10. “Beasts Of The Southern Wild” (2012)
It got hit by a major backlash over the last couple of years (watch out, “Whiplash”), but now that the air has cleared, Benh Zeitlin’s film still stands as one of the most impressive and original films on this list. A magic realist fairy tale with gritty groundings about a young girl and her father in a post-Katrina-ish flooded bayou, it’s both a tiny little father-daughter tale (anchored by superb performances by first-timers Quvenzhane Wallis and Dwight Henry), and a gorgeous epic, helmed with real imagination and beauty by the first-time director. It brushes against being twee, and a kind of poverty porn, in places, but for the most part pulls back and remains controlled. Why haven’t we got a second film from Zeitlin already, dammit?
9. “Forty Shades Of Blue” (2005)
He’s gained more attention in recent years thanks to the excellent “Keep The Lights On” and “Love Is Strange,” but director Ira Sachs originally broke through with “Forty Shades Of Blue,” a rich, novelistic melodrama about the triangle between a legendary music producer (Rip Torn), his younger Russian girlfriend (Dina Korzun), and the producer’s son (Darren E. Burrows). Unsentimentally and unshowily shot by Sachs, it’s intense, powerful, and beautifully nuanced stuff, closer to melodrama than the director’s more recent work, but never feeling anything less than drawn from human nature, rather than plot contrivance. And Torn brilliantly reminded everyone that before he was a comic boon to “Men In Black” and “30 Rock,” he was a great dramatic actor too.
8. “Winter’s Bone” (2010)
Before she was arguably the biggest movie star on the planet, Jennifer Lawrence was the unknown who anchored Debra Granik’s gripping neo-noir, “Winters’s Bone,” an adaptation of the book by Daniel Woodrell. Detailing young Ree’s dangerous investigation into her meth-cooking father’s disappearance, it’s a film that deserves consideration above and beyond Lawrence’s astonishing central turn: for the fierce specificity and uneasy atmosphere that Granik lends the Ozark setting, for John Hawkes’ terrifying, against-type performance as her uncle Teardrop, for the clarity and power of its storytelling. Lawrence is sure to have a long and legendary career, but we suspect she’ll only make a handful of movies better than this one.
7. “Chameleon Street” (1990)
Something of a hidden gem among the festival’s prize-winners, “Chameleon Street,” from writer-director-star Wendell B. Harris, beat out Whit Stillman and Hal Hartley to the 1990 Grand Jury Prize, at a time when all eyes were on the festival after Steven Soderbergh’s success the year before. Barely distributed at the time, it’s a playful, dryly comic tale of a real-life “Catch Me If You Can”-style conman who impersonates a doctor, a lawyer, and a journalist, with Harris using the tale to provocatively tackle issues of race. Bold, uncompromising, and formally experimental, it proved a little too close to the bone for most audiences, but it’s only getting more and more remarkable over time, and we hope to see something new from Harris sooner rather than later (he’s currently Kickstarting a new feature).
6. “The Believer” (2001)
Despite rave reviews and launching the career of future heartthrob Ryan Gosling, “The Believer” struggled to get distribution in the U.S., eventually slinking onto Showtime nearly 18 months after taking the top prize in Park City. But then it’s not entirely surprising: it’s an enormously powerful and provocative picture that confronts taboos head on, and which exposes something like the similarly-themed “American History X” as the skinhead porn it really is. The premise — a Neo-Nazi (Gosling, in a firecracker performance that might still be his best) who’s also secretly Jewish — might sound like a rejected Sacha Baron Cohen character, but Henry Bean’s film is a challenging, thought-provoking, and intellectually rigorous one that deserves a second airing after its shameful rejection by distributors back in the day.
