8. “The Squid and the Whale”
Noah Baumbach‘s film captures the promise he evinced with his dry-witty “Kicking and Screaming” debut in 1995. It took almost 10 years to get back on track —the films in between yielded very mixed results— but this comedic drama about a family going through a divorce in 1980s Brooklyn demonstrated the director’s ear for creating wonderfully flawed, erudite yet asshole-ish characters. Yet as nasty and acidic as many of the characters are —Jeff Daniels is pitch-perfect as the no-longer-celebrated self-centered author, and Laura Linney is typically fantastic as the mother who decides to have an affair and destroy the family unit— they’re all three-dimensional. Bittersweet, often painfully all-too-real and yet loving, “The Squid And The Whale” is a penetratingly sad-funny look at family collapsing.
7. “Mysterious Skin”
Child abuse in the movies has at this point been reduced to pat explanations of a serial killer’s motivation —very few filmmakers are prepared to examine the issue in any depth. The most notable exception to this would be Gregg Araki’s “Mysterious Skin,” which took the director’s grounding in New Queer Cinema and tempered it, making it by quite some way his most accessible and best film to date. It’s also features a totally electric, fearless performance from Joseph Gordon-Levitt, making his big step up to adult roles. Brady Corbet, in the other central but less showy role, is equally good, the two of them providing excellent, contrasting glimpses of the way in which we cope with childhood trauma. Araki gives the film a gorgeous, languid feel, aided in no small part by a crestfallen shoegazer soundtrack (Slowdive, Curve, etc.) and a great recent score by the Cocteau Twins‘ Robin Guthrie, and avant-garde composer Harold Budd.
6. “Good Night, and Good Luck”
George Clooney and his family emerged from television backgrounds, so it’s obvious that TV has been a big influence on his work, but “Good Night, And Good Luck” is a respectful (to the brink of fetishism) look into that realm. With a top-grade cast (Jeff Daniels, Robert Downey Jr., Patricia Clarkson), Clooney takes a look into one of the most influential moments in television journalism, with Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) railing against Joe McCarthy’s Un-American Activities Committee for scaremongering and in the end failing to produce any supposed communist evidence to further his bizarre jeremiad. There’s no shortage of modern day parallels to the events depicted, which gives the film an added immediacy, but Clooney doesn’t go for cheap shortcut relevance, soaking the action in period-specific black and white, and to remain historically accurate, only using real footage of McCarthy.
5. “Junebug”
The feature film debut of director Phil Morrison (known for some fabulous Yo La Tengo music videos) takes the observational family drama to new heights. This remarkably quiet picture lives and breathes in its small moments. When a prodigal son (a tender Alessandro Nivola) reluctantly returns home, it’s his future fiancee who is largely left to deal with his dysfunctional family. The script by Angus MacLachlan is notable for refusing to go the easy route, instead painting a complex, slowly revealing portrait of a family torn apart, but still under the same roof. And in the midst of it all is Amy Adams, who in a star-is-born performance, plays Ashley, the pathologically cheery sister-in-law who beneath her sunny visage is hiding tides of roiling emotion (her turn earned her an Oscar nomination). In “Junebug,” you can’t go home again, but if you do, the requirements needed to survive are explored in exacting detail.