At times it feels as if we’re living in something of a cinematic golden age, but one that’s altogether different from earlier halcyon days. Where some celebrate the former genius of the system to explain an earlier day’s proliferation of fine movies, now the system is something of a blunderer that often flings itself into follies or even crushes inspiration under its weight, but sometimes gets carried away, for reasons good or bad, and hands surprising control of vast resources over to artists who make stunningly audacious and personal use of them. The best filmmakers working in Hollywood have a passionate grasp of the cinematic past, but they don’t swoon over its polish or emulate its styles, they excavate it for its raw materials.
There’s also a ferment here of independent filmmaking that liberates young people who, in earlier times, might have had to scuffle or supplicate for years while angling for a practical chance that now, with video, and with adequate effort, they can seize for themselves. Some of these independents have developed distinctive methods as well as aesthetics—regarding subject matter, picture, and performance—that are apt for the means of production. They make their lives, their homes, their families, their problems, and even their art the focus of their movies, and because, in their individuality, they share much with others in their generation, their stories, at their best—reflecting the age-old clashes and strivings of talented and ambitious youths in life, love, and art—reverberate deeply and widely. Meanwhile, the proliferation of arthouse cinemas and the sudden availability of classics on DVD and via Netflix go hand in hand with the rise of their art: their fierce focus on the immediate and the intimate includes the intensely personal experience of movies—whether treasures from the history of cinema or instant classics newly arrived from around the world. And, thanks to the Internet’s rapidity of ripple-effects that carry word from bloggers and enthusiasts to the world at large, the independent aesthetic and its artists have quickly had an impact on the Hollywood mainstream, in salutary ways.
On the international scene, if Europe is (with a few exceptions) no longer the limitlessly fertile ground for movie art that it once was, there are wonderful filmmakers appearing in places where formerly there were few. Here, too, aesthetic and methods have developed together, and the opening of the cinema to new ranges of experience is matched by the increasing diversity of styles and practices. (The vagaries of distribution keep from this list a bunch of movies that have been shown at festivals or special series but haven’t yet been released theatrically here.)
It’s a great moment to be watching movies, and this year a ten-best list would be an absurd constraint. The first five movies named below are head and shoulders above the year’s other releases, but the next twenty are all worthy successors, and, depending on my mood on a given day, could change places freely. I’ve tried to line them up in ways that suggest resonances between them. What can be said is this: at a moment when academic study and digital media make the cinematic past even oppressively omnipresent, when changing technologies put the very nature of cinematic practice into doubt, and when the economy of the industry seems caught between the Scylla of production costs and the Charybdis of uncertain distribution, new generations around the world for whom the cinema is a prime part of identity and a crucial mode of self-recognition are nonetheless drawing it, with remarkable industriousness, into ever-closer contact with their own lives and experiences, and, as a result, are bringing forth a burgeoning, exhilaratingly eruptive and disruptive present-tense cinema that already looks ahead to the cinema of the future.
1. “Shutter Island” (Martin Scorsese)
Images that seem wrenched from the most visceral side of the director’s mind—a sort of cinematic self-psychoanalysis that becomes a collective confession of the substantial fears and horrors of a historical moment that’s not only not lost but constantly being rediscovered as style.
