My best films of the year out of a lost from the AVclub (need to rewatch Only Lovers...): Best case for finally retiring that cheapest of gimmicks, color cinematography: Ida Look, it was cool for a while, before the novelty wore off. But isn’t it about time that we all stopped pretending that color cinematography is anything more than a passing trend or cheap gimmick—a desperate attempt, like Smell-O-Vision or D-BOX—to sell movie tickets? Fans of that passé ploy should feast their eyes on Ida, and then say with a straight face that the spectrum of light has anything on the timeless beauty of black-and-white. The first film director Pawel Pawlikowski (My Summer Of Love) has shot in his native Poland, Ida follows a young novitiate nun who discovers that she’s a Jewish survivor of the Nazi occupation. Narratively, the movie is spare and affecting. Visually, it’s absolutely breathtaking, full of painterly backdrops and stark juxtapositions of light and dark—the latter exemplified by the inky eyes and pallid skin of lead actress Agata Trzebuchowska. Every monochromatic image, shot in the boxy Academy ratio, is gorgeous enough to hang in a museum. You had a good run, color, you really did. But Ida proves that the only shade cinema ever needed was gray. [AD] Best use of Mia Wasikowska: Only Lovers Left Alive (runner up: The Double) Mia Wasikowska elevates everything she’s in, even holding her own against Tim Burton’s rococo CGI explosion as the star of Alice In Wonderland. In Only Lovers Left Alive, she’s a storm in the form of a bloodsucker, with glittery shoes and vintage dresses and kittenish fangs, and practically the only real source of action in Jim Jarmusch’s ultra-cool vampire movie. It’s a pleasure to hang around with Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton), but they don’t do very much until Wasikowska’s Ava comes sauntering in to shake things up. For more of the actresses’ MVP charm, see The Double, wherein human turtleneck Simon (Jesse Eisenberg) is pushed into action when his doppelganger James (also Eisenberg) begins making moves on Wasikowska’s character, Hannah. Hannah, who was written into the script by director Richard Ayoade and isn’t in the original novella by Dostoyevsky, might be relegated to the copy room in the basement, but she’s not afraid to give Simon or James or any of the other creeps lurking about a good earful. [Jenni Miller] Best fish: Snowpiercer The summer’s best action movie also features the season’s biggest “what the hell?” moment, when Chris Evans’ rebel leader—mounting an insurgency aboard a train carrying post-apocalyptic humanity’s last survivors—comes face-to-face with a horde of masked, ax-wielding adversaries. That these enemies look ferocious does plenty to ratchet up the sequence’s suspense. But further escalating things, the faceless villains break the pre-battle calm by passing a dead fish up to the front of their group, where it’s held by its tail and (in close-up slow-motion) gutted. Is it a ritualistic gesture toward the planet’s arctic condition? A symbolic act meant to foreshadow the violence they’re intending to inflect? A sign that these assassins are simply sick and tired of eating seafood? Regardless, the unlucky fish—who the Evans character later slips on, hilariously, like a banana peel—is the baffling signature image of Bong Joon-ho’s thrilling Snowpiercer. [NS] avclub/article/best-films-2014-so-far-halftime-report-superlative-206679
Posted on: Tue, 15 Jul 2014 22:51:44 +0000