The 10 best films of 2013

The 10 best films of 2013 joint third / Behind the Candelabra

The 10 best films of 2013 No 1 / The Act of Killing

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

The 10 best films of 2013, joint 3rd / Gravity

The 10 best films of 2013, joint 3rd – Gravity

Sandra Bullock's down-to-Earthiness and some stunning special effects raise Alfonso Cuarón's space thriller above the rest, in our continuing countdown of this year's top 10 films

Andrew Pulver
Tuesday 17 December 2013 15.21 GMT

When Gravity finally dropped at the Venice film festival earlier this year, it answered a question that had been perplexing the film world for quite some time: was this long-in-the-making space thriller going to be a gigantic disaster, a folie de grandeur from fast-talking Mexican writer-director Alfonso Cuarón who, despite his impassioned rhetoric, was not necessarily considered the most reliable reins-holder in town?

Well, within minutes of the lights going down, sighs of relief could be heard all around the auditorium – or perhaps it was the first sobbing gasps of terror as the audience, pinned back in their seats, realised what was in store for the two doughty astronauts, played by Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, stranded high above Earth. Cuarón, who had been plugging away on the film for several years, and who had opted to develop entirely new lighting and visual effects techniques to convincingly portray the extra-terrestrial settings, was entitled to feel triumphant, and the film's subsequent box-office performance will have more than satisfied his masters.

With the benefit of hindsight, what Cuarón pulled off is properly extraordinary. Spending vast amounts of money on – and perfectly realising – box-fresh documentary-style visuals which put the viewer right up there in the space shuttle alongside astronauts Ryan Stone (Bullock) and Matt Kowalski (Clooney) is the first, and most obviously impressive achievement. Then, to construct a nerve-shredding thriller that – science quibbles aside – refused to adopt any of the standard sci-fi tricks usually employed by space-set films. More than that, to somehow nudge the narrative into an area that – while not quite Kubrickian – allowed for some heavyweight philosophical/spiritual musing on death and rebirth. And finally – to do all this with Sandra Bullock, queen of quirk, in the driving seat. Though she was by no means first choice for the role, Bullock has turned out to be absolutely inspired casting, injecting a quotidian human warmth to the role that, possibly, may have been lacking had Angelina Jolie, the original lead, not jumped ship.

Gravity, if we're being honest, is not perfect: there are one too many clunking narrative nudges, particularly in the fleshing out of Stone's backstory, which are designed no doubt to ease the minds of studio executives anxious the film would not be relatable enough to be a mainstream hit. But no matter: the immersive brilliance of those zero-grav scenes is without equal – certainly this year, and possibly the entire century to date.

THE GUARDIAN

The 10 best films of 2013 joint third / Behind the Candelabra

The 10 best films of 2013 No 1 / The Act of Killing

Monday, December 16, 2013

The 10 best films of 2013 No 5 / Django Unchained

The 10 best films of 2013

No 5

Django Unchained

Our rundown of the top 10 films of 2013 continues with Quentin Tarantino's "southern", the hip, flashy revenge fantasy that dared to tackle slavery

Henry Barnes
Monday 16 December 2013 16.17 GMT

When Django Unchained was released back in January, Spike Lee did what he does best: took umbrage. "American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western," the director tweeted. "It Was A Holocaust".

Lee hadn't seen the film, but he had a point. Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino's action fantasy about a freed slave (Jamie Foxx) enacting bloody revenge on plantation owners across the southern states, does make pre-civil war America look cool. It's loaded with style, plugged into a killer soundtrack, shot with a confidence that we hadn't seen from Tarantino since Jackie Brown. The script – for which Tarantino won an Oscar – is funny, the story is exciting, the performances – particularly Christoph Waltz's turn as the dentist-cum-bounty-hunter Dr King Schultz (another Oscar) – are vital. And then, in among all the crash zooms and gunplay and snappy rejoinders, there's the devastating brutality of the slave trade.

Django Unchained is a hip, flashy film that dares to tackle the slave trade. It takes the cartoonish stereotypes of the martial arts, western and blaxploitation genres and uses them to confront a modern audience with the grey areas of contemporary racial politics. Schultz hates the slave trade, but he bought Django, and he is – make no mistake – using him. He's both emancipator and captor. He's also a wealthy, white gun-for-hire who risks his life for the cause of a former slave (for free). In that he's more unrealistic than Calvin Candie, the moustache-twirling villain (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), or Stephen (Samuel L Jackson), the "house slave" overseer at Candie's ranch. Schultz is the moral centre of the film. And he is absolute fantasy. A stab at crude fictional reparation. A symbol for a much more modern sense of white guilt.

And yet, by presenting a rare and meaningful analysis of a period that many are still too wary of talking about, Tarantino compels us to take Django Unchained seriously. The slaves wearing branks in the trader town in Mississippi, the introduction of Django's wife Broomhilda – whipped first, dragged naked from a sweatbox later: these practices happened, the images are horrifically real. And still you watch them recognising that you are experiencing an entertainment product (as all films, even Steve McQueen's sombre analysis of the same subject, 12 Years a Slave, are in part). It's this quandary that makes Django powerful: the same quandary that has made most of Tarantino's films, from the depiction of extreme violence in Reservoir Dogs to the crass racial epithets of Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, so startling.

A film set to a backdrop of the most inhuman of human behaviour shouldn't be fun. But Django is. It's also shocking and horrible and unwatchably grim. Tarantino makes no apologies for tackling this period of American history in his own indomitable style. In doing so he presents one way – not the wrong way – of reflecting on an atrocity that's almost incomprehensible.

THE GUARDIAN

The 10 best films of 2013 joint third / Behind the Candelabra

The 10 best films of 2013 No 1 / The Act of Killing

The 10 best films of 2013 No 6 / Before Midnight

The 10 best films of 2013

No 6

Before Midnight

Our countdown continues with a third installment in the saga of Jesse and Celine, now married with children and on holiday in Greece

Catherine Shoard
Monday 16 December 2013 12.03 GMT

Another year, another sequel, another shameless attempt to cash in on prior brand recognition and to exploit fans desperate for another hit of their favourite franchise. So why was Richard Linklater's second sequel to Before Sunrise greeted with a loving embrace, rather than the spitting backlash that awaits most reboots?

It's because the Before trilogy (actually, I'm holding out for an octet) has most in common with something like the Up documentary series, which traces the progress of a group of people at seven year intervals. The three Before films, spaced with nine years between them, are so brilliantly constructed, so seamlessly blended with the actual aging of their actor/screenwriters that they had started to assume the role of real-life touchstones, rather than works of art.

There was no pressure, then, for this third instalment. No worry that in tripping up the film-makers would not just be trampling the legacy of two minor masterpieces but pulling the plug on something so special and tangible it goes beyond movies. In fact, of course, this turned out pretty much perfect.

Celine and Jesse drive along in their rental car, have lunch with friends, stroll through the fields and look at goats, kiss and row in a hotel room, then have what might be a reconciliation by the sea. That's about it. But for my money, the technical achivement is just as towering as Gravity's. Those precisely-paced long, long scenes, just dialogue, so casual and natural it couldn't be improvised, knock you over, again and again.

Midnight isn't quite flawless. The ending doesn't have the same satisfying crackle of Sunset; the lunch scene is stagey, your sympathies are too skewed away from Delpy. But these imperfections enhance the picture, make you appreciate it all the more, mean you care for its characters in a way that isn't fleeting or situation specific. Before Midnight transcends cinema. It feels like a commitment. It feels like it's for life.

THE GUARDIAN

Thursday, December 12, 2013

The 10 best films of 2013 No 7 / For Ellen

The 10 best films of 2013

No 7

For Ellen

So Yong Kim's story about a vulnerable rocker and his daughter is music to Andrew Pulver's ears, as we continue our list of this year's top 10 films

Andrew Pulver
Thursday 12 December 2013 11.13 GMT

For Ellen arrived somewhat unheralded in cinemas, a product of the 2012 Sundance film festival; unheralded, perhaps, because of its opaque title and director So Yong Kim's track record of wispy meditations on Korean-American identity. But what a pleasure it turned out to be. It's never easy to create a plausible musician on screen – Spinal Tap has seen to that – and particularly a nail-varnish-wearing, soul patch-sporting rocker of the type that Paul Dano impersonates here.

But instead of attempting to distil a hard-partying, cooler-than-thou muso, Dano's Joby Taylor is an intensely vulnerable, childlike figure, as ineffectual as a 10-year-old. We first see him as he drives chaotically through the snow into a small American town (naturally, his car breaks down) on his way to finalise a divorce agreement with his pissed-off wife. The Ellen of the title is their daughter, a sussed but not especially cool six-year-old. And the fourth element in the story is Fred Butler (Jon Heder, barely recognisable from Napoleon Dynamite) as a square but strangely star-struck lawyer attempting to shepherd Taylor through the legal aspects of the separation.

In synopsis, the plot is unremarkable: Taylor wavers over the divorce when he realises it means his wife gains complete custody of Ellen, takes the kid to a shopping mall for a bonding afternoon out, and wavers some more. That's about it. But For Ellen is a study in tonal brilliance, in an absurdly enjoyable alchemy between camera, performance, and self-deprecation. Dano has all the choking sincerity of early Nicolas Cage, laced with the kind of grubby histrionics that Withnail might have tried if he'd been a noughties thrash-metaller. Kim, filming in calm, naturalistic long takes, brings out all the underlying tenderness of this undeniably idiotic character, so much so that every reverse and confusion Taylor experiences becomes more and more unbearable.

In an interview earlier this year, Kim told me For Ellen is informed – like her earlier films – by her father's attempt to reconnect with her after abandoning the family when she was a child. How she managed to transmute such difficult personal experiences into such cinematic delight is something of a miracle.

THE GUARDIAN

The 10 best films of 2013 joint third / Behind the Candelabra