Faat Kiné

The Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène is probably the most well-known African director outside of his home continent. Beginning to work in the early 1960s—the decade in which some African countries began declaring independence from their colonial occupiers, and in which African artists could now comment upon their countries' own turbulent colonial histories with greater freedom—Sembène made the first feature film released by a sub-Saharan African director, Black Girl (La noire de...), in 1966. Two years later, in 1968, Sembène would release Mandabi, the first movie that was entirely spoken in Wolof, one of Senegal's major dialects (and Sembène's mother tongue). Throughout his career, he made provocative, didactic, progressive, proudly Senegalese works that criticized the new African bourgeoisie, grappled with the polyvalent and troubling colonial history of Senegal (and numerous northern African nations), and commented upon social woes such as the oppression of women and religious intolerance in a society well-known for the oft-contentious cohabitation of Christianity and Islam.

There are many reasons for Sembène's comparative prominence among African directors. Some of these reasons are controversial and are common among some African directors, such as the co-funding of some projects by European production companies (which provides films with a more pervasive distribution outlet in Europe and overseas) and Sembène's progressive critiques of some facets of Senegalese culture, which would likely be sympathized with by the majority of Western viewers who would be interested in exploring African film. More importantly, though, Sembène is probably the best-known African filmmaker internationally because he is one of the best, at least at what he is trying to accomplish. Among African directors who repeatedly comment upon the sociocultural states and political histories of their countries, Sembène is likely the most impassioned, creative, unique, and compassionate. It would be foolish to claim that his forward-thinking social commentaries are pandering to liberal Western audiences who support the films' critiques of traditional Senegalese culture, for it is obvious through Sembène's use of numerous Senegalese cultural and artistic traditions (among them the employment of a griot character to comment upon the events in his stories, or evocative observations of modern Dakar's vibrant and eclectic cultural community, or the use of Senegalese dialects rather than French) that the director deeply embraces his homeland and employs a uniquely Senegalese cinema to criticize the country's injustices.

Following Sembène's death in June 2007 at the age of eighty-four (he completed his final film, Mooladé, only three years prior), there was a mild growth in interest in the director's filmography. In the United States since then, retrospectives of Sembène have been popping up at film festivals and specialty movie houses. And while many African directors' films have yet to be released on DVD in this country in any fashion, six of Sembène's films are fairly readily available (although what I see as his greatest film—Ceddo (1977)—still is not).

A few days ago in Minneapolis, as part of their eight-film series paying tribute to Ousmane Sembène, the Walker Art Center played his 2000 film Faat Kiné (which is available on DVD). It is the eighth film that I've seen by him, and I would count it as one of his three masterpieces (along with Ceddo and Xala [1975]). It is most remarkable, perhaps, for its general air of joy and optimism, although there are considerable amounts of pain and tragedy to be had as well. The emotional climax of Faat Kiné features a rousing speech by a young high-school graduate who has already been preemptively elected as President of the Society of West African Nations by a Senegalese youth club; hearing him speak, and uninhibitedly ridicule the Senegalese bourgeoisie who drastically mishandled the country's newfound independence in the 1960s, we leave the theater feeling that, in the hands of a politician like this, the future for Senegal (and other African nations) may not be destined to flounder like so many people seem to think.

Lest we conclude that Sembène offers us a false sense of hope in Faat Kiné, though, the director makes sure to remind us that a system of restrictive patriarchy and religious intolerance is still very much in place in Senegal. The movie concerns a woman named Faat Kiné, a single mother of two who owns her own gas station in Dakar. Her first child, Aby, was conceived during a fling with a high school professor who subsequently refused to provide for their daughter and, furthermore, denied Faat Kiné her high school baccalaureate (a feat which is basically necessary in modern Senegal in order to land a self-sustaining job). The father of her second child, a son named Djip, was a petty gambler who stole Faat Kiné's life savings only to be imprisoned in France. Faat Kiné's father, shamed that his daughter has become an unwed mother, tries to burn his daughter (quite possibly to kill her), but, in a surreal and nightmarish scene, inadvertently torches his wife instead. (A grisly close-up in the following scene shows us Faat Kiné's mother's still-scarred flesh. Rather than seeming self-consciously shocking, this jump cut from a flashback to the present day fully makes us recognize the sacrifices made for Faat Kiné by her mother, and correlatively by Faat Kiné for her own children—perhaps the movie's predominant theme.)

Amongst so much tragedy and heartache, Faat Kiné has persevered and has managed to provide a solid future for her children. Having been lucky enough to land her gas station job in high school, she has climbed to the top of the ladder there, earning derisive stares from male customers but the respect and admiration of her friends and employees. (In one amusing scene, as Faat Kiné and a former lover argue in her office, her assistant manager eavesdrops nearby as he meticulously restocks the office—ready to protect his boss, though he is well aware that she can protect herself quite sufficiently.) In one surprisingly frank scene, Faat Kiné's mother confesses that, although she would protect her to the death, she wished for a time that Faat Kiné would die, so that she would not have to experience the pain and oppression to which she would certainly be subjected. But immediately after this confession, her mother commends Faat Kiné for doing what she herself could not do—providing her children with a promising future and teaching them that individualism and self-reliance are more valuable assets than depending on others to survive. Implicit within this interaction—and voiced explicitly later in the film—is the suggestion that this life lesson of self-reliance is something that was not widely accepted in the first decade of Senegal's independence, and that it has taken new generations of younger Senegalese people to recognize their own patriotism and independence. One of Sembène's most hopeful themes here is that the youth of Senegal's urban areas may be able to remedy the mistakes made by the country's first two generations during independence, a theme which is all the more remarkable considering that Sembène was 67 when he made the film, and that old age is traditionally revered in Senegalese society. (The young politician that I brought up before—who, not coincidentally, is Faat Kiné's son Djip—reminds us that this reverence is only appropriate if it is deserved.)



Individualism and selfhood are two of the recurring themes in Faat Kiné, then, but one of Sembène's most impressive feats is in wedding these ideals to a sweet portrayal of intimacy and budding romance. While the movie is subversive and clever, it is also cheerfully generic and didactic, which should not be perceived as criticisms here. In an attempt to reach as wide an audience as possible, many sociopolitical filmmakers in northern African countries inject their themes into light and breezy romantic comedies. They hope to entertain and instruct. Sembène has often eschewed straightforward generic elements from his films; though often funny, movies like Mandabi (1968), Xala, Ceddo, and Camp de Thiaroye (1987) disregard romantic subplots and zippy dialogue in order to deliver their social commentaries as forcefully as possible. Faat Kiné, then, may be Sembène's most entertaining and fast-moving film, a movie that provides vibrant romantic comedy while addressing pertinent issues in modern Senegalese life. Understandably, Faat Kiné has discarded the notion that she needs a man in her life; after having been horribly abused, on two different occasions, by the father of her children, she has decided that she can be happier, more successful, and a better mother without the companionship of a husband. Not that she hasn't been sexually active; one altercation is between Faat Kiné and a male gigolo that she used to pay for sex, and several dialogue scenes between her and her female friends offer frank discussions of condom usage and the threat of AIDS. The gender roles, which are so extensively reversed in Faat Kiné, are subverted here as well: Faat Kiné uses men to satisfy herself sexually but then shuns their companionship, in a manner all too often practiced by the men in her society.

But the end of the movie—one of the best endings to any movie I can think of in recent memory—shows us that Faat Kiné is still looking for love and, only after considerable reticence, is willing to give in to it. Having been hardened by life for so long and forced to depend only on herself, Faat Kiné is ultimately reminded that intimacy and companionship are possible. Her own children, self-reliant and progressive though they are, struggle to find Faat Kiné a man throughout the film—they believe, despite all of her declarations to the opposite, that a husband will make her happier. The end of the movie wisely offers no guarantee of marriage or even a lasting monogamous relationship, but it does have Faat Kiné ultimately relinquishing herself to desire, letting her armor down just momentarily for the companionship that she's been resisting. This allows for a laugh-out-loud moment towards the end of the movie: after her girlfriends try to convince Faat Kiné to take an eligible suitor home with her, she proudly says, “You're too late, I already screwed him at the toilet.” But the final image, coyly sexual, is more sweet than vulgar: Faat Kiné reclines and beckons smilingly to the man before her; in close-up, her toes begin to wiggle as their affair consummates itself offscreen. Remarkable for portraying a group of women who are proudly, independently, and intelligently sexual (even one married woman, who mocks her husband for losing his erection immediately after she suggests using a condom), Faat Kiné is both wise and joyful, pragmatic and romantic; it may be a more agile balancing act than Sembène has ever accomplished (or, perhaps, attempted).

If the movie portrays a harshly patriarchal society yet ends by relishing the sight of a group of empowered women, it also laments the religious intolerance of modern Dakar, yet ends by offering a hopeful reconciliation between Christians and Muslims. Implicit references towards religious intolerance pop up frequently throughout the film—for example, when a Muslim customer at Faat Kiné's gas station asks an attendant if they have a prayer area, then glowers at the helpful employee because he's wearing a crucifix around his neck. The conflict between the two religions is a common theme in Sembène's cinema, particularly in Ceddo, which was heavily censored in Senegal due to its purported anti-Muslim sentiment. (That movie features a bizarre and fascinating interlude that suddenly flashes forward centuries to modern Dakar—it may be the most abstract and metaphorical moment in any of the director's films.) This antagonism is also referenced in Faat Kiné, when several of her possible suitors are deemed unworthy because they are Muslim while Faat Kiné is Christian. But at the end of the movie, as Djip and one of his friends smilingly observe Faat Kiné and her newfound paramour dancing intimately, they plot to reconcile their union by providing a marriage for them. Djip, a Christian, claims that he won't allow Faat Kiné's marriage to take place in a mosque; his friend, a Muslim, says he can't have the marriage take place in a church. There's a moment of awkward silence. Then they smile at each other, and say, simultaneously, “At City Hall!,” and shake on it blithely. The moment is didactic, even cheesy, but shamelessly so; Sembène poses troublesome questions but offers possible and inspiring answers, which is arguably a more effective tool for social activism than simply providing embittered social commentary and leaving it at that.

Speaking of didacticism: Faat Kiné may be Sembène's most straightforwardly didactic film. This is coming from a director who ended Mandabi with a series of superimpositions of relevant dialogue from the entire film, and has a postman say, quite literally, to the main character, “You are the future of Senegal!” But this brand of didacticism is not, in my opinion, a detractor. Sembène has said quite explicitly in interviews that he wants his movies to be a form of night school for his viewers; he wants to leave absolutely no ambiguity as to what he's trying to say and he wants to suggest possible avenues that audiences may take after the movie is over. So while I do appreciate movies that are mired in ambiguity, mysteriousness, abstraction, and are open to interpretation, I just as equally respect movies that work towards political and social activism in as direct and emphatic a way as possible. With Faat Kiné, we always know exactly what Sembène is trying to tell us: the Senegalese bourgeoisie and its country's leaders mishandled the first decades of independence by disregarding self-reliance and depending upon their colonial occupiers (who continued to occupy); this political oversight can be reflected in modern Senegal's patriarchal system, which suggests that single women must find a man to provide for them instead of relying upon themselves; but in order to thrive, Senegal must, in the future, rely upon its youth and its women to provide eclectic democratic voices to their society, and it must find a way for Christians and Muslims to coexist peacefully in urban areas. It's impossible to walk away from Faat Kiné without recognizing these ideas, some of which are voiced directly. It's not the only kind of socially-commited filmmaking (a more cryptic movie can inspire outrage and change—say, the Dardennes' Rosetta, for example), but it is an effective style that Sembène has mastered throughout his decades of impassioned filmmaking. So while it's a shame that so many excellent African filmmakers remain mostly unnoticed in this country and overseas, Sembène's prominence cannot possibly be viewed as unfortunate, especially when it makes available a film as funny, powerful, unique, and humane as Faat Kiné.

The 50 Best Films of the 2000s: Numbers 10-1

10. When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (d. Spike Lee, USA, 2006) Whether viewed as a process of fact-checking and historical investigation, an outlet that allows the victims and survivors of Hurricane Katrina to speak their minds, an impressionistic exploration of what New Orleans represents and the images it conjures, and/or a striking ethnography of American cities' problematic yet electrifying melting-pot populations, When the Levees Broke is among the most valuable films made in this country since the new millennium. The movie is actually all of these things and many more, which helps to explain the documentary's four-hour running time (it was originally released as a miniseries on HBO). While some topics that the film attempts to uncover are exposited less successfully than others (many have criticized, for example, the film's disturbing but convincing claim that the shoddy craftsmanship and possibly intentional destruction of New Orleans' levees represented a far-reaching governmental conspiracy), that exhaustive breadth is also what makes When the Levees Broke so valuable. More than a document of an overwhelming tragedy in American history, it is a document of a specific place and time and the people who came together (whether violently or peacefully) within that setting.

Seeing the entire film not on television but at a premiere screening at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, I realized the overwhelming social power of the movie—with all of the pain and tragedy that the documentary evokes, it ultimately seems to be an act of cultural unification, asking that we not forget about the significance of New Orleans and really explore the context in which Katrina struck. When the Levees Broke manages to do what countless news media outlets couldn't in the aftermath of either Katrina or 9/11: simultaneously commemorate the victims of these tragedies and investigate what they meant sociohistorically. Among the brutal images of Lee's film—bloated victims floating through flooded streets, dilapidated houses marked with foreboding X's—audiences can band together in outrage. Look at what our government has done, how drastically they failed; look at this country's myths so incontrovertibly proven wrong.

Lee, a director often prone to grand stylistic tricks and a blatant authorial hand, here suppresses his own voice. Certainly, he makes his points through canny editing, through allusion and through suggested historical parallels, but this is no Michael Moore diatribe. Consisting primarily of talking-head interviews and unaired news footage, the embittered power of the movie emerges through montage. Contradictions and lies are exposed when the claims of FEMA, Michael Brown, George W. Bush, are placed adjacent to footage of people suffering without aid—treated like outcasts, aliens, refuse. Lee's most remarkable feat here is in taking himself out of the picture (at least explicitly), allowing the people of New Orleans to tell their own story. I've always been a fan of the director's work, but When the Levees Broke is on a level all its own—more powerful, in its own way, than even Do the Right Thing, and evoking an even greater level of impassioned outrage.

9. The Seeds (d. Wojciech Kaspierski, Poland, 2006) The limited theatrical exhibition outlets for short films in this country have led to the assumption that films' running times are somehow in direct proportion to their value, or at least that a movie less than an hour may be worth watching as a television interlude but not as a self-contained film in itself. Because this pattern of film viewing has much to do with the high price of renting celluloid film for theatrical exhibition, and the high number of tickets that need to be sold to recoup this price, and the desire for people who are going out to catch a movie to be provided with several hours of entertainment, the general dismissal of short films will probably continue. But if somehow, at some point, you get the chance to see The Seeds, don't waste the opportunity; it packs a wallop rare for a film of any length.

I saw Kasperki's film at the Milwaukee Film Festival in 2006, where I happened to be volunteering as an intern for the short film viewing committee. After watching a handful of good-not-great shorts that were being considered for inclusion in the festival, I was unprepared for the haunting power of The Seeds; even without the benefit of comparison, it would have been clear that this film was in a league of its own.

Set in a secluded village in southern Siberia, the movie observes an agrarian family struggling with their intense love and hatred for each other. There is a violent tragedy in this family's past that is not ever entirely exposited for us; a daughter in the family also seems afflicted by some mental illness. Resistant to explain anything to us clearly, The Seeds simply observes and suggests, portraying a turbulent family life that probably could not be elucidated for us anyway, even if we did know exactly what was happening. The family's interaction with each other is rough, their pain apparent, but this is because of the fact that they love each other rather than despite that fact. A scene suggesting the family's cruel indifference towards one daughter can be followed by a painfully tender scene between the patriarch and that same daughter; we realize that familial love and anger may sometimes go hand-in-hand.

It may seem hyperbolic to compare the movie to Tarkovsky and Bergman simultaneously, but that was my honest reaction when I first saw the movie; never before have I seen a film that combines so intensely the almost cosmic sense of alienation that defines Tarkovsky with Bergman's harrowingly magnified evocations of pain and passion. In thirty minutes, we bear witness to a family struggling with life on the other side of the world, isolated both geographically and emotionally. Out of something so common and relatable as familial woes, The Seeds manages to create a majestic and troubling sense of wonder.

8. The Wind Will Carry Us (d. Abbas Kiarostami, Iran/France, 2000) Among the most unique movies I've ever seen, Kiarostami's sublime dark comedy is both absurd and modestly realistic, documentary and fiction. An engineer (known only as The Engineer) and his two assistants travel from Tehran to a remote Kurdish village; throughout the movie, we don't know exactly why they have traveled here, only that they have come to visit a remarkably old woman (also never seen) and perhaps to work on completing a film that, seemingly, gets no nearer to completion. Rather than explain these mysteries to us, The Wind Will Carry Us coasts by on observing the daily lives of the residents of Siah Dareh (hence its documentary aspects) or crafting sublimely subtle sight gags out of deft manipulations of sight and sound, relying especially on the edge of the frame and offscreen happenings. J. Hoberman likens Kiarostami's stylistic punnery to the films of Jacques Tati, which helps to explain why I love this movie so much; its wonderfully stilted, almost-absurd dialogue also reminded me of Jim Jarmusch.

Themes regarding the rift between modern technology and Iran's or Kurdistan's traditional societies seem almost to rise to the surface (the main character keeps on having to run up the village's highest hill in order to receive a cell-phone call from Tehran—this is also where the village's graveyard is situated), but, in a bemused style that I tend to favor, these themes are only hinted at rather than voiced explicitly. We can ponder such ideas if we want, or we can laugh at Kiarostami's sly sense of humor, or (just as satisfyingly) we can look at the countryside. The director's style is democratic: the viewer decides what he or she will concentrate on, what he or she will enjoy. And here, there's much to enjoy.

Detractors may claim that this blithely oblique style, this evasion of any specific plot or thematic concept, can lead to inconsequentiality—that we may walk away from The Wind Will Carry Us with our curiosities piqued, but unenlightened. Assuming that “enlightenment” is actually something that movies should be expected to offer, I would counter that confusion can, in fact, lead to enlightenment. Lacking a specific narrative or thematic guide to usher us through a film, we are left to our own devices, and fumbling with our own bewilderment, we may personally arrive at something far grander within ourselves than what any filmmaker can suggest to us. Films that at first seem to be about nothing sometimes seem, by their end, to be about everything.

7. Kabala (d. Assane Kouyaté, Mali/France, 2005) I've always enjoyed African film (despite the fact that an entire continent's cinema cannot and should not be grouped together into a single subset), but the complete uniqueness and striking narrative styles that define so many of the films from Mali and Nigeria and Senegal and elsewhere are also what make them largely unsuccessful in this country. Because distributors and exhibitors in the States are often unwilling to give African films even a limited release (Bamako and Tsotsi—otherwise known as Crash in Africa—are two of the few that I can think of over the last couple years) most American audiences have to rely on film festivals and online DVD companies to get their hands on African movies. Which is a shame, since many of them are so beautiful, majestic, and (to use a problematic and potentially condescending word) exotic that they really should be seen on the big screen.

Kabala is the best example from the last decade, a Malian-French co-production that has a story and a primary theme that are actually quite familiar from numerous recent international productions, but that still seems totally different than anything else you've seen. It's about a sacred well in a Malian village that has recently become contaminated. The elders decide that a traditional fire dance is required to rid the well of its impurities. When one young man's torch doesn't light during the ceremony, he is suddenly accused of illegitimacy and cast out of the village. Years later, he returns home to provide further assistance to the still-plagued village, only to find that much has changed since his departure.

Like numerous other recent films from Mali, Senegal, Burkina Faso, and other Northern African countries, Kabala is about the rift between traditional religion and modern resources; about the coexistence of contemporary business and economics and a more mystical form of ancient spirituality; and about the dangers and benefits that may be gained from depending upon outside sources. The movie is faced with a difficult enigma: it may simultaneously seem to pander to Western audiences (in its criticisms of established conservative traditions and insularity) and to indulge in a brazen form of traditional African folklore that seems totally alien to most Western viewers.

But this enigma is really what the movie is about—coming to terms with the difficult decision of whether or not to depend on outside resources to “modernize” some African regions. Since this is what the movie is concerned with, its simultaneous indulgence in and subversion of traditional religious tenets makes sense, and contributes to a bewildering style that encapsulates the movie's difficult sociocultural quandary.

It also makes Kabala astonishingly beautiful. The Malian settings are gorgeous to begin with, but they are filmed so lushly—and Andrée Davanture's editing transitions so smoothly between powerful close-ups and majestic long shots—that this terrain takes on a mythical quality. Just as ably, though, Kabala can intensify its human relationships into the stuff of grand melodrama—the movie is as striking in its drama as in its scenery.

6. Hero (d. Zhang Yimou, Hong Kong/China, 2004) As a middle-schooler just beginning to embrace my love for film, I would rewatch kinetic (but undeniably silly) kung-fu films like Fist of Legend and Twin Warriors over and over again, transfixed by the propulsive acrobatics they offered (and, perhaps, also by their cartoonish plots). I still think these films have value in an almost-abstract, motion-and-light kind of way—the graceful movements of bodies in these films may be favorably compared to the lights and shapes flitting about the screen in animated works by Len Lye and Norman McLaren, for example—but I can just as easily recognize that the majority of kung-fu films have as little interest in innovative storytelling, aesthetic ingenuity, or thematic heft as they have great passion for their action sequences. (This is to disregard peculiarities like Wong Kar-wai's hybrid Ashes of Time or some obscure and magical Shaw Brothers nuggets from the '70s.) I've never denied that I love these movies, but sometimes they are a bit of a guilty pleasure—hypnotic, dizzying, electrifying, but hardly groundbreaking.

Hero is something else entirely—a kung-fu film about pacifism. In it, the warrior Nameless (Jet Li) arrives at the court of the King of Qin claiming to have killed three of the most deadly assassins in the kingdom, all of whom had been trying to kill the King. Flashbacks are employed, but all of them are equally untrustworthy—nothing is as it seems to be, as every epic battle and meticulously choreographed duel may or may not be a ruse undertaken for a larger political purpose. Its fight scenes are gorgeous—shot by Christopher Doyle (Wong Kar-wai's frequent cinematographer), they embellish their color-coded pageantry, as crimson leaves flutter around warriors and drops of water cascade through the screen while fighters skip blithely over the surface of a lake—but the movie is just as much about political machination as fight scenes. In its own bombastic way, Hero is about politics as much as some of Zhang Yimou's previous works (such as Ju Dou or Raise the Red Lantern).

If the movie indulges in martial arts operatics but is still, essentially, about the power of peaceful resistance, that contradiction never really seems hypocritical. The violence here almost always takes on a plaintive, tragic tone; transcending action-movie filler, the martial arts in Hero are likened to traditional Chinese music, calligraphy, and theater, and thus are posited as an essential aspect of China's cultural history. The real coup is not in suggesting that the martial arts are an integral component of Chinese culture, or portraying them as a ballet—numerous kung-fu films have done this, including, most famously, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—but in theorizing about how this history and this art form can be used in order to prevent further political tyranny and violence. (J. Hoberman claims that Hero is a Leni Riefenstahl-esque indulgence in the aesthetics of fascism—that the movie condones the actions of a despot killing in the name of eventual unification—but it seems that Hero's admittedly overblown pageantry is meant as an indictment of shallow political theatricality, not a celebration of it.)

Zhang's best film is probably still the quietly enraged Ju Dou (1991), but it undeniably belongs to a different career timeframe than Hero. In some ways, we may lament Zhang's move towards incredibly expensive kung-fu epics (Hero had, at the time of its release, the highest budget of any Chinese movie ever made), especially since it seems Hero was put into production partially as an attempt to one-up Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. While Zhang would make the equally impressive (yet less complex) House of Flying Daggers immediately after Hero, he would also go on to make the ugly, empty Curse of the Golden Flower. (I haven't seen his latest feature, A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop, but the majority of reviews suggest that it's similarly garish.) Whatever Hero means in the context of Zhang's career, though, it does seem remarkably unique within the martial arts genre—a deft and exciting action picture that uses the tropes of its predecessors to question the political repercussions of violent force.

5. The Holy Girl (d. Lucrecia Martel, Argentina/Italy/ Netherlands/Spain, 2005) The subversive power of Martel's incredibly sly dark comedy is so reserved that it takes a while to sneak up on you; when it does, though, you realize that Martel's half-blasphemous/half-reverent take on sin, pleasure, redemption, and Catholicism is worthy of Luis Buñuel (only Martel's humor is a little sprier than Buñuel's atheist absurdity).

Following a Catholic-school lecture on faith and vocation, 14-year-old Amalia (María Alche, whose face always appears half angelic and half devilish) is lured by the heavenly sounds of a theremin being played during a street performance. While she and a small crowd observes this theremin player, Amalia suddenly finds herself being groped by a tall, middle-aged doctor standing directly behind her. She soon discovers that this doctor is attending a medical conference being held at the hotel owned by her mother. Deducing that the lustful Dr. Jano—who somehow seems more despondent than lecherous, despite the fact that he's feeling up a teenager—has been sent to her for the salvation of his soul, Amalia undertakes her newfound, heaven-sent vocation.

With The Holy Girl and its predecessor, La Ciénaga (2001), Martel has forged a totally unique style in modern cinema. It's tempting to compare her deadpan, formally-based humor to Jim Jarmusch or Aki Kaurismäki, but Martel's comedy somehow seems even more devious than theirs. Deploying off-kilter perspectives and disorienting editing structures to bizarre effect, Martel and her crew attempt to create a world that always seems alien, mythical, disorienting in its perpetually hazy humidity. (Martel's films are set in the small northwest Argentinian town of Salta, where she also grew up.) We usually don't know what's happening within a given scene, or even in the movie as a whole, until we're well beyond the establishing point. (This is actually somewhat of a flaw, I think, in Martel's 2008 film The Headless Woman, but in her first two features, it's sublime.) This is why it feels we've made a discovery whenever we detect one of Martel's clever in-jokes, and why we may identify so fully with the characters' sense of detachment and profound confusion.

The Holy Girl ends on a high note, almost effervescently, making it clear that Martel's aim is not to mock her characters but to identify with their ethical confusion. With astonishing formal exactness, she lets these prickly webs of human interaction play out; we are bemused by the irony and the unexpectedness of these interactions, but at the same time we identify with the sexual confusion and religious doubt that plagues the main characters. That numerous reviewers read the film in almost diametrically opposite ways (some saw it as liberating, dexterous comedy; some as a haunting and bleak cautionary tale) is a testament to how ambiguous and non-judgmental the movie is.

4. Beau Travail (d. Claire Denis, France, 2000) What the hell happens in Beau Travail? It should come as no surprise to fans of Denis that that question can't really be answered. It's a loose adaptation of Herman Melville's Billy Budd, set amongst the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti, but beyond that—as in L'Intrus, 35 Shots of Rum, I Can't Sleep, and some other Denis films—the movie is mostly about observation and atmosphere. Denis seems to recognize that she is a perpetual outsider to this isolated cadre of militaristic men in eastern Africa, the most stereotypically masculine subculture you can imagine; so instead of offering any moral interpretations or narrative motivations, she (and her cinematographer, the great Agnés Godard) simply watch the men interact with each other. Small hints at their characters may be gleaned through looks, gestures, fleeting actions, but none of these men can be “explained” in their entirety.

Beyond some of the most beautifully photographed scenery you'll ever see in a movie, Beau Travail is notable for adapting Melville's incredibly cryptic and metaphorical prose to the cinematic form. Of course films can be elusive and cryptic, but seeing images play out before us lends things a concrete, actualized nature—the transformative power of movies makes us believe that these things are actually happening (even if we don't always know exactly what these things are). Denis's sublime skill with Beau Travail is to transpose Melville's ruminations to a visual form that ponders the nature of good and evil, camaraderie, repressed homosexuality, and other intangible notions solely through observation. Although we can't specifically put a name on the heated emotions and moods that Beau Travail puts us through, it does undoubtedly work us into a frenzy; we are transported to an unnamable and overwhelming mindstate.

The half-naked bodies of the soldiers exercising in the blazing sun are a common visual motif in the movie; Denis and Godard do aestheticize the men, and such scenes do take on an air of eroticism (which makes sense given the homoeroticism Melville included in his story), but most of the men are never exactly explored as flesh-and-blood individuals with real inner states. The men, like the movie itself, are mostly about immediacy, corporeality, physicality, the things we can see on the surface that suggest something deeper (but only suggest it). The final scene of the movie is a bewildering summation of liberation and chaos, but it's only the breaking point of what the movie is trying to do all along, only in more restrained ways—tear out of its shell and flail at us, mystifyingly.

3. Kings and Queen (d. Arnaud Desplechin, France, 2005) Kings and Queen has, at one point, one of the most purely bizarre and unexpected interludes I've ever seen in a movie (it involves Mathieu Amalric's character, a neurotic charmer named Ismaël, bursting into a breakdancing routine in a sanitarium); shortly thereafter, it offers us a madcap, hilarious scene in which Ismaël and his smarmy attorney try to steal drugs from the sanitarium's pharmacy, a sequence almost unparalleled in its unbridled energy; and finally, at the end of the movie, it offers us a sweetly awkward interaction between Ismaël and his surrogate son, Elias, that is among the most tender and affecting portraits of familial love that you'll ever see in a movie. The greatness of these scenes lies partially in the performance by Amalric, France's best actor working today, but it's mostly the result of Arnaud Desplechin. The director is more than a brilliant dramatist or comedian or postmodernist or innovator; he's all of these things at once. Desplechin manages a deft balancing act that is most impressive because none of these various styles or conceits seem pranksterish or disingenuous.

As impressive as Mathieu Amalric's performance is Emmanuelle Devos's as Nora, the queen of the title. Her kings include four men with whom she's been in love: her son, Elias; Elias's deceased father; Nora's own father; and Ismaël, an impulsive musician with whom Nora lived for a time. The relationship between Nora and Ismaël is now more platonic than sexual, though no less genuine; this is why Nora asks Ismaël to act as Elias's father.

Like A Christmas Tale, this basic storyline, reminiscent of a number of family melodramas, is merely a jumping-off point for Desplechin's numerous tangents and ruminations—on love, on French history and classical art, on hatred, on the difficulties of communication. Even when the movie focuses on advancing its plot, its aesthetic ingenuity continues to overwhelm even as its narrative captivates us—for example, during the sequence in which we discover how Elias's father died, an unsettling scene portrayed in the style of modernist theatre, with abstract lighting and evocatively spare sets. Miraculously, the movie's experimentation with style and narrative never serves to undermine or weaken its emotional aspects. An unexpected insert of Nora's father reading to her a vitriolic letter—as he's framed in an almost direct frontal composition and the film stock takes on an extremely grainy, blue-gray quality—could have been an indulgent misstep in another director's hands, but here, her father's words become even more passionate, more obliterating, thanks to the scene's aesthetic excess.

Simplistically, one could claim that Nora's storyline in Kings and Queen represents the style of grand melodrama, that Ismaël's takes on the traits of screwball comedy, and that the movie itself is about the overwhelming highs and lows that everyone experiences, and how the movies as an art form, throughout their entire history, have helped us persevere through them. Parts of this appraisal would be accurate, but it also seems too easy, too schematic, which Kings and Queen definitely is not. It may be more apt to say that the movie is about how happiness necessarily carries with it a twinge of sadness and vice versa, and that love, true love, is so passionate and unrestrained that it cannot survive without madness and anger and desperation. This is why the tumult of emotions and styles in Desplechin's movies never seem parodic or insincere; his movies are about how real life is closer to this maddening whirlwind than to the convenient genres and emotions we usually find in films. While Kings and Queen is resolutely cinematic, then, it is also closer to bewildering (and wondrous) reality than almost any movie you will see.

2. Head-On (d. Fatih Akin, Germany/Turkey, 2005) The title is appropriate; so is its original German title, Gegen die Wand, which translates as “Against the Wall.” The movie rushes at you without restraint, angrily, ferociously, passionately. It's raw and aggressive, which befits a movie about lust, the alienation of immigrants in their adopted country, the conservatism of religious and cultural tradition. It will likely turn you off, and only a scene later seduce you again with its intensity and bravado. It's that kind of movie.

The movie is about two Turkish immigrants living in Hamburg: Sibel, a beautiful 22-year-old woman desperate to escape her restrictive home life with her parents; and Cahit, an aimless drunk perhaps twice her age who she asks to marry her so she can leave home. Both characters are suicidal—they meet in a mental institution after she tries to slit her wrists and he drives full-speed into a brick wall. (Only one of the many ways in which the movie's American and German titles are manifested.) Initially, their marriage is completely emotionless, an act of desperation. Even as their compassion for each other deepens, their sincerity is always tinged with a sense of desperation and futility.

As you may be able to surmise, this is not a pleasant movie. It has moments of levity, even sweetness, but for the most part we are reminded of how much these characters hate themselves. While Head-On is in part a movie about the alienation and loneliness felt by immigrants in a foreign land (and the genuine sense of community that may nonetheless be achieved there), it is more generally about reaching a point in your life when everything seems hopeless, and trying to find a way in which that bleakness may be alleviated. To criticize this movie for its overwhelming unpleasantness is to miss the point; it's one of the few films I've seen recently that wants to portray lives at their bleakest, darkest, lowest points, not in an attempt at shock value, but to reach out to viewers who have felt this way and may still feel this way.

Funded by both German and Turkish production companies, the movie was heralded by audiences and critics in both countries as either a German or a Turkish triumph, respectively—an irony that points towards both the economic co-dependence and implicit contentiousness between the two countries, especially in Germany. This, too, is partially what the movie is about. The power of Head-On's implicit sociocultural commentary is epitomized by repeated shots of a traditional Turkish band performing on a carpeted stage in Istanbul—a reminder that Fatih Akin is not decrying traditional Turkish culture, but lamenting how that culture may not transplant to a new land so easily, and also how that traditionalism may stifle younger generations more than it unifies them. Even more broadly, the film may be about how, in the modern world, distinct ethnic cultures must be increasingly assimilated into other ways of life, forcing all of us to establish new identities and moralities without depending upon traditional national codes and mores.

Head-On is not remarkable simply because it is so bleak; it evokes, instead, a desperate passion that most lives must deal with at some point. Raw and volatile, hauntingly beautiful, and acted by two performers (Birol Ünel and Sibel Kekilli) who appear immersed in the act of baring their souls, it is one of the most emotionally turbulent movies you will ever see. Afterwards, you won't be uplifted, but you will feel like you've lived through, and rebounded from, immense tragedy.

1. Yi Yi (A One and a Two) (d. Edward Yang, Taiwan/Japan, 2000) Jean-Luc Godard once famously said that Au hasard Balthazar is “the world in an hour and a half”; I find it more accurate, if less impressive, to claim that Yi Yi (A One and a Two) is the world in three hours. Edward Yang's majestic, light-footed, sublime, funny movie spends about a year with three generations of an affluent family in Taipei. Nothing momentous happens, but at the same time, everything that happens is momentous: characters ponder infidelity, the meaning of their lives, choices they've made, lost opportunities and shattered dreams. Most broadly, Yi Yi is about the unexpected turns that our lives take and the fact that, for years, decades, lifetimes afterwards, we wonder if the choices we've made are right. How would our lives have been different if we had done this differently, if we had chosen to do this instead of this?

The movie goes about these questions in unassuming, clever ways. Successful businessman NJ, the patriarch of the central family, bumps into his first love on an elevator; realizing that his workaday lifestyle is so hurried that he has neglected his own happiness, he regrets standing her up a long time ago, confessing these doubts and concerns to a Japanese business partner. (The Taiwanese man and his Japanese friend must speak English to each other; it's the only language they both understand.) NJ's son, eight-year-old Yang-Yang, ponders what he sees and wonders if he can really trust his vision all the time. He also experiences his first love with a classmate; in sweet, fumbling fashion, he tries to drop a water balloon on his crush, and accidentally hits the principal of his school instead. In a miraculous scene shortly thereafter, during a school fieldtrip, Yang-Yang observes his classmate in a planetarium with a vista of sparkling stars in the background, and you begin to fall in love yourself. Meanwhile, NJ's wife speaks to her mother-in-law (who is in a coma) and realized how flat and unfulfilling her life is. Their daughter, Ting-Ting, wonders whether or not she should start a fling with her best friend's boyfriend. Death, birth, and marriage also happen. A checklist of what happens in the movie can't do justice to how sprawling and affecting it is. Each tiny happenstance, no matter how slight, takes on epic proportions, because we realize how differently things may turn out if only one other thing had happened instead.

More ably than any other movie I've ever seen, Yi Yi evokes the difficulties and joys of living in the modern metropolis. Scenes are often filmed via reflections on the windows of stores and automobiles; other scenes play out in extreme long shot, as intimate relationships take place amongst thousands of passersby. Modern life here is seen as electrifying and overwhelming; technology and consumerism are ubiquitous, but so is a sense of community and possibility. This depiction of modern life and technology bears specifically upon Taiwanese culture, as NJ's generation finds themselves immersed in a booming industry of computer products and a globalized electronics industry. As economics and technologies change drastically around us, so do families and personal lives; Yi Yi eloquently empathizes with these unsettling changes at the same time that it embraces them.

The director, Edward Yang, who passed away in 2007, achieved his masterpiece with Yi Yi (almost as good is Yang's sprawling 1991 film A Brighter Summer Day). It has its moments of tragedy and lamentation, but mostly, we are filled with a great sense of elation, a reassurance that the doubts, regrets, and difficulties that we deal with in our own lives are in fact shared by people throughout the world. Yang can achieve this grand sympathy because he loves his characters, and, despite the turmoil through which it puts us, he loves life.

The 50 Best Films of the 2000s: Numbers 30-11

30. Brand Upon the Brain! (d. Guy Maddin, USA/Canada, 2007) Maddin is as much a collage artist as a filmmaker, picking and choosing from a mad collection of sources—the history of cinema, pulp novels, his own memory, bizarre images that may have been glimpsed in a nightmare—and making something totally, invigoratingly, frighteningly new. Contradictions abound, as they do in a dream or a memory: his movies are frightening and silly, singular and allusive, mad and understated, filled with pulpy stories and abstract non-narratives. Quite simply, there's no one else making movies like him, and there never really has been—but distinctiveness is not his only, or even his foremost, quality.

Marcel Proust may seem like an absurd comparison to Maddin, but both the writer and the filmmaker spring forth from their own hazy memories, creating something operatic and highly formalized from the interweaved fabric of their pasts. Even though the plot of Brand Upon the Brain! involves a demented mad scientist performing midnight experiments, an orphanage run from a lighthouse that offers mysteries such as the disappearance of a boy named Savage Tom and bizarre drillholes in orphans' heads, a brother-sister detective duo known as the Light Bulb Kids, cross-dressing and ambiguous sexuality, mother-daughter sexual antagonism, and other oddities, Maddin still insists that 96% of the movie is accurately drawn from his own childhood. Figuratively speaking, that's actually easy to believe; this deranged world must be forged from some very troublesome and intimate memories, wedded to an absolutely unique artistic mindset.

Shot on archaic-looking black-and-white film (with some sporadic sparks of color) and edited together in a jagged, schizophrenic manner, the movie is exhilarating in a purely formal sense; even its intertitles, which are meant to both embrace and send up the hyperbolic storytelling styles of 1920s silent cinema, are highly entertaining in their mixture of postmodern irony and cinephiliac enthusiasm. But Maddin's movies are not just indulgences in postmodern tomfoolery; considering how amusing his films are, it's surprising how genuinely frightening, unsettling, and emotional they remain, especially in Brand Upon the Brain! and Cowards Bend the Knee. Watching something like this is like flipping kinetically through Maddin's family photo albums, but the pictures seem to have been recorded in some other alternate dimension.

29. Wendy and Lucy (d. Kelly Reichardt, USA, 2008) Deceptively simple, Wendy and Lucy is unquestionably one of the saddest movies made in the last ten years, but it also may be the one that most ably encapsulates how this country's recent economic hardships have affected the lives of individuals. Michelle Williams gives a flawless performance as Wendy, a young woman trying to travel to Alaska, where a lucrative job awaits, with her beloved dog. She has planned her funds carefully; she has just enough money to make it to her destination. So when her car breaks down en route, her dire economic straits force her into a series of increasingly difficult decisions. The underlying, and painfully relatable, truth: our relationships with those we love should not be endangered by poverty, but sometimes they are; money should not be a greater priority than happiness and togetherness, but sometimes, due to external circumstances that we cannot change, this is the case.

Much of the movie is understated—the most hopeful moment, for example, is a brief interaction in which a kindly security guard covertly loans Wendy a few dollars from his own minimal savings, which we come to recognize as a magnanimous self-sacrifice—but it doesn't seem accurate to call the movie “quiet.” Its compassion towards Wendy and Lucy, her dog, is painfully sincere; its bitterness towards the kind of world where money dictates our behavior and our relationships is palpable, and justified. This passionate, humane outrage, which culminates in an astonishingly bittersweet final scene, leaves you staggering by the time the movie ends.

28. Bright Leaves (d. Ross McElwee, USA/UK, 2004) The director of Sherman's March again creates a compelling, free-flowing mosaic that simultaneously explores his family legacy, the history of the American South, the role that cinema plays in our lives, and other fascinating tangents. Watching this gorgeous, stimulating movie, I kept thinking about Chris Marker's Sans soleil (1983)—one of my favorite movies, and one in which any jumble of interrelated topics that appeal to Marker at any specific point in time will become the new subject of his documentary. I like documentaries like this: the truth about any particular subject can never really be exhausted, especially not in a medium as subjective as cinema, so I usually find it more compelling when directors use the documentary format to ruminate about a number of challenging ideas, posing questions instead of offering answers.

But whereas Marker remains a cypher in Sans soleil and most of his movies (we never get a sense of the director as a flesh-and-blood character), McElwee's movies are primarily about his own life, his own history. Even when he originates with a specific historical topic, as in Sherman's March, the subjects very quickly begin to center around McElwee's life history, his family, their troubles. Bright Leaves, for example, is broadly about the tobacco industry in North Carolina, but this subject appeals to McElwee because his great-grandfather, John McElwee, was one of the titans who gave birth to that industry. Creator of the Bull Durham line of tobacco, John McElwee's career was essentially destroyed by his rival, James Buchanan Duke—founder of the Duke dynasty. This rivalry, McElwee hypothesizes (after being convinced by a second cousin), was in fact the inspiration for the 1950 film Bright Leaf, starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal. The tangents and subtopics branch out compellingly from there, but the central glue that ties it all together is McElwee's family and their close connection to the world in which they grew up.

Ross McElwee displays wit and self-reflexivity in amusingly subdued ways—for example, in his inclusion of dialogue scenes that show him debating how he should film the following scene, or in musing about the filmmaking process while constantly emphasizing himself as a creator who works at the behest of chance, luck, and whatever the world around him has to offer. The movie is meta, then, but for a reason: McElwee reminds us that—for all of us, not just for this passionate filmmaker—cinema plays an integral role in fashioning the myths and half-formed truths by which we lead our lives, ultimately becoming an addiction not unlike the cigarettes that built North Carolina's economy and endangered the well-being of McElwee's family.

27. Up (d. Pete Docter & Bob Peterson, USA, 2009) I will always remember Up as the movie that had me bawling before a stone-faced five-year-old who was staring at me intently, sitting on her mother's lap in the row in front of me; I will remember it, also, as a movie that could take you from that place of intense sadness to euphoric highs that practically sent you sailing from the theatre.

We should have known by now that Pixar's incredible winning streak was no fluke, that they kept on making one incredible movie after another not because they were lucky but because they are probably the best storytellers and stylists working in American film today. But many people still seemed wary, expecting them to fail spectacularly at some point. After seeing Wall-E, I found myself having similar doubts, especially when I heard that Up was coming out less than a year afterwards—one masterpiece couldn't possibly be followed up by another, could it?

My doubts were foolish. The makers of Up are so profoundly in love with the life experience, and so obviously compassionate towards the worlds and characters that they create, that we can't help but be affected by what happens as though they were occurring in our own lives. (This is why the emotional states that I mentioned before are so overwhelming: the pain is our pain, the joy ours' too.) This incredible sensitivity is mixed with a wild storyline that has an elderly widower and a fresh-faced eight-year-old Cub Scout careening to South America on a balloon-equipped house, ultimately finding talking birds and a nefarious plot conducted by a hermetic villain. The unusual plot and beautifully maintained pathos do not contradict each other; in fact, the unexpected twists and turns in the story turn out to provide the perfect outlet for the movie's themes on loneliness, companionship, adventure, and a sense of fulfillment.

It may seem hyperbolic to claim that Up's predominant theme is the entirety of human life, and even more so that it satisfies the complexity of this theme; but astonishingly, I would say that this is close to being true. Childhood, love, marriage, parenthood, friendship, aging, lost dreams, death—these are all conveyed with intense sympathy by Up. This is why the movie makes you feel overjoyed about living, even when it makes you feel life's intense pain as well.

26. Cure (d. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan, 2001) Kurosawa's slow-burn brand of horror is epitomized by Cure, a difficult and hypnotic chiller that offers no easy answers. A series of bizarre murders are committed in Tokyo in which each apparent killer is a normal, mild-mannered, everyday person who carves into their victims a sinister “X.” The only connection shared by these unfortunate murderers is that, shortly before their crimes, they came in contact with “Mr. Mamiya,” a mysterious cypher with a sinister history in hypnosis.

This story makes for awesomely ominous serial-killer fodder, and Kurosawa satisfies the creepy potential of this setup. The horrific home of Mr. Mamiya, for example, is every bit as creepy as Buffalo Bill's mannequin-laden lair in Silence of the Lambs, and the numerous interactions between Mamiya and our detective hero, Takabe, are almost unbearably intense, filmed as they are in Kurosawa's distinctly removed, often static aesthetic. But ultimately, Kurosawa is more concerned with theorizing about the nature of evil than simply providing a good genre picture. All of the everyday people who become murderers in Cure are saintly, noble folks, almost to the point of parody; Takabe himself, for example, sacrifices himself to care for his wife, whose sanity is quickly deteriorating. A significant point to the movie is that we begin to see Takabe unravel far before he even comes in contact with Mamiya. The underlying idea is that good and evil are separated only by the thinnest of threads, and that one can topple over into the other with alarming abruptness. This theme takes on even greater power when we recognize that Japan's recent J-horror trend in film reflects a largely unexplained rise in violent crime committed in Japan's urban areas over the last decade; what could contribute to such a violent plague?

Cure is probably Kurosawa's most cryptic and disturbing movie, especially thanks to its staggeringly bizarre ending. Many have criticized the last half-hour of the movie as being too slow, too difficult, too confusing, which would be a valid criticism if Cure were only concerned with providing a good story with a neat resolution. But its climax and ending make it apparent that the movie is trying to unsettle us with its narrative as much as its characters are unsettled with their inexplicably gruesome actions. Ultimately, as seems to be true in real life, the sudden transformation from good into evil cannot be explained; it can only be fleetingly, disturbingly witnessed.

25. Silent Light (d. Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/ Netherlands/Germany, 2009) The opening and closing shots of Silent Light are miraculous: beautiful night photography records the long journey of darkness into dawn for the opening shot, and for the final image, the pattern is reversed—the magnificent colors of twilight are embraced as day fades into night. Both shots take several minutes, as the shot arcs gracefully through the sky. Even if you've seen a sunrise or sunset (which we all have), the images still seem totally new, something that only cinema can accomplish.

This description could apply to much of Carlos Reygadas' filmmaking. One of the most austere and provocative arthouse directors working today, his movies include Japon (2002) and Battle in Heaven (2005), both of which feature explicit sex and nudity, incredibly long, often static shots of either the horror or wonder of nature, and bare storylines that are meant to evoke the profound ethical confusion of the human experience—the lack of a definitive moral code that tells us what is right and what is wrong.

Silent Light is a departure from these two movies in some ways. There is no onscreen sex or nudity, for example, and the setting is totally different than almost any movie that's been made before: Silent Light is filmed in a remote Mennonite community in Mexico, using non-professional actors who actually live within that sect. (Even the language spoken in the movie—a Germanic dialect called Plautdietsch—has reportedly never been heard in a film before.) But in other ways, Silent Light absolutely abides by Reygadas' stylistic and philosophical interests: its cinematography is stark and breathtakingly beautiful, and its characters are still tempted by passions and loves that they know are “wrong,” which forces them to make decisions that harshly reveal the painful confusion of living a human life.

The two main characters are Johan and Marianne, who are carrying on an affair even though both of them are married. Maybe in most modern communities this would be an unspectacular story, but in this austere and close-knit community, this affair is absolutely a betrayal of these characters' ideals. However, there is real love involved between them, and Johan has already confessed this affair to much of his family, including his wife Esther, who resignedly accepts this fact while continuing to love her husband. There are no tearful arguments between loved ones, no grand confessions; there is primarily great inner turmoil that centers around the rift between one's faith and one's natural human desires, between a self-imposed moral code and a passion that is impossible to resist.

I've grown tired with a lot of movies that have recently come out on the international arthouse scene: while I used to respect practically any movie that offered a stark, austere aesthetic, a somewhat abstract narrative, and muted performances meant to convey inner pain, I've since recognized that this mode of filmmaking can in fact lazily disguise a lack of any profound ideas with a style often unquestionably referred to as “artful.” But Reygadas continues to fascinate; his gruelingly long takes and intensely muted atmosphere try to get at some deeper human pain, and do achieve a profound beauty. He embraces the arthouse legacy that was originally conceived by mentors such as Carl Theodor Dreyer and Andrei Tarkovsky. The style of Silent Light is meant to reflect the solemn moral code by which its Mennonite community lives: in both cases, great passion and pain lurk beneath the surface.

24. There Will Be Blood (d. Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, 2007) There Will Be Blood really does seem like nothing that's been made in Hollywood before (or maybe even on the American independent scene); its closest antecedent may be Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), but only in the vaguest genealogical way. Anderson's movie is an adaptation of Oil!, the Upton Sinclair novel, that only uses the first 150 pages as a springboard; it's an allegorical portrayal of the war between modern capitalism and institutionalized religion that exposes how the two may be more closely linked than separated; it's a cryptic horror movie about murder and evil and being torn apart from within; it's absurd and brazen and funny and heartbreaking.

Daniel Day Lewis gives maybe the most singular performance I can think of in any movie over the last decade as Daniel Plainview, a formidable big-oil man in the early twentieth century who destroys those around him in his quest to own everything within his grasp, people included. Paul Dano, who deserves commendation for being able to stand his own against Lewis' titanic performance, is a pair of identical twin brothers—one of whom, a manipulative evangelist, stands in the way of Plainview's empire. The focus of the movie is actually quite concentrated, mostly taking place in the barren fields of Texas at the heart of Plainview's oil operation; but the movie still feels epic in scope and majestic in execution, thanks largely to Anderson's distinct and intuitive aesthetic.

To call the movie a triumph of style over substance (as some critics did) is to miss the ways in which Anderson absurdly hyperbolizes Plainview's loneliness and desperation. Yes, so much of the movie is brilliantly over-the-top: the famous milkshake speech (which was partially based on actual Congressional transcripts from big business trials in the 1920s), Plainview's humiliating beating of Paul Sunday followed by Sunday's humiliation of Plainview in his church, Plainview's vicious castigation of a businessman while dining with his son in a restaurant, and Paul Sunday's ultimate fate are all grandly evoked, but they all also center around Plainview's realization that his fierce ambition will always outweigh and eventually obliterate his relationships with those around him. You could say, then, that both There Will Be Blood and Anderson's earlier Magnolia are operatic epics, but whereas the latter is exhausting and somewhat more of a stylistic prank than an effective drama, There Will Be Blood is as awe-inspiring in its characterizations as in its visual majesty.

23. The New World (d. Terrence Malick, USA/UK, 2005) How can you capture the discovery and exploration of a totally new world on film? Such a film would require euphoria and terror, awe and loneliness, exoticism and intimate beauty. Some movies have succeeded at this daunting task: we may think of the moment in which T.E. Lawrence first appears through a desert haze in Lawrence of Arabia, or the sense of splendor that runs throughout Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World. But The New World is perhaps the only movie I've seen that maintains this sense of awe throughout its entire (lengthy) running time; as the film plays out before you, you really do feel like you're being guided through uncharted territory.

It may be little surprise that Terrence Malick is responsible for such an overwhelming achievement. Maybe the most sensitive stylist in the history of American movies, Malick's filmmaking is always beautiful, but that beauty is meant to manifest some deeper emotion: longing, love, passion, heartache. There's plenty of the above in The New World, which is basically a retelling of the well-known Pocahontas tale. This is no Disney movie, though. Malick's film is more specifically about the birth of this country, the seemingly limitless potential of this beautiful untouched land at its origins, and how quickly that potential was besmirched by the colonial mindset of entitlement and Manifest Destiny. Love and loss, indeed; the classic tragic-lovers tale of Pocahontas and settler John Smith is paralleled to the rapture and violence that accompanied the arrival of European explorers in this country. This is why The New World can simultaneously seem so majestic and epic, and yet essentially is an intimate look at individual people who find themselves lost in an overwhelming world.

Not unlike Herzog in many of his movies, Malick is concerned with how the natural beauty of this world may be ruined by the greed, ambition, and folly of man. He's not unwilling to see some aspects of human civilization as majestic, as is evidenced by Pocahontas' initial journey to England late in the film (her introduction to a new world is almost as rhapsodic as John Smith's introduction to America earlier on); but for the most part, the visual splendor of The New World is meant to remind us of how this country's edenic nature no longer exists.

The movie is not without flaws; Malick romanticizes the native American Indian population unabashedly, which sometimes turns the movie into a simplistic indulgence in exoticism not unlike Dances with Wolves. But even during these weaker moments, The New World achieves a poetry uncommon in any kind of cinema. Malick and his cast are sensitive and smart enough to turn some sappy, wooden dialogue (“He is like a tree, he shelters me,” says Pocahontas of one character) into a solemn trance of sorts—intoning words of love and desire while the camera evokes likeminded images. This is the kind of movie you get lost in, becoming hypnotized by its images and thirsting for more.

22. Into Great Silence (d. Philip Gröning, France/Switzerland/ Germany, 2007) I saw Into Great Silence at the Times Cinema in Milwaukee back when it still catered to foreign/arthouse films and retrospectives of classics, all on 35mm. Since I had no car at the time, I had to venture practically all the way from the east to the west side of Milwaukee on the bus, then walk an additional fifteen minutes or so to the theatre from the bus stop on Vliet St. (This may mean little to non-Milwaukeeans, but for me, and maybe for other folks who have undertaken a similar crosstown journey to see a movie, the half-invigorating, half-tedious memories are flooding back.) It was, therefore, an hour-long trek to see this lengthy documentary about the Grande Chartreuse, a 900-year-old-plus Carthusian monastery hidden in the French Alps. Turns out such a heavy investment in moviegoing befits a film as momentous as Into Great Silence.

Director Gröning wrote the monks of the Grande Chartreuse in 1984 asking for permission to film there. Because they are among the most ascetic order in the world, it took the monks of the Grande Chartreuse sixteen years to give him permission to do so, and even then only with strong restrictions: Gröning could use no voiceover narration and no artificial lighting, and he was not allowed to bring a crew along with him—Gröning himself was the cinematographer and sound-man.

I don't know if Gröning would have decided upon a similar aesthetic regardless, but this stripped-down style is entirely appropriate for Into Great Silence. We simply observe the monks of the Grande Chartreuse, going about their everyday lives. These lives involve the sort of religious austerity that we may have predicted—chanting, praying, studying scripture, and so on—but they also include a great deal of levity and immediate pleasure—going sledding, enjoying an orange in a sunlit garden, etcetera. This makes Into Great Silence not so much about a specific religious institution, but about joy and spirituality and its ubiquity in the world. It may sound like poetic naivete to say that one can find God in an act as simple as sledding in the sunlight or in peeling an orange, but this seems almost incontrovertible, given all the simple and joyous beauty that this movie has to offer.

There is a certain ethnographic pleasure to be gained by the movie: we are granted access, for 165 minutes, to a sealed-off world of rigorous simplicity that we would otherwise never know. In some other ways, though, Into Great Silence offers an immediate connection to our own lives, reminding us that divinity and bliss need not be confined to the pages of the Bible or the walls of a church. This is why my hours-long voyage to and from the west side of Milwaukee to see Into Great Silence was so appropriate: waiting for the bus in twenty-degree weather with the lights of downtown in the distance, everything, after watching this movie, seemed full of majesty.

21. A Christmas Tale (d. Arnaud Desplechin, France, 2008) How do you describe an Arnaud Desplechin movie? Part screwball comedy, part operatic tragedy, teeming with both self-reflexivity and genuine melodrama, bounding with allusions to existentialist philosophy, Renaissance painting, hip-hop music, and other cultural artifacts, Desplechin's movies resemble what may have been the result if a dozen disparate and unique directors from the history of film collaborated on a single madcap epic. No surprise that his movies are usually marked by two-and-a-half-hour-plus running times, then.

Like Kings and Queen before it (and, to a lesser extent, like Desplechin's My Sex Life...Or How I Got into an Argument), A Christmas Tale is about a dysfunctional family, the bombastic personalities that comprise it, and the struggle it faces to remain connected. A Christmas Tale in particular takes place around the titular holiday, as the matriarch (played inimitably by Catherine Deneuve) discovers she needs a bone marrow transplant to battle her liver cancer and must turn to her family for a donor. If this synopsis sounds like a million other happy-sad yuletide family dramas, you will be bewildered by the movie itself. (Even if you have no idea what to expect from the movie going in, you will probably be bewildered—I absolutely was, wonderfully so.) It's as though Desplechin is using this cliched setup not only to poke into the most interesting nooks and crannies of these characters—relying upon teary-eyed confrontations as well as the most unexpected and fleeting moments between them—but also to indulge in his stylistic and metacinematic inclinations. He uses the story as a springboard to dabble in the limitless tricks and narrative devices available to the filmmaker, nodding reverentially towards a history of wildly diverse cinema.

This appraisal may make A Christmas Tale sound like hollow showboating, but there's definitely nothing hollow about Desplechin's movie. Just because the film isn't conventionally melodramatic doesn't mean it's not emotional. The unpredictable glimpses we are offered into the characters' lives—a live DJ performance that comes out of nowhere, or a glance shared between a husband and wife after a bittersweet development that seems to speak pages of dialogue in a few seconds—turn the Vuillard family into a brightly-colored tapestry in increasing danger of ripping each other apart. (Paradoxically, the intense relationships among this family are also what keep them so intimately connected, as Desplechin reminds us that love and hatred are flip sides of the same coin, separated only by the thinnest of boundaries.) The movie may not be as emotional as Desplechin's prior Kings and Queen, but it comes close (and both of them are among the most striking comedy-drama-whatevers of the last ten years).

The incredibly complex backstory of this family resembles some Dickensian epic, as it contains siblings who died in their youth, economic swindles, banishments, suppressed lust and longing, and other tragedies. Heavy as much of this plot is, though, the main feeling we experience while watching A Christmas Tale is euphoria, excitement, a giddy anticipation of what is going to happen next. His panoply of styles and moods is doubtlessly overwhelming, but it leaves you with a satisfying fatigue, like coming down off of a high or waking up the day after Christmas with a magnificent hangover.

20. The Hedge of Thorns (d. Anita Killi, Norway, 2003) At 13 minutes, The Hedge of Thorns contains more visual poetry and overwhelming sadness than most feature-length dramas. Gorgeously animated in a languid stop-motion style not unlike (and, for what it tries to achieve, superior to) Fantastic Mr. Fox's, Killi's film is about two neighbors, a young boy and girl who play together almost every day in the snowy plains between their homes. When World War II encroaches upon their world, though, tensions rise and a protective barrier is built between the two families (the titular hedge of thorns), separating boy and girl until years later, when the war has ended. That the ending is an impassioned tearjerker is not all that surprising, considering that The Hedge of Thorns is an unabashed antiwar movie (made during the initial years of the War in Iraq). What is surprising is how effective and genuine its sentiment is, achieving profoundness through understatement and simplicity rather than moralistic showboating.

Several movies in the past have tried to decry war by filtering it through the innocent worldview of children—for example, René Clément's Forbidden Games (1952) and Isao Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies (1988). The latter is actually a perfect point of comparison for Killi's short: both masterpieces of animation and pathos, The Hedge of Thorns and Grave of the Fireflies are able to evoke astonishing pain and loss through their young characters. Most war movies—even (or especially) those which claim to be antiwar—in fact have clear-cut heroes and villains, portray combat in a viscerally exciting way, and concentrate more on the valor of soldiers than on the violence and loss experienced by civilians. The Hedge of Thorns, with bitter succinctness, makes us feel the destruction, physical and otherwise, that war instills.

I saw The Hedge of Thorns in 2003 at a film festival for children held in and around Milwaukee, where I was volunteering as a projectionist and subtitle-reader (the festival unfortunately no longer exists). Seeing the movie for the first time (while simultaneously reading its subtitles to the audience) surrounded by young children and their families who were obviously as affected as I was, I realized how often critics and filmmakers underestimate the intelligence and sensitivity of young audiences. I thoroughly enjoy the insanity and creativity of many children's movies, but I wish more of them attempted the sincere message of peace and loss that The Hedge of Thorns accomplishes (as do Up and Wall-E), and took place in a world that had some bearing on our own reality. I've tried to find Killi's film since then online or through the production company, but—in a fate common to many international short films—it now seems unavailable except on DVD through the Norwegian Film Institute. However, a representative clip from the film can be viewed online here:

http://www.trollfilm.no/new/eng_torne_1.html

19. Café Lumière (d. Hou Hsiao-hsien, Japan/Taiwan, 2005) J. Hoberman calls Café Lumière “exquisitely understated,” which itself seems like an understatement. Directed by the Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien—whose movies are distinguished by an incredibly tranquil (some would simply say boring) pace, a typically stationary camera that observes scenes play out, a melancholy love for his homeland and ambivalent observation of its transformation into modernity, and incredibly subtle social commentary that depends upon at least some prior knowledge of Taiwanese culture, politics, and history—Café Lumière is decidedly for those viewers who like to disappear into the movies they watch, get lost in them, spend time with the images they offer to us. Patience is required, but once you let yourself sink into the movie's beauty, boredom is the last thing on your mind.

Café Lumière is Hou's homage to the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, commissioned in honor of Ozu's 100th birthday. The two directors are akin in many ways—Ozu shares many of the stylistic and thematic preoccupations I mentioned above, although he integrated them a bit more evenly into a studio style and a narrative format—but Hou is able to attempt an even more languid, reverential style that Ozu, as a contract director, was not exactly free to indulge in (even if he had wanted to). Of course, too, Café Lumière observes the technological and sociocultural shifts of modern capitalism in the latter half of the twentieth century, which Ozu (who passed away in 1963) was unable to do. (One imagines, though, that if Ozu had lived to see the new millennium and made films about the transformation, the result may have been pretty close to Café Lumière—see Ozu's masterful 1959 satire Good Morning as an example of his bemused interest in modern technology.)

The main character is Yoko, a Japanese woman who has just returned to Tokyo after a stay in Taiwan. We observe her wandering throughout the city, snapping pictures and conducting research for a project about twentieth-century Chinese composer Jiang Wenye, whose music acts as the movie's soundtrack. This being said, though, Café Lumière doesn't exactly have a plot. We observe characters eating meals and watching the metropolis around them, sometimes in frustration, sometimes in awe. The whole movie can be summarized as a testament to observation, to listening as well as watching: while the patient cinematography and the title's homage to one of the founders of cinema point to a fascination with sight, a minor character—a bookstore clerk named Hajime who pines for Yoko and who spends his free time recording the sounds of Tokyo for his computer-created artwork—equally respects the act of listening.

Hajime's use of his computer to create art, his digital recorder to capture sounds, and a camcorder to capture images—not to mention Yoko's use of numerous technological apparatuses to conduct her research, or Hou's beautiful, almost-abstract compositions of Tokyo's train system—indicate Café Lumière's multifaceted view of modern technology. It's a standby of modern arthouse cinema to portray technology as a deadening force, suppressing communication and alienating urban populations. While this theme is somewhat understandable in recent Southeast Asian cinema, given the turbulent sociocultural shifts that have been experienced in that region over the last several decades, the reality seems more shaded than that: technology can also connect people, can create beauty and art, can forge a more intimate connection between individuals and cities rather than a pronounced distance. Hou is sensitive to this tricky relationship between people, their cities, and their technologies; Café Lumière is enraptured by these relationships as well as, sometimes, dismayed by them.

I consider myself a city-lover—I can't imagine myself settling down outside of a metropolis—so to see the beauty and joy of modern city life so calmly captured by Hou (along with its frustrations and difficulties) is a wonder to behold. Like the aforementioned Into Great Silence, Café Lumière will leave you giddy about something as simple as walking around outside when the movie is over—taking in sights and sounds which suddenly seem so quietly majestic.

18. Golden Door (d. Emanuele Crialese, Italy/France, 2007) Deftly interweaving somber realism and fantastical surrealism, Golden Door turns its dual filmmaking styles into a metaphor for the immense migration of Europeans to the United States in the early twentieth century. The commingling of cold reality with bewitching superstition represents the rift between the Old World and the New: the movie opens with a visit to a witch in the Italian countryside convinced that a young pregnant woman must be exorcised of demonic snakes within her belly, but this scene could not be more different than those set at Ellis Island later in the film, in which immigrants new to this country are detained by an infinite amount of red tape and modern bureaucracy.

Golden Door ably evokes the claustrophobia, grime, disappointment, and heartache of the voyage to America, but impressively, it also conveys the hope, expectation, and electrifying uncertainty that accompanied it. The sporadic dream sequences that arise out of the characters' fraught states of mind are not just brightly-colored distractions meant to alleviate the film's bleakness; suggesting the extent to which desperate individuals rely upon their own fantasies for hope, such scenes in Golden Door underline the drastic gap between the American myth of open arms for all foreign peoples (represented by Lady Liberty herself) and the actual experience that such immigrants underwent.

For all of this, and considering how unsettling are the movie's scenes of foreigners being randomly married off to American suitors, Golden Door contains a great deal of joy and sweetness. This is primarily thanks to a tenuous central relationship between an Italian immigrant named Amato and a bourgeois woman played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, who, having just been jilted by her lover, depends upon Amato for admittance into the United States. Their rapport together is not the stuff of romantic comedy—meaning there's no grandiose union at the end of the movie—but it's enough to make Golden Door a movie of bewitching contradictions: real and dreamlike, sweet and somber.

17. Crimson Gold (d. Jafar Panahi, Iran, 2004) Jafar Panahi is one of modern cinema's most potent realists; here, working from a script by the equally great Abbas Kiarostami, he creates an unforgettable movie not only about class stratification in modern Iran, but about impoverished people living throughout the world, eager to change their lives for the better but often given scant opportunity to do so. Essentially, the movie is about the robbery of a jewelry store, but to label it such is to ignore what it's really concerned with. The narrative structure—presumably conceived by Kiarostami and perfectly constructed by Panahi—makes us aware of the inevitability of the movie's events before they happen, then circuitously doubles back and shows us the circumstances out of which this tragedy arose.

Wielding a slow, quietly-unfolding aesthetic familiar from Kiarostami's filmmaking, Crimson Gold gains tremendous power from the lead performance of Hussein Emadeddin, playing a Tehran pizza delivery driver. Large, stocky, often blank-faced, Hussein (the character and the actor) seems to coast through the movie, impelled by external forces but rarely taking any initiative of his own—that is, at least, until the desperate moments that open and close the film. We realize by the end that Hussein is not actually blankly wandering through a world that does not affect him; he is observing and internalizing, and ultimately decides that the only action he can take is a foolish and drastic one.

Panahi's previous movie, The Circle (2001—also excellent), is about the plight of single women in modern Iran, and their inability to play a decisive role in their society. Crimson Gold also takes a committed sociocultural stance, but its theme is based on class, not gender. Both the female characters in The Circle and the impoverished characters in Crimson Gold are given few (almost no) opportunities by a society that favors the wealthy and the politically powerful. The subdued passion with which Panahi delivers these critiques of his home country helps to explain the censorship woes and visa difficulties with which Panahi and his movies have been faced in Iran, and reminds us that cinema is still one of the most powerful forms of artistic activism available to us.

16. In the Mood for Love (d. Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong/France, 2001) It boggles the mind how a movie can be so blissful and so sad at once, although that difficult emotional state represents perfectly the bittersweet passion of an irresistible love affair. Among the most gorgeous movies ever made, In the Mood for Love soars on atmosphere, showing us how this love affair unfolds in oblique, suggestive, yet no less fiery images. Set in 1960s Hong Kong (the setting of Wong's own childhood), the movie concerns Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan, who are renting adjacent apartments in a crowded building. Eventually deducing that their spouses are themselves having an affair, the two characters, compelled together by proximity as well as sadness and loneliness, can hardly avoid the intense passion into which they are thrown.

If 2046 (this movie's pseudo-sequel) is a boldly fractured and kaleidoscopic fantasy of doomed love, In the Mood for Love begins to step towards that hyperbolic world, though its erotic melancholy is still rooted in reality (albeit a color-soaked reality that only the cinema can evoke). That the movie is essentially about love, lust, and passion, although the main characters never touch and their relationship is never consummated onscreen, points towards the burning intensity of this movie—enraptured by its images, you feel something close to lust yourself. And by the time the movie's astonishingly somber and aching ending rolls around, you feel like a love of your own has just trickled through your grasp. A movie to watch on sweetly lonely nights, In the Mood for Love achieves an extreme of both sadness and desire that is sublime to behold—it's a movie that you live through.

15. Tropical Malady (d. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/France/Germany/Italy, 2005) Speaking of lust: Tropical Malady is a movie about ogling, about looks filled with desire and desperation, about how passion and the romantic chase can literally transform us. The first half of the movie concerns a tenuous relationship between a dreamy soldier named Keng and a shy farmboy named Tong. This first half is itself dreamy and romantic, patiently observing Keng and Tong as they flirt coyly, venture into a cave supposedly haunted by spirits, hold hands and discuss mixtapes they've made for each other (with dialogue that sweetly and gently parodies the cliches of romantic melodramas), and enjoy streetside singers in Bangkok.

Halfway through the movie, though, in typical Weerasethakul fashion, the movie stutters and reverses itself. The second half appears to take place in an alternate but parallel universe: in the same agrarian setting around Tong's farm, villagers have been plagued by a tiger who has been ridding them of their livestock. Taking the shape of a traditional folktale, this second half posits that the tiger is in fact a mythical beast inhabited by the spirit of a man (who may or may not be Tong himself). A soldier ventures into the forest to track and trap the tiger—the soldier may or may not be Keng. Even if the storyline does not transition quite so conveniently between its two halves, it is undeniable that the latter half, like the first, is about an erotic conquest, about the power of looking between two beings—a theme that culminates in a burning exchange of stares between the soldier and the immense tiger beast, lit by a hypnotic jungle moonlight, staring down Keng, the camera, and the audience.

Truly unlike practically any other movie ever made (except, maybe, by other movies by its director—Blissfully Yours in particular), Tropical Malady soars along on its own dream logic, and by the end of it somehow makes a perfect dreamy sense. The movie and its shimmering jungle scenery seem themselves to be inhabited by spirits—how else to explain its majestic beauty?

14. The Circle (d. Jafar Panahi, Iran/Italy/Switzerland, 2001) If Crimson Gold delivers its passionate social commentary to us with aching restraint—revealing to us only gradually how dismayed it is with Iran's current cultural state of affairs—The Circle condemns its homeland's gender politics with unabashed, vitriolic anger. Little surprise that the movie was banned in Iran, though Panahi's film in fact reminds us that reacting with justifiable anger to the injustice of one's home country is maybe the most committed form of patriotism imaginable—caring so much about your country that you'll do whatever it takes to change it for the better.

The circle of the title is a vicious cycle by which single women in Iran are perpetually oppressed. The beginning of the film shows two women in a figurative prison, attempting to travel to a distant city where they might find work and shelter but unable to do so because they lack the proper identification or the companionship of male relatives. The end of the film features a group of women in a literal prison, with Panahi's appropriately restrictive aesthetic showing us a woman speaking desperately through a sliding panel of the prison door—to an unlistening guard, and to the overwhelmed audience. Doubtlessly a hopeless ending, Panahi leaves the audience in the same plight as the besieged women in his film—trapped by a cruel cycle of heartless codes and strictures, with no chance of escaping an arbitrarily demeaning social system.

Elsewhere on this list, I've commended movies that offer bleak storylines, themes, and commentaries while balancing out that bleakness with humor, beauty, levity, and so forth. No such luck with The Circle—although it does offer some moments of humor, the overall effect is unremittingly oppressive. This is appropriate, as is the movie's complete lack of ambiguity. Its artfulness lies in its directness, and its beauty lies in its impassioned humanism. Not just a movie that tries to affect its audience (though it undoubtedly tries to do this as well), The Circle is out to change the world.

13. Cowards Bend the Knee (d. Guy Maddin, Canada, 2004) The plot keywords on Cowards Bend the Knee's IMDB page include “wax museum,” “abortionist,” “hairstylist,” “murder,” “sex,” “urination,” “shower room,” “ghost,” and “ice hockey.” Yeah, that sounds about right, but such a checklist still can't get close to the bewildering effect that Maddin's film achieves. In idiosyncratic fashion, Maddin wields a stuttering faux-silent-movie aesthetic (black-and-white 16mm film with flashes of faded color, emphatic intertitles, a jagged Eisenstein-meets-MTV editing style, photographic effects like smears and lenses that blur the images into a half-remembered cinematic dream) and a surreal Freudian storyline to simultaneously embrace and obliterate the conventions of film history. Cowards Bend the Knee may be Maddin's most aggressively weird movie yet; somehow, though, it's also sweet at times, and is often mouth-gapingly hilarious.

The movie begins with a drop of semen splurted onto a microscope slide; inside this unlikeliest and gooiest of settings, the rest of the movie ostensibly takes place. (The first image we see when we zoom microscopically in to the specimen slide? A group of ice hockey players—the Winnipeg Maroons—immersed in a tense game.) The story veers wildly to include the Maroons' star player, his pregnant girlfriend, a blonde vixen who runs a hair-salon-slash-back-alley-abortion-clinic, the blonde's voluptuous daughter, incest, amputation, and other unpleasantries.

If you wanted to, you could pull a plethora of sadomasochistic, psychosexual themes from this phantasmagoria; indeed, within all of the madness, certain central motifs (the knotty relationships of families, expected gendered behavior from males and females) do become apparent. But Cowards Bend the Knee is better experienced, I think, as a madcap, frenzied trip through the skeleton-strewn closets of cinematic history, and/or as an addictive hallucination transplanted directly from Maddin's own singular psyche. Endlessly watchable, even among all the torridness (at only sixty minutes, I watched it twice in a row the first time I rented it), Cowards Bend the Knee is the most invigorating hour you'll ever spend within a sperm sample.

12. Spirited Away (d. Hiyao Miyazaki, Japan, 2002) My favorite of the Japanese master's movies, Spirited Away (like many of Miyazaki's films) is simultaneously an astonishing journey into pure imagination and a powerful analogy for the alienation and confusion of youth and aging. It opens with ten-year-old Chihiro and her family moving to a new town; they stumble upon a mysterious tunnel hidden deep in the woods (as her father tries to forge a shortcut), and venture through it to a fantasy world that is at once threatening and enchanting.

The marvelous wonders of this movie are in its details. The massive baby that acts as the villainess's henchman of sorts; the dustball creatures that befriend Chihiro as they labor away in the bowels of the village's bathhouse; the faceless slime monster who regurgitates gold and is repulsed by, yet thrives on, the greed of those around him—these are fantasies that turn Spirited Away into the stuff of legend, the cinematic version of a folktale you could recite to your children as they fall asleep.

Miyazaki's subtle but pressing concerns with preserving our environment are reiterated (by this same sludge monster, a river spirit who throws up all of the discarded waste we've tossed into our bodies of water), as is the gentle beauty of his animation, among the most beautiful and complex work ever completed for a hand-drawn animated movie. It's an auteurist triumph, then, but it's also simply a world you can dive into—it will scare and transfix you in sublime ways.

11. Wall-E (d. Andrew Stanton, USA, 2008) There's never been another American animated movie like Wall-E. Its emotional sincerity, visual splendor, social commentary, and narrative structure are almost unparalleled in the history of American animation. The only other movie that's come close in a few of these categories is Pixar's Up, although it's still impossible for me to determine which of the two movies had me bawling more uninhibitedly.

That Wall-E is a gorgeous triumph of computer animation almost goes without saying, although it bears repeating that the sequences set in the dark reaches of space are among the most beautiful ever completed for any American movie. (The “dancing” demonstration between Wall-E and Eve as the Captain learns of earth's way of life in the control room is basically miraculous.) What's so unexpected about Wall-E is its heartfelt passion for preserving our planet, and its alarm at the fact that practically every sign points to our rapid destruction of it. No dreary, condescending eco-lecture, Wall-E and its makers cherish life and remind us of the immense tragedy of destroying it. That some could accuse the film of condescending to its audience by supplying us with a liberal talking point (as some conservative critics did) is unfathomable; the movie may be about protecting our environment, but this is a humanistic and optimistic concern, not a political one. Others claimed that an animated Disney movie is no place for a movie about ecological peril and changing our way of life—as though “children's” movies had to be divorced from pressing issues currently facing us in reality. (Such a reaction is far more condescending towards young audiences than Wall-E ever could be.)

But enough about its social themes and its interest in reality; Wall-E is truly memorable as one of the most emotional and romantic movies made in the United States over the last several decades. It should be a sobering lesson to live-action filmmakers that it takes two robots to remind us of the sublime tenderness that movies can offer us. Comparisons of Wall-E to the silent comedies of Chaplin and Keaton are apt, not only because of the movie's dialogue-free first act (in which Wall-E attempts to woo Eve and experiences repeated pratfalls) but also because of the sincere relationship evoked between the two characters throughout the rest of the film. No dialogue is needed; we observe their interaction and it seems we know what love looks like.