Filed under: film
I’ve seen, and listened to via podcast a number of films-of-the-year lists, enjoyed them, agreed with them in parts, don’t see much reason to add another to them. But it was quite a filmish year for me, with my first visit to Sundance and over 50 cinema trips (dismal by professional standards, I know, or even real cinephile standards, but more than I think I’ve managed any other year), and a recap seems in order. So here are two lists, first of the ten films I most regret missing this year, then of moments in film that mattered to me.
What I missed that I regret most (in quasi chronological order)
- Benda Balili
- Submarine
- Meek’s Cutoff
- A Separation
- Tree of Life
- Project Nim
- Skin I live in
- Kill List
- Take Shelter
- Deep Blue Sea
Looks like my missed list would be a pretty good best of list in other parts. (I should say I have mostly only myself to blame — I think the excellent Greenwich Picturehouse showed all but two of those)
A similarly quasi-chronological list of moments that moved, mattered and stunned
- The girl in the car close to the end of Life in a Day, who hasn’t done anything special but wants to be in on what’s happening.
- The distraught shepherd phoning home from the high pasture near the end of Sweetgrass
- The doping/seduction/murder in Animal Kingdom. (Also the remarkable painterly scenes of the boy alone in the house at night; also the cut to the gallery scene; also…In dramatic terms, this was pretty much my film of the year)
- The bullet-time-ish moment where he finally gets it right in Source Code (quite ambivalent about the double coda after this, though I appreciate some of why it was needed). It’s like Ecclestone’s “Just this one time, everybody gets to live” moment in The Doctor Dances, one of the Moff’s great moments
- The God’s presence at Monaco sequence in Senna
- The bit where Elle Fanning acts at the boys in Super 8
- The amends made in the barber’s shop in The Interrupters
- The lift scene in Drive
- The automaton starts to draw in Hugo (actually, pretty much all of Hugo…)
- The Burj Khalifa exterior sequence in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
- The Siberian shore lingered on, repeatedly, through rippled panes of glass in How I Ended This Summer
- “Allow it” in Attack the Block; way to define a hero..
- The death/goat on the table in Il Quattro Volte
- The final stairway sequence of Russian Ark (yes, I know — but it was new *to me* this year…)
- “Rhinoceros“: Midnight in Paris (more generally, Corey Stoll; but for a moment, Brody…)
- “Loser loser loser” at the end of Moneyball
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