80. “Force Majeure” (2014)
With “Force Majeure,” Ruben Östlund made most directors of American cringe comedy look timid and feeble. Östlund’s breakthrough film is a devastating satirical takedown of modern masculinity, a film with nearly as much galvanic power as a fast-moving avalanche that threatens to wipe out the oblivious residents of a toney Swedish ski resort. It’s like “Curb Your Enthusiasm” by way of Michael Haneke: a persistently heartless farce anchored by some fine acting and Östlund’s exacting, rapier-sharp direction (unsurprisingly, an American remake is in the cards). Johannes Bah Kunke stars as Tomas, who unwittingly drives a considerable wedge between himself and his wife and kids when he flees from the scene of the aforementioned avalanche, thus cementing his cowardice and proving his damning instinct of selfish, self-preservation over his own family’s safety. The laughs in this movie are the kind that draw blood (Östlund would continue in this squirmy vein with 2017’s Oscar-nominated art-world lampoon “The Square”), so consider yourself warned. – NL
79. “Eden”
Perhaps one of the more underseen films on this list due to the film’s distancing and elliptical nature, “Eden,” is a minor autumnal masterwork about artistic disappointment, the halcyon days of our youth and the melancholy inherent in the changing seasons of life. Based on the true story of French director Mia Hansen-Løve’s brother Sven Hansen-Løve (who co-wrote the script) and his ongoing struggle to break into the European music scene as a DJ in the early aughts (he was making music at the same time as Daft Punk; they made it big, he didn’t) “Eden” takes place over about twenty years and follows a group of artists who get swallowed up their worst tendencies and EDM history. The fragmented editing style renders the movie’s temporal structure as a little confusing on first viewing, but the film is full of so many small details that you can’t catch them all on one viewing. Hansen-Løve’s movie is the kind of story whose impact doesn’t fully hit you until the final act, but when a certain shot slowly pans around an underground music club, you mind find yourself in tears as you realize just how life has passed you by. – AB
78. “The Duke of Burgundy” (2014)
A filmmaker who cares more about sensation and mood than story, you could forget the plot particulars of Peter Strickland’s “Berberian Sound Studio” and still find yourself swept up in the film’s clammy, suffocating vision of claustrophobic horror. And could any director other than Strickland take the hokey premise of a cursed red dress and turn it into something as ravishing and poetic, as he did with this year’s “In Fabric?” “The Duke of Burgundy” is Strickland’s most rapturous and defined work: a metaphysically-charged erotic reverie that flirts with the supernatural and the surreal without ever collapsing into silliness. While “Berberian Sound Studio” often felt like a skillfully made exercise, the psychedelic Eurotic “The Duke of Burgundy”— about a woman who studies butterflies and moths and tests the limits of her relationship with her lesbian lover— is a symphony of seduction and madness that you want to surrender to. It’s a tale of dualities, obsession and isolation, kink and camp, submission and domination, that casts a bewitching spell that haunts, lingers and demands introspection. – NL
77. “The Immigrant” (2013)
A departure from his contemporary, heavily male-centered films set the NY boroughs, writer/director James Gray’s “The Immigrant” (originally titled “Nightingale”) centers on Ewa (Marion Cotillard), a Polish woman who has landed in New York with her ailing sister to turn a new leaf in her life. Immediately separated from her sister, Ewa comes under the care of burlesque runner/pimp Bruno (reliable Gray anchor Joaquin Phoenix), whose keen fascination (read: creepy obsession) with Ewa starts to dismantle in front of him when magician Orlando (Jeremy Renner) gets involved. Darius Khondji’s cinematography and Chris Spelman’s score are wonderfully transformative, like vintage Polaroids turned into moving images before your eyes. Strengthened by the performances — especially Cotillard, who officially acts better in English with a Polish accent than in English; and Phoenix, who manages a great feat of transcendent empathy as he contort his characters’ emotions in such ways that make you kick yourself for ever thinking they were creepy — the picture is a time machine into an ever-alluring era. Gray takes a unique approach to evoke a popular time period, while keeping within his thematic sandbox of love, family, and honor. – Nik Grozdanovic
76. “The Social Network” (2010)
David Fincher has walked away from so many promising projects in the last few years—the “Steve Jobs” biopic that eventually went to Danny Boyle, the sequel to “World War Z” — that his fans often find themselves wondering if he’ll ever direct a classic again (“Mindhunter” will have to do for now). While there are many in the tank for the trashy fun and deception in “Gone Girl,” “The Social Network”— Fincher’s brainy, characteristically menacing collaboration with Aaron Sorkin that details the rise of Facebook, and the moral fallout behind its inception— remains the master director’s last indisputably great film. It’s a pristinely observed dissection of tech-obsession and male pettiness, as well as another one of Fincher’s gloomy studies of spurned outsiders yearning to break away from what they know and enter a rarefied ecosystem that doesn’t initially accept them (in this regard, there are shades of Fincher’s prescient and widely misinterpreted “Fight Club” in the narrative). This film that moves like a speeding bullet train, and makes rat-a-tat-tat dialogue scenes feel deeply engrossing. The fact that Fincher can take countless shots of Harvard undergrads tittering at their laptops and render them genuinely thrilling is a testament to his undeniable skill. – NL
75. “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013)
Lest his partisans fear, in light of his 2011 family feature “Hugo,” that Martin Scorsese had gone soft, the master roared back into R-rated territory with this cheerfully vulgar, unapologetically nasty adaptation of Wall Street sleazeball Jordan Belfort’s memoir. Working within the coke-infused, lightning-paced template of his ‘90s gangster pictures, Scorsese crafts a “Goodfellas” for the financial district, ruthlessly lampooning the excesses and amorality of the dirtbags that sent the country into an economic tailspin a few years earlier. “Wolf” bypasses the hand-holding of “The Big Short” and other responses to that crisis, taking more sly, satisfying approach of his crime films: first detailing the spoils of the good life, and then watching ruefully as it all goes south. – Jason Bailey
74. “Zama” (2017)
After a ten year absence which left such a gaping hole in world cinema, Lucrecia Martel returned with the masterful, enigmatic colonial allegory “Zama.” Seemingly under the guise of a slow burn historical drama, “Zama” eventually reveals itself to be an uncompromisingly bleak comedy about the horrors of imperialism and an entitled cog in the system whose miserable existence is repeatedly tested. Martel employs her usual idiosyncratic approach, while also recalling the existential meaninglessness of “A Serious Man,” and another black comedy masquerading as a period drama, “Barry Lyndon.” It’s hard to make a film about something as ugly as colonialism look as beautiful as “Zama” does, but Martel and D.P. Rui Poças find a way to masterfully juxtapose barbaric, racist men and the naturally gorgeous environments that have been pillaged and plundered. The intentionally repetitive image of Don Diego waiting for word by sea begins as a beautifully languid and almost poetic moment, only to become a punchline. Nobody is coming for him and land he has stolen is his purgatory. “Zama” might be the funniest film you might ever see about the inherent cruelty and racism that has forever altered the modern world we live in today. — MR
73. “Weekend” (2011)
One of the cornerstones of an enduring motion picture is a sense of simplicity. Even films that feature convoluted plot structures or elaborate twists of dramatic fate tend to hinge their success on the notion that some storytelling techniques are best approached in a straightforward manner. Andrew Haigh’s loving queer romance “Weekend” is the best kind of uncomplicated film about a one night stand that evolves into something more. The cinematography by Ula Pontikos is seductive and soothingly rhythmical, and the lead performances by Tom Cullen and Chris New feel lived-in in the best kind of way, implying that their characters have endured life’s slings and arrows long before the movie begins in earnest. The simple emotional core of “Weekend”—two gay men hooking up, spending a weekend together, and sadly parting ways while wistfully wondering what the future may hold for them—is ultimately what’s so memorable about it. This is a movie of tiny but unshakeable moments, and an ode to the fortuitous connections we make along life’s winding pathways. – NL
72. “White Material” (2010)
Simultaneously tactile and intangible, you don’t watch the films of Claire Denis as much as you feel them and then process them for hours on end. One of cinema’s foremost sensualists, even when her work is as alienating and potentially off-putting as this year’s magnificent outer-space tone poem, “High Life,” its engulfing. One of Denis’ finest films, “White Material” is a work whose superficial plot outline does little to indicate the dark, sweeping magnetism of its execution. This is a poetically nonlinear, captivating jewel of a film that’s simultaneously about estrangement and abandonment. It stars the ever-terrific Isabelle Huppert as a French émigré who refuses to leave her family’s Africa-set coffee plantation in the midst of a civil uprising, and also the indispensable Isaac de Bankolé as a mysterious, wraithlike rebel known only as The Boxer. The film’s elliptical editing, courtesy of Yann Dedet, makes the film feel like a half-remembered dream, and its insistent, slow-drip score by Tindersticks mastermind Stuart Staples (who has scored more than a few Denis classics) will haunt your dreams and sear itself into the dark corners of your brain. – NL
71. “Shoplifters” (2018)
We’re unable to choose who we call family and the closest relationships are often the most complicated. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Shoplifters” is a tragic miracle of humanist cinema questioning the very notion of what makes a family unit, and it has one of the most powerful endings you will ever see. Following a “family” that supports each other through less than honest means, the movie is a perfect example of the Japanese filmmakers sense of cinematic control and artistic discipline. “Shoplifters” might be a domestic melodrama, but the conflict never feels heightened because the stakes are sewn into the narrative with Kore-eda’s raw sense of empathy and poetic naturalism. The ending hits like a ton of bricks being dumped on top of your chest, but still never feels like it’s trying to hit you with a cheap emotional sledgehammer. Everything comes together during the film’s final stretch, and Sakura Ando gives one of the most heartbreaking performances of the decade; sadly robbed of awards attention throughout the 2018 Oscar season. – AB
