The Devil's Backbone

After the uninspired sophomore effort of Mimic, Guillermo Del Toro’s modest but emotional and affecting wartime ghost story represented an early career creative reboot of sorts. The Devil’s Backbone resounds best not so much for its genre scares or creature effects, but the effective point of view of children displaced by war and Del Toro’s distinctly gothic and disturbing take on the subject matter.

The Big City

A remarkably poignant and mainstream accessible slice of Indian social realism from the master Indian director. The story of a conservative Indian mother and wife who finds herself embarking on a professional career outside of the cultural traditions of women at the time resounds powerfully for anyone who identifies with the struggles of personal empowerment and the conflicts of societal expectations.

Only God Forgives

Nicholas Winding Refn’s talking-piece, blasted at Cannes and now viewable by the regular public in theatres and VOD, from these eyes is less the ‘pretentious exercise’ or ‘remarkable disaster’ as described by many critics than a bold audacious Tarantinoesque throwback exploitation picture told with Kubrick-influenced compositional perfection and a strong touch of Asian bombastic grandiloquence.

The Place Beyond the Pines

A tad clunky in the ambitious sprawling narrative of this picture, Derek Cianfrance’s unbridled ambition to push his storytelling abilities above and beyond Blue Valentine is a wholly admirable risk. Despite a rickety third act, which pulls together the 20 year journey of two characters on either side of the law, Pines is a thrilling auteur cinematic exercise reminscient of the ambitious blue collar dramas of the late 70’s specifically Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter.

Trance

The idea of Danny Boyle doing a Christopher Nolan-style heist/con thriller is enticing but Boyle’s imposing style however, bold and unique, just doesn't fit the material. What starts out as a clever puzzle film about hypnotism and art thievery detours into a sanctimonious tragic love story washing away everything we desire from a cutthroat noirish genre film.

Night Train to Munich

Carol Reed’s WWII espionage pot boiler confidently stands as tall as any of the celebrated Hitchcock war thrillers of the era. While this picture predates his more acclaimed post war pictures, The Third Man and Odd Man Out, it sizzles with the same kind of high stakes urgency.

The Elephant Man

The Elephant Man endears as one of my favourite films of all time because it exemplifies what makes a great film – taking traditional stories, themes and genres told in unconventional ways. Here David Lynch’s marriage of his avant garde peculiarness with the weepy triumph of the human spirit story of John Merrick, the physically deformed circus performer who went from circus freak to Victorian celebrity, is as an inspired cinematic concoction as there ever has been.

Myth of the American Sleepover

Another ensemble coming-of-age film involving a handful of high schoolers on their last day of summer experiencing the pains of love? But wait, with little fanfare outside of festival play and the Independent Spirit Awards, and almost no penetration into the mainstream consciousness, this picture is arguably the best high school movie produced in years. Just when you thought it was impossible to find a fresh way to tell a high school saga, writer/director David Robert Mitchell manages to find realism and truth in almost every frame of this picture.

Shoah

The masterful comprehensive examination of the Holocaust never fails to mesmerize on all levels of cinema, history and humanity. Though never having seen Claude Lanzmann’s lauded and landmark 9-hr film on the Holocaust until now, the effect of watching it today is probably more powerful than it was first released, and likely will become more revelant and revelatory with each passing year.

Rumble Fish

There’s no doubt Mr. Coppola like many other 70’s mavericks suffered to achieve the success and admiration in the 80’s. That said, there’s much to admire in the Coppola ouevre of this decade. In particular Rumble Fish, a difficult film for sure, cold, austere and considerably weirder than the literary treatment of The Outsiders, but astonishing and eye-poppingly brilliant nonethless.

Frances Ha

The choice of shooting black and white for this picture is key to its warm feelings of cinematic nostalgia and the seemingly effortless naturalism. There’s an instant timeless quality to Frances Ha, recalling the works of Woody Allen (Manhattan), Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise), Francios Truffaut and other New Wavers. Perfectly in sync with Boambach’s freeform style is the grand presence of Greta Gerwig whose lively personality is the raison d’etre for this picture. And recalling Diane Keaton’s performance in Annie Hall, we should expect Greta Gerwig to have similar award accolades during award season.

Things to Come

From H.G. Wells's screenplay adaption from his own book 'The Shape of Things to Come' came one of the most ambitious science fiction films ever made. A one hundred year narrative of a fictional city in England from 1940 to 2040 showing the technological and political progress balances its graceless thematic bluntness with truly astonishing visual design and conceptual ambition.

Naked Prey

One of the unique experiments of the 1960’s, Cornel Wilde’s ambitious parable of culture and conflict is remarkably simple in concept - a British game hunter captured by African natives for torture escapes and has to fight the harshness of the African environment while in flight from his pursuers. The result, a 90min chase film which comments on the fragile state of our civilization with the same irony as “The Most Dangerous Game”. "Lord of the Flies”, and “Planet of the Apes” would also become the main influence for Mel Gibson to make his own version of the story, "Apocalypto".

Carlos

Olivier Assayas' memorable addition of Euro-art house credibility to what was essentially a procedural action film told with maximum realism, cinematic swagger and panache resounds memorably in the light of other New Millenium hot button thrillers such as Zero Dark Thirty and Homeland.