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.

Scum

Alan Clarke’s powerful indictment of the British juvenile penal system is a virtuouso cinematic achievement, ugly and beautiful at the same time, influential to the modern works of Steve McQueen, Gus Van Sant and others. Scum, like Clarke’s mostly television work in the 70’s and 80’s represents some of the best films ever shot for television.

Straw Dogs

This is Sam Peckinpah's other unquestionable triumph, second to The Wild Bunch, a classic morality tale that furthers his career examination of violence and the specifically American perception of it. While The Wild Bunch was told using the tropes of the Western genre and the familiar themes of male camaraderie, heroism, anti-heroism and machismo, Straw Dogs is about a cowardly pacifist forced to find his latent primal urges to protect his home and family.

Stoker

In the long history of Asian genre directors crossing over into English-language films, Chan-wook Parks’ Stoker, a deliriously directed noirsih thriller, is the cream of the crop. Unlike this year’s other Korean-directed thriller Jee-woon Kim’s The Last Stand, Park’s devilish film about nebbish teenager disturbed by the arrival of her long lost Uncle bristles with cinematic ingenuity and with a kind of inspired unconventionality not seen since the bombastic heyday of Brian De Palma.

Band of Outsiders

Even after six films following his celebrated Nouvelle-Vague debut 'Band of Outsiders' finds Godard at his hippest, frolickiest, cool, witty and irreverent – a postmodernness which bleeds formally into the seminal early work of Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino.