Les trois couronnes du matelot

Tags

Movie Reviews, Movies, Raoul Ruiz

Les trois couronnes du matelot (Three Crowns of the Sailor) – Art 6/5 Ent 3/5 Worth 6/5

10 minutes into this film, there wasn’t anything that indicated this would be in any way different from Raoul Ruiz’s other pictures, which even when they’re bad from the perspective of his raised expectations, they’re still without question worthy of your time. It featured some staples of Ruiz’s technique: the immediate surrender of dramatic narrative to filmic narrative, manipulations of foreground and background that defy the traditional elasticity of screen space, the ambiguous and almost perfectly poetic dialogue that makes you easily forget the way people talk in reality. Then it hit me. The key to this obscure chamber of myth, the unconscious and the surreal is to approach it as you would a Bob Dylan song: submitting your suspension of disbelief as collateral for entrance to hear a bluesy folk song about things jarring, cruel and romantic.

Ruiz mixes in a jambalaya of Chilean mythology, the soulful stories of sailors who frequent far eastern ports, whore houses and blarney taverns, and writes it into a slowly unraveling stream of competing authors’ consciousness and unconsciousness. Characters speak with a frankness that disorients the audience, while other characters obscure their meaning. There’s a dozen or so stories that together tell a collage. The abstraction left a proletarian demented sailor to shoulder the burden of a story that had little to do with him and his journey, and something quite more to do with the harsh randomness of life.

Ruiz could have flopped with this one pretty easily. He could have tripped up on himself and spewed out a column of convoluted celluloid that made Caligula look grounded. It succeeds on multiple levels for having been written with electricity in its art, meat in its heart and music in its poetry. Some of Sacha Vierny’s shots are incredible, especially for being low budget, and low budget 30 years ago on top of that. I felt a definite cinematic influence from Jean-Luc Godard’s post-New Wave films. An all around masterpiece that makes film as art something intuitively enjoyable the second and third time through. This is in the reach of Tarkovsky, but extremely different.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084824/

Condemned Horror: 21 Films in from the Dark

Tags

a serbian film, Antichrist, blair witch project, dario argento, demons, giallo, grotesque, horror, Night of the Living Dead, Roman Polanski, rosemary's baby, salo, Satan, slasher films, texas chainsaw massacre, the descent, the ring, vampires, Zombies

The horror, thriller, crime and supernatural genres all sport an enormous collection of films, many of which I haven’t seen. Out of those I have, there are certain types that serve certain roles. The best in each role I’ve outlined below. Condemned Movies’ favored horror pictures of the modern era:

These actually kept me up at night:

The Blair Witch Project

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0185937/

When I went to see this in theater, the terror it struck in my psyche didn’t quite manifest while I was in the dark theater with about 300 other kids my age on a Friday night. The gasps and tremors effected only a smile on my face, no terror, knowing that I’m in a brigade of generation y kids who will face any specter or demon that would thrust itself out of the screen. Once my friends and I made our way back home after the movie, it became quite another story. One of them suggested we immediately go camping, because in no simpler terms I think he’s a fucktard. Of course, we all considered it, and started gathering camping supplies, but after taking one look into the bush, filled with a massive grizzly bear and wolf population, that was visible just beyond my neighbor’s backyard, we reconsidered for “practical” reasons, obscuring the surreal reasoning: how exactly were we to know the Blair Witch wouldn’t leave little straw trinkets outside our campground? The first person shaky cam revolution may not have begun here, but it hit its fever pitch here, proliferating a dizzying and tired style that seems inappropriate when not being chased by redneck phantasms.

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The Descent

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0435625/

I went into this movie expecting some scares, and yet I was also expecting a pedestrian thriller with creepy crawlers. I left this movie with a trace amount of post-traumatic stress. I stared at the dashboard in my Cadillac for 10 minutes, baking in the sun, trying to process what just happened in that dark, unpopulated theater. The only other time I left a movie swearing that fighting in combat wasn’t worth it for any reason was after the opening minutes of Saving Private Ryan. The harsh doling of mortality quickly made the cruelties of the universe well present in The Descent, I remember seeing three ladies walk, nay, dash out of this film as soon as the roller coaster began. There are few movies that can match the claustrophobic panic of this one.

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The Ring

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298130/

Call me a sacrilegious oaf, but I enjoyed the American version far more. The DVD came with a tongue-firmly-in-cheek feature that connected you directly with the narrative ploy featured in the film, conveniently titled “Don’t Watch This”, which held the prospect of the girl crawling out of your very own television, much like those in the film. I didn’t click it. I’m not an adventurous spirit by heart, I enjoy staying home and watching Squidbillies when all the excitement is going down. But for the love of Christ I will never, ever, click “Don’t Watch This”.

Iconic classics:

Night of the Living Dead

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063350/

Every boy worth his salt is schooled in every possible scenario and “what if” of the eternally perplexing question: what would you do in the, albeit rare, case of the eventual Zombie invasion? … steal an AK-47 and a box full of motrin IB then dash to Isle Royale. The zombie movie (and vampire movie) prior to Romero’s classic was easily dismissed as an archaic romp not necessarily worth one’s time. Mummies and Frankenstein. Such does not sate the mind’s curious search for meaning through the portal of mortification. “What if”, expanded radically with racist and sexist themes in this landmark film, would continue with a critique of the consumer culture in the sequel “Dawn of the Dead”. This film is indeed “patient zero” for most horror films made today.

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Rosemary’s Baby

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063522/

Lucifer is an extremely popular villain, and anti-hero (since Milton’s Paradise Lost), but his progeny is a pop culture villain of recent vintage. The Satanic cult was a fresh invention in the time of Rosemary’s Baby, and some cruel arithmetic in the universe had it that Roman Polanski would feel the sting of the inferno quickly after making this film. Mia Farrow gave up a role in The Detective to star in this timeless creeper, despite the admonition of her recent beau Frank Sinatra, resulting in her divorce. Such trivia only serve to make such painful flux hovering around this picture all the more attention-grabbing, with other cultish rumors and general inexplicables floating around. The film itself and the narrative were shocking for their time, and inspired countless other pale shadows. Polanski’s fetish for the devilish noir would not end here.

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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072271/

Ick. Just ick. Texas is ick. Leatherface is ick. Inbred southerners are ick. Meathooks are ick. Chainsaws are ick. Every … single … thing …. about this film is ick. TCM inspired countless other horror films that came after, with the sheer terror, the obscured character of the primary villain, and the gruesomeness that separated all that followed from the candyass slapstick murder that preceded. Are we worse off because filmmakers decided that realism counts for something more than atmosphere? Well, we’ve always had people like this, maybe TCM just woke us up to their presence.

The new gothic atmosphere:

Alien

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078748/

I’ve told this story before: while watching this movie in theater in the ‘70s, my mother and her friend jumped out of their seats in the infamous chestburster scene and immediately went out for pizza, never considering watching another second for another ten years, once I watched it all the way through myself at an inappropriately young age. Though we might not really understand it today, with the over-commercialization of a niche monster movie series, the original Alien scared the bejeesus out of people. Before this, they hadn’t much dark sci-fi to go on. They probably expected Wookies monging about like Yogi Bear on meth. The effervescent psychosexual tension between a 7-foot tall penis monster and the female object(s) of its murderous desire make this one disgusting cornucopia of Freudian frustration splattered on screen. And to think, they made children’s toys out of this within the decade.

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Let the Right One In

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1139797/

I’m of the opinion that this film cheats in exporting a cultural norm with Scandinavian decorum. Like Italians exporting food or Brazilians exporting music, this borderline turkey gets away with a few oohs and aahs abroad despite its failings. If you’ve ever been to Luleå, or sifted through the metal section of a record store (what are those?), you know just how god damn dreary, moody and laconic the Scandinavian joie de vivre is. In any case, they pulled off an interesting enough marker of the vampire tale, Viking-style. Unfortunately, we’re deprived of the rich bile-churning disgust that the novel presents, which is Lolita meets Bram Stoker. Profits dictate that will have to wait until we’re truly a degenerate society.

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The Ninth Gate

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0142688/

You probably won’t like this movie. You won’t get it. You won’t want to get it. You may even be discriminatory because of the fact that Polanski is directing it. If you’re a real putz, you probably don’t care much for the narrative. Most likely, you just feel jilted by the ending. No worries, folks. This film is entirely worth it solely for the Ayn Randesque characters and the uncompromisingly rich cinematography. I always hear how people want to watch movies so they can travel to Europe. If you want to see the Europe that everyone else sees outside of tourist season, this is it. But even better, if you want to see a Europe that takes The Third Man and shoves him up Satan’s asshole, sows him in, and cuts him out of the horse innards in a Bahomet ritual … Polanski did it for you. The puzzling symbols and clues are left scattered throughout the film, only serving our intellect like a French butler, while the British cook boils us up a hot bowl of funny red mushrooms to digest in the final scene.

Delicious pastiche:

Amer

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1426352/

The filmmakers (Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani) deliver the goods in this homage to giallo slashers of the ‘70s. Included are some haunted house and psychosexual dreamscape luciferean romances, as we plod through a film virtually bereft of dialogue, something that deeply pleases anybody sick to death of pathetic attempts at dialog by genre writers unfit to write book reports on A Confederacy of Dunces. The vibrant colors are a given, with their objective in mind. The insanely beautiful framing and detailed shots are painful to sit through because of their presence in a mere stabby mcvagina movie. Nevertheless, what more praise can I give this film than it raises all the wrong passions in me, just like it aspires to do.

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Scream

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117571/

A highly amusing byproduct of this film is the Scary Movie series, in two respects. For one, at least the very first Scary Movie served as a hilarious send-up of Scream and similar late 90’s slasher revivals. But furthermore, the redundancy of Scary Movie is made clear in how they’re parodying a pastiche. Scream was a fine enough self-reference on the slasher pic, it didn’t necessarily need a Budweiser commercial spoof. Wes Craven is at home with horror/thrillers, and this might as well be his magnum opus in that regard. In otherwise underwhelming careers, the cast here works out splendidly for their archetypal roles. Finding people who haven’t seen this movie is a pure delight, because its relation to middle class suburban American households, enjoying a film on a dark Friday night, works out to keep you on the edge of your seat, regardless of how many shotguns you have on your gun rack.

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Shaun of the Dead

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0365748/

The Zombie film has largely met all of its creative cult-de-sacs by the time ‘Shaun’ came out. It had tried out goofy camp, darker and more evil re-makes, and even a complacent return to pre-Matheson Zombies that sleepwalked through the kitchen for orange juice. A triple-punch of 28 Days Later, the Dawn remake, and Shaun of the Dead returned to life in a revenant dance the latest generation of Zombie fanatics, whose fantasies are spilled out into Left 4 Dead, comic books and the ever intriguing “what if” scenarios. Shaun held itself above the others by being conscious of the Zombie clichés and having fun with them, but it also struck new territory because it explored the adventures of the 21^st century inept beta male.

Cult classics:

Evil Dead II

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092991/

The sequel is pretty much a direct re-make of the first Evil Dead, but it’s the difference between a Rolex and a water-proof Nickelodeon Spongebob watch. Even better, Raimi and Campbell developed a more sardonic sense of humor for the sequel that made it less of a taxing experience and a richer leaping-off-point for the cheese-o-rama adventure film that completed the trilogy. Like the “Night of the Demons” series, Evil Dead gives us the conflated monster of lazy thinking: the Zemon. Part Demon, part Zombie, 100% Ty Cobb swinging dick monster truck-driving cornswogglin’ evil undead. Bruce Campbell might not be the second coming of Peter Sellers, but he serves his purpose in Evil Dead II, and makes the movie an enjoyable watch.

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Hellraiser

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093177/

The creative, check that, destructive mind behind this story should, in any safe society, be locked away with the other lunatics who urinate in public and eat glass. That man would be Clive Barker, and I think anybody who watches Hellraiser will be feeling the tortured imagination swirling in a black cloud of hate in his mind for some time. Pinhead using flying meathooks to tear random people to shreds just because they played with some rubix cube has to be the most arbitrary demonry imaginable. The other causations just make me want to puke. I won’t give them away. Just terrific.

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Night of the Demons

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093624/

I discovered this one in a backwards way after seeing the sequel on subscription cable at 3AM, which galvanized my black leather-wearing rebellious years. A decade and a half later, I’m looking back in morbid disgust at the laziness abound in that sequel, but I’ve really gained an appreciation for the more raw and visceral original. I should have been clued in when I noticed the sequel sparing absolutely no expense by lifting entire scenes from the original. Like I mentioned about Evil Dead II, this movie has the venerable Zemon monster foe (part Demon, part Zombie). Once bitten, twice converted, six hundred and sixty six times lathered with makeup in the matter of seconds. The camp is existent here in an unassuming ‘80s kind of way, but if there were such a thing, this is a candidate for supernatural realism in its matter-of-fact presentation of just the facts. The comedy doesn’t pacify the creepiness of this gem.

The philosopher’s skullfuck:

Antichrist

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0870984/

There’s no getting around the fact that this movie has some of the most visually powerful scenes in recent cinematic history. That only bears the sledge hammer’s weight heavier upon your nutsack. Von Trier pulled a few public stunts to preface the reception of this film, coloring the overactive imagination of cultural theorists to anticipate misogyny and other Freudian ‘issues’. In a word, he’s a prick. Don’t shy away from exploring it, the tantalizing meaning behind each and every “wtf” experienced in this movie is worth prodding. With our powerful relationships thus deconstructed, how far are we all from the state of nature? Clubbing bitches upside the head for procreation … thinking like bears in our murderous neglect of children that leads to heightened sexuality in the mother … forcing a controlling hold over the mentality of one’s lover to manipulate their emotions to our benefit. Von Trier is, in effect, the opposite of Dr. Phil vis a vis healing the marriage crisis.

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Deep Red

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073582/

Before committing to his various kills, Dario Argento planned out each scene with the meticulous design used by the obsessive compulsives who figure prominently in his features. Some of the deaths have their own foreshadowing, ringing a poetic note in tune with an empty-souled organ player. The murderer is given a circumspect and drawn-out appreciative camera for each death. The camera builds a world that can only be soaked in on slow motion. David Hemmings continues into another noir picture with another Italian luminary, and throws into the thriller genre to consummate the frustrated implications leftover from Antonioni’s Blow-Up. Argento taps into some pretty deeply-rooted cords wrapped around our psyche in Deep Red, making us feel disjointed and tipping over the edge of a cliff with surreal imagery and attempts to make us feel calm and safe. Hitchcock on LSD, as it were.

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Funny Games

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119167/

Michael Haneke must have woken up one day and said to himself: “Michael, today we’re going to write a screenplay where a couple of sick sunsabitches terrorize the audience by first breaking the fourth wall, and then directing the narrative”. I don’t like this movie on a personal level. It’s fucked up. It plays cinematic games while the characters play sadistic ones. Some viewers propbably can’t tell which ones affected them more. I haven’t seen this movie in a good 8 or 9 years, and I think that’s too fresh in my memory. Even the final category below doesn’t compare to the story in Funny Games, because of its quintessential attitude, where Haneke treats it as an elaborate terrorist beheading that takes a giant shit all over structural narrative assumptions we’ve been subjected to in other thrillers. The re-make is supposedly a shot-for-shot deal. I’m not watching that one either.

God is not a loving god:

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099763/

Low budget. Gruesome pathology. Stendhal meets Hannibal Lecter. There’s just all kinds of shit wrong with taking a realistic take on a prolific and … a recent at the time, let’s not forget that … a recent serial killer. Michael Rooker had a field day with this career-maligning role that he might’ve felt was just worth it. This is disturbing to watch in how cheap the production is, and how unromantic and gritty the act of murder becomes. Re-living it within the mise-en-abyme prism of the characters watching a massacre over in VHS is just too hard to bear. Fire and forget is the key here. I’m not watching this shit again. And it’s not even that bad compared to the two below.

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Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073650/

The source material for Pasolini’s choral ode to murderous sexual humiliation was, surprise of all surprises, the Marquis de Sade. De Sade wrote 120 Days of Sodom as a reaction to the Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau, who assumed a natural grace in reason and human progress. De Sade held the aristocratic assumption that humans were limited in their rational faculties, but he took it a step further than anybody else would ever conceive through the next century and a half: he posed our limitations as a gross middle finger shoved right into our faces. Napoleon, Marx, Lenin, Hitler, Mao – what unites them? They had a common assumption that they utilized human reason to devise a grand new strategy for living and being in their respective polities. They were all wrong. Their end results uniformly matched exactly what you watch in Pasolini’s 120 Days of Sodom. Eating buckets of shit. An aristocratic insolence towards the dignity of the common people. The use of the common people as objects of pleasure and mortification for the whimsy of dignitaries. The Italian fascists aren’t the only ones given a nod here, but everyone who is so converted to a material culture that their grasp of pain and pleasure is alienated enough to permit them an unfeeling hold over inter-personal relations to any degree where Orwellian language covers up mass suffering.

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A Serbian Film

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1273235/

I hate people. I officially hate people. If I can specifically target Serbs for my hatred, I would. I know how complicit they are in a psychopathic national attitude in regards to what they did in Bosnia and Kosovo. I would just love to have it so simple as to single Serbs out as a bunch of monsters, but of course, and depressingly, I know better. The filmmakers of this disgustathon wanted it to be a testament to the political culture that emanates from the Milosevic ultranationalist state that emerged in the post-Tito Civil War era. Everything depicted here, other than coincidental incest, was very likely a casual if not endorsed action during the Civil War. I’m sorry, I know some of you might think it only ironically feeds into the cycle, but all of that only makes me feel even better about having bombed them. This is a nation that took offense to a harmless joke by Chelsea Handler and issued hundreds of death threats to her. I’m sorry, I can’t resist saying it: Serbs, ya’ll are fuckin’ clownin’.

Kynodontas

Kynodontas (Dogtooth) – Art 4/5 Ent 3/5 Worth 6/5

I am not European. As much as I wish I grew up in Central Europe, I did not. I grew up in the last frontier of the United States. I’m practically a redneck. So almost every European film I begin watching, I have a fairly high rate of attrition, meaning I give up easily because most European films are fucking boring and useless. A lot of the supposedly interesting and canonical films are just a bunch of Marxist or Post-Structuralist claptrap that isn’t worth anybody’s time. So I almost gave up on this movie. I’m very glad I didn’t. There’s something awfully familiar, yet also new about this story. It’s a little bit Lord of the Flies, it’s a little bit M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, a little bit Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema. But it has a darkly humor to it that raises my fancy immediately. It has a little bit of developmental fun, in a twins studies kind of way, on how kids would develop if their only connection to the world outside their family compound is through their parents, their VHS players, and a girl who whores herself out to the family. One girl constructs a personality from videos, reciting lines from famous American movies, and creating dance moves both from pornos and Jennifer Beals’ moves in Flashdance. By the end, I wasn’t only sold, it had me in stitches.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1379182/

The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice

Tags

Orson Welles, Shakespeare

The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice (1952) – Art 5/5 Ent 4/5 Worth 6/5

How different would have Welles’ career been should this movie had the fortune of being completed on schedule, with ample funding. The judges at Cannes forgave an incomplete project, the most trying of the audience’s patience is the poorly synced audio, but the movie went completely unnoticed in America until its restoration and modification by Welles’ daughter. Orson Welles is somebody we already accept as a lion of the cinema, but his fights with the studios set him on an uneasy path that I think we can all agree left his potential unmet. If some investor had the balls to throw money into this project, we might have been graced with a more prolific Welles in the States. The merits of this work have been listed in abundance everywhere. The impossibly gorgeous architecture of the camera that takes Eisenstein to new heights is worth sitting through Shakespeare even if you don’t understand a word of that early modern English poesy. The emphasis on ‘honor’ was a reading of the play that gained more traction at the time, in part because Orson conveniently latched on to it. Is the blackface offensive? Uhm .. no. It’s barely noticeable at any rate. Some of the shots in this film are pure genius: the shadows of the revelers on the wall, the dizzying end, the exterior shots of ‘Cyprus’. This is a visual feast, by which we’re not easily sated.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0045251/

Midnight in Paris

Tags

Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen

Midnight in Paris – Art 4/5 Ent 5/5 Worth 5/5

This is just a wonderful film, and almost made me forget that it was a Woody Allen flick. Aside from his incessant desire to turn all his lead actors into an annoying and snarky iteration of himself (including Rebecca Hall in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but more convincingly Larry David in Whatever Works), this movie is less like the Woody Allen films of the past two decades, and the ’70s, a little more like Stardust Memories and Zelig, but it’s altogether refreshingly new from somebody who should by all rights be retired by now. Leave it to Woody Allen to make a love note out of his travelogue become both charming and serious. I really loved this movie for its ability to combine Samantha Brown’s adventures with Bill and Ted’s. I would have loved to explore some of my own “Golden Age”(-s , indeed, I have more than one). Although I doubt I would have ever become disillusioned with them, because although I see progress in history and don’t mind a bit of trouble and complexity here and there (if anything I revel in it), I still accept the past with historicist context. So just bring some Motrin IB and some sunscreen and let’s go visit the building of the pyramids. Seeing Rachel McAdams as a bit of a bitch was really fun. Of course, it’s Woody Allen making that happen.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1605783/

Favorite Contemporary Actresses

Isabelle Adjani

A crazy woman known for portraying crazy women, despite her intensity she always did so with a very lucid comprehension of the job, and she’s always been one of the best performers. Starting in the ’70s with stonewalling of Francois Truffaut’s attempts to devour another one of his actresses while filming The Story of Adele H, she brought to bear that at the center of the tempest is a fortress. Her personality and love affair with solitude, not to mention the dumbass decision to do Ishtar while having a fling with Warren Beatty (ruining a career in Hollywood) kept her from claiming a bigger slice of international pop culture. After falling off the map, she’s recently found renewed relevance with an award winning performance in La Journee de la jupe, and maybe a second wind like Catherine Deneuve managed in her later career.

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Jennifer Beals

She’s just a steeltown girl on a saturday night, lookin for the fight of her life .. yeah, sorry. She’s a Yale girl, she shouldn’t be pigeonholed as a frizzy-haired stripper her whole life. Besides, she showed us in The L Word that Hollywood made a grave mistake spitting her out like a cherry seed. In virtually anything she does, she’s good, which is kind of unfortunate, because most of her jobs are crap, supporting roles or indies. Here’s hoping she can turn it around with a wave of success from the Showtime lipstick lesbian series.

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Emmanuelle Béart

So I included my dream woman, you wanna fight about it? She’s slipped, in more ways than one, and has largely lost her stardom, but from the mid ’80s to the early ’00s, her exhaustive acting output gave us some of the best performances in French cinema, winning a César for Best Actress in Manon of the Spring. Now this might sound like a justification for keeping her off of this list, but Béart is precisely the opposite of Cate Blanchett: she’s never had a performance that stood out from the rest, but she’s had a half dozen outstanding films. There’s something to be said for having good taste in projects.

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Juliette Binoche

It’s difficult to comprehend how much Ms. Binoche has achieved over the past three decades. She’s a frequent nominee for every award circuit, and every major film festival has credited her with best actress. She’s memorably worked with Jean-Luc Godard, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Anthony Minghella, Chantal Ackerman, Michael Haneke, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, and Abbas Kiarostami. If you ask an American under 40 to name one French actress, if they say anybody at all, they’d say Binoche. She turned down Jurassic Park to be in Three Colors: Blue. She’s shown 50 different ways of being damaged. Her reputation precedes her.

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Cate Blanchett

I make no exception to the obviously indisputable fact that Cate is the best actor alive today. She can do anything Messers Depp and Day-Lewis can do, and she’s a perfection of what Meryl Streep began. If you’ve ever seen an interview with her, it’s more mesmerizing than her work, because despite the fact that she’s kind of a scatterbrain, and incredibly demure, shy and humble, she has the air of an Orson Welles, Peter O’Toole or even Elvis emerging with every word. She has a natural lightness in her step. The greatest tragedy is that she hasn’t had a crescendo in her career. Partly that’s because practically every script she accepts leads to numerous accolades and awards, but also because no single script has been a masterpiece worthy of her efforts.

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Helena Bonham Carter

You simply must love Helena. Really, that’s more a command than a statement. A virtuosa with aristocratic heritage, HBC is solely limited in her taste oscillating between the absurd and the costume drama. Say what you will about The King’s Speech – a movie that suffers most of all from the plaudits heaped upon it in a vacuum of better sentimental options – her performance showed a woman who’s come a very long way from the tedious as hell A Room with a View. From Fight Club on, she was fully capable of taking over a film. Most of what she does is simply great fun.

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Jessica Chastain

2011 was the year of Jessica Chastain, with seven notable productions suddenly thrusting her into pop culture, with a Vanity Fair cover as a no-name the year previous. Her ability was essential for Terrence Malick’s poetic vision in The Tree of Life to be interpreted properly, as a mythological mother figure who had the demeanor of a serene goddess. She was one of the few things that made The Help bearable. Her foil to Michael Shannon’s insane intensity in Take Shelter … oh for fuck’s sake, she’s good people, and she’s here to stay.

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Charlotte Gainsbourg

There are graveyards full of the careers of the children of great artists. Charlotte is the natural product of the controversially lurid song “Je t’aime… moi non plus“, sung by her parents, Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin. It isn’t surprising that she’d desire a career in the arts as well, but what is surprising is how god damn good she became after cutting out on her own, away from music – the medium her father conquered in France – into acting. Ambitiously, she went even further out of her comfort zone by taking a lead role in an English film (she may be Anglo-French by some piece of paper, but she’s distinctly French). And her performance as Jane Eyre was the first interpretation I’d ever seen, and I compare all others to her (like Mia Wasikowska). If you weren’t impressed by her in Antichrist, I just don’t know what to tell you.

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Eva Green

Not since Kate Hepburn has a woman entranced the audience with a mere turn of the head. After her breakthrough role in The Dreamers, she had me, but then she forced me to sacrifice to a cult in her honor after Kingdom of Heaven. Without catching her breath, she pulled off the best Bond Woman there ever was, helping to revitalize the hugely successful franchise from its sordid state. She should really stop trying to pull off a natural or even regional accent in English, even though it almost worked okay in Cracks, because it’s getting Schwarzeneggerish.

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Rebecca Hall

Even if you don’t like action films, or Ben Affleck, or Boston … you really ought to take a few hours and watch The Town primarily for Ms. Hall. Another from a family of artists (her father, a director for film and stage, chartered the Royal Shakespeare Company; her mother was an American opera singer), Rebecca Hall is quickly gaining ground in Britain and America as top billed talent, and deservingly so. But I hope she does more work quickly, because the her two signature roles have been spastic, indecisive douche canoes. First as one of the title characters in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and another as a fragile hostage dealing with minor post-traumatic stress in The Town.

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Anne Hathaway

I wasn’t fully convinced that Anne was anything more than a dime-a-dozen Disney star they produce out of some plasticine bubble gum factory until I saw her go completely nuts in Rachel Getting Married. Though her supporting background role in Brokeback Mountain slightly eroded those suspicions, it could have just been a stroke of luck. She’s testing my patience with all the other crap she’s doing lately. Everyone seemed to pan the Oscar hosting job by her and James Franco, but most of them blamed her only in guilt by association. Her turn as Catwoman was enormously inferior to Michelle Pfeiffer’s, but I place that blame squarely on the shoulders of Christopher Nolan, who sees women as either creatures to kill, or garnishing for an action story.

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Isabelle Huppert

I feel as if I’m living in sacrilegious error for not having seen all of her work. This side of the Atlantic, she hasn’t made it as a household name, but it’s quite the opposite in Europe. If The Piano Teacher were an American film, she’d at least be as big as Diane Lane over here. She can do any genre or any role, she can carry films on her back, she can make good films great or bad films interesting, and like Juliette Binoche, she can perform with interpretive exactness at the direction of some of the same greats: Jean-Luc Godard, Raoul Ruiz, Michael Haneke, Bertrand Tavernier, Claude Chabrol, Olivier Assayas, Francois Ozon. There’s just something supernatural about her ability to disappear into variant subtle characters without any flamboyance.

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Catherine Keener

I’ve always really liked Catherine Keener for the simple reason that she never does a weak character, and rarely chooses roles that are uninteresting. Every role is natural or fun, and every movie she’s in is worth watching. Great agent, great taste, great talent. Her leading roles make me wonder why she’s relegated to supporting ones, or low key films. Playing Nelle Harper Lee in Capote and the frizzy lady in Being John Malkovich are career highlights most would kill for.

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Mia Kirshner

Mia is a spicy nacho, and she can eat you alive. Isabelle Adjani and Charlotte Gainsbourg may play at being crazy ass bitches, but I wouldn’t want to ever be locked in a room with the real Mia. I wouldn’t want to denigrate her great performances by saying she’s pulling from her personal life, or speculate that the reality matches the fiction … but c’mon. Look at all them horror/slasher movies she’s in. And as a stripper in Atom Egoyan’s Exotica? I think it’s safe to say that there won’t be any female character in a television series as deliciously nuts and narcissistic as Jenny Schecter any time soon – by far one of my favorite performances in film or television. God, I hope somebody puts this lady in a room with David Lynch.

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Rooney Mara

Watch the American version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and then watch the Swedish version. Aside from having funny long ō names, Rooney Mara and Noomi Rapace’s performances couldn’t have been more different, and it’s clear Mara’s was the superior take, and in fact the only redeemable aspect of any Dragonalia. 2013 will be for her like 2011 was for Chastain. I know this because, like Chastain, Terrence Malick’s tapped her for a role. Watch for it.

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Frances McDormand

Being married to Joel Coen certainly helped her career, but his career wouldn’t have been what it is without Frances McDormand. The Oscar for Fargo was one of the few times the Academy got it right, and it’s a small consolation that she was at least nominated for Burn After Reading. When the Coens loan her out to other directors, she maintained without the ability to get weird wit it. Almost Famous, the Cameron Crowe self-love fest, and the Michael Douglas / Robert Downey Jr. comeback vehicle Wonder Boys were both demonstrations in her ability.

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Samantha Morton

Sure, she’s talented beyond belief. Yeah, she’ll turn you upside down in an otherwise mediocre film. And of course, she can convincingly play an Irish woman and an American woman, and pull off any accent in the book (though most English actors are trained for that). But for god’s sake, lighten the fuck up, will you lady? In the words of Peter Griffin, throw a pie already! She brought a moral indignity to a social-climbing actress in The Libertine, making it just that much more great. I am in awe of the destruction of her character in The Messenger; the ability to juggle multiple layers to one performance (and keep up with Philip Seymour Hoffman) in Synecdoche, New York; her channeling of Chaplin’s City Lights in Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown. Put her to any task in any film and she gets it done perfectly.

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Carey Mulligan

An Education, Lone Sherfig’s dalliance with a superficial ’60s, was so good because it brought a real breath of fresh air in Carey. Coming of age stories are almost uniformly stupid, but Carey showed a perfect youthful egotism hard to fake. She went and squandered my admiration with the dumbass Wall Street sequel, but she wasn’t exactly bad in it. She was in Drive, but I prefer to forget that movie and instead focus on black Steve McQueen’s Shame, where she went toe to toe with Michael Fassbender at the highest pitch of a sexual disorder. Any lesser actress would have shrunk.

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Molly Parker

Molly Parker has done a lot of work, and not all of it in very interesting films. She’s never had a lead role in a big movie, and she’s never really even had a supporting role in a big movie either. She’s never really brought a bad performance, however, so, she’s a well-traveled work horse in lesser indie films, I guess is what I’m trying to say. She’s definitely deserving of more success than she’s had so far. I’ll watch any piece of crap that she’s in, especially because she takes some very kinky roles like a necrophiliac or a prostitute hanging out with Peter Sarsgaard all day. If you ever come across a Molly Parker film, stop and watch it.

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Sarah Polley

I have to admit that the ridiculous mythological epic Beowulf & Grendel was what really brought me around to liking Sarah Polley as more than that chick in Atom Egoyan films and the Dawn of the Dead remake. She’s been in a lot of mediocre forgettable crap (Splice?, Weight of Water?), so it unfortunately comes as no surprise that she isn’t a bigger name. Get a better agent Ms. Polley, you’re fucking talented as shit, get with the program.

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Parker Posey

I love the ’90s, indeed. Parker “Queen of the Indies” Posey is everybody’s favorite “holy shit, it’s ___________” while watching random movies, because she’s been in at least 5 dozen films but never quite got to the point where she sold them with her presence. I’m sure she’s real broken up about the fact that she’s had steady work for 2 decades, most of it with the Christopher Guest troupe. She’s smart, funny, and versatile … somebody put her in the next Lord of the Ding Dongs movie and more idiots will appreciate her.

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Chloë Sevigny

God I love Chloe. Parker Posey may have dabbled in cute little indies, but Chloe launched head-first into some real art house shit that they only air on the Sundance Channel at 3AM (she once gave mouth party to Vincent Gallo!). I have to give a special thank you to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3 for giving me the trailer for Kids, which was maybe the most painfully ’90s movie you could find. Chloe went on to do a lot of avant garde and fashionable flicks, most of which are only worth seeing today if you’re into slow going abstraction or nostalgia, but her role on Big Love as the scheming little wolverine of a Mormon fundamentalist sister-wife, Nikki Grant (one of my all-time favorite characters), really convinced me that she could hold up more mainstream productions.

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Meryl Streep

For as long as I can remember, I never really noticed Meryl Streep in anything she did. She’s such a plain jane, the kind of actress that only other women can appreciate. But when you start paying attention to actors, and how they work their magic (which is maybe the most deceptively difficult profession in the world, in that just everybody thinks they can do it but so precious few actually can), you start seeing people like Streep leap out in front of everybody else. Sophie’s Choice and Doubt are two movies I didn’t see until just lately, both validating her talents and suspending all criticism I had. But it’s in crap movies like Still of the Night, Death Becomes Her or Devil Wears Prada that you see her having the most fun with it all. It’s not just that she’s matched Newsweek in monthly production, but she is just literally everywhere and doing an amazing job in every role, being amply awarded (and nominated, a running gag for the Academy schmucks). Nah, Meryl’s got it.

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Tilda Swinton

Tilda is the reverse of the comedy-tragedy mask, in that her natural face is a blank canvas, glistening pale in the sun at various film festivals, on which you can paint damn near any character imaginable. She naturally looks stunningly like Conan O’Brien (and even responded enthusiastically to his suggestion of playing him in The Late Shift 2), but you can take that and make her frumpy, beautiful, regal, stoic, frazzled, sharp. She may be one of the most talented actors alive, because of an intellectual awareness of people and emotions that is more writerly than actorly.

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Emma Thompson

When I began seeing ads for Wit on HBO back in the day, and saw that it was Emma Thompson starring in it, I was like “yeah, she’s witty, so what?” I just keep laughing about the time she was on The Daily Show to promote the latest Nanny McPhee, and interrupting her cute anecdotes, Jon Stewart stopped her in her tracks by saying “has anyone ever mentioned to you that you might be charming?”. Emma is one of my favorite actresses because she brings a warmth and life to a variance of characters in many very well written films, and the one I like the most was as an English servant in Remains of the Day. If Emma’s in it, you know it’ll be fun.

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Mia Wasikowska

Though I wasn’t the least bit impressed with Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, it had a few rather genius actors (Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter) just laying it all out there as batshit as can be. It seemed to me the only actor who wasn’t on LSD was Mia. The Kids Are Alright, Albert Nobbs, and Lawless gave her supporting time to demonstrate skill in low key productions, and her lead in Jane Eyre opposite Michael Fassbender was a safety move on a well-tread Bronte story, but the future is brighter yet for Mia.

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Naomi Watts

We can all thank David Lynch for dragging this gem of a woman out of obscurity for the classic mindfuck, Mulholland Drive. With little over a decade of major roles coming her way, she’s established herself as a flawless actor and internationally bankable lead. She’s one great project away from an Oscar (or, knowing them, one mediocre project that panders to the slobber-mouthed Cheetos crowd). Working with Lynch, Innaritu, Haneke, Cronenberg and that weird Hobbit fellow has really given her diverse territory to explore and excel in conquering. Naomi has an obsessive grasp of detail with every character, helping to accent something distinctive about them that draws you in.

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Kate Winslet

I have a hard time deciding who I like more in the battle of the K/Cates … Winslet or Blanchett. Together, they’re unparalleled. Yet they both take very different roles, and few similar ones. I guess the reason Kate gets the dubious distinction of having the other one talked about in my rationalizing for her spot on this list is that I’ve always had Cate’s innate ability above Kate’s. Eternal Sunshine? Little Children? She’s had both box office (Titanic) and critical acclaim, while Cate’s only had cameos in the Lord of the Ding Dongs movies. But Kate has an achilles heel: she’s too grounded of a person to allow any transmigration into the extreme characters Cate can manifest instantly. Ms. Blanchett seemingly has no strong grasp of her center, she’s too easily adrift in mimesis, whereas Ms. Winslet had to work at it. But like Depp and Day-Lewis among men, it’s Winslet and Blanchett among women.

Favorite Contemporary Actors

Javier Bardem

You don’t create iconic characters without the actor being a little bit writer as well, as Bardem’s take on the Cormac McCarthy character Anton Chigurh can attest in No Country for Old Men. It’s in no small part thanks to Bardem’s natural charm that in Biutiful, it’s difficult to come to terms with the fact that we’re empathizing with a character who, if portrayed by most any other person, we’d want to crucify him. Al Pacino once left a rambling voicemail lauding him for his work on Before Night Falls. What more needs be said than that?

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Vincent Cassel

Vincent Cassel has a unique ability to build from a raging narcissist cinematic archetype starting point further characteristics in a panoply of egotism. For instance, the psychopathic warlord under Joan of Arc in The Messenger; the dishonored and emasculated boyfriend seeking absolute vengeance in Irreversible; the suave but hapless nemesis in Ocean’s Twelve; the control-freak perfectionist dance company director in Black Swan who dips in the honey pot. Cassel has a yeoman’s toolbox to do any role well.

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Sacha Baron Cohen

In comedy, the two of the most important things are timing and surprise, and Cohen has an innate grasp of both. His inventory of pop culture satire enlivens what might otherwise be languid Socratic Irony, playing a fool to let the targets of his derision lower their guard and say things they’d sue him for putting on film later (references to Freddy Mercury come to mind). It still yet all might be nothing, if not for his ability to deliver in a casual roll with the punches. Watch his interviews on HBO’s Da Ali G Show with unsuspecting famous people to see his comedic skills at highest effect. But the most interesting thing about him is how he incorporates the political theory of Hannah Arendt into his comedy. The Banality of Evil is examined through satirical candid camera. He’s capable of moving past this gimmick, but I don’t know if he’ll top it.

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Tom Cruise

Coulda, woulda, shoulda for this poor soul. He had more going against him than just picking bad projects, he also stifled his growth as an actor early on by limiting himself to big budget blockbusters. Once the ‘80s came to a close, we never saw the same courage from him until he worked with Kubrick on Eyes Wide Shut (by far his best role), allowed a little grey in his hair for Collateral, and then no hair at all for Tropic Thunder. It’s a good pattern for success, now if he could only rid himself of that scientology crap, he might have a golden age in his later years. For somebody so overrated generally, his actual talent is underrated in a way that would be tragic if it weren’t for the fact he’s incredibly successful anyway.

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Daniel Day-Lewis

Daniel Day-Lewis is the perfection of the Method style, the gold standard by which all aspiring Method actors should measure themselves. His natural intensity and the dedication he puts into the roles are the stuff of legend. His selectivity in roles hasn’t been fortuitously bankable, but then, if that’s what you were expecting, you just don’t get DDL, whom Scorsese had to stop from being a cobbler in Italy to come back to cinema. Even lightweight productions like Ballad of Jack and Rose and The Boxer might not have been notorious films (relatively speaking), but he made them excellent. You have to go all the way back to A Room with a View to see him as a foppish turd, and he personally felt upset with himself over what he thought was a hammy turn in Unbearable Lightness of Being. If that’s ham, I’m a Christmas turkey. Oh yeah, Daniel Plainview …

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Johnny Depp

What is there to say about Mr. Depp that Tiger Beat hasn’t already said? There’s nobody who can seamlessly disappear into a wider array of characters as he. There was a time when the most bankable stars – Charleton Heston, Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, Russel Crowe – all had to be naturally alpha males, ‘type A’, sexually unambiguous and also capable of beating the shit out of someone, or Tom Hanks. It’s one of those fateful moments of history that some schmuck at Disney dropped the ball and let Johnny churn out one of the most interesting characters in a deeply uninteresting movie series with Jack Sparrow. I’m totally not cynical (stoic if anything, which is related), so I’m extremely happy that such a brilliant actor is raking in the dineros, even in trashy movies like The Tourist. He’ll slip up and do something relevant again soon, and it will be great.

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Robert Downey Jr.

Downey is an incredibly interesting case of the reverse blow-up. He didn’t really begin with anything too interesting, good, or even lucrative. But his early life was just enough insanity to fuck him up with the party lifestyle, and it put him through rehab and got him into all sorts of good tabloid trouble. But with maturity, little help from the missus, and trying and re-trying the game, he sorted himself out, and perfected his craft in the sobriety of middle age. That tends to be a natural advantage in people, a little bit of inner emotional distress to understand the world in a peculiarly different way. His grasp of comedy is one of his greatest strengths. If Iron Man were Eric Stoltz, was there a prayer in hell of that movie being a cash cow?

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Colin Farrell

I do not blame Farrell for the abomination that is Alexander, that so besmirched the son of Zeus, and reincarnation of Achilles. That was all Oliver Stone’s fault. All. This irish feller started out with a bunch of drab or forgettable roles, and he still does them on occasion, but his upward swing was impressive. He has all of the makings of a fantastic lead for the next summer blockbuster, as proven each summer, but is perfectly suitable as a pathetic fisherman like in Ondine, an illiterate thug or a nepotistic coke fiend. His range is solid, and his abilities are proven. He’s on the cusp of something bigger.

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Michael Fassbender

Fassbender is one of the best of the new class, if not the best. He was robbed in the criminal fashion of Hollywood for not even receiving a nomination for his work in Shame. Whatever you thought of Prometheus, whether you liked it or you’re a goofball retread, the one uncontroversial thing about the movie was his amazing turn as the Lawrence of Arabia-obsessed android David. His interpretation of Mr. Rochester in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is slightly better than most of those who’ve preceded him. There’s plenty of depth and danger to every one of his characters, even in throwaway roles for cheesy action films. His Magneto in X-Men belonged in a film not targeted at children.

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Ralph Fiennes

He’s as prolific as he is a perfectionist. I’d be remiss to keep him off the “Master” list, if not for the fact that he’s a dullard with zero comedic talent – something In Bruges adequately works around. We can’t all be ballers, I guess. Otherwise, there’s simply no role that “Rafe” can’t do. His quick cameo in The Hurt Locker showed that, if he fancied the notion, he could conquer action films as well. But it doesn’t interest him. His body of work is an enviable assortment of straight up killing it. Most serious actors rightfully look to him as a modern day lion of British acting, rivaling Olivier and Gielgud. And yet, I doubt we’ve seen his best efforts.

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Jamie Foxx

I think Jamie Foxx is an excellent example of how easy it is for truly great comedic actors to switch to drama. Comedy in the Anglo world is the hardest performance to do, because we’ve democratized snobbery with regard to comedy to such an absurd degree compared to elsewhere. If you’re a brilliant comedic actor, it would be child’s play to calculate the appropriate effect in dramatic roles. Anybody who’s seen Booty Call or In Living Color knows Mr. Foxx’s adept comedic skills well. Despite the praise heaped on him for performances like Ray and Dreamgirls, I think his best moment was in Jarhead. If the entire movie followed him instead, well, I would bother watching it again. Instead I’ll just look at youtube clips.

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Zach Galifianakis

My appreciation for Zach was slow to the show. I thought Out Cold was one of the better stoner movies in recent memory, but I didn’t separate him specifically from the film. In the ensuing decade, I was unimpressed with his stand-up, and didn’t notice him in anything. It wasn’t until I began seeing him explode onto the entertainment industry after The Hangover, and I saw him in Between Two Ferns, and his ancillary work in every little thing he feels capricious need to be in, that I realized we were dealing with a comic genius here. That internet show alone is enough to impress, but his work, both comedic and dramatic, since taking off from the Hangover, has given birth to a new star. Enjoy the ride people.

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Vincent Gallo

The inspiration for Billy Walsh on Entourage, this guy is fucking nuts, and a little bit of a prick. And that’s exactly why I love his work so much. If it weren’t for the fact that he marches to the beat of his own drum, he would be a more prolific and praised actor. But obviously, he enjoys eschewing mainstream appreciation, and it’s hard to blame him. The work he does do, like Tetro, is extremely frustrating in this regard. He could be bigger than Johnny Depp, but has an insufferability that will never be copacetic with playing the game. Brown Bunny was a tad unbearable, and poor Chloe Sevigny supposedly had to go to therapy because of the blowjob scene, but the movie was worth it just for him.

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Tom Hardy

Hardy is one of a few guys, like Fassbender, who are emerging out of obscurity and lowly supporting roles, to taking over the film industry. There’s little about Hardy not to love. If you squint, you can see Mickey Rourke circa 1984. One of Hardy’s acting idols is Gary Oldman, with whom he’s had the pleasure of working a number of times in recent years: The Dark Knight Rises, Lawless, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Hardy shares much of what made Scary Gary great, yet also has the build and alpha wolf presence that would enable him to be a Bronson or Bane. He and Nick Nolte made the closet parade Warrior well worth watching. Like Rourke, Hardy might not be a match for an auteur, but I who knows. One can hope.

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Tony Leung Chiu Wai

I’ll admit it, Tony Leung is one of my favorite actors simply because he’s Wong Kar wai’s avatar, as Mastroianni was for Fellini, Solonitsyn was for Tarkovsky, and von Sydow was for Bergman. He’s not above comedy (Tokyo Raiders), sweeping historical epics (Red Cliff for instance) and cheesy action (Internal Affairs), which you’ll find in ample supply out of East Asia today, but he does leave the best stuff for his many auteur and art house films with Wong kar wai. In the Mood for Love, 2046, Flowers of Shanghai, Chungking Express, and Ashes of Time are enough to consider him one of the greatest actors of his generation. If there were any justice in the world, he’d have more exposure this side of the Pacific. Time will tell.

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Viggo Mortensen

Viggo truly can do no wrong. He takes his job seriously enough to scare immigrant women and children with his Russian mafia tattoos at Burger King while filming Eastern Promises, acting again after A History of Violence for a short stint as David Cronenberg’s id, before they both took a vacation while exploring Freud. You might think he gained some of his capacity as an actor from Sean Penn who directed him in The Indian Runner. A lot like Daniel Day-Lewis, he may pick some mediocre projects like Alatriste, but he only does it because the role itself is worth exploring, and his execution is flawless. I’m very glad Lord of the Ding Dongs sent this guy’s career into star territory, but he has more potential to be a bankable star in his own right.

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Sean Penn

Sean Penn is a lot like Cate Blanchett, in that they’re both just utterly perfect in every way, for every role, but there aren’t many truly impressive films that either has been in, with a leading role. Daniel Day Lewis had There Will Be Blood, but Sean Penn only has Milk and Mystic River, which are both decent in their own right, but very limited in scope. Penn’s collaboration with Terrance Malick was limited by the roles, and Malick movies are more about Malick anyway. Sean Penn needs to work with Darren Aronofsky for the role of a lifetime.

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Michael Pitt

It wasn’t until Boardwalk Empire that I thought there’d be much range for Michael Pitt’s career, beyond brooding effete intellectual or heroin chic roles. Now if only he could branch out into comedy and more sympathetic roles, we might have something here. At any rate, he’s already established himself as a reliable and deeply interesting performer. Last Days might have just been a loose Gus Van Sant homage to Kurt Cobain, but it’s worth seeing for Pitt’s acting.

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Mickey Rourke

An incredibly interesting career, because most of his work passed by the public consciousness. When he was redeemed with The Wrestler, I wondered what he’d been redeemed from. He’s always done very sharp work, but the reception of the films he chose to act in has never been that friendly. He didn’t have any truly remarkable films in the ‘80s, but a half-dozen tremendous performances in very decent ones. Then a stretch of bad projects here or there never really killed his career off completely. Solid but small roles in Sin City, The Pledge and Rainmaker kept him on everybody’s radar. Now he’s blowing it again with dumbass movies like Iron Man 2 and The Stallone muscle ensemble. Well, good for him, I guess. Stash that money away Mickey and don’t blow it!

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Mark Ruffalo

Despite the fact that he’s often tapped for lame roles, it’s his work in very un-lame ones that impress me. The Kids Are All Right and Zodiac show me this guy has the stuff to do just about anything well. Sympathetic male love interests in chick flick rom-coms might be what pays the bills, but I think after The Avengers, he’ll be in higher demand, and give us more to work with.

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Michael Shannon

Might be jumping the gun here, but in the search for the next Nicholson / DeNiro / Pacino, we might have a great candidate taking over our screens lately. Raised by a lawyer and an accountant, Michael Shannon is a veritable hurricane of pent-up rage and self-hatred, bearing the weathered face of an oil worker, and he is also the most metal actor working today (proof).  After finding some renown for his performance in Revolutionary Road, he’s begun to seep into the mainstream. His character on Boardwalk Empire, Agent Nelson Van Alden, is a study in sexual displacement from an unknown, likely Protestant revivalist background into a saturnine prohibition agent / merciless fallen angel of moral enforcement. Shannon’s interpretation of the character is cringe-worthy, in a very, very good way. His character in Take Shelter was an extrapolation of the same, after a steady regimen of shrooms.

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David Thewlis

The British guy who’s in everything. His work on Mike Leigh’s Naked was an outstanding initial bang, that he’s had trouble following up with any significant lead roles. His supporting work is all very impressive and varied, and he keeps getting it, with good reason. A very reliable character actor.

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Stanley Tucci

I have to include Campbell Scott, Tucci’s buddy, in the praise of Tucci himself, because the only reason I’m leaving George C. Scott’s kid off this list is because of the dearth of relevant films and the seeming tragic downward path of his career to the USA network. Stanley Tucci is an outstanding character actor, and he’s made himself abundant, working tirelessly over the past decade and a half. Every role, he disappears into the character. He’s like the character actor version of Johnny Depp. His intelligence for the art of acting is infectious. His few lead roles have also been amazingly well done, but unfortunately he’ll never be a traditional lead, and only get the most praise for being bad guys.

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John Turturro

Working with the Coen brothers and Spike Lee so much put John Turturro on the map, and he must have earned that loyalty between two very different sets of filmmakers somehow. His lead role in Barton Fink makes for one of the best films in the modern era. Like Bill Maher said when he invited him on his show recently, studios bring him on projects to give the films respectability. He’s the beard for crap movies (Transformers). Much like Stanley Tucci, there’s simply no role he’s incapable of perfecting, and he works in just about every movie being made, so far as scheduling will permit.

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Christoph Waltz

Quentin Tarantino was correct when he said he outdid himself with the creation of Hans Landa, the delightfully evil Nazi Jew hunter. Delightfully evil – how much more transparent could you get? This was no problem for Waltz, who brought to life a whimsical turkey, with a genius balance of comedy and evil. Don’t forget for a second that Werner Klemperer’s Colonel Klink was entirely a possibility given Tarantino’s directing. Three Muskateers WAS a failure, all around, but Waltz burned a sense of injustice into the audience’s hearts, as he brought an interpretation of Richelieu that pained you over his not being in a serious epic. Carnage was an actor’s film, and he’s an actor, so … that movie was good.

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Hugo Weaving

There’s something unfortunate about the fact that out of three of Hugo’s biggest jobs, he only gets about 10 minutes of actual face time. And no, having 400 of his faces in the Matrix sequels doesn’t quite make up for it. His dramatic and comedic abilities are simply too profound to stick with action films, but it’s what interests him and pays the most, so whatever works. He could just as easily get away with being a romantic lead in a Jane Austen adaptation. I’ll see any movie with Hugo because he brings the rest of the production up a little regardless of surroundings.

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Michael K. Williams

MKW really does have a giant career ahead of him. President Obama has even named Omar (his character on the Wire) as one of his favorites in fiction, of course with the outward caveat that he doesn’t endorse the gay ghetto murdering Robin Hood’s pursuits or philosophies, but, in the words of Obama himself: “Where’s Omar at! That’s my man! He’s a man with code”. Though his role as Chalky White in another HBO production, Boardwalk Empire, is also a gangster during a different kind of prohibition, the two men are worlds apart. Where Omar is a rogue, Chalky is a captain in both the underworld, and the daylight, whose story is about racial pride, Hoppinjohns, and being a man in a world that took the right away from him.

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Michael Wincott

Principally cast as a villain, such as in the Kevin Costner meh-orama Robin Hood and 1492: Conquest of Paradise, Michael Wincott has a wider array of facades in his back pocket, so many in fact that it’s hard to keep up with his almost schizophrenic career choices. His collaborations with Julian Schnabel are particularly curious, but solid roles. He is unquestionably one of the most underrated talents in the business, and deserves so much more. Unfortunately, his work has been tailing off in recent years, and I don’t know if he’s acted at all recently.

Det sjunde inseglet

Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal) Art 5/5 Ent 4/5 Worth 6/5

The movie that made Ingmar Bergman, and brought art house cinema into the mainstream. This film has so deeply transformed our imaginations, I feel like it’s a decent gamble to suggest the creators of Rome had this movie in the back of their minds when they wrote the story of Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo. Bergman’s a fantastic director, there’s no questioning that, that’s why they teach him in film school of course! But I love this masterpiece of his for multiple reasons. I connect as a New World scandihoovian, I connect as an amateur mediævalist, I connect as a follower of Bergman’s cinematic vision. The much-ballyhooed chess scene is hard to wipe from your memory. The sardonic and stoic humor is something I grew up around, and I assure you, it isn’t something native to the era of black plague. The seemingly meandering soliloquy here and there about faith and God are a pill to swallow, but worth listening to for some insight into Bergman’s own philosophy, which colors all of his works. Watching this with Fanny and Alexander gives you a quick grasp of that philosophy and its roots. Just one of the better films ever done, and remains to this day worth the while.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050976/

The Wrestler

The Wrestler – Art 3/5 Ent 5/5 Worth 6/5

Darren Aronofsky really hit a home run with The Wrestler, and it’s all the more interesting that he did it without reverting to the conventional narrative of Pi and Requiem for a Dream, nor relying on any narratives that delve into fantastical philosophical or psychological visual adventurism. This movie is minimal and gritty. It rides Mickey Rourke’s deservingly applauded comeback performance, but not as much praise is given to Marisa Tomei’s equally oustanding performance. This a rough tragedy through and through, and it will break your heart, but along the way there are moments of sheer delicacy that will melt your heart. Some of the content can be traced to the wear and tear on wrestlers’ bodies as seen in Beyond the Mat, and this also served as a narrative device like in Aronofsky’s next project: Black Swan. The tragedy is in the material destruction of their bodies being commensurate with the achievement in their life’s work, at the expense of their lives.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1125849/

The Dreamers

The Dreamers – Art 5/5 Ent 4/5 Worth 5/5

A true gem that went unnoticed, despite gaining some notoriety for marginally controversial subject matter. Much of the current world is driven by the ideas of people who became disillusioned with revolution in the ’60s, and the eureka moment for many of them came in 1967 and 1968. The May ’68 student uprisings in Paris separated dyed in the wool mindless ideologues and political hacks from intellectuals who put truth above ideology. When the students failed to cause a revolution and their supposed Comrades in the Communist Party sat idle scratching their heads doing nothing, the jig was up. De Gaulle solidified his position and extended the Fifth Republic’s lifespan for another 5 decades, but the lifespan of French hard leftism died immediately. This movie traces a filmic heritage that led up to the barricades and molotov cocktails, but which advocated nothing of the sort. Sorry for being the imperious American here, but it’s quite true that William Pitt’s character “got it”, while the French brother and sister seemed lost with their Maoism and Parisien philosophies that were about to collapse. The lifeblood of their jouissance was predicated on eliminating all sorts of structures, mindlessly. They could not exist in a post-’68 world without major compromise. Bertolucci doesn’t get enough credit, perhaps for not being as experimental as many of his contemporaries, but he really does not make bad films. If you’re not in love with Eva Green after this, you suck.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0309987/

Underground

Underground – Art 5/5 Ent 3/5 Worth 5/5

Is it possible to make a slightly avant garde, comedic and yet serious war epic, depicting the history of Yugoslavia through the Nazis, the Communists and the Civil War, right during the immediacy of the genocides, the NATO bombing of Bosnia and Serbia, and the rolling waves of retribution? Yes, it is, and Emir Kusturica did it. It’s hard not to love this movie, and to western eyes, it’s really not as foreign as you’d expect. The ties to the west are profuse throughout it metaphorically.

www.imdb.com/title/tt0114787/

Prospero’s Books

Prospero’s Books – Art 6/5 Ent 1/5 Worth 5/5

Greenaway and Shakespeare, that’s either a combustible potion or vodka in the creme brulee. If you’re willing to get art house as fuck, go straight for this. If you’re willing to get modern Shakespeare as fuck, go straight for this. If you want gun battles and fist fights and motorcycles, go straight for this. That last one, you might be a little disappointed, but I want you to see it anyway. John Gielgud being in this is outstanding, because of his extensive knowledge of Shakespearian works, this combines the old with the new in such a brilliant way that binds both to a higher vehicle.

www.imdb.com/title/tt0102722/

Mia aioniotita kai mia mera

Mia aioniotita kai mia mera (Eternity and a Day) – Art 4/5 Ent 1/5 Worth 5/5

This is not for everyone, and is extremely chill and meditative at almost Tarkovskian proportions, but I’d just like to point out that if you’ve watched My Big Fat Greek Wedding, orThe Bucket List, and felt that both left you with a bad aftertaste even though you went in expecting more, this movie could very well please your aims in the respect of trying to delve into balkan culture, and absorb the emotions of an old man trying to find meaning before he shuffles off his mortal coil. The first time you watch this, you’ll think this belongs better in the ’60s, in some collection of Antonioni films, and you’d be partially right, because the screenwriter was Tonio Guerra, the go-to guy for many of the neo-realists when they began exiting that niche. Bruno Ganz is incredible in anything he does, and this movie is no exception.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0156794/

Ta’m-e guilass

Ta’m-e guilass (Taste of Cherry) – Art 4/5 Ent 1/5 Worth 5/5

Like the Soviets, Iranian cinema is depressingly deserving of a better country. Movies like this will get you thrown into a dark cell and tortured these days, and after watching it, you’ll just have to ask how on earth one could find it politically incorrect, and not a universally beautiful tragedy of one man’s life winding its way around the final paths of its journey. The filming within cars is a theme of Kiarostami’s that he continues in Ten, and creates an intimate positioning whose intent is consummated in the final scene, which renders the connection to real life that reignites disbelief both distant and irrelevant. A high wire act, to convince the watcher that it’s not reality and yet it still is.

www.imdb.com/title/tt0120265/

Una pura formalità

Una pura formalità (A Pure Formality) – Art 4/5 Ent 2/5 Worth 5/5

Giuseppe Tornatore made two movies that work not unlike a combination of Federico Fellini and Woody Allen in his highly acclaimed Cinema Paradiso and Malena, but A Pure Formality is held in stark contrast. It’s Kafkaesque and yet its inclusion of Polanski is not coincidental. Gerard Depardieu is a reclusive author and now his greatest fiction is unfolding before your eyes. Two very commanding performances that make it worth seeing by their own virtues, but this movie is further evidence of my theory that when the light hearted go dark, sparks fly. I’m no fan of twists, but this movie does it well, with just enough ambiguity to remain seductive.

www.imdb.com/title/tt0110917/