Mother Nature is a serial killer.

A few weeks ago, World War Z was barely on my radar. I had no interest in a gore-free, PG-13 zombie movie, and the reports that the movie was basically an adaptation of Max Brooks' book in name only, as well as the much-publicized decision to scrap and reshoot the third act, did little to change my mind. That the film's director is Marc Forster - a director I consider not just bad but incompetent and bizarrely overpraised - was also not an encouraging sign. After reading a good deal of positive reviews and, especially, hearing good things from horror-loving friends, I decided to give World War Z a try. After about ten minutes, I was very surprised to find that, not only was World War Z not bad, I was actually loving it. The rest of the movie never disappointed me; it's not perfect, but if you can put aside your expectations, it's consistently thrilling, clever and often very creepy. I never expected to say this, but World War Z is the best popcorn movie I've seen so far this summer.

After a great opening credits sequence, with news clips about real-life fears like climate change and overpopulation set to a Carpenter-esque synth score (credited to Marco Beltrami and Muse - this piece sounds more like Muse), World War Z introduces us to our hero, Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt). We quickly learn that Lane used to work as an envoy for the United Nations, but retired to become a stay-at-home dad to his two daughters. As in Spielberg's version of War of the Worlds, just as much time as needed is spent on establishing the characters before we're hurtled into the action; the escalating sense of chaos as Philadelphia is quickly overtaken by zombies is very well staged, especially when Forster cuts away from the standard shaky-cam, rapid-cut coverage of the action to wide aerial shots that survey the scope of the rapidly spreading epidemic. There's never been a zombie movie with the budget of World War Z, and while the narrative doesn't reinvent the wheel, to see the a zombie movie unfold on a literally global scale is a treat for anyone who ever imagined what the original version of Day of the Dead might have been like if Romero had the money.

While World War Z doesn't match Romero's level of, er, biting social commentary, it works because it treats zombies as a credible real-world threat - even if it's not a faithful adaptation of the book, it's true to Brooks' straightfaced take on a seemingly ridiculous hypothetical situation, not to mention his emphasis on the importance of commonplace but essential components of survival like staying hydrated and preventing infection (the everyday kind, not just the zombie kind). The movie's also a nice antidote to the hypermasculine, increasingly dumb redneck soldier bullshit of The Walking Dead. It's not inconsequential that Lane works for the U.N., and as the film takes him to South Korea, Jerusalem and a W.H.O. office in Cardiff, meeting soldiers, scientists, and government officials attempting to deal with the zombie crisis, there's a subtle but surely not accidental emphasis on the importance of nations working together to solve problems that threaten all of humanity. Better yet, the movie consistently creates situations where resourceful thinking is a better survival tool than blasting one's way through a zombie horde. I'm not saying World War Z is An Inconvenient Truth, but with the voice of progressive activism represented by a badass, machete-wielding Brad Pitt instead of Jeffrey DeMunn in a Hawaiian shirt, a few zombie-loving kids might be inspired to learn a thing or two about the World Health Organization or the U.N., and that ain't bad.

Admittedly, the PG-13 rating and general lack of zombie carnage is noticeable, and the way the movie is carefully cut to pull its punches is distracting and sometimes irksome. On the other hand, what the movie lacks in viscera, it makes up for in intensity - there are action sequences in this, like the scene in Jerusalem or one set aboard a commercial airplane, that are among the most suspenseful and expertly staged I've seen in recent years (this doesn't make up for Monster's Ball, Marc Forster, but keep up the good work). And the movie doesn't shy away from its pulpy antecedents - I was pleasantly surprised that the word "zombie" is used frequently instead of "walkers" or some other dumb euphemism, and the movie isn't above classic B-movie scare tactics. I can't lie, I'd probably give the movie an extra half-star if it was rated R, but I also appreciate that this is a zombie movie I can share with my young, horror movie-obsessed son when it comes out on Blu-ray.

And, surprisingly, the redone third act works, focusing on a pretty clever solution to the problem and the emotional through-line of Pitt getting back to his family - as Damon Lindelof actually managed to save a screenplay, I hope the internet gives him a break for a while. The family stuff, in particular, rings very true, largely thanks to Mireille Enos as Gerry's wife Karen, who does a lot in her handful of scenes to build a convincing relationship with Pitt. And I also absolutely loved Daniella Kertesz as Segen, an Israeli solder who is a total badass even, or especially, after she's badly wounded. I can't explain why - we learn basically nothing about the character - but after one big action sequence, I was actively worried that Segen hadn't survived and very relieved when it was revealed that she did. Of course, a lot of the credit for World War Z working as well as it did goes to Pitt, who produced the movie and who stuck with it through its troubled production - if I hadn't read so beforehand, I'd have never guessed that the movie went through such drastic changes. And I have to assume Pitt is also largely responsible for the movie's humanitarian streak - the movie urges us to take care of each other and not lose hope, not just with zombies but whatever might be coming, which would feel trite if it weren't clear that its star and producer believes it. When most of the summer's movies have made a lot of noise but very little on their minds, it's refreshing to see a blockbuster that not only delivers on the spectacle but is actually about something that matters.

It's still there. It's still there. It's still there. It's gone.

(A warning: While I'm not going to get into overt spoilers, stop reading if you'd prefer to go into Before Midnight without knowing anything that happened to Jesse and Céline after Before Sunset faded to black.)

In my review of Before Sunset, I mentioned how I originally saw it and Before Sunrise when I was younger and less experienced in relationships and life than the characters, and I wondered what Before Midnight would tell me about what life might be like in a few years. So I was surprised to find that, though Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) are now in their early forties and I'm 29, I related to Before Midnight far more immediately than I expected. Perhaps it's true that, as some of my friends have suggested, I'm in the throes of an early mid-life crisis. Where the first film was about a perfect moment and the second was about whether it's possible to recapture the connection Jesse and Céline shared that night, Before Midnight is about the choice between fighting to preserve a romantic ideal of love alive through all of life's mundane and dramatic obstacles, loving a long-term relationship for what it is, or leaving. For anyone with a certain amount of relationship experience and general life baggage, Before Midnight will cut deep, but in the best way possible.

The movie begins at the end of a summer vacation in Greece, as Jesse says goodbye to Henry (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick), his son from his first marriage. Jesse did miss his plane nine years earlier, leaving his wife for Céline and eventually moving to Paris with her after the birth of their twin daughters. Director Richard Linklater and his two lead actors once again wrote the screenplay, and they smartly allow us to gradually fill in the important details of the past nine years, rather than forcing a lot of awkward exposition at the start. The characters have grown as we might have guessed, with Céline still the activist who feels despair at her self-described Sisyphean attempts to make the world a better place, and Jesse still the charming, if self-satisfied, romantic. It's true that, as the characters observed in the last film and again in this one, we basically stay the same throughout our lives; what has changed are the characters' circumstances, the responsibilities of raising two children and, in Céline's case, the struggle to balance her own self-identity with her roles as a wife and mother, not to mention the idealized version of her that Jesse has written into two novels. While most relationship movies rely on affairs or other contrivances to create drama, it's a pleasure to watch these two fully developed characters grapple with the simpler, more universal problem of continuing to learn how to grow together.

By now, it's clear that Hawke and Delpy know their characters inside and out, and their easy chemistry as Jesse and Céline flirt and bicker (often at the same time) is a joy. The physical familiarity between the two characters, the way they hold and sometimes lean on each other, rang true; this is the first of the films with a love scene, and it feels like they know each others' bodies well, which can't have been easy for the actors to fake. There's a scene involving nudity that is probably the least gratuitous nude scene I've ever seen; it perfectly gets the point in a relationship where partners can hang out in the buff in the most casual, unerotic way possible. The scene fits perfectly with the main question Linklater and his actors pose, namely, how do we keep a romance alive when we're no longer falling in love but are in the thick of it, when we think we know everything about the other person there is to know? There's a great scene where Céline and Jesse are having dinner with their fellow guests at an elderly writer's summer estate where each guest offers their perspective on love. Linklater gives equal voice to sentimental and pragmatic notions of love; the film repeatedly returns to the idea that with love, as with all of life, all things are uncertain and possibly fleeting. Existential doubt has rarely been presented with such warmth and generosity of spirit.

The movie builds to a protracted argument, which is triggered by Jesse's suggestion that he should live closer to his son but, as with most relationship arguments, is really about a dozen other things. I generally resist using this term, but it's one of the most realistic blowouts between a couple that I've ever seen, perfectly capturing how a person can express a profound truth about the relationship in one breath and make a completely off-base, defensive accusation in the next. It's often hilariously relatable - as I've been known to make a dramatic exit only to return a minute later, I cracked up both times Céline did. At the same time, it gets pretty brutal, largely because each actor is willing to strain our affection for these characters we've fallen in love with - it's painful to watch Céline purposefully insult Jesse to get a rise out of him, or to watch Jesse turn self-righteous in order to evade the hardest questions. At the same time, if one were to film any of us having an argument with our partners, I can't imagine the results would be flattering. Some of the reviews I read of Before Midnight in advance made it sound like the movie built towards Bad Timing levels of emotional violence, but it's not nearly that raw. Frankly, I feel bad for anyone who is that disturbed by the reality that couples, even great couples, sometimes have painful arguments; they've got some rough times ahead.

Though Linklater and his cast don't pull any punches about how hard it can be to make even the best relationships work, Before Midnight still ends on a note of hope. I suspect that these movies are the work of a director and two actors who, with each new chapter, try harder but continually fail at hiding the fact that they're unabashed romantics. These films are clear-eyed but never cynical. I suspect that we'll find Jesse and Céline still together in nine years, but even if they aren't, the movie suggests, that doesn't take anything away from what they've shared (and shared with us). And if this turns out to be the last chapter in the story, it ends on a perfect note. These characters once agreed to make the most of the one moment they'd share; now, having built a life together, they're left with the hope that they're still living in that moment.

Broke into the wrong goddamn rec room, didn't ya, you bastard!

When I asked my friends recently to vote for a horror series for me to review, Tremors (can one call it a trilogy?)* won by a decent margin. After rewatching it, I have to insist that, while Tremors is very good and one of the best giant monster movies, it's barely a horror movie. Perhaps it's because I watched movies like Alien and Jaws when I was very young, but even as a kid, when I saw Tremors after those movies, I never found it scary. I suspect that director Ron Underwood and screenwriters S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock weren't really trying to frighten audiences; for a movie about giant worms attacking the residents of a small desert town, Tremors is actually very lighthearted, even gentle.

What Tremors is is a Hawksian siege movie in the vein of Rio Bravo, El Dorado and Rio Lobo, movies about unlikely heroes banding together to protect their towns from outlaws; Tremors simply substitutes "Graboids," as one character dubs them, for outlaws. Our heroes are Earl (Fred Ward) and Val (Kevin Bacon), two hired hands who are attacked by the Graboids on a work site and try to warn, then protect, the nearby town of Perfection, Nevada. Earl and Val are the kind of male protagonists we don't see much of any more in studio movies, even genre movies; they're grizzled, vulgar, unshaven and a bit dim. If Tremors were made today, it might star The Rock and Vin Diesel, who, despite their impressive physiques, can't compare with a chainsmoking Fred Ward for pure manliness. This was the same year Ward played Henry Miller, making Ward's 1990 about as good a year as any actor has had. Bacon is good too, even though Tremors is one of the least useful tools in Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, unless you like to go through Reba McEntire just to make things interesting. But I digress. The point is, Val and Earl sleep in their truck and eat baloney and beans for breakfast, and they embody a long-absent and much-needed representation of masculinity in film - shit kickers who rise to the occasion.

I'm stretching here to get about a thousand words out of Tremors, but bear with me. John Carpenter also used the Rio Bravo template, most famously in Assault on Precinct 13 but also in genre movies like Prince of Darkness and, of course, his remake of Hawks' The Thing From Another World. Tremors owes a lot to Carpenter in the way that it blends a Western aesthetic with Creature Feature thrills (it also features Victor Wong, who was in Prince of Darkness and Big Trouble in Little China). Where Tremors departs from Carpenter is also why I don't consider it a horror movie. In Carpenter's movies, the progragonists isolated together against an external threat causes them to gradually (or, in the case of The Thing, rapidly) turn against each other. There's very little interpersonal conflict in the town of Perfection, Nevada, even after the shit hits the fan. Everybody cooperates on plans to defeat the Graboids and escape, and unlike, say, the characters in Night of the Living Dead, nobody is jockeying for alpha male status. In another movie, the survivalist gun nuts played by McEntire and Michael Gross would be in conflict with the other characters, but aside from some mild teasing and one brief standoff between Gross and Bacon, everybody gets along famously. It seems antithetical to the entire history of post-1960s horror movies to not use that setup and, especially, two very conservative supporting characters to interject sociopolitical subtext into the movie. Underwood doesn't seem to have any interest in that; indeed, Tremors seems to be completely free of subtext. The Graboids represent Graboids.

If that weren't reason enough to not classify Tremors as a horror movie, there's the also the very low body count to consider - only one of the main characters is killed, along with a handful of peripheral characters in the first 20 minutes. While a movie like Jaws, even after countless viewings, can still make my heart race from Chief Brody just barely defeating the shark in the nick of time, there's very little suspense as to whether Earl, Val and the rest of Perfection will defeat the Graboids - at one pont, Val actually punches one in the face. The filmmakers clearly didn't have any desire to wring suspense out of the possible deaths of its characters.

However, they do clearly have a blast showing off their huge, animatronic sandworm effects, and even 23 years later, the Graboids still look pretty slick. The effects team included two of KNB's co-founders, Howard Berger and Robert Kurtzman, and the creatures were designed by Tom Woodruff and Alec Gillis, who worked on Aliens and all of the subsequent movies in that series. Their work on Tremors, which was released a year before T2 and the practical-to-CGI paradigm shift, represents one of the last great all-practical productions. Both the large Graboids and the smaller heads that emerge, like the xenomorph, from the creatures' gaping maws are surprisingly believable - amazing how helpful dirt and K-Y Jelly are in selling a creature effect. While Tremors was a throwback even in 1990, its low-key pleasures are even easier to appreciate today, as the "bigger = better" mentality dominates megabudget popcorn movies more than ever. What Tremors lacks in scale, it makes up for tenfold in character. Replayed constantly on cable in the early '90s, it's a nostalgia staple for many, many people my age; luckily, unlike too many of the movies we loved as kids, Tremors holds up.

*I've learned that Tremors cannot be called a trilogy because of the existence of Tremors 4, which I was not aware of until now. God help me.

Someone's living in our boat.

The moment I knew I loved Mud happens about a half hour into the movie, when 14-year-old protagonist Ellis (Tye Sheridan) sneaks away to the island hideout of the titular escaped convict (Matthew McConaughey) he's been assisting in the middle of the night. Sitting by a campfire, eating the canned franks and beans Ellis brought for Mud, Ellis mentions that his parents might be getting divorced. "I'm sorry to hear that," Mud responds, with enough real regret in his voice that I realized he wasn't just relying on Ellis for help but had quickly grown to care about the boy. It's a simple moment, written and acted perfectly, that made me feel like I'd known and cared about these characters for my entire life.

Writer/director Jeff Nichols' follow-up to Take Shelter, one of the best horror movies of recent years, is a southern Gothic that, as my friend Jason Alley pointed out, is a great coming-of-age tale in the vein of To Kill a Mockingbird and Stand by Me. Set in rural Arkansas, the story is told from the point of view of Ellis and his best friend, Neckbone (Jacob Lofland). Neckbone lives in a trailer with his uncle Galen (Michael Shannon), and Ellis lives on the river with his parents (Ray McKinnon and Sarah Paulson). When Ellis and Neckbone discover Mud hiding out in a boat lodged in a tree, it gives Ellis the opportunity to be a part of a romantic adventure, helping Mud reunite with his beloved Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), and proves a welcome distraction from the huge changes happening in his life and the looming threat of adulthood and the complications of adult relationships. With a largely embellished backstory and an escape plan straight out of Twain, Mud is essentially a kid in a lot of ways, and it's suggested that he sees himself in Ellis' idealism and chivalrous nature. But as the story unfolds, both characters are forced to face the harder realities of life and growing up.

I'd rather not say too much about how this occurs, not because Mud is full of plot twists but because it unfolds in such a remarkable way, seeming relaxed, almost folksy before revealing itself to contain unexpected depths. Nichols reveals worlds about his characters through subtle details - take, for instance, the many punk flyers plastered on the walls of Galen and Neckbone's trailer, advertising bands that were big when Galen was in his twenties. Then we remember Neckbone wearing a worn, ripped Fugazi shirt at the beginning of the film, and we understand everything about Galen, his life before he became responsible for Neckbone, and his obvious affection for the boy. Nichols' understated but remarkably assured screenplay takes its time establishing its characters and a sense of place, allowing information like how, for instance, a quiet old man who lives across the river (Sam Shepard) fits into the story. Moments like Ellis' first infatuation - and his first heartbreak - have a subtle but universal emotional impact.

Nichols' direction reminds, alternately, of the sense of wonder in '70s Spielberg and Terrence Malick if he were still interested in classical narrative. There are moments in Mud that felt so perfect, so full of warmth and love for these characters and their dreams, that I was practically hugging myself. By the final, beautiful shot, I felt positively euphoric. Other than Jason raving about the movie and its high score on Rotten Tomatoes, I had no particular expectations for Mud going in (between this and Inglourious Basterds, I've decided that Cannes buzz is useless). I'm glad it was that way; as the story, especially in the last third, took turns that I never expected, I found myself greatful to be in the hands of a great storyteller - after this and Take Shelter, it's clear that Nichols should be considered one of the best of the newest generation of filmmakers. If Mud is playing near you, I strongly recommend checking it out - don't read too many reviews in advance, just go see it and let it works its magic on you. Oh, and McConaughey is great in this - it's been a pleasure to see him step up his game lately, and he has the potential to become one of the great leading men of his generation. And he even manages to keep his shirt on for about three quarters of the movie.

Never trust a Vulcan.

Is Star Trek Into Darkness the first franchise movie where an iconic character's identity is treated like a spoiler? While I've never been one to seek out spoilers, I knew the real identity of "John Harrison" (Benedict Cumberbatch) last week thanks to the IMDb, and I think I preferred it that way. When "Harrison" properly introduces himself to Captain Kirk, about half of my audience gasped, so I guess it works as a surprise (though he pretty much gives it away a few lines earlier). As effective as the scene is, though - and Cumberbatch does make a terrific "John Harrison" - it highlights a big problem I had with Star Trek Into Darkness. In exchange for a momentary surprise, the film trades the opportunity to further develop the movie's central villain and his motivations, which are awkwardly related to us after the fact; Cumberbatch is good enough that the character makes a strong impression anyway, but the script doesn't do him any favors. While Star Trek Into Darkness is consistently entertaining, it sometimes falters due to its emphasis on momentary effect over a coherent story and character logic and, more damagingly, fan service over originality.

Let me clarify, should this come off as too negative, that there's a lot to like about the film, particularly the returning cast. The movie's great opening sequence opens with a chase in progress, as Kirk (Chris Pine) and Bones (Karl Urban) are being chased by the primitive inhabitants of a planet covered with brilliant red foliage while Spock (Zachary Quinto) finds himself stranded in an erupting volcano. Within a few minutes, we've been reintroduced to all of the principal cast, and it feels like no time has been lost at all. With the excellent first movie having gotten the task of establishing these new actors in their familiar roles, the cast is able to have more fun this time around - there's an obvious ease in Bones' griping or Spock and Uhura's (Zoe Saldana) bickering that make these characters feel fully lived-in, and it's a pleasure to watch them play off each other. J.J. Abrams' direction is assured, and while his lens flares have become an easy target, I like them and his aesthetic sensibility - he strikes a balance between fantasy and verisimilitude that's a great fit for Star Trek. And the movie is a delight to look at, thanks to the wonderfully detailed Enterprise sets and excellent visual effects; the ribbons of blue light the Enterprise leaves in its wake have never looked better. I highly recommend seeing it in IMAX or, if you don't live near an IMAX theater, on the biggest screen possible.

Unfortunately, the script by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Damon Lindelof can't quite support the story's huge canvas; worse, it often doesn't really feel like Star Trek. I don't say that as a Trekkie or because I think there's only one right way to approach Star Trek. But the film's attempt to continue the series' traditions of plotlines with contemporary resonance stumbles here; echoes of drone warfare are interesting but quickly discarded in favor of nonstop action, which has the effect of making the movie's frequent allusions to 9/11 disturbingly shallow. The plot's incorporation of a corrupt Starfleet admiral (Peter Weller) who is responsible for creating the villain is a clear attempt to mirror our ethically murky political climate, but it comes at the expense of a future that, as usually depicted in Star Trek, represents the fulfillment of our highest ideals. There are several moments when Kirk and his crew kill villainous or even mildly adversarial characters when other obvious solutions were available; it's a huge contradiction of the characters as we've come to know and love them. While I don't expect Star Trek Into Darkness to go full Next Generation and have characters engage in lengthy philosophical debates, I have to admit that when Scotty (Simon Pegg) complained that the Enterprise's mission is exploration, not combat, I couldn't have agreed with him more.

It's true that the previous Star Trek also emphasized action over ideas, but that one worked better for me because of moments like the moving opening sequence and the scenes exploring Spock's human side. It had a genuine sense of wonder, and the time-travel plot left the series open to exploring fresh new stories and opportunities to get to know these characters better. On this basis, I was ready, for most of its runtime, to forgive Star Trek Into Darkness for not quite being the Trek I know and love. Then the movie reaches its climax, an explicit reworking of the iconic, devastating ending of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The movie spends 90% of its running time asserting itself as a more action-packed, Star Wars-flavored version of Star Trek, then shamelessly mines the series' previous high point in an attempt at borrowed emotions. Pine and Quinto are good enough that the moment is kind of moving, but reusing specific images and lines of dialogue in a slightly different context only serves to remind us what a superior job the earlier film did of building their relationship. In Star Trek II, the ending feels like the tragically logical place the movie had been headed all along, both in terms of story logic and thematically. Here, the ending is about nothing except exploiting our affection for the earlier, better movie. Worse, any possible emotional impact is immediately dulled by a lame plot device that undoes in five minutes what the original series took an entire other film to resolve. It's a dumbed-down, chickenshit move - Abrams is often referred to as "the next Spielberg," and as far as lame cop-out endings go, he's already far surpassed Spielberg's entire filmography.

Star Trek Into Darkness is still worth seeing for the many things it does right, but its missteps are surprising and very disappointing. Maybe they shouldn't be, given the fact that Abrams has repeatedly said he never liked Star Trek and wanted to make a movie for people like him. I don't want to minimize what Abrams achieved, breathing new life into a series that had grown stale and making a new Star Trek movie something worth getting excited about again. I just hope the next chapter really takes advantage of the freedom the first film established to tell new stories and take the Star Trek mythos into uncharted territory. Congrats, J.J., for succeeding in your stated goal of making Star Trek more like Star Wars. Now go make your goddamn Star Wars and, while you're at it, why not find a filmmaker who loves Star Trek to replace you?

Gatsby? What Gatsby?

I had two thoughts as I left a matinee of The Great Gatsby yesterday afternoon. The first was that it may be impossible to make a truly great adaptation of the book. While I easily preferred Baz Luhrmann's movie to the 1974 version, it has a few of the same problems - an elusive heroine that is more of a symbol than a character, occasional difficulty translating plot incidents that are witnessed from a distance by our narrator into cinematic terms - that suggest that the greatness of Fitzgerald's book is so specific to its medium that even a director taking the formally literary approach of Two English Girls or The Royal Tenenbaums would still only approximate the novel's impact. The second is that, imperfect though they may be, I'd love to see several different directors' takes on the material - the aspects of the book that are suited for film are rich with possibilities, and could be interpreted any number of ways to fascinating effect. Luhrmann's interpretation is pretty much exactly what a Baz Luhrmann version of The Great Gatsby - opulent, often gaudy, beautifully shot and boldly, proudly theatrical - and yet it understands Fitzgerald's book far more than I expected (or than the reviews suggested). It's sometimes exhilarating, sometimes maddening, always teetering on the edge of ridiculousness, and thoroughly entertaining.

As expected, Luhrmann treats narrator Nick Carraway's (Tobey Maguire) introduction to the nonstop party of Gatsby's world on Long Island with the same hyperactive style as Ewan McGregor's first visit to the Moulin Rouge (maybe just a notch less manic). The movie is great eye candy, bringing the empty surfaces of Fitzgerald's wild party to life with obvious glee as Luhrmann crowds the frame with flappers, jazz musicians and the many drunken recipients of Gatsby's hospitality. The movie really comes to life when Carraway finally meets the elusive Gatsby - DiCaprio is perfect in a very challenging role, balancing Gatz's charisma with his disarmingly naive longing for lost love Daisy (Carey Mulligan) and the character's more elusive qualities. Gatsby is a self-created man who, when given the chance, escaped the life he was born into and chose to become someone else (I realized, watching the film, how much Don Draper has in common with Gatsby). It's a balancing act for any actor, and DiCaprio does a fine, subtle job, making the character appealing yet remote and reminding me, at times, of David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth (another work strongly influenced by Gatsby).

Mulligan is lovely as Daisy, perhaps as good as any actress could be, but it occurred to me this time that Daisy is, to some extent, an unplayable character. If I remember correctly, her motives for the choices she makes are mostly guessed at by Carraway in the novel; she remains distant, a symbol for the elusive American dream that even a man with Gatsby's will and determination can only grasp at (Gatsby serves as the perfect critique of John Galt thirty years before Atlas Shrugged was published). One of Luhrmann's smartest decisions was to play the romance between Gatsby and Daisy for the human drama, rather than the metaphor (the mistake that kills the painfully solemn Jack Clayton film). It's romance done with Luhrmann's typical bold strokes, and it's not entirely successful. But I was pleasantly surprised when the director actually toned down his bombastic visuals in the movie's second half, as the story turned to the destruction of Gatsby's hopes. The conventional reading is that the many bad things that happen by the story's end are a cynical comment on the essential emptiness of the excesses of Gatsby and his world; where Luhrmann departs, fascinatingly, is to treat this as a tragedy, a loss of innocence for Gatsby as well as his narrator. The movie celebrates Gatsby's essential optimism - it's done a little clumsily, and I'm not sure I agree with the interpretation, but it's a valid reading of the text that Luhrmann is able to support, and I honestly prefer a unique approach to the book that makes me raise an eyebrow to a reiteration of musty received wisdom.

It's this idea that there's a "correct" way to adapt Gatsby that has showed up in many of the scolding reviews by critics that have taken it upon themselves to defend the novel's honor. I suspect that Fitzgerald, whose work was bracingly modern in 1925, would chuckle at this; one of the earliest writers to really understand the ephemeral, shifting nature of popular culture, it seems likely that he would have gotten a kick out of a Gatsby film scored by Jay-Z (he probably would have been tickled by the very idea of hip hop). This is not to say that Luhrmann's approach is entirely successful, or that one is wrong to dislike it. The framing device of having Carraway telling the story as a novel he's writing while recovering from alcoholism in an institution, aside from the lovely effect of typewritten words literally floating across the screen, doesn't really work at all, and Tobey Maguire's performance - not bad, but not very interesting and punctuated by Maguire-isms - doesn't help (thankfully, the supporting cast is terrific, particularly Joel Edgerton as Tom and Elizabeth Debicki as Jordan Baker). And I wish Luhrmann had taken a little more time on the aftermath of the story, the wreckage of Gatsby's grandiose illusions (though, as the movie runs 140 minutes already, I can understand the impulse to wrap it up).

That said, I admire Luhrmann for always swinging for the fences. Usually, the result is either terrific (Moulin Rouge) or very bad (Australia), with very little room in between. While Gatsby, surprisingly, is at neither extreme, I imagine that, in the long run, it will prove more divisive; it's one of those movies that is bound to gain devoted fans to match its detractors. As for me, I'm thankful for the movie for one of DiCaprio's best performances, for the times I'll rewatch this on Blu-ray to savor the eye candy, and for all the high school kids who will have a better time than I did on the day that their teachers wheel in the TV set from the library.

Sidenote: Though I usually find 3D annoying and pointless, I was glad I took a chance on it here. This is the fourth movie, out of the maybe ten or so I've seen in the format, that was really enhanced by the process (the others being Avatar, Jurassic Park and, of course, Piranha).

Satan! Come to us! We are ready!

I saw a matinee of The Lords of Salem after an overnight shift, and I'd been awake since the previous afternoon. This was the perfect way to watch it, I think, as much of the movie is from the point of view of a protagonist who spends much of the movie slipping in and out of nightmares until it's unclear where dreams end and reality begins. Her name is Heidi (Sherri Moon Zombie, in her strongest performance), a radio DJ and recovering addict who receives a strange record - a repetitive, atonal series of notes - that places her and any woman who hears it into a trance-like state. Heidi soon finds herself haunted by flashbacks to a 17th-century coven performing bizarre rituals and visions of demons. The story allows writer-director Rob Zombie to let loose with the hallucinatory imagery and inventive sequences he excels at, with the film's low budget meaning he's not constrained by the commercial compromises that came with directing two installments in the Halloween franchise. This is Zombie's best movie since The Devil's Rejects, and his most wildly imaginative - by the film's batshit climax, The Lords of Salem has less in common with any American horror movie in recent years than with European horror and its embrace of abstract dream logic.

It'd be easy to simply list the directors that are overt influences on Zombie and call it a day (for the record: Kubrick, Polanski, Carpenter, Argento, Fulci, Jodorowsky, Ken Russell and probably a dozen others I can't remember at the moment). But The Lords of Salem works as well as it does because of the way Zombie internalizes these influences and makes them his own. The many overt similarities between Heidi and Laurie Strode in Halloween II suggest that Zombie is preoccupied with female protagonists overcoming some sort of personal trauma, especially if they have dreads and decorate their bedrooms with vintage movie and rock posters. What makes Zombie unique is his sincere empathy for his characters; it's rare to find horror films that, even as the story finds his characters being stocked and terrified, have such a deep sense of sadness about their misfortune. The unrequited relationship between Heidi and a co-worker, Whitey (Jeff Daniel Phillips), feels authentic, and Whitey's understated concern for Heidi is unusually affecting for a horror movie. As crazy as Zombie's movies can get, they work because of his underrated ability to populate them with people, not human-like avatars who kill time while we wait for them to get naked and get killed. This is the second horror movie of the year, after Evil Dead, to draw a line between addiction and possession, and there's a moment near the end of the movie, a look between Heidi and Jeff as she closes a door, that is as affecting as anything I'm likely to see in more "serious" movies this year.

As it's a Rob Zombie movie, The Lords of Salem is populated with beloved genre character actors and B-movie stars - Judy Geeson, Patricia Quinn and Dee Wallace are a lot of fun as a modern-day coven, with Wallace's character drawing on her own real-life work as a self-described spiritual healer (between this and a similar character inspired by Wallace in The Innkeepers, it's interesting that she's left such a lasting impression on the horror directors she's worked with). Meg Foster is also, um, memorable and very creepy as the head of the 17th-century coven. Zombie's tendency for occasionally awkward dialogue and broad comic relief remains, but overall, The Lords of Salem is surprisingly mature and restrained. Zombie has continued to develop his talent for mining tension out of negative space and building suspense in the eerily quiet, still moments between scares. And though most of the movie was shot on sets, the exterior shots filmed in Salem do as great a job as any movie I've seen of capturing the uniquely chilly, eerie atmosphere of New England in the fall.

There are scares in The Lords of Salem that are as subtle as anything in Rosemary's Baby or The Tenant, including one instant classic where Zombie plants a terrifying detail in the frame, waiting for us to notice it. It's a very effective slow burn that builds to a completely insane climax - without spoiling anything, it reminds more than anything of William Hurt's hallucinations in Altered States. The Lords of Salem is the second movie this year, after Spring Breakers, where it seemed completely unbelievable that I was watching it in a multiplex - I can't imagine this movie playing well with a Friday-night teenage crowd, and even fans of Zombie's other movies might be baffled by it. But for horror fans who get excited about the genre's wildest possibilities, The Lords of Salem is well worth checking out.

Sidenote: Horror fans have poked a lot of fun at Zombie's tendency to let his camera linger on his wife's body in various stages of undress. But isn't it sort of sweet, after five movies and years of marriage, that his wife's butt is still one of his favorite subjects? I bet they're a great couple.

What is this love that loves us?

To the Wonder's haunting, beautiful opening scenes follow the film's lovers Neil (Ben Affleck) and Marina (Olga Kurylenko) as they visit Mont Saint-Michel. The shots of Neil and Marina exploring the eighth-century architecture and playing on the soft, almost rubbery beach as the water creeps in capture the heady, ephemeral feeling of the early stages of a romance as clearly as any movie I can remember. From these early scenes, it's clear that Terrence Malick is pushing the abstract, roaming narrative approach he's become known for further than he ever has, which gives them the bittersweet quality of a fond, fleeting memory. Almost as soon as we've been introduced to Neil, Marina and her daughter Tatiana (Tatiana Chiline), the film abruptly moves to Oklahoma, where Neil has brought Marina and Tatiana to live with him. Malick follows the ebbs and flows of Neil and Marina's romance with this same elliptical, poetic style; it's a romance on a cosmological scale, a representation for Malick of our (often strained) relationship with the infinite. Though the scale of the drama is as intimate as Malick has ever attempted, it's characteristically ambitious, both formally and thematically; the result is uneven and often maddening, but fascinating nonetheless.

This is Malick's first film set entirely in the present, and the scarce biographical detail about Malick's own life suggests that it's even more personal than The Tree of Life. That his previous movies were all period pieces made them a clearer fit for the prism of memory that the director is increasingly drawn to exploring. It's jarring, in a pleasant way, to see mundane locations like a Sonic drive-in or a grocery store through Malick's eyes. As always, Malick's camera is very busy, circling the actors, peering out of windows and turning away from the action to catch a flower or rainwater flowing over leaves into a sewer grate (cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki has become Malick's most important collaborator). As others have noted, Malick choreographs his actors like a dance - when Neil and Marina fight, we see them chase each other from one room for the next, and in its impressionistic way, the moment perfectly captures the roaming tension of a real-life argument between lovers. With the near-total absence of dialogue, we can understand the health of Neil and Marina's relationship in terms of how they move around and apart from one another. Kurylenko is particularly suited to Malick's approach, allowing her body and movement to become girlish during the early stages of infatuation, animalistic (at points, literally prowling on all fours) when Marina is lusting after Neil, and rigid as their relationship falters and she struggles to regain her sense of place. This probably sounds ridiculous, but Kurylenko deserves a lot of credit for risking ridiculousness and, within what must be a very limiting framework for an actor, creating a character we feel we know and understand.

As Neil and Marina separate, reconnect and grow apart again, Malick connects the love between two people to a very Christian concept of communion with the world around us, even as God's presence and love for us can seem very elusive. This is made explicit by Father Quintana (Javier Bardem), the local priest, who shows compassion to the poor, sick and drug-addicted people in his town even as he struggles with his own loneliness and distance from God. This aspect of the movie has been met with derisive chuckles by many of the film's reviewers, but I was actually fond of it; there are very few modern American filmmakers who deal with religious faith in a serious way, and I admire Malick's bravery in his earnest depiction of the world as beautiful and divine, even as he explores spiritual doubt. Less successful is the attempt, through Neil's work as an environmental engineer, of exploring our destructive impact on the earth; this was handled more successfully in The Thin Red Line, and it's brought up so cursorily here that it would have probably been better to leave it out.

The problem I had with parts of To the Wonder wasn't Malick's style, however, but the vague aspects of things he seems to have deliberately left out. While Kurylenko and Bardem do as much as they can with the little character detail they're given, Affleck and, especially, Rachel McAdams as an old flame Neil reconnects with when Marina returns to France for some time aren't given enough to work with, and their characters remain total ciphers. I don't mean to suggest Malick should have pursued a more conventional approach to character development, but I can't fully feel the intimacy I think he wants us to if I don't know who these people are, and it would be very possible for him to create distinct characters without sacrificing the qualities that make To the Wonder unique. A film like In the Mood For Love, for instance, is similarly elliptical and poetic, but by the film's end, we know who the two main characters are, and the result is emotionally devastating. Malick's own Badlands is also about relationships, but Kit and Holly are such indelible characters that the film moves us as both a story and a poem of images. By the end of To the Wonder, I had no idea who Neil was, though Affleck tries gamely. While there were certain scenes and moments that resonated with my own experiences with love, it was in a very broad sense; by reducing his characters to pure archetype, Malick has created a film that is aesthetically and intellectually interesting but emotionally remote, and I don't think that was his intention. If the movie is about how we know God by knowing one another, than why don't we ever get to know these people?

I'd known, going into the film, that Malick was also married to a French woman with a daughter who moved with him to Texas, that they eventually divorced, and that Malick later married a woman he'd known when he was younger. What I didn't know is that Malick's ex-wife died shortly before he would have begun the process of writing To the Wonder. I found this incredibly sad, and I immediately understood To the Wonder much more clearly; I occasionally wonder what it will feel like if my ex-wife passes away before I do, and I can understand why it would compel Malick to revisit the relationship. I wish that I had felt that urgency in the film; perhaps because the movie is so close to his own experiences, Malick remains elusive when I would have preferred him to be open, philosophical even in the moments when the movie badly needs a naked expression of feeling. Even the sex scenes are strangely cold - I don't mean to sound like a letch, but if you're going to have your attractive female leads disrobe, to drain the moments of any eroticism seems almost as exploitative as pornographic leering. For these reasons, To the Wonder was a surprising disappointment, at least when compared against Malick's other films. My problem wasn't Malick being Malick (I love all of his previous films), it was that the film badly needed its director, who sees the whole world with such incredible clarity, to look inward.

That said, To the Wonder is still very much worth seeing, as even when Malick stumbles a bit, he's still a master filmmaker. I realized, at one point, that I had no idea how long I'd been watching the film, and this is to Malick's credit - he makes films for us to lose ourselves in. The film frequently favors low-angle shots that keep the sun or moon in the frame, quietly reminding us that our own dramas are a small part of a much larger chain of being. We need films and directors who remind us of that, and more than anything, I admire Malick for continuing to march to his own beat knowing that the movies he makes aren't for everyone but inviting us to see things through his eyes all the same. A friend I saw the movie with remarked that "If Malick keeps this up, he's going to be in trouble." Perhaps, but I know that whatever trouble he gets himself into next, I'll be there on opening weekend.

There ain't nothin' in room 237. But you ain't got no business goin' in there anyway.

I'm the exact target audience for Room 237. The Shining is my favorite movie, and as I've written before, even after watching the movie countless times over the years and absorbing as much criticism and information about the making of the film as I possibly can, I still find surprising new details every time I revisit it. It's been gratifying to see the film's stature grow over the years - I remember thinking, from the two-star reviews I'd find in TV listings and video guides back in the early '90s, that it was generally considered a bad movie. The only positive recommendations I knew of were my mom's and a reference to Danny's imaginary friend Tony in the "Weird" Al Yankovic vehicle UHF. Thanks to the internet, The Shining found the same validation as many other great movies with mixed receptions have, as fans consolidated and began to share impressions and theories about the film.

In recent years, Toy Story 3 director Lee Unkrich has hosted a treasure trove of Shining-related ephemera at The Overlook Hotel, and Movie Geeks United devoted a long episode (part of their Kubrick Series) to the making of and various theories - both insightful and charmingly bonkers - about The Shining. It's those more offbeat theories that are the subject of Room 237, which eschews talking heads in favor of audio-only interviews of several devotees of the film sharing their interpretations of its meaning. These interviews are illustrated by clips from The Shining, other Kubrick films and movies by other filmmakers - footage of the cinema in Lamberto Bava's Demons, for instance, is used repeatedly when subjects talk about the theatrical experience. The film is one of the video essays that have become a popular form of criticism in recent years, with Red Letter Media's Plinkett reviews and the more serious essays by Matt Zoller Seitz and others at Press Play being two great, very different examples of the form. Room 237 director Rodney Ascher's approach to the video essay is particularly sophisticated, placing The Shining in multiple contexts so that the film is seemingly engaged in a dialogue with itself, with its fans, with its director's larger body of work and with the medium in general. Not only is it an incredibly fun and sometimes uncanny approach to its subject - I told my girlfriend, about a half hour in, "This is what the inside of my brain looks like" - but it's a brilliant visualization of the way that a relationship between a movie and its fans can be a living, evolving thing.

As for the theories themselves, it's true that some are quite silly - I don't think Bill Watson has a boner in that one shot, the poster on the wall is clearly a skier and not a minotaur, I don't see Kubrick's face in a cloud, and I'm very confident that the movie isn't Kubrick's admission that he helped fake the Apollo 11 moon landing, because the moon landing really happened. It's not important to be persuaded by these theories, though, as the movie is neither claiming they're credible nor making fun of them. Some have complained that Room 237 trivializes film criticism by presenting credible film analysis, such as Bill Blakemore's reading of the film as a comment on the genocide of Native Americans, side by side with conspiracy theories. But I don't think the movie is about "film criticism" as much as it is about how a work of art can inspire any of us to become lost in its mysteries.

Also, some of the interpretations presented here actually are quite insightful - while I don't think The Shining is a literal cryptogram about Native Americans or the Holocaust, it's clearly a movie about how we're haunted by our past sins, not just personally but in a broader cultural sense. Maybe not every Calumet can or German typewriter is a direct comment on this, but it's definitely a movie with multiple layers of meaning. When one narrator points out the frighteningly illogical course of Danny Torrance's rides through the Overlook's hotels on his Big Wheel, with Ascher mapping his route onscreen, it's difficult to reject the sort of dream logic that Kubrick was probably playing with. Perhaps, as another narrator suggests, the movie's many symbols, symmetries and paradoxes are the work of a bored genius. In any case, the thing that resonated with me most deeply was the insistence that Kubrick, who famously favored wide angle, deep focus shots, did so because he wanted every detail of the production design to register. It strikes me as a solid metric of a great director, one that communicates meaning not just with the subject of a shot but with every seemingly peripheral detail.

As I wrote earlier, I'm obviously predisposed to getting a kick out of this stuff - the use of the same sans-serif font, the white-on-black title cards punctuating the different sections of the film, and the quotations of Wendy Carlos' version of "Dies Irae" in William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes' score filled me with geeky joy. But while Room 237 is a treat for fans of The Shining, it should also be a lot of fun for anyone who has been accused of overthinking a movie (or book, or album) they love. It's a fascinating, highly entertaining valentine to cinephilia and the ways that the things we love end up defining us.

Nobody's ever gonna live in our house!

 This is my contribution to this year's White Elephant Blogathon.

One of the most interesting developments in the film industry during the drive-in era was the proliferation of regional independent and exploitation filmmakers. The most famous of these is George A. Romero - the spiffy new Monroeville Mall in Dawn of the Dead and the decaying neighborhoods in Martin are a large part of what makes them memorable. Among the most successful of the regional filmmakers was Charles B. Pierce, the head of a Texarkana ad agency who made his directorial debut with The Legend of Boggy Creek, a mockumentary about a sasquatch-like beast who prowls the Arkansas wilderness. Boggy Creek grossed over $20 million in the early 1970s, and the directors of The Blair Witch Project cited it as an influence. Both Boggy Creek and Pierce's third film, The Town That Dreaded Sundown, have very effective fright scenes, with Pierce's lack of experience in Hollywood working for the films - they're homemade movies that don't play according our expectations, and without the security of formula, we dread what could happen next. In both films, the payoff isn't as effective as that early sense of foreboding; the pacing and tone are uneven, and the awkward attempts at comic relief are often wince-inducing. The Evictors, Pierce's third and final horror movie, has a much more assured tone; in its own unassuming way, it's very effective.

The film opens with a sepia-toned prologue showing a bloody raid on an isolated farmhouse whose owners have killed several people. Cut ahead to 1942, when a young couple (Jessica Harper and Michael Parks) move into the house. What follows is a straightforward southern Gothic, as locals try to warn the couple of the house's violent history - subsequent owners have all died under mysterious circumstances, naturally - and Harper is soon tormented by a mysterious stalker. It's a simple story, but Pierce does a great job of staging the bloody flashbacks and present-day scenes of peripheral characters dispatched by the unseen villain in a tense, effectively suggestive way. As my friend Greg pointed out in his Letterboxd review, Pierce knew how to get as much atmosphere as possible out of the use of locations and natural light - Greg compares the cinematography to the films of Terrence Malick, and after revisiting Badlands the other night, I can see the resemblance. The Evictors also benefits from the presence of Harper, who doesn't have a lot to do for much of the film but, when it's time for her character to be terrorized, has the same vulnerable, almost porcelain quality that made her performance in Suspiria so effective. And while Michael Parks is absent for much of the film, it's a hoot to see him as a young man, and I appreciated that Pierce skipped the obligatory scene where the husband tells the frightened wife that she's just imagining things.

Once the plot reveals what's really going on, The Evictors does deflate a bit. The film has the suggestion of a supernatural menace that made me hope for a Deadly Blessing-like "wtf?" ending, but the payoff is easily guessed from the outset and not very interesting. The film does end with one final twist that makes absolutely no sense, but I must admit that I did get a kick out of its almost defiant incomprehensibility. Though the ending of The Evictors is a bit of a letdown, it's a pleasure getting there; unavailable on DVD for many years (it's on Netflix Instant and getting a release as an extra on Scream Factory's upcoming The Town That Dreaded Sundown disc), it's a mostly forgotten but likeable little sleeper that is also a welcome reminder of the idiosyncratic gems that served as the B-features on many a drive-in double bill. I've been lucky in the White Elephant Blog-a-Thons these past few years, in that I keep getting genuinely good movies that are new to me; Paul, I know these things are chosen at random, but I'm probably due for a stinker.

Top 10: 2012

Steven Soderbergh, discussing his (hopefully temporary) retirement in an interview with Vulture, commented that "I just don't think movies matter as much any more, culturally," observing that the audience for original content aimed at adults has largely moved to television. Quentin Tarantino has also repeatedly discussed his plans to retire, citing the industry's switch to digital projection as "not what I signed up for." Paul Schrader has repeatedly referred to the "post theatrical era" in interviews for his upcoming movie The Canyons, a microbudgeted thriller that relied on crowdsourcing for financing and to assemble much of its crew. Whether the traditional moviegoing experience or the cultural importance of film is dead or dying remains to be seen - in Soderbergh's case, his comments reveal more about him than they do about the medium - but it's clear that the massive transition to digital production and exhibition, coupled with the ever-multiplying number of distribution channels, will effect film culture and history in ways that none of us can quite predict yet.

The future is already here; the last movie I saw projected on film was The Master, appropriately enough. Before that, I saw a few movies - Prometheus and The Expendables 2 - projected on film over the summer at a local multiplex. The sound was muddy and the prints were already a mess after a few days. It was clear that the theater wasn't even trying anymore. It has since switched over to digital, as did the art house theater where I worked as a projectionist for eight years (thankfully, they've kept their 35mm projectors). I loved that job, but had I known I was literally witnessing the end of the era, I would have spent more time rewatching and appreciating every print and less time farting around on the internet between reel changes.

We're in the midst of a paradigm shift, and just as the greater national (global?) paradigm shift (coupled with a particularly divisive election year) have made us more prone to defining ourselves by our differences, our varying tastes and pop cultural proclivities have also become more heated, in both trivial and unsettling ways.  Shortly before The Avengers' record-setting opening, I tried to explain in detail to a friend who had implied that my lack of excitement for the film was pretentious that I couldn't get excited for what was, at its heart, an elaborate act of corporate synergy. His response was "So you're more of a DC guy." It's not a new thing for geek culture to be contentious, but as once-marginal genres and properties are, more than ever, dominating the box office and the cultural discussion, the bullies became more vocal. A movie like Prometheus could go from the rabidly anticipated film of the year, every detail of every trailer analyzed in minute detail, to a completely picked-apart carcass that one would be ridiculed for liking by the end of its opening weekend. "Did you see the Red Letter Media review?" "Did you see the 'How Prometheus Should Have Ended' video?" I mention Prometheus not because it isn't a flawed film, but because no movie better represents the triumph of left-brained thinking in contextualizing popular art. A chorus of voices demanding to know what Lard-Ass did after the pie eating contest.

And then there was The Dark Knight Rises, a movie I like very much but is no fun to talk about, as it means aligning myself with the bullies who told any critic who dared not praise a movie that is by no means beyond criticism that they should die violently. Then twelve people actually did die violently while watching The Dark Knight Rises, and most of us remembered how trivial any of this ultimately is and how lucky we are just to be able to go to a movie and live and be happy. Still, this remains a climate where all discussion about Django Unchained boils down to whether or not Tarantino overused the word "nigger" and countless op-ed pieces have been written about whether Zero Dark Thirty is saying torture is good or bad (after having had enough of the anti-Zero Dark Thirty pieces, I joked to my girlfriend, "That's it, I'm a Republican now"). Every film has a cultural context when it is released that it both creates and is created for it; right now, we're letting that context be defined by the talking point generators and the quipsters, reducing everything down to whether a film is awesome or sucks, whether it's liberal or conservative, whether the filmmaker reinforces or contradicts our biases. Whether this is truly the post theatrical era or something we don't have a name for yet, it seems more important than ever that film critics and real cinephiles do whatever we can to broaden the conversation.

And in the midst of all this were films that looked back into the (sometimes recent) past to discover what our history can teach us about the present. Others looked into the future, realizing our anxieties about where we may be headed in frightening detail, yet also finding hope in unlikely places. At least one movie looked to the past and the future. Several of the best movies of the year were independent films, but the definition of independent films is changing - it can refer to someone like Megan Ellison investing tens of millions of her own fortune into ambitious, medium-budget films that would have been mid-level studio productions not long ago. And while I never deliberately adjust my list to ensure diversity, it makes me happy that, after an election that signaled that diversity is not just a growing but an essential component to where we're headed, my favorite movie of the year was directed by a woman. That's not why it's my favorite movie, but somehow it feels right this year.

It was a strong year for movies, and while I've never liked the idea of an "honorable mentions" list, I've decided to include my full ballot for the upcoming Muriel awards as a hat tip to some of the other excellent films released this year. I can't guarantee that you'll like any of the movies listed here, but they're all worth checking out, on the big screen or Netflix Instant or on TNT a few years from now. I don't think cinema is dying, but if I'm wrong, it's having one hell of a death rattle.

1. Zero Dark Thirty

I have to give Jen, my girlfriend, credit for pointing out something about Zero Dark Thirty that I haven't read in any review - its production history is like Fever Pitch, the Drew Barrymore/Jimmy Fallon rom com that was supposed to end with Drew and Jimmy breaking up and the Red Sox losing until the team's 2004 victory prompted a rewrite and a new happy ending provided by reality (not that I'm equating bin Laden's assassination with the Sox winning the series). Similarly, Zero Dark Thirty began as an existential thriller, like Zodiac, about the cost of the seemingly endless pursuit of Osama bin Laden until reality necessitated a drastic rewrite. Several people whose opinions I respect have speculated that the earlier version of Zero Dark Thirty may have been the more interesting film, but the film that director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal have made has hardly sacrificed narrative complexity or moral ambiguity - it's a difficult, often deliberately upsetting film that is honest about the emotional catharsis most of us felt upon hearing of bin Laden's death while also challenging our assumptions about what we sacrificed to get to that point and whether we can ever get it back. In her single-minded pursuit of bin Laden, Jessica Chastain's Maya is a surrogate for our national preoccupation with - revenge? justice? - acheiving closure through giving an ending to a story that has no real ending (it's in this way that the film most resembles Zodiac). Zero Dark Thirty is a brilliant procedural that also had more to say about this moment in time than any other film this year; I know that it's great, but I suspect that I'm still too close to it to fully understand why.

2. Looper

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the year - I thought it would be good, but I was blindsided by just how original and ultimately moving Rian Johnson's third feature is. Johnson's first film, Brick, is one of the strongest debuts in recent years, and it's exciting to see him bringing his talents to a bigger-budget sci-fi/action movie that is consistently tense, exciting, smart and is still clearly born from Johnson's idiosyncratic sensibility and philosophical preoccupations. The chase between Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis as a younger and older version of the same character is a great showcase for both actors; as with Moonrise Kingdom, Looper is also a fascinating exploration of the underlying world-weary sadness behind Willis' stoic appeal. The film stands alongside The Terminator and Back to the Future with its witty, sometimes grim exploration of the storytelling possibilities of time travel; it's both technically superb and capable of marvelling with a low-tech editing trick or a perfectly timed camera movement. But what makes Looper really special is the ingenious way that, after using the time-travel plot as an exploration of the often scary idea that we inherit the world our elders have left for us (or that we create for ourselves in our foolish youth), it reveals late in the film what it's really about (with one important detail established early on in a brilliantly off-handed bit of misdirection). The film is a brilliant inversion of the "What if you could kill Hitler?" question, carrying a hopeful (and earned) message about the ways that love, mercy and a single act of personal sacrifice can echo through the years. I was not expecting a violent action movie starring Bruce Willis to arrive at a place of authentic grace, and it was a pleasure getting there.

3. Django Unchained

Quentin Tarantino's three most recent films all come back to Carol J. Clover's assertion that exploitation movies afford their makers the opportunity for a more honest and direct examination of racism, sexism and our ugly history. Tarantino is clearly unconcerned with questions of good taste, and yet for all their blood and  pulp, his movies have a consistent (if cockeyed) sense of moral responsibility. In Django Unchained, the scenes involving plantation owners' violent exploitation of their slaves are brutal, protracted and difficult to watch, but the scenes involving the masters' violent comeuppance are cartoonishly gory and, frankly, a hell of a lot of fun. I can understand why this is problematic for some, and maybe this is a sign that I'm not fully morally developed, but I hope black audiences enjoy the hell out of watching Django (Jamie Foxx) get paid to kill white people. Django Unchained isn't as perfect a film as Inglorious Basterds, but it's more emotionally satisfying and may be the one I revisit a bit more in the future. As with all of Tarantino's movies, it's gorgeously shot, has a great ensemble cast and is both a smart deconstruction of and a fully satisfying example of its genre. Unlike any of his previous films, it has not just a moral but a political dimension; Tarantino reveals himself as the kind of liberal I can relate to, not preoccupied with the vanity of philosophical perfectionism but possessing a real and urgent understanding of justice and equality. That he expresses it by literally burning our ugly past to the ground is the icing on the cake.

4. Lincoln

I was tempted to call Lincoln the MLK to Django's Malcolm X, but then, Steven Spielberg's film isn't really about slavery as much as the political process and the thorny, sometimes dubious means by which real and meaningful progress is achieved. Daniel Day-Lewis is amazing, but it would have been shocking if he phoned it in. It's Spielberg who is the big surprise here - while this is clearly his film, but aesthetically and in its generosity towards its characters, it's not quite the earnest, teary-eyed biopic I would have expected (frankly, I was fearing Amistad 2). Working from a brilliant Tony Kushner script, Spielberg has made a film devoted to the slow, often frustrating process of passing the 14th Amendment, its moral the necessity of pragmatism and compromise. In other words, it's subject matter that could have been deadly dry, and I'm not exactly surprised that I was literally the only person under 50 in the audience when I saw the film. But when Lincoln inevitably becomes a mainstay in high school history classes, I think that its teen audience will be surprised by how funny, suspenseful and relateable it is; maybe it'll even keep them awake until the bell rings. I kid because I'm acutely aware that this is the squarest movie on my list, and one easily dismissed as calculated Oscar bait. But it really is so more than that, and I urge my fellow millennials to stop texting and listening to the hip hop for a little bit and give it a try.

5. Magic Mike

The most fun I had this year was watching this with a sold-out audience of riled-up women. Thanks to you, Mr. Soderbergh, the theatrical experience is not only alive and well, its panties are wet. The experience would have been a blast even if the movie was terrible, but it was surprisingly great, a deadpan comedy that recalls Shampoo in its mix of cheerful smut and sly social commentary. Channing Tatum is ridiculously likable, the dance sequences are a blast to watch, and I would happily watch a sequel that focuses entirely on Matthew McConaughey's character. That Magic Mike is so much fun but also smart and incredibly well-made is something of a marvel - audiences were able to hoot and holler at all of Tatum's moves without feeling bad about it in the morning. If Soderbergh is truly done with filmmaking, at least he's going out with a bang.

6. The Master

I got a bit burnt out on discussions of The Master, mostly because of their repetitive nature ("Who is the real master here? Is Amy Adams the real master?") but also because, after seeing it, I was just the slightest bit let down. You can feel in what I wrote about the film back in September that I'm taking a "Maybe it was me?" attitude, but after talking with friends that had the same reaction, I'm not so sure. For 80% of the movie, I was convinced that Anderson had made another masterpiece; then it gets to London and "Slow Boat to China," and I couldn't help feeling like this wasn't exactly Daniel Plainview screaming "I told you I would eat you!!" at Eli Sunday. I'm still a bit baffled by the film, but I'm very eager now to revisit it; I still suspect that, like Kubrick's later films, The Master's seeming vagueness could prove to have dimensions I haven't considered on repeat viewings. If I discover the film supports my suspicion/hope that its actually about how, as I wrote in September, pussy is the only thing worth believing in, than it IS a masterpiece. But maybe not. All of this is a roundabout way of explaining why The Master isn't higher on my list, as it also boasts three of the strongest performances of the year, is technically astounding, contains scenes that are as great as anything Anderson has written and directed, and is so clearly and completely the work of a filmmaker committed to realizing his singular vision. The Master is a movie I have to live with longer before I'm sure how I feel about it, but even if it turns out to be not as great as the sum of its parts, its imperfections are more fascinating than any number of movies that aim straight for the middle and succeed.

7. The Dark Knight Rises

The final chapter in Christopher Nolan's trilogy is actually better than its predecessor in one important way - the action sequences are more fluidly shot and edited. But it was probably impossible to replicate the astonishing impact Heath Ledger's performance had on the previous film, and Nolan was wise not to try. That said, it's a thematically and emotionally satisfying resolution to the trilogy - it's easy, at this point, to forget just how radical Nolan's approach to Batman really is, and the greatest pleasure of The Dark Knight Rises is seeing the payoff thematic and narrative threads set up in Batman Begins that we didn't realize at the time. It's also the most fun of the three films - after the surprising brutality of The Dark Knight, it's fun to watch Nolan introduce elements of James Bond and Hitchcock's lighter capers and even a little romance into the film. Whoever reboots the franchise next would be wise to take it in a more comic book-y direction, as these films have probably taken a serious take on Batman as far as it can go. But I'm so glad we'll always have these three films - as far as big-budget franchises go, none match Nolan's films in terms of ambition and intellectual depth while still sticking the landing.

8. Holy Motors

Holy Motors is an interesting example of whether or not one is committing the intentional fallacy by interpreting it using biographical information about its director. Although the movie ends with a photo of Leos Carax's wife, Katerina Golubeva, who passed away last year, I didn't know who it was until I read it after the film, and the movie doesn't explicitly identify her. So while I was watching the movie, I read it as a sort of requiem for analog filmmaking; on reflection, it's also a literal act of mourning, with Carax making himself inseperable from his medium, reflecting on its mortality as a way of acknowledging his own. Either way, for a film that is about endings, it's surprisingly exuberant, clearly intoxicated with the playful possibilities of moviemaking. Its protagonist, Oscar (Denis Lavant), who works his way through a variety of surreal, sometimes ridiculous scenarios over the course of the day, is clearly tired of his work. And yet a movie that contains a mid-movie performance by a chorus of accordions just because it can reflects no apparent resignation on the part of its director. It's one of the most pleasurable expressions ever of an artist raging against the dying of the light.

9. Cloud Atlas

An unwieldy, cumbersome beast of a movie that threatens early on to turn into a complete disaster but is ultimately a beautiful and astonishingly original adaptation of David Mitchell's novel. What the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer have achieved is so unique not just because it weaves together multiple storylines - D.W. Griffith was doing that 100 years ago - but because the movie's themes of breaking down conventions and personal transformation are so clearly reflected in its form and the collaborative nature of its creation, both in its directorial threesome and the obvious commitment of its repertory cast. It's flawed and messy in a beautiful way, a movie that takes huge chances that are head-scratching in the moment but pay off beautifully.  It challenges our notions about narrative and form and what a movie should be in ways that are witty, lyrical and surprising. And it makes a passionate and intelligent case for the eternal soul, which I'm a sucker for. If most movies were half as ballsy as Cloud Atlas, we'd be immeasurably better off for it.

10. Silver Linings Playbook

After hearing about the premise of Silver Linings Playbook, I honestly didn't expect it to end up on this list. I'm very averse to movies about the power of love to cure mental illness, and the plot sounded like a mess - a dance contest? Really? Luckily, David O. Russell's adaptation of Matthew Quick's novel is, if not bluntly realistic, an honest and perceptive character study about mental illness; that it's also a sharp, sweet romantic comedy reminiscent of Billy Wilder, and that it succeeds at being both things, is something of a minor miracle. And the dance contest turned out to be a plot point that stems perfectly from the characters (aided by Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence's strong performances, and a great ensemble cast), rather than contrived device, that leads to a resolution that is sort of beautiful. This isn't a movie about love conquering bipolar disorder, it's a movie about two flawed people who care about each other enough for each to encourage the other to become healthier and stronger. I can see why it could be very grating for a lot of people, but it touched a lot of nerves in a good way - no movie this year made me feel as happy. I heard a critic on a podcast say recently that emotion can be an impediment to critical judgement, but I think that's only true if you don't trust your own emotions. Maybe I shouldn't. I don't know. This movie was so goddamn cute.


The rest of the ballot:

Best Lead Performance, Male 

1. Joaquin Phoenix, The Master

2. Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln
3. Jack Black, Bernie

4. Jamie Foxx, Django Unchained

5. Liam Neeson, The Grey

Best Lead Performance, Female 

1. Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty
2. Rachel Weisz, The Deep Blue Sea

3. Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook

4. Kara Hayward, Moonrise Kingdom

5. Sarah Paxton, The Innkeepers

Best Supporting Performance, Male 

1. Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master

2. Matthew McConaughey, Magic Mike
3. Christoph Waltz, Django Unchained

4. Michael Fassbender, Prometheus

5. Bruce Willis, Moonrise Kingdom

Best Supporting Performance, Female

1. Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables

2. Amy Adams, The Master
3. Doona Bae, Cloud Atlas

4. Shirley MacLaine, Bernie

5. Sarah Silverman, Wreck-It Ralph

Best Direction 

1. Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty

2. Rian Johnson, Looper

3. Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained

4. Steven Spielberg, Lincoln

5. Steven Soderbergh, Magic Mike

Best Screenplay (original or adapted)

1. Rian Johnson, Looper

2. Tony Kushner, Lincoln

3. Paul Thomas Anderson, The Master

4. Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained
5. Mark Boal, Zero Dark Thirty

Best Cinematography
 

 

1. Mihai Malaimare Jr., The Master

2. Robert Richardson, Django Unchained
3. Norm Li, Beyond the Black Rainbow

4. Dariusz Wolski, Prometheus

5. Roger Deakins, Skyfall

Best Editing 

1. William Goldenberg and Dylan Tichenor, Zero Dark Thirty

2. Bob Ducsay, Looper

3. Lee Smith, The Dark Knight Rises

4. Alexander Berner, Cloud Atlas

5. Jay Cassidy and Crispin Struthers, Silver Linings Playbook

Best Music (original, adapted, or compiled)

1. Reinhold Heil, Johnny Klimek and Tom Tykwer, Cloud Atlas

2. Jon Brion, ParaNorman

3. Howard Shore, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
4. Jeremy Schmidt, Beyond the Black Rainbow

5. Nathan Johnson, Looper

  

Best Cinematic Moment

 

1. Entr’acte, Holy Motors

2. 30 year montage, Looper

3. Emergency extraction, Prometheus

4. First processing, The Master

5. Skyjack, The Dark Knight Rises

6. “You lie to me and I hurt you,” Zero Dark Thirty

7. “I’ve Got a Name,” Django Unchained

8. The elevators open, The Cabin in the Woods

9. Dance contest, Silver Linings Playbook

10. “Fresher shit,” Magic Mike

Best Cinematic Breakthrough
(vague explanation:  a performer, filmmaker, or technician who made a notable debut in film, took his/her career to a higher level, or revealed unforeseen layers to his/her talent during the year 2012)

1. Panos Cosmatos, Beyond the Black Rainbow

2. Drew Goddard, The Cabin in the Woods

3. Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward, Moonrise Kingdom

4. Channing Tatum, Magic Mike

5. Quvenzhané Wallis, Beasts of the Southern Wild

Best Body of Work
(a performer, filmmaker, or technician who made superior contributions to multiple films released in calendar year 2012)

 

 
1. Megan Ellison (Lawless, The Master, Killing Them Softly, Zero Dark Thirty)

2. Matthew McConaughey (Bernie, Magic Mike, Killer Joe, The Paperboy)

3. Anne Hathaway (The Dark Knight Rises, Les Miserables)

4. Steven Soderbergh (Haywire, Magic Mike)

5. Joseph Gordon-Levitt (The Dark Knight Rises, Premium Rush, Looper, Lincoln)

Best Ensemble Performance
 

 1. Lincoln

2. Moonrise Kingdom

3. Django Unchained

4. Argo

5. Silver Linings Playbook