My Top 25 Best Movies of 2013

Am I too late to be posting this? Most people post their “best of the year” lists in late December, early January, right? And this is March. Bugger. Oh well, better late than never. And hey, the Oscars were on last night, so I can just seamlessly tie it into that. Yeah, that’ll work. So, 2013 was a great year for cinema and yadda yadda yadda, let the fawning commence!

25. “Upstream Colour”

Multi-talented indie auteur Shane Carruth’s anticipated follow-up to his brain-boggling time travel head-scratcher “Primer” was another strange, low-key sci-fi which was just as confounding and intoxicating as his cult 2004 debut. Through lyrical editing and sensuous images, “Upstream Colour” tells a story of kidnapping, identity theft, farmyard pigs and mind-altering parasitic grubs, and for what it’s worth, it’s the best mind-altering parasitic grub movie of the year. Having now seen it twice, I’d say that it’s best to let the film’s entrancing aesthetic wash over you rather than get too caught up in the frankly baffling plot details; even on the second viewing I still hadn’t the foggiest what was going on in those last 20 minutes — but I’ll be damned if I wasn’t fascinated by it.

24. “Nebraska”

I read online somewhere — don’t ask me where, I can’t remember — that “Nebraska” is like director Alexander Payne went back in time and made a student film, to which I say this: if only student films were this good and if only they had Bruce fucking Dern in them. In Payne’s bittersweet, handsomely shot black-and-white dramedy, the chronic bit-parter finally lands a leading role worthy of his performance in Douglas Trumbull’s under-appreciated 1972 sci-fi classic “Silent Running,” playing a kooky old fart who falls for a mail scam and travels to Lincoln, Nebraska with his son, played by Will Forte, to collect his supposed $1 million sweepstakes prize. As a lovably clueless, snowy-haired dolt, Dern has never been better, and as an ode to humdrum midwestern America that’s equal parts mocking and loving, Payne’s film is completely authentic.

23. “Stories We Tell”

Canadian actress Sarah Polley’s enthralling and powerful documentary “Stories We Tell” is a deeply personal account of her family history, as shown through home movie footage (some real, some staged), recalled by friends and family members and narrated by her British-born father Michael, who reads from his memoir. The film’s primary focus: Polley’s mother Diane, an actress who died when Polley was 11, and the true identity of Polley’s biological father. Unashamedly self-indulgent though it may be, Polley’s bravely intimate documentary teaches us that everyone has a story, and that with the right techniques that story can be riveting, moving and full of surprises, as it so very much is here.

22. “Filth”

It’s crystal clear that James McAvoy had an absolute blast making “Filth:” you can see it in his demented grin and the crazed twinkle in his eyes. In Jon S. Baird’s ferocious adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s darkly twisted novel, McAvoy plays Bruce Robertson, a manipulative, junkie scumbag Edinburgh detective with a penchant for abuse: he abuses those around him, he abuses his power, he abuses himself and he’s loving every scheming, coked-up, self-loathing minute. “Filth” may share the same deliriously fucked up sense of humour of another Welsh adaptation, none other than Danny Boyle’s “Trainspotting,” but Baird gives it an energy and a style all on its own. And at the centre of it all, McAvoy is exhilaratingly unhinged, like Professor X on one hell of a bender.

21. “Mud”

There were a number of terrific coming-of-age indies which came out of the US last year: James Ponsoldt’s “The Spectacular Now,” Nat Faxon and Jim Rash’s “The Way Way Back” and Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ “The Kings of Summer,” to name three. My favourite of the bunch was “Mud,” Jeff Nichols’ tale of two Arkansas boys who discover a strange man named Mud living in hiding on a small island. Starring Matthew McConaughey as the mysterious pistol-toting hobo, Nichol’s drama is part of the former go-to rom-com lead’s dubbed “McConaissance” — which last night culminated with his highly deserved Oscar win for “Dallas Buyers Club” — and while it goes without saying that he’s utterly brilliant, it’s the young Tye Sheridan who burns bright as the teenage protagonist learning the harsh truths of reality. Keep an eye out for this kid: if he sticks to it he could be a big star.

20. “Side Effects”

I’ve seen “Side Effects” twice now, once oblivious to its many knotty surprises, once having witnessed all the knots neatly unravel, and on both watches I was utterly gripped. As Rooney Mara’s unstable anti-depressant user does something horrible and as she and her doctor, brilliantly played by Jude Law, have to deal with the consequences, Steven Soderbergh’s layered thriller asks two questions: is a person under the influence of prescription drugs responsible for their actions, and is the doctor who prescribed the drug responsible for the actions of his patient? Soderbergh has gone on record as saying that he’s done making movies; if this is true, it’s a great loss, because here he’s crafted a sly Hitchcockian thriller that’d make the big man himself proud.

19. “The World’s End”

Much to our collective relief, the concluding chapter of Edgar Wright’s loosely connected Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy proved worthy of its two predecessors, the seemingly insurmountably brilliant “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz” — if anyone could do it, it was Edgar Wright. Bursting with energy and blue alien-robot goop, sci-fi comedy “The World’s End” follows a bunch of estranged old mates as they go on a nostalgic pub crawl together in their sleepy home town, and as that pub crawl is disturbed by a hostile intergalactic force. Wright throws at us a thrilling mix of rapid-fire gags, laugh-a-minute hilarity, hyperkinetic action and surprising poignancy. Simon Pegg, meanwhile, gets to say probably my favourite one-liner of the whole year: “Get back in your rocket and fuck off back to Legoland, you cunts.” Perfick.

18. “The Great Beauty”

In the opening scene of Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Great Beauty,” a tourist taking photographs in Rome becomes so overwhelmed by the beauty of the Italian capital that he literally falls down dead. Sorrentino is, of course, taking the piss, but watching “The Great Beauty” it’s difficult not to have a similar reaction: the sheer, dazzling extravagance of Sorrentino’s latest is enough to make one light-headed, with wild party scenes that’d make the great Jay Gatsby need a lie down. That it’s also an engrossing journey through the gorgeous European city as led by the magnificent Toni Servillo is certainly a boost. Comparisons to Fellini have flooded the film since its release; I like to think of it at “8 1/2” turned up to 11.

17. “All is Lost”

Robert Redford sits quietly in a boat in the middle of the ocean for an hour and a half and it’s utterly riveting. Lost at sea, Redford’s unnamed lone sailor must fight for survival, battling the elements armed with a broken boat, a life raft and some flares. J. C. Shandor’s gripping and soulful survival drama is the anti-“Life of Pi,” less fantastically spectacular and more low-key, featuring almost no dialogue, a single cast member and no accompanying CGI zoo animals. There’s just Redford and his uncanny ability to hold an audience’s attention. The whole film is like a testament to how watchable Redford really is: I would have gladly watched him sitting quietly in a boat for another hour and a half.

16. “A Field in England”

Ben Wheatley takes us on a mind-melting head trip through what must be the strangest field in England I’ve ever seen. Set in the middle of what appears to be the English Civil War, Wheatley’s experimental black-and-white brain-boggler follows a gang of extravagantly costumed men who flee a battle in search of an ale house; soon enough, there’s blood on the grass, the sun's turned black and Reece Shearsmith is running around like a rabid dog tied to a rope. As if it wasn’t weird enough, in the hallucinogenic finale, Wheatley turns the WTF dial up to 11 and breaks off the control: it’s like staring at rorschach blobs after having consumed mass quantities of magic mushrooms. Also, fair warning: the look on Reece Shearsmith’s face as he emerges from that tent will haunt your nightmares.

15. “The Place Beyond the Pines”

Spanning three decades and two generations, Derek Cianfrance’s sprawling, New York-set drama “The Place Beyond the Pines” at first follows a motorcycle stunt driver turned bank robber played by Ryan Gosling, then Bradley Cooper’s rookie cop who fights corruption in his police department, then Gosling and Cooper’s troubled teenage sons, who cross paths at their high school. The director’s follow-up to his “Blue Valentine” is certainly ambitious in its epic scope, but Cianfrance manages to keep it on the same level of quiet intimacy of his 2010 dark romance. His third film has the feel of an old American classic; years from now it may be looked back on as one.

14. “The Selfish Giant”

On its grim and gritty surface, “The Selfish Giant” looks to be a typically Loachian kitchen sink drama about a young, recently expelled working-class Bradford boy collecting scrap metal to sell to a local scrap dealer. But writer-director Clio Barnard, adapting from a story by Oscar Wilde, turns such expectations on their head and makes “The Selfish Giant” an enchanting and haunting tale of friendship, greed, death and street-racing horses. The young British actor Conner Chapman is a tremendous find, spirited, cheeky and capable of projecting a whole range of adult emotions, albeit as filtered through the eyes of a child. He also manages the rare feat of being a bratty little shit and making us love him for it, a feat also accomplished last year by Leonardo DiCaprio. But we’ll get to that later.

13. “Rush”

So perfectly cast are Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Brühl as the British F1 racer James Hunt and his Austrian opponent Niki Lauda, respectively, that when stock footage of the actual Hunt and Lauda is presented to us, we can barely tell them apart from their on-screen counterparts. Chronicling Hunt and Lauda’s heated rivalry from a small Formula Three race in 1970 though to the 1976 Grand Prix, director Ron Howard spins for us both an exhilarating thrill-ride and a mesmerising story of masculinity and obsession. Much like Asif Kapadia’s spellbinding documentary “Senna,” “Rush” did something once thought impossible: it made me excited about Formula 1.

12. “Beyond the Hills”

Two estranged friends, one a stubbornly devout and emotionally repressed nun played by Cosmina Stratan, the other a free-spirited godless sinner played by Cristina Flutur, are reunited in the desolate hills of Romania. As the latter lives in the former’s Orthodox convent with the rest of the nuns she becomes unstable and soon enough the head priest begins to suspect that her increasingly erratic behaviour is the result of demonic possession. Cristian Mungiu’s haunting Romanian drama, based on a real case, is not the easiest film to sit through; it’s long and slow and bare in its presentation. But it is unforgettably chilling and Mungiu’s subtle direction keeps us gripped, all the while Mungiu remains completely non-judgemental as characters commit questionable acts in the name of their belief system.

11. “Captain Phillips”

As he did so successfully in “United 93,” director Paul Greengrass takes a real-life drama and turns it into a blisteringly intense thriller. Here, the story is that of Captain Richard Phillips, whose container ship was boarded by armed Somalian pirates in 2009 and who was himself taken hostage in the ship’s lifeboat. As Phillips, Tom Hanks is an absolute powerhouse, while Greengrass ratchets up the suspense to near-unbearable levels of intensity. The unexpected snubbing of Hanks for an Oscar nomination is the stuff of scandal: he deserved a nod for that heart-wrenching final scene alone.

10. “Short Term 12”

Certainly one of the more memorable images of last year was of Brie Larson and John Gallagher, Jr. chasing after a young, wailing boy with the American flag tied around his neck and the stars and stripes flowing behind him like Superman’s cape. Adapted from his own short film, Destin Daniel Cretton’s underseen, emotionally draining indie drama is set in a foster-care facility for troubled teens. As a care worker who is herself dealing with her own emerging, long-buried troubles, Larson gives a beautifully layered performance, steely yet on the verge of shattering at any minute, while Cretton’s sensitive direction avoids cheap sentiment but still manages to jerk a few well-earned tears.

9. “Blue is the Warmest Colour”

At last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Abdellatif Kechiche’s three-hour French romance “Blue is the Warmest Colour” bagged the coveted Palme d’Or prize, awarded in an unexpected move to both the film itself and to the film’s two stars, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux. Some critics argued that the voters were merely won over by the film’s stark depictions of raunchy lesbian sex; I argue that it was because Kechiche’s film is a beautiful and enthrallingly intimate portrayal of young love and desire, performed with heart-bursting passion and astonishing authenticity by its two enormously talented leads. I’m sure the raunchy lesbian sex scenes didn’t hurt though.

8. “The Wolf of Wall Street”

Jordan Belfort is an asshole: a straight-up, full-on, coke-snorting, wife-cheating, money-swindling asshole. As the real-life stock broker/scam artist at the centre of Martin Scorsese’s darkly comic epic crime drama, Leonardo DiCaprio gives the best performance of his career, deliciously manic and equal counts loathsome and roguishly lovable; plus, in a scene where an overdose of Quaaludes sends him into what he calls the “cerebral palsy phase,” he reveals himself to be an unprecedented master of physical comedy. The film itself, it’s magnificently entertaining: a gloriously fucked up ride through the mind of a lowlife living the high life. Jordan Belfort is an asshole, unpunished and proud, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have a blast watching him be one.

7. “Frances Ha”

Ahoy, sexy! Noah Baumbach’s “Frances Ha” is a whimsical, wryly funny blend of Lena Dunham’s HBO smash “Girls,” Woody Allen’s monochrome Manhattan and a French New Wave picture by Truffaut or Godard. Greta Gerwig, who also co-writes, is endearingly awkward as the babbling, self-deprecating Frances, an aspiring pro dancer living in NYC who is, in her own words, not yet “a real person.” When not following Frances as she stumbles her way through social situations and money problems, Baumbach’s comedy-drama follows her drifting relationship with her best friend, the also excellent Mickey Sumner, which looks set to disappear. The result is tender and hilarious and utterly wonderful and, if I may make a prediction, a mini-classic in the making.

6. “The Act of Killing”

From 1965 to 1966, more than 500,000 people accused of being communists were murdered in Indonesia by government-sanctioned death squads. The perpetrators of these heinous crimes were never punished; in fact, as we see in Joshua Oppenheimer’s extraordinary documentary “The Act of Killing,” they were celebrated as heroes, and still are to this day. For his film, Oppenheimer invites two of these proud, self-titled “gangsters” to re-enact their crimes in front of the camera, and it’s through these re-enactments that the true, horrifying nature of their crimes finally dawns on them. Oppenheimer’s raw, revealing and often surreal film is a work of earth-shattering power and knee-buckling emotional force; fighting back both fury and tears is a losing battle. If you don’t walk out of this an absolute mess you are a stronger man than I.

5. “Her”

It’s eerily believable in this day and age: a man falling in love with a piece of computer software. It’s also eerily romantic in Spike Jonze’s future sci-fi “Her,” the story of a lonely dweeb played by Joaquin Phoenix who starts up a relationship with an artificially intelligent, Siri-like device voiced by Scarlett Johannson. Jonze, the brilliant bastard, takes this weird and potentially creepy predicament and turns into one of the most engrossing and sweetly compelling love stories of recent years. As the bespectacled, moustachioed, passionately romantic lead, Phoenix is nerdishly charming, and even with the limitation of being just a voice, Johannson has astonishing presence — methinks she’s been cruelly overlooked in this year’s awards season.

4. “Inside Llewyn Davis”

Oscar Isaac is an absolute revelation in “Inside Llewyn Davis:” who knew that one guy from “Drive” could belt out a tune like that? In the Coen Brothers’ melancholic tribute to the ‘60s New York folk scene, Isaac plays the titular struggling musician, who with a ginger cat in his arms goes from couch to couch and gig to gig searching for his big break but constantly hitting brick walls. As we’ve come to expect from the Coens, “Inside Llewyn Davis” is an achingly brilliant piece of writing, directing and acting, filled with their usual dark humour, human emotion and lovingly drawn eccentrics. What it also has is a live folk soundtrack which sounds like it was produced in the heavens: you’ll walk out with a tune in your ear and a couple more echoing through your heart.

3. “Before Midnight”

If “Before Sunrise” was about young love and “Before Sunset” was about young love recaptured, “Before Midnight” is about young love fading, falling under the strain of marriage and children and middle age. It’s also about Jesse and Celine, once again played to perfection by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, talking and strolling their way through a sunny vista, this time Greece, which I for one could sit and watch for an eternity. I love this couple and I love listening in on their long conversations. I look forward to hearing more in ten years time if Hawke and Delpy and director Richard Linklater feel the need to return to Jesse and Celine’s lives once more. If not, “Before Midnight” is a beautiful and completely satisfying close to their love story, which has lasted almost 20 years and captivated us all.

2. “Gravity”

More than just a staggering achievement in visual effects, Alfonso Cuarón’s breathtaking 3D space spectacle is a ground-breaking testament to the power of cinema, its power to dazzle, its power to amaze and its ability to take audiences on a thrilling big-screen adventure (in space!). Joyless cynics say that “Gravity” is nothing more than empty CGI; what has escaped them is that Sandra Bullock’s endearing leading performance gives the spectacle a heart and a soul, and that the film is not just a flashy special effects showcase, it’s a new way to tell a story. Watching “Gravity,” my jaw was at my ankles and my brain was exploding out of my ears. “Gravity” is the future, and the future is mind-blowing.

1. “12 Years a Slave”

The visceral brutality of Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave” is merciless, as it absolutely should be. The slave masters showed no mercy in the treatment of their slaves — why should McQueen? For we the audience’s comfort? For the sake of our squeamishness? Or perhaps because such depictions are, say certain individuals, inherently cruel and sadistic? Some have complained that the film’s depiction of this ugly time in American history is “too much,” that it should be toned down. To hell with that — this is the hard and painful truth, and in bringing the story of the slave Solomon Northup to the big screen, McQueen portrays the terror and the pain in all its grim detail. “12 Years a Slave” is the best film of 2013 because of the raw power of its storytelling and its unflinching portrayal of humanity at its ugliest. If it has one flaw it’s that at its end there appears text outlining the events in the aftermath of Solomon’s imprisonment; how, pray tell, does McQueen expect me to read this when I have tears in my eyes?