“The 50 Best Films of 2023” by Walter Chaw
by Walter Chaw The world is on fire. It’s burned away my illusions.
“The 50 Best Films of 2022” by Walter Chaw
My mom died this year, but I lost her decades ago. Our relationship was radioactive, and I had neither the courage nor the resolve to even begin to repair it–or to investigate whether there was anything left to repair. I lost a mentor this year, too, because I wasn't interesting enough to maintain as an apprentice. I turn 50 in 2023. It's an age that seemed absurd to me as recently as a few years ago. If I live to 54, I'll be how old my dad was when he died. My mom's death brings an end to this season of death for us, my wife and me. We're both orphans now, because everything worked out the way it was supposed to. It's how parents hope it works out. I guess we're lucky that way. Maybe it's just me, yet it felt like there were many films in 2022 dealing with childhood and lost parents, biological or otherwise. Lots of films about ghosts.
“The 50 Best Films of 2021” by Walter Chaw
by Walter Chaw Writing these annual wrap-ups feels to me a little like this passage from Anne Sexton’s “45 Mercy Street”:
I walk, I walk
I hold matches at street signs
for it is dark,
as dark as the leathery dead
The annual best-of ritual is frustrating because one can never see all the great films in a year–but it’s the kind of frustration that feels aspirational for a change in this, our time of social and environmental apocalypse. I’m thrilled to talk about things that are good for a change and the movies in 2021 were very good indeed. So good that while I feel like I could have made a list 100 strong, I know there are still more gems from this year left to see.
Editor’s Choice: The Year in Blu-ray (2021)
by Bill Chambers It was a pretty strong year for Blu-ray and another bad one for civilization, which is probably why an unusually high number of discs (Donnie Darko 4K, The Road Warrior, and Criterion’s Citizen Kane, to name a few) fell victim to human error in 2021. I’m not dissuaded by this, I’m touched by the format’s resilience in the face of adversity. One thing is for certain: the pandemic has not been kind to the hoarder of physical media–this hoarder, at least. It’s led to short-stocked titles, import levies, fewer offers of review copies, and me not making one of these lists in 2020 because there was so much I missed. I don’t think I expected to be back in the same boat 12 months later–or maybe, to paraphrase the world’s greatest detective, I knew I would be, but I hoped I wouldn’t be. I’m ignoring any pangs of FOMO this time around, though, because I did see at least 10 titles worth singling out, even if collectively they don’t tell the whole story of the year in home video. Besides, any excuse to proselytize for physical media as the oil slick of streaming continues to submerge preexisting content delivery systems.
“The 50 Best Films of 2020” by Walter Chaw
There will be libraries written about the fallout from 2020: memoirs and sociological studies and an entire generation of art forever coded to this collective flashpoint. If the trauma from an event like 9/11 can reshape the discourse for the next decade, how long will the afterimage of the pandemic–of probably 500,000 known dead when all’s said and done from wilful mishandling and a lack of financial, medical, and institutional support–linger in the minds of the survivors? How will we, together, come to terms with our current status as a banana republic, vanquished in a non-shooting war by foreign dictators, and on the verge of witnessing the pathetic, ignoble death of our brief experiment? It will go, and we won’t even fight.
“The 50 Best Films of 2019” by Walter Chaw
2019 will be defined for me by two things–one is interesting, the other is not. The “not” is that my friend Sam killed himself. He used a gun. Sam and I disagreed about guns. He had been in various levels of law enforcement, retired to be a 9-1-1 operator, found himself traumatized after his service, and moved across the country to be closer to his young daughter and ex-wife. To be a dad, you know. Sam owned a lot of guns, but in the last couple of years, he began to ask me about statistics and troubling trends. Mass shooting events devastated him–as they devastated all of us, before we got used to them–and the doctrine and culture in which he was raised started to show its limitations as a strategy for species survival.
Editor’s Choice: The Year in Blu-ray (2019)
by Bill Chambers I learned to appreciate the benefits of streaming this past October when I became so fatigued from illness that getting up to load a disc may as well have been trekking across the Sahara. (It really put the “physical” in physical media.) Then Disney+ launched, and “Maclunkey” happened–a startling reminder that streaming content can change at the drop of a hat depending on corporate or creator whim. It remains a struggle to fight complacency, though, given that a) the screener pool is drying up and b) even the cheapest disc will probably set you back as much as a month’s subscription to a streaming service. In short, I wouldn’t call this a definitive or comprehensive list of the year’s best discs by any stretch, merely the best among those I had an opportunity to audit. But FILM FREAK CENTRAL will never stop championing physical media, for a variety of “because”s:
“The 50 Best Films of 2018” by Walter Chaw
2018 was a traumatic year for me that should turn out to be a good year in hindsight. I read something by a career counsellor who told clients thinking about a change to stop thinking and quit their job. He said you can't know what you can do until you stop doing what you're doing. I've spent the past six months doing things I would never have had the time or headspace for had I not walked off a ledge. It's not good for the heart but it's good for the soul. I've finished a couple of large writing projects and positioned myself to be available for a handful of genuinely interesting opportunities. I'm evolving. It's a daily thing. It's a work of a lifetime. This year, I have watched my friends achieve extraordinary things with their art and it's filled me with joy, not to mention inspiration. I don't know what they see in me in return, but I hope to justify their faith in 2019. I wouldn't have been able to be rash without the strength of my family and the support of my friends. A couple–you guys know who you are–somehow knew when to reach out and did with the right encouragement in what felt like the nick of time.
“The 50 Best Films of 2017” by Walter Chaw
There’s one good thing that came out of the first year of the Trump presidency, just one: this realization that what we had always indulged in terms of masculine misbehaviour is dangerous and vile. The entertainment industry, the lowest arm of which gave us Trump, took the brunt of the new “wokeness,” almost as though it were taking responsibility for birthing something like Trump by enacting a purge. It’s not over. One can only hope the enablers are next–the ones who looked the other way or silently helped normalize a flesh tax for entrance into the realm. Change has to be more than lip-service and the now-familiar tone-deaf apology for narcissism and incomprehension. I could go deeper here about my personal dismay, sense of betrayal, rage, disgust…and I want to–but men have been talking over women about their experiences for long enough.
Walter Chaw’s Top “10” of 2016
by Walter Chaw There are conundrums presented by what I do now for a day job and this moonlight I won't quit. Let me get at that by telling you an old, old story about filmmaker Peter Hedges that is sort of current again because he's acting in a good film out this year called Little Sister. (His son, meanwhile, co-stars in Manchester by the Sea.) When I met Mr. Hedges, it was to interview him for Pieces of April. As per my usual process, I saw and reviewed the movie first, logging it with Bill before going to meet him. The idea behind this is that I never want my work to be coloured by any personal feelings I might develop for the artist over the course of a conversation–for good or for ill. It's not that I don't trust myself to be fair, it's that I don't know how knowing someone changes the environment in my head. I will be fair, but I'm not the same person before I meet someone and after. The world essentially changes when you meet someone.
Editor’s Choice: The Year in Blu-ray
by Bill Chambers The reason film and physical media are prematurely pronounced dead every few weeks is that the mainstream keeps narrowing, limiting the visible spectrum of both industries. Studios remain halfheartedly committed to Blu-ray Disc but, as this Top 10 list incidentally shows, it’s really become the domain of boutique labels restoring and annotating studio-neglected fare, capitalizing on streaming’s short-term memory and populist leanings while inspiring devotion among connoisseurs. Please note that I limited my selection process to titles I’ve personally audited and would endorse anyway, with or without frills. Some of these may be reviewed in full at a later date.
Film Freak Central’s Best of ’15
by Walter Chaw 2015 was an interesting year for me.
FFC’s Best of ’14
by Walter Chaw Two things in 2014. Well, one in 2013 and one in 2014. The first was the Telluride Film Festival, which occurs on Labour Day Weekend and which I attended for the first time in a decade in 2013. The second was a conversation I had with a friend over Skype earlier this year, around the time of my 41st birthday. They led me, those two things, to change my life over from one of quiet desperation to one of perpetual stimulation and challenge. I left a major corporation and a job that provided security and some measure of stability to become general manager of the Alamo Drafthouse in my home state of Colorado. As someone who tends towards depression, it’s hardly hyperbole to say that it was a decision that probably saved my life.
FFC’s Best of ’13
by Walter Chaw Searching for themes in 2013, you come upon the obvious ones first: the frustrations of the forty-five percenters; the growing income gap; and the death of the middle-class, encapsulated in brat-taculars like The Bling Ring and Spring Breakers and prestige pics like Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street, David O. Russell's American Hustle, and, um, Michael Bay's Pain & Gain. You see this preoccupation with the economy in Nebraska's quest for a million-dollar Clearinghouse payday, and in Frances Halladay's desire for a place to sleep and a career that can subsidize it (see also: To the Wonder and Byzantium). It's there in the identity theft of Identity Theft and the motivations of the prefab family from We're the Millers, paid off with picket fences in an ending with echoes of My Blue Heaven and Goodfellas. Consider All is Lost, an allegory for pensioners who've lost everything to the wolves of Wall Street, adrift on a limitless span, taking on water but plucky, damnit. Too plucky, in the case of Redford's Everyman hero–who, frankly, would've better served his allegory had he drowned with salvation in sight.
Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2012
by Walter Chaw I wish To the Wonder had been released this year–Take Shelter, too. The one because I love Terrence Malick and I’m excited that he’s working so much, the other because I fear that Take Shelter is the last time Michael Shannon will anchor a picture without being instantly Christopher Walken-ized. It’s his The Dead Zone, and he’s amazing in a movie that takes big risks and pays off in a meaningful way; if he were to star in it now, I think it would be mistaken for camp. I also wish I’d seen Margaret in time for my 2011 list. Alas, local publicity has never been terribly interested in my participation. Nevertheless, thanks mostly to Netflix and FYC screeners, I saw a great many great films this year.
Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2011
2011 was a turning point for me. Two films–Red Cliff and The Tree of Life–did it, the one returning to me a measure of my identity, the other giving me a sense that I'd avoided asking ultimate questions about my relationship with film from the start. My stances that there are right and wrong answers in the liberal arts and that people are only entitled to an educated opinion held steady–but I'd never asked why it was that the things I liked were the things I liked. Around this time, I read Jonathan Lethem's monograph on John Carpenter's They Live and was consequently inspired to write one of my own, on Steve De Jarnatt's Miracle Mile. I chose that movie not because–perhaps I should say, not only because–of its relative obscurity, but because it was a movie I've been evangelical about since first seeing it in 1989. The process of writing that monograph consumed much of the last half of 2011. I skipped screenings because of it, and found myself incapable of reviewing the films I did see very well, if at all.
Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2010
The last year of the first ten or the first year of the next ten, 2010 finds the state of our motion pictures as an awkward, yearling thing, finding purchase in the aftermath of the fear and nihilism of the post-9/11 state in something as dark but perhaps now more purposeful than despairing. If the best films of the immediately-after are represented by stuff like No Country for Old Men and Synecdoche, NY, the best films of this liminal year are pilgrims in search of a (doomed) idea of perfection and the dreadful cost of its pursuit. Is that explanation in part for the rise of geek culture (The Social Network, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, It's Kind of a Funny Story, Kick-Ass), this gradual empowerment of the weaker position? While examinations of vengeance and solipsism continue to be tough themes to shake, they've begun taking the form of marginal uplift as opposed to mostly-undiluted nihilism.
Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2009
The last year of any decade usually a watershed year, we come to the end of 2009 with a bounty of riches. A year that just a couple of months ago I feared wouldn't yield ten films from which to choose has, through a flurry of screeners and late-season additions, convinced me of its cinematic legitimacy. Find in the top ten three war films, five films about the state and politics of the modern family, one about a poet, and one about a cop. Discover that each of the first ten has a direct corollary in the next ten (suggesting that there's a good bit of synchronicity in 2009), and that although women directors remain a novelty, three penetrate the top ten for the first time in my decade of lists. Other threads include a continuation of the last two years' feelings of disconnection and entropy indulged, the notion that institutions of right are the ones perpetrating the bulk of atrocity, and investigations into the self that mainly fulfill Nietzsche's maxim of abysses looking into the lookers. It's a summary list, in a way, of the '00s.
Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2008
I'm going to call 2008 a "down" year, but not because there were fewer masterpieces produced–only because the theme that resonated for me the most was this sense of a cycle completing. If it's true that every generation flatters itself as the last one, it's equally true that every decade of film nears its completion with its full measure of anticipation/regret (liebestraum as zeitgeist, no?) in its eighth, sometimes ninth, year. Even films that on the surface seem filled with the fruit of human ambition and desire–like James Marsh's ebullient Man on Wire, in which the World Trade Center appears as the phantom lover of highwire artist Philippe Petit–take place, after all, at the ground zero of this epoch. What's dying throughout 2006 and 2007, all this sussing through father issues and the cult of masculinity and love and the courage of children, is dead now. It's not nihilism anymore, it's pragmatism. The dream is over, the insect is awake.
Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2007
Well the road is out before me
and the moon is shining bright
what I want you to remember
as I disappear tonight
today is grey skies
tomorrow is tears
you'll have to wait 'til yesterday is here.
-Tom Waits, "Yesterday Is Here"
Break it down: 2007 resets the early days of the New American Cinema–the last years of the Apollo space program (and sure enough, we have a documentary about the remaining Apollo astronauts in David Sington's In the Shadow of the Moon) and Watergate, the death twitches of the 1960s gradually revealing themselves in pictures. Whether this leads to another Golden Age or merely another stutter-step on the road of our grief remains to be seen, but past the halfway point of the first decade of the new millennium (and six years after 9/11 hit its own reset button), the 2000s have already established themselves with the usual single-minded purpose. At the least, celebrate the resurgence of American cinema–the mainstream re-establishing itself as not just a dream factory, but a garden of auteur delights as well. 2007, above anything else, heralds a banner year for the auteur theory (Paul Thomas Anderson, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the Coens, Tarantino, Sean Penn, Cronenberg, Brad Bird, Kim Ki-duk, David Fincher, Ken Loach, Ang Lee, Brian DePalma–and flicks I didn't catch by guys like Paul Schrader, Francis Ford Coppola, Tsai Ming-liang, John Sayles, and so on), with the films, like Sweeney's razors, functioning as extensions of the directors' biological selves.
Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2006
I think the start of 2006 held so much promise mainly because it heralded the end of 2005. Not a doomsayer by any stretch, I find myself, at least in my own head, defending the state of film against facile diagnoses. "Books are always better than the movies based on them" and "They don't make good movies anymore" are the common phrases trotted out to simulate critical thought–better yet is the carrying around of the cross of "You just don't like anything." The truth is that books are only superior to the movies made from them about half the time (consider that almost all of Hitchcock's films are based on shitty literature); that good movies are no rarer than usual; and that disliking Blood Diamond, Dreamgirls, and The Holiday doesn't mean I don't like anything. Still, I admit to taking short rides with those facile phrases over the years, trying them on for size, seeing if and how far they will fly.
Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2005
January 9, 2006|After a year, 2004, wherein we indulged in the fantasy that we could forget our recent past in favour of better tomorrows, 2005 finds us obsessed with the things we've lost (especially children), the things we deny, and the difficulty of living with ghosts. It was a reflection of our political landscape split starkly into a Yeatsian twain between the worst, with their passionate intensity, and the best, lacking all conviction–the ultra-conservatives producing more of the same old tired, divisive hate (The Island showed that even Old Scratch could be predictable and boring) and the ultra-liberals producing high-minded garbage that either studiously avoided a point-of-view (The Interpreter, The Constant Gardener, Kingdom of Heaven, Syriana) or was so clearly left-wing proselytizing that it jettisoned context and energy in favour of bland political allegory (Good Night, and Good Luck.). The reason Bush Jr. won a second term is that he ran unopposed–and after the disastrous year the Grand Old Party had under him as their fearless leader, the real tragedy is that there's still no strong message in any opposing party to fill the void. Which explains, I guess, why the most ambivalent, overtly politicized films of the year were not only ultimately mediocre, but also made by a guy who taught himself how to finally direct an almost-passable film on the trial-and-mostly-error backs of three of the most highly-anticipated films of all time (George Lucas and Revenge of the Sith) and the king of everything for everyone (Steven Spielberg and his War of the Worlds and Munich). The blatant exceptions were Christopher Nolan's genre Munich (Batman Begins) and David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, a film that says volumes about vengeance and the delusions of the righteous while trapped in the body of a good old American, sexy dames and guns-a-blazing, neo-noir.
Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2004
There's a wonderful, haunted Dan Simmons short story called "The River Styx Runs Upstream" in which technology has made the resurrection of beloved family members possible, though the resurrected are barely recognizable as human. It's an iteration of the W.W. Jacobs story "The Monkey's Paw", of course, a fictionalized platitude of watching what you wish for, and the tale's melancholic tone–its themes of surfacing and being unable to let go of the past–colour the best films of 2004.
Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2003
Stained by the twin horrors of school shootings and 9/11, the films of 2003 (many of the best of which are actually 2002 films that didn't find a release slot until this year) are interested in listlessness and languor, in addressing what appears to be a national ennui where the worst are filled with passionate intensity and the rest of us are spectators. Declared the worst year in memory at the Cannes Film Festival by any number of wags, 2003 was instead, I'd offer, deadened by a sort of fatalistic nihilism that bleaches our entertainments with a grey wash, making it difficult to muster much in the way of enthusiasm on the one hand and comfort on the other. The splashiest of the year's best films, in fact, are about revenge and noble sacrifice, while a trio of strong pictures (Dogville, The True Meaning of Pictures, Rhinoceros Eyes) have been pushed back to 2004, transforming this year's wrap-up into something of a patchwork creature. Stepping back, it seems only right that it be that way.–Walter Chaw
Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2002
THE YEAR THAT WAS…
by Walter Chaw
Love stories were the rule of the day for the year that was 2002. Sprung love stories, twisted love stories, emotionally devastating love stories flavoured by entropy and nihilism. The films that seem to fall out of that purview, About Schmidt and Morvern Callar, show themselves ultimately to be pictures moved by the deaths of a loved one or, as with Wendigo, studies of the dynamics of family from surface ideal to subversive schism. Romance is the prism through which identity and normalcy are redefined–a certain celluloid co-dependency that made 2002 (and 2001) the best years for film, and American film in particular, since the heyday of American cinema in the 1970s.