(My) Best of 09: Picture.

10. Where the Wild Things Are (read my review)

You can be the biggest cynic on earth and you will still let out a big "aww" the second Karen O's enchanting score appears accompanying the studio logos which Max (Max Records) has scratched and made his own.
When seconds later we meet the hyperactive child we can't help but fall in love with his ambition to make the world his own. As he travels to the island of monsters unaware of the creatures he will meet we're reminded of times in our childhood when nothing made us afraid and life was an adventure waiting to be conquered.
How Spike Jonze made a film that penetrates the armor of childhood while examining the bittersweetness we carry on to adulthood is a wonder upon itself.
An exercise in nostalgia that still manages to refresh our days in unimaginable ways.


9. Police, Adjective (read my review)

Like Steve McQueen's "Hunger", this Romanian film might become known for a bold setpiece that has the camera fixed while three characters talk inside an office.
Police officers Cristi (Dragos Bucur) and Nelu (Ion Stoica) sit in opposing chairs while Captain Anghelache (Vlad Ivanov) questions them about the ongoing case they've been working on.
Up to that point in the film Anghelache has only been a ghost who Cristi tries to avoid and when we meet him we understand why.
With a single sentence Anghelache shatters Cristi's idealistic methods and questions Nelu's stoicism, then in the film's most controversial moment dedicates more than ten minutes to a dictionary entry!
But then and there director Corneliu Porumboiu establishes that his film is not the pretentious nod at academia it often seems to be but a dark comedy that mocks the power language has obtained in our societies.
Its examining of the absurd however has utterly terrifying repercussions.


8. Antichrist (read my review)

Despite Lars von Trier's efforts to make "Antichrist" something everybody would squirm, cry and complain about, the film might very well be the most moving and personal work he has done to date.
Those willing to see beyond the mutilation, bloodied genitals, talking foxes, poetic deaths and medieval allegories will find themselves peeking at the psyche of a man who likes to call himself the greatest director in the world but is filled with as many doubts, insecurities and problems as the rest of us.
The obvious facade of "Antichrist" perhaps is saying that he might be all bark and no bite, but take the time to peel its layers and you will see a courageous attempt at dialogue with the divine.


7. Bright Star (read my review)

Watch how Jane Campion turns this...

"I almost wish we were butterflies
and lived but three summer days
three such days with you
I could fill with more delight
than fifty common years
could ever contain"

...into cinema.


6. The Hurt Locker (read my review)

Before it became an awards juggernaut and the center of ridiculous claims, "The Hurt Locker", like some of the best films of 2009, was a small picture that reminded us of the power that lies in genre.
Action flick expert Kathryn Bigelow refreshed our notions of the war action film as something that can be profound without losing its thrills.
In the process proving Michael Bay, Clint Eastwood, chauvinism and war mongers were all wrong.


5. Broken Embraces (read my review)

Who knew Michelangelo Antonioni's infamous tennis ball could take on the shape of Penélope Cruz? Apparently Pedro Almodóvar did and in "Broken Embraces" he uses his muse to break our hearts and open our mind's eyes to the notions of what's real and what's not.
Unlike the cold Antonioni, Pedro proves that intellectual stimulation can also be warm and affective as he frames his theories in a melodramatic plot that recalls "Notorious" and "Voyage to Italy".
The film's title is an homage to neorealism but its structure and reach couldn't be more postmodernist if they tried.


4. Vincere (read my review)

What's the best way to tell a story that deals with rumors about the life of a historical figure? To answer this question Marco Bellocchio looked back at art history and came up with three influential movements that used aesthetics to dig into larger truths.
"Vincere" therefore is a romantic melodrama inspired by silent films, expressionist opera and Eisensten-ian editing.
Bellocchio is able to keep these currents from clashing and succumbing to their own grandiosity, like a masterful conductor using a storm to make music he makes "Vincere" thunderous and big but keeps it from sinking under its own weight.


3. A Prophet (read my review)

Speaking of genre as a way to connect to more profound subjects, Jacques Audiard's "A Prophet" may look like a gritty gangster flick at first glance-and it sure works like one-but the underlying themes of racial empowerment, spiritual search and criminal coming-of-age at its center are worthy of discussing with your shrink your social worker and your priest.
But the movie is never as "Officer Krupke" specific as that description, Audiard makes the story of Malik (Tahar Rahim) mean something different to whoever's watching and while some will be inspired to call it the best thing since "The Godfather" others will be more intrigued with figuring out the theological meaning of the title cards Audiard inserts throughout the film.


2. Up (read my review)

An adventure film in the very essence of the word, Pete Docter's "Up" is another winning entry in the Pixar canon that makes the studio the most consistently brilliant factory in Hollywood or a good luck streak waiting to crash.
The creativity in this film makes it seem more like the former though, especially in the way the screenwriters and director make the oddest elements work like magic.
Beyond its obvious homages to classic cinema, Buck Rogers and Indiana Jones, "Up" owes its most precious moments to the machinations of old studio Hollywood where people seemed to sit around a desk, throw things inside a giant pot and come out with a film that had romance, drama, comedy, adventure and even room for various analytical readings.
"Up" is the rare kind of movie that still happens to have it all.


1. The White Ribbon (read my review)

If "The White Ribbon" is the year's coldest film, it-ironically- might also be the most inviting. Long gone are the days when going to the cinema was an interactive experience in which the filmmakers and the audience made the movie together.
We have grown used to sitting in the dark, munching on our pop corn and leaving all the problem solving and idea digesting to the people up on the screen and behind the camera.
Leave it to Michael Haneke to bring this sort of event back with a film that might seem like an over analytical allegory at first but also happens to be the most delicious mystery of the year.
One which we're invited to participate in because it reaches beyond the film.
The strange crimes occurring in the German village are enough to keep our brain working throughout the movie looking for clues and suspects but Haneke makes sure we also have fun on the way back home from the theater and makes us see that despite our universe being in true color, it might just be an extension of the black and white world we've just left.
The burning of that barn we saw might be that mysterious explosive that just blew an Afghan building halfway across the world and the bullying of a young disabled child might explain why certain kids grow into violent adults that solve everything with violence.
"The White Ribbon" might work as a prequel to every movie Michael Haneke has ever made but it also works as warning to the world we've yet to see.

Police, Adjective ****

Director: Corneliu Porumboiu
Cast: Dragos Bucur, Vlad Ivanov, Irina Saulescu, Ion Stoica
Marian Ghenea, Cosmin Selesi, George Remes, Alexandru Sabadac

The notions of lawfulness, morality and conscientiousness become the unsolved case at the center of Corneliu Porumboiu's brilliant "Police, Adjective".
Set in a small Romanian town, the film follows Cristi (Bucur) a young police officer whose latest assignment consists of following a teenager (Sabadac) tipped off as a marijuana dealer.
Convinced that the kid is innocent and that it's his dealer who should be incarcerated, Cristi spends time and resources trying to uncover something bigger; for he finds it wrong to cut a teenager's life short for smoking a joint.
"Everybody does it in Prague" he says convinced that Romania too will come to see social drug use as something common. "Maybe attitudes will change a bit but not the law" replies Nelu (Stoica) one of his coworkers .
It is with this kind of remark that director Porumboiu hints at us that his movie won't deal with the usual shenanigans associated with the police genre.
His film takes a turn towards the other kind of procedural drama: the one that deals with intellect, not instinct.
This is confirmed when we start realizing that Cristi's case isn't really going "anywhere". He follows the kid around, watches him do almost the same thing every day and then files a report (which we read in its entire glory) for his superiors.
The day to day of Cristi's job is filled with the dry sense of humor that's become a staple of the Romanian New Wave. We see as Cristi goes from department to department asking for help he sometimes won't get.
"I won't return to those files" establishes a clerk, while another one threatens "if you start that I'll do nothing at all" when Cristi suggests a deadline. It's obvious that there isn't a sense of real duty in the people performing these jobs, or is it perhaps that Cristi is making a big deal of a "lesser" case?
Cristi's sense of importance is concentrated on his thorough reports, perhaps to make up for the fact that not even he likes this job; he fills them with detail containing enough deadpan to hint at his boredom, but also reminding us that this is in fact how most police forces work.
When his literate wife (Saulescu) notices he's made a spelling mistake she corrects him while informing him of the grammatical changes effected by the Romanian Academy.
In another scene they have a cute debate over a pop song: he thinks the elaborate metaphors only hide the banality, she finds the use of symbols and images something brilliant.
Soon Cristi learns that the importance of words is essential in his profession, particularly when the law is subjected to so many grammatical conditions, like when his suspect becomes a "distributor" for sharing his hashish with his friends.
Porumboiu doesn't choose the subtle way and gives us a dialectical lesson using a dictionary in the film's most controversial scene.
When Cristi finally faces Captain Anghelache (the intimidating Ivanov) and is forced to choose between his own moral law and being a police officer.
Some will find the obviousness of the scene an insulting piece of facile didacticism as the director even includes a blackboard while Ivanov's character becomes an elementary school student's worst nightmare and reduces the other adults in the scene to dunces.
Those more willing to follow the movie's sly game will come to realize that this is in fact where the director had been leading us and Cristi all along.
Throughout the first three quarters of the movie we see how this man's world has turned into a cell he carries everywhere. This is hinted visually by always showing him through fences, surrounded by door frames, hallways and even confined by his own pullover.
Cristi's existential battle during most of the film is the equivalent of a prison stay to be solved in the last scene's unofficial sentencing.
"You no longer know what you are, that's your problem" says Captain Anghelache. He might very well be talking about a world where the law and humanity no longer go hand in hand.