You’re probably reading this in hope of learning what the year in movies was like. Well, I’ll tell you: it was just like last year, only with different movies. In 2012 the big Oscar contenders included a fact-based political intrigue set in the late 70s (Argo), a period piece about slavery (Django Unchained), a screwball comedy about a mentally ill man and his wacky family (Silver Linings Playbook), and a historical drama set in the White House (Lincoln). In 2013 the big Oscar contenders include a fact-based political intrigue set in the late 70s (American Hustle), a period piece about slavery (12 Years a Slave), a screwball comedy about a mentally ill man and his wacky family (Nebraska), and a historical drama set in the White House (The Butler). When I asked my boss if we could just run the copy from 2012 and change the titles, she said that would be fine as long as we recashed our paychecks from last year. So here’s our new copy. —J.R. Jones
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3Neighboring Sounds In this brilliant debut feature, Brazilian writer-director Kleber Mendonca Filho weaves together numerous characters who live crammed together in a suburban, middle-class high-rise, though ultimately the building itself becomes the main character. His subject is not how these people relate to one another but how, for the sake of their own mental health, they try to block each other out, constructing a privacy for themselves that’s as shaky as a house of cards.
4A Touch of Sin Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke tells four stories about individuals driven to violence, yet his real subject is the economic violence visited upon them every day by a predatory capitalism. With an agenda like this, the movie might easily have turned into a heavy-handed thesis film, yet Jia focuses so intently on each of his four protagonists that his social argument accumulates slowly and silently. How much can a person take before he snaps? we wonder in each instance, until the question widens to include all of China, and the whole human race.
9The Missing Picture Like The Act of Killing above, this documentary by Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh deals with atrocities in southeast Asia, and like that film it’s unique. Panh uses archival footage, sound effects, voice-over narration, and meticulously hand-carved and -painted figurines to re-create his experiences in the late 70s as a victim of the Khmer Rouge, who destroyed his little village and forced him into an agricultural collective for four years. The movie screened only a handful of times at the Chicago International Film Festival, but expect a commercial release next year.
8Drug War Hong Kong director Johnnie To is a master at orchestrating action-movie plots; even in its quiet moments, this cops-and-robbers saga never flags. It’s grandly entertaining but also formally rich in its visual motifs, camera movements, and interconnected characters; no current Hollywood director works so fruitfully in the classic Hollywood tradition.
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