The Pianist. In a scene in Schindler’s List, a Nazi officer serenely plays Beethoven on a piano while soldiers around him are butchering people. Based on a true story, this return to greatness by Roman Polanski (himself a Holocaust survivor) can be viewed as a response to that scene. Adrien Brody puts in the most powerful performance of the year as Wladyslaw Szpilman, a concert pianist who survived the Warsaw Ghetto and lived to play again. No other film suggests as well the gradual, insidious horror of that experience or argues as convincingly that art can indeed be created after Auschwitz.
About Schmidt. Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) has retired from his job in an insurance company, and he’s just beginning to catch on that his life has been meaningless and futile. In a last stab at asserting himself, he drives from Omaha to Denver in a Winnebago to stop his daughter’s wedding to "nincompoop" Randall. Keeping him company is his correspondence with a little Tanzanian boy, Ndugu. Payne’s satire can be a little thick, and some have accused him of being condescending. But you can’t really condescend to Jack Nicholson, and Nicholson is what makes Schmidt happen. This is a hilarious, compassionate black comedy.
Thirteen Conversations About One Thing. Jill Sprecher’s film is one of the greatest multi-character, multi-narrative movies since Robert Altman’s Short Cuts. The ambitious chronology starts in medias res and moves sideways as Gene (Alan Arkin) chats with Troy (Matthew McConaughey) about happiness. Their subsequent tales are ironic commentaries on their beliefs, as are those about Beatrice (Clea DuVall), whose optimism and good will are poorly rewarded, and Walker (John Turturro), a physics professor whose lectures on inertia, entropy, and the law of falling bodies mirror his own life. These people are all strangers, but their lives interweave with ironic serendipity in Sprecher’s cinematic fugue.
Punch-Drunk Love. Adam Sandler appeals to people because he’s childish, inane, and angry. So does Paul Thomas Anderson, who in addition can be described as self-indulgent and pretentious. They’re an unlikely but complementary pair, and Punch-Drunk Love is the best film from either. Sandler’s presence lets you buy into Anderson’s flights of fancy and inhabit his weird little universe. Anderson has found his on-screen persona in Sandler and Sandler his ideal director in Anderson — it’s a punch-drunk cinematic love affair of perfectly matched talents.
Minority Report. This is the best adaptation yet of the work of the visionary sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick, whose tales demonstrate how experience, memory, and identity can all be synthesized and manipulated — and probably are. John Ashcroft’s dream of America has been realized in Washington in the year 2054, where killing has been eradicated by the Pre-Crime system, which predicts when a murder is going to be committed. The culprit is arrested — before the crime, which now never happened. What threatens the system is not its essential paradox, however, but the "human element" as Pre-Crime chief Tom Cruise gets fingered for a future murder. The plot, always engaging if ultimately predictable, is secondary to the layered, allusive imagery. Minority Report gives one hope for the future, if only that of film.
Secretary. "Different strokes for different folks" might apply to this wry and oddly gentle shaggy-dog story about sado-masochism. Maggie Gyllenhaal puts in a stunning performance as a fragile young woman who’s just checked out of the clinic that’s treating her for self-mutilation. She takes on a job as a secretary with James Spader’s attorney, and they hit it off. Gyllenhaal brings innocence and determination to her role, and Spader, who has walked on the wild side before in sex, lies and videotape and Crash, is elegant, sad, and weird. Together they bring tenderness and sting to their offbeat mating dance. Steven Shainberg’s adaptation of the Mary Gaitskill short story evokes a dreamlike strangeness in details and mood that enhances the painfully familiar humanity of its protagonists.
Je rentre à la maison/I’m Going Home. In his 90s and still going strong, Manoel de Oliveira is one of the world’s greatest filmmakers, and this luminous and baffling homage to art and life and the aching fragility of it all is one of his masterpieces. Gilbert (Michel Piccoli) is an actor who returns backstage after a performance to find out that his wife, daughter, and son-in-law have been wiped out in a car crash. Only his grandson remains — but far from focusing on the cute little tyke, Oliveira indulges in close-ups of Gilbert’s new tan shoes. Later, in a masterpiece of excruciating miscasting, Gilbert is put in the role of Buck Mulligan by a director (John Malkovich) who’s adapting James Joyce’s Ulysses for the screen. What’s the point? It’s a mystery, and that’s part of the charm of a film that combines the absurdity of Buñuel with the pathos of De Sica.
Lovely & Amazing. Nicole Holofcener’s first feature since her 1996 debut, Walking and Talking, takes on female stereotypes and overturns them, sometimes. It’s a tale of three unlikely sisters and the mother who loves them and makes their lives miserable. Jane Marks might have been an easy target of parody: rich and idle, she fills her loneliness by adopting an overweight African-American girl, tormenting the two daughters she gave birth to, and undergoing liposuction. Instead, she provides the film’s humane center, and it doesn’t hurt that she’s played by stalwart Brenda Blethyn, or that Holofcener, who also wrote the script, couldn’t sustain a cliché if she wanted to.
Satin Rouge. Lilia, a middle-aged widow in Tunis, fills her days sewing, honoring the memory of her deceased husband, and worrying about her teenage daughter. Occasionally, when a bit of racy music comes over the radio, she’ll let down her hair and dance in front of the mirror. Searching for her daughter one night in a nearby cabaret, Lilia faints and awakens to the demi-monde of the belly dance. Tunisian director Raja Amari captures middle-class emptiness, repression, and longing in a few precise details; this is a melodrama with dignity and sting that takes familiar situations and follows them down exotic passageways. Forget Todd Haynes’s overwrought and superficial Far from Heaven — Satin Rouge is the real homage to Douglas Sirk.
Bloody Sunday. January 30, 1972, was a turning point in history before it became a hit song by U2. In the northern Irish city of Derry, thousands took part in a non-violent march against internment without trial and other unjust British policies. By the end of the day, crack British paratroopers had shot 13 unarmed demonstrators dead. Paul Greengrass’s uncompromising, brutally moving documentary transforms the chaos of events into the transcendence of art. In the end, seeing the film is like surviving a disaster and attaining an awful clarity. More than mere propaganda, Bloody Sunday possesses the grandeur of tragedy.
Lovely and amazing