15. “Her” (2013)
Up until “Her,” it was easy to split the credit for Spike Jonze’s remarkable films with his collaborators: Charlie Kaufman’s singular screenplays for “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation,” the beloved source material and Dave Eggers script for “Where The Wild Things Are,” even the amazing music of his music video subjects like the Beastie Boys and Bjork. But “Her,” about a lonely man (Joaquin Phoenix) who falls in love with his operating system (Scarlett Johansson, in a performance that got Oscar buzz despite being voice-only), was all Jonze, and was at least as good as his previous films. Combining one of the most rigorous visions of the near-future ever seen on screen with an intensely personal and surprisingly raw story, anchored by one of Phoenix’s most disarmingly lovely turns, “Her” was a terrifying tale of singularity disguised as a heartbreaking romance. Or possibly the other way around.
14. “Leviathan” (2014)
One of the most startling political pictures of the decade, “Leviathan” saw Russian helmer Andrey Zvyagintsev expose the top-down rot and decay of his country in the Putin era. Like his previous picture, “Elena,” “Leviathan” melds the aesthetics of the slow cinema movement with the narrative heft of a great novel by Tolstoy or Dostoevsky as it unfolds the story (based loosely on the Biblical tale of Job) of a decent husband, father, and mechanic who’s put through hell when the local mayor decides he wants to take the man’s house and land in order to build a new church. Wrenchingly sad, bitterly funny, and merciless in its skewering of politicians and the church alike, all set amidst haunting and barren landscapes beautifully captured by cinematographer Mikhail Krichman. A major, major work from a major, major filmmaker.
13. “Stories We Tell” (2012)
Standing as one of two exceptions we’ve made for this feature full of feature films, is Sarah Polley‘s wholly intimate documentary, “Stories We Tell.” The Canadian actress-turned-filmmaker struggled with whether to release a story that’s the cinematic equivalent of allowing everybody to flip through her diary, but thank goodness she did, because ‘Stories’ is a masterpiece of documentary filmmaking. Polley filmed her closest relatives as they fondly recounted moments from the director’s childhood, and through seamless progression, we meet her father Michael, mother Diane, and Quebec-born film producer Harry Gulkin, an integral storyteller for the major plot twist in the documentary. That’s right, a documentary with plot twists. An examination of the very nature of storytelling; what stuff do you keep out when recounting a story? To what end? Is there a moment when everything should be revealed? How do past secrets affect present emotions? These kinds of questions swirl in the mind upon viewing the film, something personal mirroring universal, heartbreaking life itself.
12. “The Tree of Life” (2011)
Perhaps the divisions that have sprung up in our ranks over “To The Wonder,” and no doubt will again when “Knight of Cups” (review here) is released, can actually be traced back to one simple fact: everything Terrence Malick is trying to say in those films, he has already said in the achingly beautiful “Tree of Life.” Structured around a generational look at a family, with the mother (a radiant, quasi-angelic Jessica Chastain) representing Grace (and love, kindness, and otherworldly things) and the father (a taciturn, bitter Brad Pitt) standing for Nature (and work, duty, and terrestrial hardship), it is a film whose ambitions are far more all-encompassing than anything he tried before or since. Is it therefore pretentious? Well, it’s an attempt to find God through cinema, so how could its reach not exceed its grasp? But for every time it falters, there’s another moment it transcends, as if you can feel Malick reaching up through those branches to the sky, and back through time to its beginning, and occasionally, momentarily brushing his fingertips against something divine.
11. “Upstream Color” (2013)
Polymath Shane Carruth’s belated follow-up to the inventive DIY time-travel film “Primer” is not a dream, but it is elliptically chopped and screwed with lyrical and inscrutable hypnagogic logic. A celestial romantic thriller, “Upstream Color” is an abstract whodunit made in the tradition of a Hitchcockian noir, with innocents in the wrong place and wrong time caught up in intrigue. In this case it’s a couple, taking tentative steps towards a romance, who discover they’ve been the victims of an insidious, mysterious inception: a type of mind-wiping abduction later exploited by an elusive composer. The how and why details are still a milky ephemera, but the serene movie about connection, identity, and recovery is clearly about two souls united by chance who work to solve the enigmatic metaphysical crimes perpetrated against them. Translucent in form, radiant in execution, and deeply evocative, “Upstream Color” challenges the grammar of cinema with gorgeous and expressive results.