian Petzold’s glassy dream-thriller “Yella” for the third time. Petzold’s earlier pictures, like “The State I’m In” (2000) and “Something to Remind Me” (2001), have had little play here, confined to a couple of screenings at Siskel. Yet this 47-year-old German director shares the amplitude of ideas about image and sound being as important as text with the Englishman who turned 38 on Wednesday. (Happy Birthday! Here’s $10 million!)

“Yella,” like most movies, unfolds like truth, like a moment, but it is also a dream, or perhaps less a dream than a portrait of a dreamer who cannot wake. Like his earlier movies, the ninth feature from Petzold haunts for what is shown but also for what is merely implied. Petzold works in apparent realism, concrete in his depiction of space and color, yet things remain disquietingly abstract—haunted. (”Ghosts,” the name of his 2005 feature, could title any of his work.)

“Yella” keeps the viewer off-kilter with strange happenings, beginning as Yella (Nina Hoss), a woman in East Germany, is stalked by a man who turns out to be her ex-husband. An accident happens. No one could survive. They both do. (Petzold admits reworking Herk Harvey’s “Carnival of Souls” for this story.) She improbably boards a train, drying her blood-colored blouse—Little Red Yuppie Hood?—and heads to the urban west, proves to be proficient in business, the equal of the venture capitalist who employs her. While her ex continues to stalk her, the dance of attraction between Yella and her boss resembles her earlier romance, as if her boss were a hale, hearty version of the earlier man, as if memory could only become moored by repetition. Hoss has the intense features of an older Mena Suvari, with a dash of Greta Scacchi’s coolness, along with an unnervingly steady gaze. Yella is central to nearly every scene, in almost every shot. She wears a blooded-red blouse that suggests vigor within, a burst of liveliness in the VC realm. Petzold’s images are hushed, interiors and compositions in painterly geometry that holds beauty that gratifies the eyes but becomes disturbingly clinical in accumulation. The real becomes spectral before these backdrops and in these spaces.

Working with his usual cinematographer, Hans Fromm, Petzold places his characters in patterns of urban isolation; the effect is studied, but never becomes forbiddingly icy. It’s tempting to explore comparisons to other filmmakers, such as Antonioni, or to the use of space in theatrical work, in which Petzold spent much of the 1980s. Like the late Italian master or Godard in their moment, European directors continue the struggle to capture the modern world as it enfolds us. His cool complexity suggests a familiar world with ease as simple as breath. Like Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck (”The Lives of Others”) or Joachim Trier (”Reprise”), Petzold is an anatomist of the unsettling, the unbearable, the heartbeat that remains beneath the money-counting tick-tock of contemporary commerce.

But I’d still belabor the comparison of Nolan and Petzold: among other things, they’re landscape artists, photographers of precision. (The surfaces submerged by the plotting that only seem to be the primary cinematic element.) Big doings are conveyed in simple gestures and images (with elusive yet evocative potential means that surpass mere framings and focal lengths). In “Yella,” sound matters, too: alarms drill, clocks tick, birds call, bells ring. A sonic boom? Seismic. A crow’s caw, the wind in the trees, the thrumming of a small river: a woman always living, mentally, at water’s edge. 

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Now here’s a city I could imagine living in: Christopher Nolan’s Gotham City, a justbarelynot Chicago. “The Dark Knight” captures Gotham City as a nightscape that surpasses the gleam and hazard of Hong Kong, a setting that makes literal the divide between wealth and poverty, of comfort and peril. It starts with the elevation of Bruce Wayne’s abode to a penthouse overlooking the Chicago River on Wacker Drive and continues through the film’s many swooping, gliding perspectives of the city by sky by dark, contrasting with the sustained chase scenes that descend to the welter of warrens of Lower Wacker Drive. Pick a metaphor, make an analogy. More allegory than simply gory, Nolan, writing with his younger brother Jonathan and with Wally Pfister again shooting, makes “The Dark Night” a story comprised less of arcs than dovetailing dualities, oppositions that hardly rise to dialectic but suggest primal symptoms: good and evil, light and dark, the moral-settled mind versus the disordered, insane one, to suggest only a few. The look is central, and Pfister’s skills echo those of Gordon Willis (”The Godfather,” most of Alan J. Pakula’s paranoiac gems) and Mark Lee Ping-Bin (”In the Mood For Love,” “The Vertical Ray Of the Sun”): Chicago stories high, insanely crisp, almost painful indelibility. You can fall from the sky, you can fall from grace, and the light is always creeping toward gloom. And, too, Bruce Wayne is an oligarch, a plutocrat, a beneficent billionaire: Gotham City is very post-Soviet. But in later complications (which I’ll only hint at), this reportedly $180 million production becomes more than brooding, kinetic brutalism, but a blunt political allegory for many choices the U.S. has made since 9/11, involving moral responsibility and thinking oneself absolved when others make choices: “In their desperation, they turned to a man they didn’t fully understand.” What does the Joker say? “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” There is a major subplot involving surveillance that is a direct echo of the Fourth Amendment-violating actions by telecommunications companies, which were retroactively pardoned the day after “The Dark Knight”’s first Chicago screening. Gateman? Alluded. The temptation to act unilaterally, as a vigilante, in times of hazard? Check. “That’s too much power for one person!” Spoken aloud. The placement of the line “No one wants to get their hands dirty” is eminently suggestive of the timing of the Vice-President’s cry that it was our turn to explore “the dark side.” Heath Ledger’s Joker? Man, oh man. No backstory. No explanation. The embodiment of terror: what do you want? Fear. Ledger mingles old-fashioned Cagney-style intonations with a lovingly observed Bridgeport-type Chicago inflection. A good listener, he was. Still, the look is the second most seductive element, with Nolan’s insistence on the “practical,” that is, locations, settings and stunts that are done physically rather than through digital smearing. Gary Oldman, as Commissioner Gordon, is keenly quiet. Morgan Freeman’s skepticism is matched by Michael Caine’s doubt. Aaron Eckhart, hair much like his director’s, demonstrates the fine line between zealotry and payback. (Maggie Gyllenhaal? Present.) Brutal, yet piercing, “The Dark Knight” is a necessary fable. “You thought we could be decent men in an indecent time.” Yes. Yes, we did. 152m. Anamorphic 2.40 widescreen or widescreen/IMAX blended. (Ray Pride)