The Social Network

David Fincher, 2010

Eleven years after Fight Club blitzed American movie theaters, David Fincher directed another film about two men who found a radical organization, but are torn asunder when the enterprise takes on a life of its own. Which film was more ideologically potent? Project Mayhem could never exist in real life. Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin’s friends-club currently claims more than 1.35 billion active members. The Social Network is a confluence of so many elements going exhilaratingly right in perfect tandem. There’s hundred-take Fincher directing in full perfectionist mode; a towering script that deflates Aaron Sorkin’s signature histrionics until all that’s left is a bulletproof core; a host of fully realized performances, from one-scene-wonder Rooney Mara to double-dutied Armie Hammer to a too-cool-for-school Justin Timberlake, with Jesse Eisenberg’s nuanced, bitter nerd brooding above it all; even Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor’s sinister, sinuous score fits perfectly. It’s a morality play for the digital age, a geek tragedy without the divine comeuppance. It’s a slobs-vs.-snobs college movie. It’s the rare biopic that sympathizes with its subject, but never absolves him. It’s a crackling courtroom drama. It’s a work of entertainment that swings for the fences in its grand statements on the modern era, and clears it with yards to spare. Like the solitary piano-plinks within the misty strings on Ross and Reznor’s “Hand Covers Bruise,” a poignant irony hums at the center of The Social Network: Even as technological leaps appear to bring us all closer together, we feel more alone than ever. Several Facebook layout updates later, Zuckerberg’s screeds about keeping the site ad-free seem adorably dated. But with every passing year, the film’s understanding of its time and place seem savvier. —Charles Bramesco

Selma

Ava DuVernay, 2014

It seems unconscionable that it took until 2014 for audiences to get a theatrical Martin Luther King, Jr. biopic, but Ava DuVernay’s Selma proved the wait worthwhile, with a portrayal of the civil-rights movement that’s as relevant to the present as it is reverent of the past. Though set in 1965 during the voting-rights marches in Alabama, Selma arrived in theaters just as the modern-day echoes of that struggle had grown deafening, lending the film an added emotional and moral heft. But Selma is timeless, too, as a nuanced portrait of a great man that deftly sidesteps hagiography; as an examination of the tension and compromise involved in wide-ranging political movements; and as a celebration of the bravery of those who gave themselves to the cause, both willingly and unwillingly. It’s a great, important story, but it’s also a wonderful piece of filmmaking, thanks to Bradford Young’s breathtaking, refined cinematography, DuVernay’s canny grasp of staging and timing, and a nuanced lead performance by David Oyelowo that brings unforced humanity and ambiguity to a historical figure who’s rarely allowed either. —Genevieve Koski

Moonrise Kingdom

Wes Anderson, 2012

The fictional children's story books Moonrise Kingdom’s Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) packs to take on her clandestine camping trip with orphan Sam Shaukusky (Jared Gilman) serve as an appealing distillation of Wes Anderson’s film: familiar yet not quite of this world, childlike yet imbued with free-floating nostalgia, and just the tiniest bit bizarre. Moonrise Kingdom is set within its own storybook world, a cloistered island off the New England coast—an island populated by typical Andersonian eccentrics, plus Bob Balaban—that reveals other little worlds inside it: the quietly chaotic Bishop home, haunted by Suzy’s gloomy, distracted parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand); Camp Ivanhoe, a Khaki Scout enclave presided over by a be-shorted Edward Norton; and the hidden cove discovered by Suzy and Sam that gives the film its name. It’s a typically lovely and quirky Anderson diorama, as satisfying from beginning to end as anything the director’s done. By focusing his story on children who act like little adults, and adults who often act like children, Anderson achieves a sort of balance that makes his signature whimsy feel more natural and emotionally charged than some of his other efforts. It’s unmistakably an Anderson film, and unmistakably one of his best. —Genevieve Koski

Seconds

Wanderlust

David Wain, 2012

Parenthood

Ron Howard, 1989

Fun Home

Alison Bechdel, 2006

Boyhood

Richard Linklater, 2014

Shot over 12 years, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is less a sweeping story than a series of episodes offering annual check-ins on the progress of Mason (Ellar Coltrane) from age 6 to his first day of college at age 18. Apart from a mid-film section in which an alcoholic stepfather figures prominently, there’s little conventional drama. Mason and his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, the director’s daughter) bounce back and forth between his father (Ethan Hawke) and mother (Patricia Arquette, doing standout work). He develops interests, has his heart broken, and watches as the world changes around him, growing a little more observant with each passing year.

Boyhood won this poll by a healthy margin, which raises a question: Why? Were we all still so dazzled by the consensus choice for the best film of 2014? Or was there something else at work in Boyhood turning up on so many ballots? Its structure makes it unique, but it might also have made it merely an interesting experiment. Ultimately, its everydayness is what makes it so compelling. Mason’s story is particular to his character—and to the corner of the world and era in which he grows up—but the passing of time is universal, as are many of the rites of passage he encounters along the way. Linklater almost goes out of his way to gloss past many of those rites of passage—Mason’s first kiss, his first drink, the loss of his virginity—leaving viewers to piece together what’s happened from the way he behaves. But they’re still felt. The drama comes less from individual incidents than what it’s like to live in the wake of change. Much of how we experience life is in that idea: Time is less a series of milestones passed than the long stretches between those milestones. Boyhood compresses 12 years of life, but it also slows them down, pausing at telling points to capture what life means for this boy at this point in time, and finding a much bigger story in those small moments. —Keith Phipps

True Detective Season 2 Finale

August 9, 2015
Episode Title: "Omega Station"
writer: Nic Pizzolatto
director: John Crowley

Wet Hot American Summer

David Wain, 2001

Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp (Complete Series)

July 31, 2015
writers: David Wain, Michael Showalter
director: David Wain

Oculus

Mike Flanagan, 2013

Margaret

Kenneth Lonergen, 2011

Shot in 2005, finished in 2008, and dumped in a few theaters for a week in 2011, Kenneth Lonergan’s looooong-delayed follow-up to You Can Count On Me remains one of the great critical (and social-media) success stories of the new millennium. Clocking in at seconds shorter than its contractually obligated 150 minutes, after a lengthy studio war over its editing, the film feels unfinished, with abandoned subplots and other visible scars. But to some degree, Margaret was always going to be messy, because the moral issues it engages so thoughtfully and passionately resist tidy answers. Anna Paquin holds it together with a volatile performance as a strong-willed but typically narcissistic teenager who witnesses a woman getting killed in a bus accident, gives a false report to protect the driver (Mark Ruffalo), then attempts to reverse course and seek justice in the case. This aligns her with the victim’s closest friend (an outstanding Jeannie Berlin), but also finds her meddling in people’s lives recklessly, as if their tragic crises are merely the catalyst for her personal growth. At the same time, her idealism is genuine, and sullied by adults who have less-than-noble motives of their own. With Margaret, Lonergan has taken a single incident and built a drama of prismatic fascination, with insights into morality, family, adulthood, and the state of New York City after 9/11. It is the very definition of a flawed masterpiece. —Scott Tobias

So Many Roads

David Browne, 2015

49 Up

Michael Apted, 2005

Ex Machina

Alex Garland, 2015

Bernie

Richard Linklater, 2011

42 Up

Michael Apted, 1998

Certified Copy

Abbas Kiarosami, 2010

Maybe there’s a lot to unravel in Certified Copy, and maybe there’s nothing at all. The bulk of Abbas Kiarostami’s film concerns an afternoon journey through Tuscany taken by English writer James Miller (opera singer William Shimell) and a never-named French antiques dealer (Juliette Binoche). Fraught with nervous tension from the start, much of their conversation concerns the notion of authenticity in art, the subject of Miller’s latest book. Then, at a certain point, the conversation takes a turn that calls into question the nature of the couple’s relationship. From that point on, it becomes impossible to find solid footing in the narrative of the film, which Kiarostami shoots in long, immersive takes, using his signature driving scenes. Still, it’s easy to get lost in its emotions as the couple struggles to reach an understanding, and possibly save a relationship in desperate need of saving. Maybe who these people are matters less than what they feel—and what they make viewers feel. Maybe that’s as close to an understanding of how art works as we’ll ever get. —Keith Phipps

The Act of Killing

Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012

It’s a mark of The Act Of Killing’s creative ambition that a film about the Indonesian mass murders of 1965-66 manages to create a thematic connection between killers justifying their actions and dancers cavorting in front of a defunct restaurant shaped like a giant fish. Director Joshua Oppenheimer found and interviewed some of the original killers, now in positions of minor power. Unraveling the ways they identified with Hollywood gangsters, he enlisted them to re-create their murders for the cameras, moving from abstract, colorful, and stylized re-enactments to a grotesque realism that throws his subjects off balance. The process brings a grim, awful humor to the process of puncturing their self-images, and trying to bring them to understand and confront their crimes. But while it’s informative, surreal, and astonishingly bold in exploring the psychology of these specific murderers in this specific environment, it reaches significantly further in exploring the banality of evil. As Oppenheimer’s subjects justify their actions, or even boast about the people they framed and slaughtered, they reveal a great deal about the ways people distance themselves from their own actions, and in the process do unconscionable things without feeling the pangs of conscience. Oppenheimer’s film is innovative, stylish, and strange, but it’s also staggeringly important for anyone trying to understand why terrible things happen in the world. —Tasha Robinson

They Came Together

David Wain, 2014

The Host

Bong Joon-ho, 2006

Short Term 12

Destin Daniel Cretton, 2013

On paper, Destin Daniel Cretton’s coming-of-age drama Short Term 12 sounds like a typical Sundance exercise in trembling, low-key earnestness: A troubled social worker (Brie Larson, in a revelatory performance) works through her deeply buried issues and inability to love while counseling a series of troubled group-home kids who desperately yearn for love and connection, but are unwilling to let down their defenses. In actuality, Short Term 12 is something much greater and more lasting: an exquisitely wrought exploration of the troubled psyches of both the staff and the clients of a foster home that radiates compassion and empathy for all of its characters. It’s a deeply humane, ultimately devastating, legitimately tearjerking movie with plenty of acting-friendly moments of high drama and almost unbearably intense emotion. But it’s defined as much by its portrayal of those wonderful, life-affirming in-between times when kids with nothing to do and all day to do it toy with each other, savor rare moments of connection and humor with their peers and mentors, and generally behave like kids, albeit fucked-up kids who have seen more of the ugly side of life than anyone should in a lifetime. —Nathan Rabin

What Happened, Miss Simone?

Liz Garbus, 2015

35 Up

Michael Apted, 1991

The Master

Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012

Much was made of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master being shot on 70mm, and for good reason: Those lucky enough to live close to a theater projecting the film in that format had a much different experience than other viewers. While some puzzled why Anderson would use a format traditionally associated with epics for a film dominated by conversations captured in close-up, an optimal format viewing quickly clarified this reasoning: There are strong lights behind the characters, and in 70mm, viewers are positively irradiated by dazzling levels of whiteness.

Moving away from the entrancingly over-the-top, aggressively in-your-face Punch-Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood, The Master outlines the relationship between the loosely L. Ron Hubbard-ish figure Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and sexually troubled World War II vet Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix). After sneaking onto Dodd’s yacht during a party, Quell becomes Dodd’s aide-de-camp: ad hoc bartender, attack dog against skeptics, and partner in partying. Both lead actors are at their rhythmically idiosyncratic best, justifying Anderson’s confidence in paring back his visual fireworks.

The film’s investigation of male bonding through bad behavior is one thread in a rare film that wonders, without snickering, how trauma and asocialization are shaped and expressed through sexual dysfunction. If it’s not as memorable a spectacle viewed at home, that just means Anderson made his point about the glories of shooting on and projecting celluloid. Even stripped of that factor, The Master is typically dense, unexpectedly funny, and predictably unpredictable, an actor-fueled installment in Anderson’s ongoing portraits of 20th-century American history. —Vadim Rizov

Reflections: An Oral History of Twin Peaks

Brad Dukes, 2014

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Terry Gilliam, 1998

28 Up

Michael Apted, 1984

Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me: The Missing Pieces

David Lynch, 2014

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt Season 1 Finale

March 6, 2015
writers: Robert Carlock, Sam Means
director: Tristram Shapeero

The Other One: The Long, Strange Trip of Bob Weir

Mike Fleiss, 2015

Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me

David Lynch, 1992

"Yet even Lynch has a hard time getting the balance right. The film ends with a scene of Laura, now in the world beyond, weeping at the sight of a guardian angel resembling the one who earlier disappeared from a painting of children being watched over by a protective spirit. That disappearance happened at the same moment Laura realized nobody was protecting her. It’s a great example of Lynch’s ability to find power in banal, even kitschy imagery. But that scene arrives after images of a mouth devouring that supernatural creamed corn and a monkey saying “Judy,” the latter harkening back to an earlier moment in which the quickly reappearing and disappearing Agent Jeffries (David Bowie) announced he would not be talking about Judy. Is Lynch dropping a reference to be picked up in a sequel never to be made? Getting in one last joke by offering a cryptic clue never to be answered? Is the film just Lil, dancing before us with a sour face, and making us stupid trying to decipher it? Those looking for answers got only years of silence in return." -Keith Phipps

Frances Ha

Noah Baumbach, 2013

After spending the better part of a career making movies about faltering misanthropes, Noah Baumbach delivered the most upbeat film of his career with Frances Ha, thanks in large part to Greta Gerwig, who co-wrote and stars as a happy-go-lucky New Yorker struggling to master basic life skills. Over the past half-decade—heck, over the past two decades—American independent cinema has been overstocked with poignant comedies about quirky arrested adolescents, but Gerwig turns her Frances into more than just a collection of tics and flaws. She’s like everyone’s college best friend: a funny, chatty person whom everyone pities a little, though not enough to keep helping her out. Baumbach adjusts his style to fit his star, making a movie that feels like he just followed Gerwig’s Frances around the city (and elsewhere) for a year, so he could keep cutting to quick lines like, “I tried to make a frittata, but it’s really more of a scramble”— amusing fragments of dialogue that define the character. -Noel Murray

Astro City Vol. 3: Family Album

Kurt Busiek, Brent Anderson, Alex Ross

collects Astro City (Vol. 2) #1-3, originally published Jul 1996-Sep 1996 and #10-13, originally published Aug 1997-Dec 1997

Born Standing Up (Audiobook)

Steve Martin, 2007
read by Steve Martin

Twin Peaks Series Finale

June 10, 1991
writers: Mark Frost, Harley Peyton, Robert Engels, David Lynch (uncredited)
director: David Lynch

Astro City Vol. 2: Confession

Kurt Busiek, Brent Anderson, Alex Ross

collects Astro City (Vol. 2) #1/2, originally published Nov 1997, and #4-9, originally published Oct 1996-Mar 1997

Mad Men Series Finale

May 17, 2015
Episode Title: "Person to Person"
writer: Matthew Weiner
director: Matthew Weiner

The Sun Also Rises (Audiobook)

Ernest Hemingway, 1926
read by William Hurt

on Amazon's 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime

Daredevil: The Man Without Fear

Frank Miller, John Romita Jr., Al Williamson

collects Daredevil: The Man Without Fear, published Aug 1993-Dec 1993

#3 on CBR's list of best Daredevil comics 

The Incredible Hulk

Louis Leterrier, 2008

"Norton and Marvel publicly tussled over The Incredible Hulk's final cut, with Norton arguing for a longer, more character-focused film. But it's hard to see how a piece of greater depth could have emerged from material that hones in on and largely finds a zone of happy competence. It delivers the goods and waits for fans to sign the receipt." -Keith Phipps

21 Up

Michael Apted, 1977

"'The child is father of the man,' Wordsworth wrote. That seems literally true as we look at these films. The 7-year-olds already reveal most of the elements, good and bad, that flower in later life. Sometimes there are surprises; a girl who is uptight and morose at 21, vowing never to marry, blossoms in the later films into a cheerful wife and mother." -Roger Ebert

Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck

Brett Morgen, 2015

"Generally speaking, the documentary is strongest when Morgen’s voice comes through the loudest, rather than Cobain’s. The first 30 minutes or so, set before Cobain grew up and pursued a more serious interest in music, are the film’s most affecting, because Morgen folds the beginning and the end of his life together so powerfully. While clips of Cobain and Love’s domestic life provide a fascinating look at their chaotic dynamic, as well as their relationship with the press and with their infant daughter Frances Bean, they don’t have the same associative punch. Nonetheless, Montage Of Heck is more than just a energetic tribute to a great, troubled artist—it’s an affirmation of film’s specific power to communicate more than words on a page ever could. It’s a visceral biography." -Scott Tobias

What We Do In The Shadows

Taiki Waititi & Jemaine Clement, 2015

"Waititi and Clement bring to the material the same deadpan, straight-faced sensibility that paid such rich dividends in Flight Of The Conchords. What We Do In The Shadows also resonates as an eminently re-watchable hang-out movie, filled with characters, scenes, and gags worth revisiting, assuming audiences survive the dangerous but ultimately delightful company." -Nathan Rabin

7 Plus Seven

Michael Apted, 1970

"[The Up Series] also strike me as an inspired, even noble, use of the film medium. No other art form can capture so well the look in an eye, the feeling in an expression, the thoughts that go unspoken between the words. To look at these films, as I have every seven years, is to meditate on the astonishing fact that man is the only animal that knows it lives in time." -Roger Ebert

7 Up!

Paul Almond, 1964

"Every seven years, the British director Michael Apted revisits a group of people whose lives he has been chronicling since they were children. As he chats with them about how things are going, his films pentrate to the central mystery of life, asking the same questions that Wim Wenders poses in "Wings of Desire": Why am I me and why not you? Why am I here and why not there?" - Roger Ebert

Life Itself

Steve James, 2014

#6 on Dissolve's best films of 2014 

"After multiple cancer surgeries left critic Roger Ebert disfigured and voiceless in the last years of his life, he not only refused to retreat from public life, he became more ferociously engaged than ever before. His memoir Life Itself reflected this renewed spirit, and Steve James’ documentary of the same name goes deeper still. The film alternates between contemporary scenes of Ebert and his wife Chaz spending time in and out of hospitals and rehab, and a look back at a life so full of adventure, it’d take a man with Ebert’s imagination to make it up. Life Itself takes a long, bittersweet look at a Chicago and newspaper world that has long since vanished, tackles Ebert’s alcoholism head-on, and offers a love story for the ages through Ebert’s soul-affirming marriage to Chaz. It’s a film of wit and uncommon candor that captures all the seasons of Ebert’s life, from the precocious college kid ruling the student newspaper to Ebert’s partnerships with Russ Meyer and Gene Siskel to his coronation as one of our most important and influential thinkers as a Pulitzer Prize winner. Candid, affectionate, and deeply moving, Life Itself is Ebert’s final gift to a world from which he both took and gave so much." -thedissolve.com

13 Assassins

Takashi Miike, 2010

"Though 13 Assassins’ setup could stand some tightening, it’s all necessary prelude to a spectacular, action-packed final hour where all hell breaks loose and the streets and rooftops flow with blood. Facing a severe disadvantage, with Inagaki’s hundreds against their 13, Yakusho and his men create some leverage through an ingenious series of booby traps and other elaborate feints. The mayhem that results isn’t a surprise from a filmmaker of Miike’s reputation—though he handles it with more aplomb than usual—but what is surprising about 13 Assassins is how far it goes in upending the samurai picture. In Miike’s mind, there’s nothing honorable about the thoughtless commitment to honor and code, especially if it means protecting dastardly men who don’t deserve that kind of loyalty. With 13 Assassins, he’s made a film both punk and moral." -Scott Tobias

Holy Motors

Leos Carax, 2012

“In this competition,” Cannes jury president Nanni Moretti said after awarding Amour the Palme D’or in 2012, “the filmmakers seemed more in love with their style than with their characters.” This, it was widely felt, was Moretti’s thinly veiled explanation for leaving Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, strongly favored during the festival to claim the top prize, without any award at all. It’s only been three years, but history has already proven Moretti wrong. Holy Motors is a dazzling film, and perhaps its radical sprawl was too much to take in amid the mad rush of Cannes. But from the present vantage, it seems clear that the film is no mere exercise in style. Carax confronts film’s demise with an intensity that in its own way fights valiantly against it, acknowledging the medium’s obsolescence while inarguably proving its worth. In part, that means adopting the language of new media: the fractured, drip-feed format of the YouTube video, flipped through like channel surfing, always poised to deliver another fix. At first blush, Holy Motors seems like a film with an identity crisis—a family drama one moment, a murder-mystery the next. On their own, the vignettes are sublime, each in turn an exhilarating bout of pure cinema. (A mid-film plunge into accordion-led rock opera, in particular, is among the most purely delightful sequences in recent film history.) But the cumulative effect is what counts. Death hangs over these proceedings, however occasionally ecstatic the register. It’s apparent from an early shot of an audience of corpses in the cinema that Holy Motors is concerned with the death of film. What emerges by the end is a deeper fixation: the death of us all. Mortality has never before been reckoned with so vigorously. —Calum Marsh