The Best Films of Summer 2013

A scene from the documentary The Act of Killing. 

Courtesy of Drafthouse Films.

THE BEST FILMS OF SUMMER 2013

By Joshua Handler

This summer I screened and reviewed around 70 movies.  Needless to say, it was a mixed bag.  This summer saw its fair share of terrible blockbusters (each summer they seem to get dumber and dumber) and stellar indies.  The only three mainstream films this summer that got above a 3-star rating were Elysium (review here), Star Trek Into Darkness (not reviewed), and You're Next (review).  This does not mean that I have a bias against mainstream films.  As you may have noticed, I have actually been reviewing more mainstream films, as I truly do like seeing them.  The lower ratings just indicate the poor quality of the movies.  This summer's selection of indies was remarkable.  There were quite a few that passed under the radar that really shouldn't have (Drug War and Fill the Void are just some of those movies).  The following films, I believe, epitomize independent cinema today.  They are a group of bold, provocative, and compelling films that are unlike any I've seen before.

More Honorable Mentions: Una Noche (review), Laurence Anyways (review), Much Ado About Nothing (review), Twenty Feet From Stardom (review), You're Next (review), Crystal Fairy (review).

Photo by Merrick Morton © 2013 Gravier Productions 

Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

Honorable Mention: Blue Jasmine (Dir. Woody Allen) – While this Allen film has an engrossing story, Blue Jasmine is Cate Blanchett’s show.  No performance has driven an entire film like this all year.  Again, Blue Jasmine features a strong story, but it is Blanchett’s performance that hits it out of the park.  She plays Jasmine, a woman who moves from her high life in New York to San Francisco to live with her working class sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins).  Blanchett is a powerhouse, perfectly capturing Jasmine’s mental decline.  She commands every frame and will certainly receive an Oscar nomination.  My review here.

Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

10. Drinking Buddies (Dir. Joe Swanberg) – This fully improvised beauty’s success belongs to its four actors: Olivia Wilde, Jake Johnson, Anna Kendrick, and Ron Livingston.  Each gives a performance so realistic that it was hard to believe that the film was a work of fiction.  Wilde is mesmerizing and so is Johnson.  Their easy chemistry drives the film, giving it a feeling of hanging out with old friends.  My review here.

Photo credit: Gabriela Cowperthwaite

9. Blackfish (Dir. Gabriela Cowperthwate) – This disturbing, eye-opening documentary will cause anyone who has ever been to Sea World to feel a massive amount of guilt.  Cowperthwaite’s doc made waves at Sundance this year, as it explores why Sea World’s killer whale Tilikum is responsible for the deaths of three people.  This is a passionate film that infuriated and horrified me.  My review here.

Photo courtesy of A24 Films

8. The Spectacular Now (Dir. James Ponsoldt) – The most honest film about high school that I have ever seen, The Spectacular Now is a sensitive piece of filmmaking with career-making performances by Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley who also have natural chemistry.  The screenplay, by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, is gutsy, as it tackles some tough issues facing teens, mainly alcoholism and dysfunctional families.  The screenplay, though, is subtle enough to not beat the audience over the head with morals and lessons, making it even more impressive and powerful.  This is John Hughes without the sentimentality.  My review here.

Photo courtesy of RADiUS-TWC

7. Cuite and the Boxer (Dir. Zachary Heinzerling) - A beautiful documentary about Ushio Shinohara, famous for his boxing painting, and his relationship with his wife, Noriko.  Winner of the Best Directing Award for Documentary at Sundance this year, this is a moving portrait of a complicated marriage that is insightful and often quite funny.  Cutie's larger themes are universal and meaningful, yet it is in the smaller moments that this movie really shines the most.

Photo courtesy of Focus Features

6. The World’s End (Dir. Edgar Wright) – The third part in Edgar Wright’s brilliant “Cornetto Trilogy” is the most energetic – and the most heartfelt.  An apocalyptic comedy unlike any other, this is the best comedy of the year thus far with stellar performances from Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Martin Freeman, Eddie Marsan, and Paddy Considine.  Inventive, bizarre, and pure fun.  What more could you ask for?  My review here.

Photo courtesy of Cohen Media Group

5. The Attack (Dir. Ziad Doueiri) – A devastating film that ends with an emotional gut punch, The Attack tells the story of an Arab surgeon living in Tel Aviv who slowly uncovers his wife’s secrets after a suicide bombing.  Ali Suliman’s performance is heart-wrenching, and are the cinematography and score are perfect matches to the beauty of Suliman's performance.  However, what truly distinguishes The Attack from other films about the horrors of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict is that it has a message of tolerance and peace.  A masterful, enlightened, and bleak film.  My review here.

4. The Hunt (Dir. Thomas Vinternberg) - A thought-provoking and frighteningly realistic psychological drama, The Hunt follows Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen in a performance that won him the Best Actor award at Cannes last year), a kindergarten teacher's aide who is falsely accused by one of his students of sexual abuse.  This accusation slowly begins to unravel Lucas' life.  Mikkelsen is incredible and Charlotte Bruus Christensen's cinematography is rich, but what makes this film so disturbing and effective is how realistic it is - the scenario presented in the film could happen to anyone.  The ending is unexpected and will stick in your mind for days.  My review here.

Courtesy of Cinedigm

3. Short Term 12 (Dir. Destin Daniel Cretton) – The American indie of the year, Short Term 12 is a heartbreaking, yet feel-good masterpiece about a young woman, Grace (Brie Larson), who lives with her boyfriend/co-worker, Mason (John Gallagher Jr.) and supervises a foster care facility for troubled teens.  As she helps them through their problems, she has to face her own.  Brie Larson pulls off an understated performance that is revealing and mysterious and John Gallagher Jr.’s brims with warmth and heart.  The supporting cast also gives devastating performances.  Cretton develops every character and never looks down on them.  He fills the film with small, yet powerful moments that resonated with me and have never left my mind.  Above all, though, what sets Short Term 12 apart from other films of its kind is its honesty.  My review here.

Photo by Despina Spyrou

Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

2. Before Midnight (Dir. Richard Linklater) – The finale (as of now) to one of the greatest motion picture trilogies in history, Before Midnight is a raw, melancholic, and funny look at Jesse and Celine (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, respectively) and their lives nine years after Before Sunset ended.  The acting is, as usual, stellar, as it never feels as if Delpy and Hawke are acting.  They have the best chemistry I’ve ever seen on film and their characters have to be the best-developed I’ve ever seen.  Watching each Before film is like dropping in on old friends.  Linklater’s direction is unobtrusive and he lets each scene play out as long as it needs to.  In short, this is a moving masterpiece and the finest hour of all involved.  My review here.

A scene from the documentary The Act of Killing. 

Courtesy of Drafthouse Films.

1. The Act of Killing (Dir. Joshua Oppenheimer) – The most unique and important film I’ve seen in years, Joshua Oppenheimer’s groundbreaking psychodoc follows Anwar Congo, a perpetrator of the ‘60s Indonesian genocide, and what happens to him when Oppenheimer challenges him to recreate his crimes in whatever film style/genre he chooses (i.e. noir, musical, etc.).  The Act of Killing was executive produced by Errol Morris and Werner Herzog and is way more than just a documentary.  It is a political statement, a social experiment, a psychological study, and is, to date, the best documentary I’ve ever seen and the most revealing film about human nature that I have ever seen.  Unforgettable.  Review coming soon.

SALINGER Review

Courtesy of The Weinstein Company

SALINGER

2013, 120 minutes

Rated PG-13 for disturbing war images, thematic elements and smoking

Review by Joshua Handler

Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of J.D. Salinger's famed novel, The Cather in the Rye, hates "phonies".  He would hate this movie.  While it is certainly evident that director/producer Shane Salerno is passionate about his subject, he has made a film so sensationalized, disrespectful, and cheap-looking that it feels like a bad fan documentary that one would find on YouTube stretched out to an eternal 120 minutes.

The film is a look into the life of author J.D. Salinger, a man as famous for writing Catcher as being reclusive.  As fascinating as some of the information is, the film itself seems to be more of an idolization of Salinger by a mega-fan than an investigation or biography by a true documentarian.

In Salinger, it is said that Salinger told someone that he was "not a counselor" or anything other than "a fiction writer".  Shane Salerno has done a disservice to J.D. Salinger by making a film that plays like a long tabloid article turned into a feature film.  Salinger is focused largely on exposing all of Salinger's affairs with younger women and on uninteresting interviews with people who knew him.  The film has the feel of a flashy news segment with no integrity meant to draw in viewers more than report the news.  We don't get much closer to understanding Salinger than when we started.  It is possible to take everything in the film for fact, and much of it is probably true, but so much of it rings false due to the sensationalized style and the film's simplification of Salinger, an obviously complex man.

In addition to being a trashy film, Salinger is at least 100 minutes too long.  So much of it feels repetitive, as many images are used multiple times.  This is probably due to the lack of a substantial amount of photos and videos of Salinger that exist.  A clever filmmaker would have found a way around showing photos multiple times, but Salerno seemed to get lazy and just decided to use the same images over and over, making the film feel like a student slideshow.  Additionally, Salerno uses an actor to play Salinger in brief scenes in which Salinger is typing on a stage with images of his life in the background.  This makes the film feel cheap.  After about 1 hour of this nonsense, I had had more than enough, but the movie kept on going...and going...and going for another hour.  

I will say that some segments of the film are interesting, such as those parts where writer Joyce Maynard talks of her time living with Salinger, but this is a small section in a brutally long 2-hour film.  This film would have made a potentially interesting 20-minute short, but at 120 minutes, it is painful.

Overall, Salinger is a shameless documentary that is so phony and disrespectful that it is insulting to be categorized as a documentary in a category with films like Stories We Tell and The Act of Killing.  Salinger will likely play will with those obsessed with Salinger, but for everyone else, I advise that you stay away.

1.5/4

PASSION Review

Photo courtesy of EOne Films

PASSION

2013, 102 minutes

Rated R for sexual content, language and some violence

Review by Joshua Handler

There are some movies that are just terrible and are painful to sit through, there are some movies that are so terrible they're good, but there are also some other movies that are terrible yet not painful to sit through.  Brian De Palma's Passion falls in that latter category.  It is really awful in every respect, save for the cinematography by Almodóvar collaborator José Luis Alcaine, but unlike other horrid 2013 films like The Purge and Movie 43, Passion isn't a chore to sit through.  

Passion is a remake of Alain Corneau's final film Love Crime, and tells the story of two businesswomen (Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace) who spin a web of betrayal and desire.  

De Palma is a filmmaker who has made some great films like Blow Out and Carrie, but often his melodramatic tendencies emerge, even in great films like those.  I will admit, I enjoy much of Scarface, but I think it is a terrible movie.  It is melodramatic, overacted, and one hour too long.  The same can be said about Passion except for the last part.  Passion isn't too long.  It is just a melodramatic, overacted, borderline incoherent mess.  

The last act of Passion is completely ridiculous and adds insult to injury, as it throws in so many fever dream sequences in a row that it becomes incomprehensible.  The dialogue, at times, reminded me of The Room in its ability to be both painfully obvious and unintentionally funny.  

Pino Donaggio, a frequent De Palma composer, does the movie no favors with his score.  The score not only overemphasizes the melodrama, but also is very outdated.  I was never a fan of his scores for '70s and '80s De Palma films like Carrie and Blow Out, but in Passion, his score is worse than ever.  It would have fit in a '70s De Palma, not a 2010s one.  

Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace give in stiff performances, but much of this is due to the material that they are given to work with.  McAdams is usually good, and Rapace is usually excellent, particularly in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Prometheus, but because the dialogue the actresses are given is so bad and because De Palma's direction isn't up to par, their performances are subpar.

José Luis Alcaine's cinematography, though, is gorgeous.  Evoking the cool, icy look of Hitchcock films and early De Palma pictures, Alcaine's cinematography is the film's one highlight.  The lighting makes great use of shadows and makes a substantial contribution to the story.

Finally, while Passion is a bad film, it isn't awful to sit through because it is trashy and somewhat engaging.  There is a certain amount of amusement to be had listening to De Palma's embarrassingly bad dialogue ("Well I used to want to be admired...well now I want to be loved") and watching the faux-provocative scenes play out.

Overall, Passion is a passionless De Palma film with some style, but no substance.  This is best for hardcore De Palma fans.  While some may be entertained, more will be infuriated by the last 30 or so minutes of the film in addition to the terrible acting, direction, and screenplay.  

1.5/4