21 Grams
Adore
All the Real Girls
An Education
Art School Confidential
Blue Jasmine
Brave
Bully
Larry Clarke combined his fascination with the seemy (the seemiest!) hidden world of teenagers with a gripping plot involving murder, revenge, and cover-ups. It really shows us that what’s most frightening at a young age isn’t the drugs and sex and violence, but how quickly everything cann spiral into chaos.
Carnage
Dan on Real Life
Deja Vu
The Door in the Floor
Elephant
The Garden of Words
The Good Girl
Good Kill
Heaven
I’m Not There
In America
The International
The Interpreter
Killing Them Softly
Martha Marcy May Marlene
Mary & Max
A stone cold masterpiece. An animated classic (or it should be) that’s better than anything Disney or Pixar ever released—it’s that good. A grumpy old man (voiced by Philip Seymour Hoffman) becomes unlikely pen pals with a joyful but lonely and eccentric girl halfway around the world. An absolute love letter to finding connection in this world.
Matchstick Men
I’m normally not a big Ridley Scott fan but this one is really good. Takes the “girl dad”movie and combines it with a heist movie, then flips it on its head. Great watch.
Movie 43
Pacific Rim
Passengers
Perfume
Quills
Somehow Philip Kaufman made a sweet movie about the Marquis De Sade. It helps when Kate WInslet is there being all adorable in her bodices.
Rabbit Hole
Roger Dodger
The Rules of Attraction
This one proved that Roger Avary wasn’t talentless or an undeserving second fiddler to QT. Directed with real “give no fucks” verve and so very sharply written, it’s the funniest, darkest, truest campus comedy of all time.
Snatch
Wall to wall fun and looney tunes energy in live action cinematic fashion, the template for all crazy crime capers of the last 26 years. Brad Pitt has never been more unintelligibly charasmatic and cool.
Source Code
State and Main
Mamet does screwball with the best actors in the world. Hollywood descends on a small town in Vermont, where even the old codgers in the diner are ready with the wittiest bon mots you’ve ever heard. A delight.
Stone Reader
A documentary about trying to find a long lost author of a beloved novel. The best documentary about books, because it’s a total love letter to reading and the singular affect it has on us all.
Sucker Free City
Sunshine
Take This Waltz
Tape
The darkest movie (figuratively and literally) Linklater has ever made. An adaptation of a play that doesn’t leave a cramped hotel room with three of the finest actors around. Going down the rabbit hole with them as secret after secret gets revealed is a cover-your-eyes-but-also-can’t-turn-away experience.
thirteen
Tekkonkinkreet
Tenet
Tigerland
The world’s introduction to Colin Farrell is also one of the most intimate war movies ever made.
Upstream Color
Valkyrie
Vera Drake
A Very Long Engagement
I tried not to have any overlap with the Time list, but I’ve been beating the drum for this one for years. A postmodern version of the grand sweeping love stories of yore featuring separated couples who would do anything to get back to each other. Everything is a little over the top in this one, including the humor and entertainment factor, but the final scene hits as hard as any old weepie.
The Wind Rises
Wonder Boys
One of MIchael Douglas’s best performances—if not his best. He’s playing the best kind of writer/professor character: frazzled, in the middle of a divorce, working on an interminable manuscript, trying to help the only talented kid in his class while avoiding getting entangled with the class cutie played by Katie Holmes…and does it all with that oh-so-delightful weary aplomb we like to see from our middle-aged actors.
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