The year 2013 has been an amazing one for movies, though maybe every year is an amazing year for movies if one is ready to be amazed by movies. It’s also a particularly apt year to make a list of the best films. Making a list is not merely a numerical act but also a polemical one, and the best of this year’s films are polemical in their assertion of the singularity of cinema, as well as of the art form’s opposition to the disposable images of television. The 2013 crop comprises an unplanned, if not accidental, collective declaration of the essence of the cinema, an art of images and sounds that, at their best, don’t exist to tell a story or to tantalize the audience (though they may well do so) but, rather, to reflect a crisis in the life of the filmmaker and the state of the artist’s mind or, even, soul.
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It’s no surprise that the popularity of so-called serious TV series followed closely on the rise, in the nineties, of a new generation of filmmakers, including Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, James Gray, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Fincher, Darren Aronofsky, and Quentin Tarantino. These were filmmakers who outran the confident naturalism of the seventies and the nostalgic verities of the eighties in pursuit of their own disruptive extravagances. They created personalized symbolic worlds that mapped fuller and deeper realities than those of the familiar modes of unquestioned realism. In this new era of assertive directors, television producers took up the vacated middle ground, self-consciously delivering characters into living rooms, with no director to get in the way.
The ever-increasing prominence of television is, in turn, sparking a renewed reflection on the part of filmmakers about what cinema is, and what it can be. The conflict between the dependent image and the essential image, between the transparent and the conspicuous, is real and serious. The enthusiasm for serious television—and by television, I mean open-ended series with multiple directors—in large measure overlaps with, and reinforces, the art-house consensus, the latter-day tradition of quality. This decade will be remembered as the golden age of television, as the nineteen-twenties are remembered as the golden age of flagpole-sitting. In this case, TV series are the events that fulfill the desire for eventfulness while also providing an ostensible simulacrum of human interest. (This is in no way meant to cast aspersions on the many excellent artists who work in television; the effort that goes in may not overcome the systemic obstacles of script and character, the primacy of the show runner and the writer rather than the director.)
The best movies this year are films of combative cinema, audacious inventions in vision. The specificity and originality of their moment-to-moment creation of images offers new ways for viewers to confront the notion of what “narrative” might be. Their revitalization of storytelling as experience restores to the cinema its primordial mode of redefining consciousness. It’s significant that some of the filmmakers in the forefront of that charge are from the generation of the elders, innovators of the seventies. In the age of radical cinema sparked by digital technology, the rise of independent producers, and the ready ubiquity of the history of cinema (thanks to DVDs and streaming video), these older directors have experienced a glorious second youth. That artistic rejuvenation is also due to the stimulating ambiance of actual youth—a young generation of freethinking cinephiles, critics, and filmmakers who, thanks to the Internet, make their appreciation of these sublime extremes widely and quickly known, even when the mainstream of viewers and reviewers miss out.
That’s why this year’s selection is so rarefied—why the top ten is unusually tops, why the second ten could easily be another year’s top ten, why the excitement of going to the movies regularly isn’t just the pleasantness of novelty but the shock of the authentically new.
1–2 (tie). “The Wolf of Wall Street” (due to embargo until December 17th, silence reigns for now) and “To the Wonder.”
3. “Like Someone in Love.”
4–5 (tie). “Computer Chess” and “Upstream Color.”
7. “A Touch of Sin.”
8. “Blue Is the Warmest Color.”
9. “An Oversimplification of Her Beauty.”
10–12 (tie). “Inside Llewyn Davis,” “Sun Don’t Shine,” and “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints.”
13–24 (in no particular order).
“Oldboy”
25–29 (in no particular order).
“Nebraska”
Phantoms.
“The Last of the Unjust,” Claude Lanzmann’s new film, which was scheduled for a December 13th qualifying run, would have been near the top of the list. When the Academy nominators failed to put it on the documentary short list, that weeklong run was cancelled; it opens February 7th.
James Gray’s “The Immigrant,” which also played at the New York Film Festival, had been scheduled for release this fall, but instead it’s still awaiting a release date. Though awards don’t matter in the long run, this movie deserves some; it would be high on my list.
Ying Liang’s film “When Night Falls” was shown last spring (at MOMA), but only for a few days. I wish that it had been given a weeklong run that would have counted as an official release and landed it high on this list. The same goes for Eliza Hittman’s “It Felt Like Love” and Manoel de Oliveira’s “Gebo and the Shadow.”
Steven Soderbergh’s “Behind the Candelabra” is not a TV show but it’s not a movie, either. (Much credit to HBO for producing it when movie producers were unwilling to do so). Had it been released theatrically, it would have been on the list.
Among the many worthy films seen in festivals that are still awaiting release and would have ranked high on the list are, notably, Josephine Decker’s “Butter on the Latch,” Joaquim Pinto’s “What Now? Remind Me,” and Nathan Silver’s “Soft in the Head.” There are also two short films: Miguel Gomes’s “Redemption” and Dustin Guy Defa’s “Lydia Hoffman Lydia Hoffman“—which need a context for release.
Worst movies (those with the greatest disproportion between the emblazoned ambition and the mediocrity of the result): “Before Midnight,” “The Great Beauty,” and “All Is Lost,” with “Gravity” close behind (or ahead).
