20. Take Shelter (2011)
Written and Directed by Jeff Nichols
Starring: Michael Shannon, Jessica Chastain, Shea Whigham & Katy Mixon
I recommended this movie to people for years, having never seen it myself. I read a good review and told people to check it out without getting a chance to see it for myself. But after seeing Mud, Midnight Special, and Loving back in 2016, I immediately rectified that mistake. Michael Shannon does the best work I’ve seen him do in Take Shelter, as a man whose vivid, haunting nightmares of a devastating storm with dark, cigarette stained rain send him down a path of madness as he prepares for his dreams to become reality. What makes a film like this so great is the way Nichols lets the story unfold. I spoke with Midnight Special about the deliberate manner in which he tells his stories, never expositing to his audience, but gently guiding them along with inferences and snippets of information. Tiny little scenes tell so much.
Take Shelter is a brooding film about our greatest fears coming to fruition and powerlessness in the face of forces beyond our control. Can you really prepare for what you can’t control?
19. Win Win (2011)
Written and Directed by Tom McCarthy
Starring: Paul Giamatti, Amy Ryan, Jeffrey Tambor & Bobby Cannavale
I wish remembered more about this movie specifically. It’s not that it isn’t memorable, but it’s been eight years since I watched it. I wanted to watch a lot of the movies in the final 20 to refresh myself as many I’d only seen once. I just don’t have time to rewatch all twenty. The basic premise is Giamatti plays a floundering lawyer who scams a client who has Alzheimers because he needs the money. He is also the local high school’s volunteer wrestling coach and ends up coaching the aforementioned client’s grandson and taking him under his wing. Tom McCarthy is a solid director with The Station Agent, The Vistor, and best picture winner Spotlight, so that should be enough reason to watch this solid comedy with heart…let’s just forget McCarthy made The Cobbler, okay?
18. Carnage (2011)
Directed by Roman Polanski
Written by Yasmina Reza
Starring: Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, Jodie Foster & John C. Reilly
Based off Reza’s stage play, Carnage is set 99% in an apartment and plays out in real time. After a violent incident of bullying between two kids, both sets of parents meet up to discuss what is to be done about it. If the cast alone doesn’t make you want to watch this film, you’re crazy, because each member of the talented quartet is in top form. What really makes this film so brilliant is the constant evolution of conflict between the parents. It goes from your kid vs. our kid, to us versus you, to husband vs. husband and wife vs. wife, and then becomes a battle of the sexes, and it just keeps going and going like that in a circle of blame and denial. Needless to say it’s a very entertaining dramedy about people in an apartment who don’t like each other. And I don’t want to spoil the very ending, but it’s pretty brilliant.
17. Calvary (2014)
Written and Directed by John Michael McDonagh
Starring: Brendan Gleeson, Chris O’Dowd, Kelly Reilly, Aiden Gillen & M. Emmett Walsh
Calvary is a film about an Irish priest Father James (Gleeson) whose life is changed during a confession. A man tells him that, since he was horribly abused by a priest in the past, that he was going to kill him, a good priest as revenge, because that would hurt the church more than killing a bad priest. Father James is told he has one week to handle his affairs before he is murdered. This set up sets up the next week of Father James’ life as he confronts so much of the darkness around him. It’s a film where it’s best to know as little as possible and I figure that set up should be enough for you to decide if you want to watch it or not. It is an excellent film, one of the best of 2014, centered around the best work of Gleeson’s career.
16. Enough Said (2013)
Written and Directed by Nicole Holofcener
Starring: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, James Gandolfini, Catherine Kenner, Toni Collette & Ben Falcone
What makes Enough Said such a delight to watch is the two main stars. This was Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ first starring role in a feature length film and the first film role she’d had in nearly 20 years. James Gandolfini, on the other hand, plays totally against type here, as if all the goodness of Tony Soprano was squeezed out and formed into a nice, ordinary guy.
It’s also refreshing to see a romantic comedy that isn’t about young twenty/thirty-somethings and we instead see a romantic comedy from the perspectives of two people in their late 40s or early 50s, both are divorced, both have kids. These are not two starry-eyed youths who have been waiting for true love; they’re two tired adults who found true love, realized it wasn’t true love, and are now disillusioned. Because they both know the signs of relationships souring – the tiny annoyances that stack up, the personality traits that will become too much to ignore, the bad habits that can’t be broken, it makes their courtship really quite original in a romantic comedy sense. It’s a wonderful, funny film with several great actors telling a charming little story about giving love a second chance.
15. Pawn Sacrifice (2014)
Directed by Edward Zwick
Written by Steven Knight
Starring: Tobey Maguire, Liev Schreiber, Michael Stuhlbarg & Peter Sarsgaard
I really wanted to see this film for some time yet it never seemed to get released. I caught it on Netflix a few years back after hearing some mixed things; fortunately, I really enjoyed it. I thought it was a very well put together biopic on Bobby Fischer, leading up to and centering around his infamous World Chess Championship match with Russian Boris Spassky during the Cold War. The performances were solid from both Maguire and Schreiber and really elevated a script that had a few issues. In fact, I enjoyed the film so much I started playing chess again. The tension with the games, the attention to detail when it comes to studying, the emotion chess players experience but are not allowed to express due to decorum, is all really well done. Maguire captures Fischer’s escalating, paranoid madness without going over the top while also not letting us forget Fischer is a genius. Schreiber really kills it as Russian Boris Spassky, calm, confident, collected, until there is one scene where we get to see him let it all out that is a highlight of the film.
To think that, once, millions of people watched two geniuses play a board game about intelligence and strategy, that took decades to master, as if the outcome decided the fate of the free world...and now millions of people watch teenagers play Fortnite for millions of dollars. Sigh.
14. Galveston (2018)
Directed by Melanie Laurent
Written by Nic Pizzolatto
Starring: Ben Foster, Elle Fanning, Beau Bridges & Lili Reinhart
I sought this one out because my boy Ben Foster was in it. And although it had some issues with the narrative, the characterization and performances did not let me down and that’s what I tuned in for. Galveston tells the story of a mob hit man with a terminal illness who prevents his own assassination and goes on the run with a young prostitute who happened to be at the scene. What makes this film work is how unconventionally things play out with the relationship between Foster and Fanning’s characters and what happens to everyone. It’s pretty slow for a crime drama so if that’s not your cup of tea, you might want to avoid this one. However, what really cemented this film for me was the coda at the end. What a lovely finish.
13. Mustang (2015)
Directed by Deniz Gamze Erguven
Written by Deniz Gamze Erguven & Alice Winocour
Starring: Gunes Sensoy, Elit Iscan, Tugba Sunguroglu, Ilayda Akdogan, Doga, Zeynep Doguslu & Ayberk Pekcan
Mustang is a heart-warming and often harrowing depiction of five orphaned sisters living in Turkey and dealing with the conservative society they live in. When someone sees them playing with boys in the water, they are punished for having bodily contact with boys. The story follows the youngest sister Lale as her life at home grows ever more into a prison as her older sisters are abused and sold off in arranged marriages. When I watched this film, western society was constantly shouting about female oppression and the patriarchy, but this film shows female oppression and what living in an actual patriarchy is like through the eyes of a young girl watching the essential slavery of her future coming ever closer and her desperate attempt to remain hopeful.
While it is at times difficult to watch, there are good laughs along the way and much needed levity, especially from their Aunt. She is an interesting character, supportive of her nieces’ dreams yet pragmatic in teaching them about their reality.
12. Tracks (2013)
Directed by John Curran
Written by Marion Nelson
Starring: Mia Wasikowska & Adam Driver
Though Wild starring Reese Witherspoon, also a film based on a memoir of a girl who went on a long walk through nature, came out around the same time, Tracks is the film I prefer. And it’s not just my Wasikowska bias. The photography in Tracks is stunning as Robyn Davidson travels thousands of miles through the deserts of Australia with a caravan of camels (and her dog) and really lets the landscape and stellar photography carry the story. Unlike Wild and 2006’s Into The Wild, Tracks isn’t an intricate character study or a story about society vs. nature. It instead focuses on the hardships of her journey and her intermittent meetings with National Geographic photographer Rick Smolan who documented her trek…and boy does Adam Driver look like him. Tracks isn’t a film for everyone, but if you love photography (and camels, I guess) it’s a must see.
11. It’s a Disaster (2012)
Written and Directed by Todd Berger
Starring: Julia Stiles, David Cross, Rachel Boston, Kevin M. Brennan, America Ferrera, Jeff Grace, Erinn Hayes & Blaise Miller
This is a fine ensemble, black comedy about a group of friends/couples having a Sunday brunch. It’s a pretty normal event, full of backhanded compliments and barbed comments, the kind of pettiness that people of a certain age of a certain standing in society are prone to, and the type of conversations that form between people who know each other well enough to be affable yet nasty with each other. But things are shaken up when the crazy neighbour shows up in a Hazmat suit and tells them several dirty bombs were detonated a few miles away in downtown Los Angeles, meaning they are only hours away from agonizing deaths from nerve agents. Yet somehow, even destruction and imminent death won’t distract these people from their inherent personality flaws and relationship issues as they spend their final hours together bickering and being pretty self-centered.