I didn’t see enough films in the last ten years to make a convincing determination of which were “the best” but it’s been fun to see a few of the lists generated by the critics, which have brought back fond memories and also reminded me of a few movies that continue to be (in my opinion) vastly overrated. What follows is a brief list of films from the last ten years that I enjoyed and wouldn’t mind seeing again.
Hell or High Water is a film about two brothers, their love for one another, and their differing approaches to raising money when the bank tries to foreclose on the family ranch. It’s the kind of film in which every throwaway line sounds perfectly natural, but also adds to our understanding of where people come from and what they’re thinking. This quality extends from the brothers (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) to the Texas Rangers (Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham) who are sent to track them down. Even the bank president and the waitress in the diner have some good lines. There’s a fair amount of bloodshed in the film, but, like the dialog, it’s subtly modulated and consistently kept in check by the pathos of the unfolding story.
The End of the Tour. I have never read the novel Infinite Jest, and I’m pretty sure I never will, though I have read a few tennis articles by its author, David Foster Wallace. This film chronicles the last seven days of a book tour in which Wallace is accompanied by a reporter from Rolling Stone (played by Jesse Isenberg) who also happens to be a budding novelist. The two discuss life, literature, work, fame, celebrity, junk food, and other things as they travel together from one book event to another, slowly generating a camaraderie that’s laced with suspicion and envy, professionalism and need, vanity and self-disgust. The interactions are complex and often edgy, as Wallace pursues the renown that will accompany the feature story while remaining wary of Eisenberg’s power to “spin” the article any way he chooses. Whether these conversations offer an accurate portrait of Wallace I have no idea, but they make for an absorbing film experience.
Museum Hours. Much of this film takes place in the Kunstehistorishes Museum in Vienna, where a tall, middle-aged guard named Johann sits on a bench thinking his private thoughts (in voice-over) as the patrons pass by. Just when we’re beginning to think we’re watching a genuine slice-of-life documentary on the order of Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery, Johann makes an effort to help a stranger, Anne, who has arrived in town from Montreal to visit a relative she hardly knows who’s in the hospital. She has little money, doesn’t know the city, and returns to the museum repeatedly as a way to fill her idle hours. Anne and Johann are both gentle souls, lonely but also widely curious, and they slowly begin to open up to one another as the empty days go by. This plot line—it would be a misleading to call it a romance—serves as an effective counterpoint to the seemingly random but mildly engaging images the camera draws our attention to both within the museum and also on the city streets, which include bored children and cawing crows, streetcars in the snow, and closeups of Grand Master paintings. At one point we listen for several minutes to a lecture being given by one of the docents about the work of Breugel, and the parallels between his peasant-oriented work and the film we’re watching become clear. One remark that she makes could stand as the theme of Museum Hours: a painting’s ostensible focus and its actual point of interest are not necessarily the same thing.
Theeb (United Arab Emirates). Theeb is a tale of a man, the son of a sheik, who agrees to lead a British soldier across the wastes of Saudi Arabia along an old pilgrim trail, now mostly used by bandits, in search of a well. The Arab doesn’t know what the soldier is up to, and perhaps doesn’t like him much, but he’s obliged by the unspoken rules of hospitality to take on the assignment. Matters are made considerably more difficult for him when his baby brother, Theeb, decides the follow the little caravan out into the desert. Theeb bears some similarity to American westerns where the countryside is magnificent, danger is always near at hand, the law is nonexistent, and it’s sometimes hard to tell friend from foe.
Ida chronicles a few weeks in the life of Anna, a young Polish novitiate who is about to take her vows. Before before doing so, her superiors demand that she pay a visit to Wanda, her single surviving family member—an aunt whom she’s never met. Wanda turns out to be a sullen, hard-drinking woman who informs Anna almost immediately on arrival that her real name is Ida Lebenstein. She’s Jewish, and her parents were murdered during World War II. Ida has been in the convent since infancy and knows very little about the world. She seems astonished simply to be traveling on a bus, and it takes a while for her to digest this new information about herself and the evils of the wider world. Wanda agrees to help her niece find her parents’ burial site—a mission that eventually takes them to the bedraggled farmhouse Ida’s parents once owned. It’s now inhabited by God-fearing Poles who claim that “Jews never lived here.” Wanda knows they’re lying, and they know she knows.
The film’s black-and-white cinematography is extraordinary, and the pace is slow enough to allow us to savor it scene by scene. Forests, crumbling buildings, Wanda’s stylish apartment, city streets, a well-lit dance hall. The luminosity of the footage acts as a welcome counterweight to the sometimes grim drift of the plot. We see the world afresh through Ida’s limpid but strangely unfathomable eyes, both the good and the bad.
Papusza (Poland) Did the Polish film industry run out of color film, or what? First Ida, and now Papusza. Not that I’m complaining. Papusza tells the story of the gypsy poetess of that name and the gadja (i.e. non-gypsy) who comes to live with the band, recognizes Papusza’s talent, and later shares her poetry with the wider world. The film is rich in long-shots of campfires by the river in the moonlight, caravans slowly crossing fields of stubble, and riotous parties at which the gypsy musicians have been invited to play. But if the cinematography romanticizes Roma lifeways to a degree, the plot-line exposes their patriarchic cruelty and xenophobia. Things do not end well for Papusza. Her big mistake was to learn how to read and write.
Tangerine takes place in a wooden valley in Abkhazia, a sub-region of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. Georgia is now an independent state, but some of the residents of lower Abkhazia consider themselves more Russian that Georgian, and they’re fighting for their independence. The film’s central character, Ivo, is Estonian, and now that Estonia is no longer part of the USSR, many Estonians are inclined to go home, but Ivo and his friend Margus have decided to stay on until they’ve harvested the tangerines. They’ve arranged for a local militia to escort the produce to the market, and even, perhaps, help them pick the fruit. Their tranquil agricultural pursuits are shattered when a firefight takes place on the country road outside their farms, and Ivo finds himself taking care of two wounded soldiers, one Georgian, the other a Chechnian mercenary fighting on the side of Abkasia and Russia.
In Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh adds new shades of meaning to the phrase “warts-and-all” biography. His portrait of the famous English painter during the final decades of his life (Turner died in 1851) is spectacularly robust—the streets, the wharves, the salon galleries, the artist’s studio have all been vividly recreated, like a Dickens film without a plot. It’s no wonder the film garnered Oscar nominations for both costume and production design. The acting is first-rate. Timothy Spall, in the title role, mumbles and grunts his way across the screen like a cretinous lout (good enough for Best Actor kudos at Cannes), and various relatives, servants, and artist-friends also fix themselves in our imagination immediately. Marion Bailey is worth singling out for her portrayal of a jolly boarding-house matron, twice-widowed, who possesses an unaffected intelligence and sensitivity that Turner finds appealing. Yet unlike most “period” English dramas, Mr. Turner is devoid of romantic sentiment, and could hardly be said to have a plot. In one scene Turner sits in a music hall while actors on stage lampoon both his canvases and the way he paints them. A few scenes later, someone is offering him a hundred thousand pounds for a few of them.
A Royal Affair. In France they had a revolution. In Denmark, a few years earlier, a physician of enlightened convictions (Mads Mikkelsen) got the ear of the slightly-mad king and launched a series of progressive reforms. The film’s title suggests a back-stairs romance at a decadent court, with harpsichords, wigs, candles, and carriages, and there’s some of that, too, as Mikkelsen and the young queen (played by the Swedish beauty Alicia Vikander) pursue a private agenda. Wrap these elements together and you’ve got a film with more grip and pull than Ridicule, The Madness of King George, Marie Antoinette, Start the Revolution Without Me, La Nuit de Vanennes, or any costume drama you could name.
And did I mention the story is true?
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan once remarked, “The problem with Hollywood is the audience expects to get the answers like a pill. They expect to know not just whodunnit, but the motives of the characters, the how and why. Real life is not like that. Even our closest friend—we don’t know what he really thinks.” It would be difficult, I suspect, to make a good film about what we don’t know about people, but in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Ceylan gives it a shot. He has made a film in which we get to know people almost in spite of themselves, as twelve men, including a murderer and his brother, a doctor, a prosecutor, an urban and a provincial policeman, and a couple of laborers with shovels, traverse the barren hills of rural Turkey in the middle of the night trying to locate a body based on a few hazily-remembered landmarks. Though parts of the film have a ludicrous humor reminiscent of Almadóvar or the Coens, its overall tone might better be described as Chekhovian.
A Separation is an unsavory gruel of overheated conversations, long-standing resentments, deep familial affections, hopes for a better life, unshakeable religious faith, and economic desperation. The plot thunders on like an express train and though the violence involved, in the end, amounts to little more than a few slaps and shoves, every frame carries an uneasy current. As the film opens, eighteen months have passed since the Iranian couple at the center of the action applied for a visa to leave the country. The visa has now, finally, come through, but Nader is unwilling to leave without his father, who’s suffering from dementia. His wife, Simin, considers it imperative to leave Iran for the sake of their daughter, Termeh, a bright and seemingly docile adolescent who’s obviously taking in every angry work exchanged in the apartment. The two-hour film, shot with natural light in apartments and on the streets of Tehran, goes by in a flash, and as we leave the theater we’re likely to have Aristotle’s theory of poetic catharsis running through our heads: a sense of purification after the release of pent-up or horrific emotions.
The Tree of Life is a rendering of childhood in the 1950s, in Waco, Texas. It’s also a visual history of the universe. Through much of the film three brother shout, torture frogs, wrestle in the weeds, hang out with their deviant friends, play the guitar, obey their domineering father (Brad Pitt), fall in love with their charming mother (Jessica Chastain), go to church, go down to the creek, challenge and test one another, and climb trees. Most of the time their conversation consists of murmurs and mumbles. Much of the time it seems we’re hearing what they’re thinking, rather than what they’re actually saying.
Malick frames this central focus on childhood experience between two specific events, one small, the other large. No point in mentioned the small event here. The “large” event is the creation of the universe and the development of life on planet Earth. There is extended footage of cosmic events—nebulae expanding, volcanoes erupting, micro-organisms developing—with ethereal religious music sounding in the background. It all seems a bit like a cross between that BBC series Planet Earth, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. Only better.
The Social Network. I guess I have a soft spot for films set on college campuses. Young women and men are in the midst of what, for many, is the first flush of quasi-independence; they’re being challenged to show their stuff intellectually in the classroom while engaging in animated conversations at local watering holes after hours. The Social Network, is similarly well-endowed with late-night drinking, over-bright students, odd-ball personalities, and winsome coeds. It tells the story of Mark Zuckerman, the inventor of Facebook, and the plot-line would fall squarely into the category of implausible wish-fulfillment fantasies if it didn’t happen to be largely true. Though Zuckerman comes across as unbearably snarky, and treats his intellectual inferiors with bored distain, the path by which he hones the features of his networking website is fascinating to follow.
I Am Love is a lavish Italian production that has been compared to the best works of Lucino Visconti. Director Luca Guadagnino adopts a “fly-on-the-wall” point of perspective on the comings and goings of a wealthy multi-generational Italian family. Tilda Swindon attends to the concerns of her three children, her square-jawed and lackluster husband, and her mother-in-law (Merisa Berenson). The scenes flow one into the next; we’re not sure which threads are the important ones, and that’s what makes the film so interesting. It’s as if the director wants us to see the paintings on the wall, the tile on the floor, the glaze on the shrimp, and the insects buzzing amid the clover. He’s equally interested in the shape of the distant hills, the health of the family’s clothing factory, and the aroma rising from the fish soup.
The Secret in Their Eyes is a police procedural, in so far as it deals with an investigation of a brutal rape-murder on the part of a middling investigator and his brilliant but alcoholic sidekick. Yet the story is made richer by the response of the victim’s husband to the loss of his beautiful young wife, and also by a romantic subplot concerning the investigator’s boss, an equally beautiful but conservative and seemingly unapproachable young woman from the upper classes. It’s difficult to discuss a film of such quiet richness without giving away too much, but suffice it to say that in an era of fascist ascendancy, justice is not entirely served by due process, and at a certain point, life becomes dangerous for the investigator himself.
Particle Fever (2014) follows scientists making use of the newly launched Large Hadron Collider to recreate conditions that existed just moments after the Big Bang hoping to detect the presence of the legendary Higgs Bosen. Or not. It’s a red-hot scientific documentary more fascinating than any sci-fi film you’ll see this year, edited by master Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, The English Patient, The Godfather trilogy).
How I Ended This Summer (Russia, 2010). Two bored and antagonistic men stationed at a lonely military outpost above the Arctic Circle, counting the days until their tour of duty is over. Check it out—if you dare.
Hell or High Water is a film about two brothers, their love for one another, and their differing approaches to raising money when the bank tries to foreclose on the family ranch. It’s the kind of film in which every throwaway line sounds perfectly natural, but also adds to our understanding of where people come from and what they’re thinking. This quality extends from the brothers (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) to the Texas Rangers (Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham) who are sent to track them down. Even the bank president and the waitress in the diner have some good lines. There’s a fair amount of bloodshed in the film, but, like the dialog, it’s subtly modulated and consistently kept in check by the pathos of the unfolding story.
The End of the Tour. I have never read the novel Infinite Jest, and I’m pretty sure I never will, though I have read a few tennis articles by its author, David Foster Wallace. This film chronicles the last seven days of a book tour in which Wallace is accompanied by a reporter from Rolling Stone (played by Jesse Isenberg) who also happens to be a budding novelist. The two discuss life, literature, work, fame, celebrity, junk food, and other things as they travel together from one book event to another, slowly generating a camaraderie that’s laced with suspicion and envy, professionalism and need, vanity and self-disgust. The interactions are complex and often edgy, as Wallace pursues the renown that will accompany the feature story while remaining wary of Eisenberg’s power to “spin” the article any way he chooses. Whether these conversations offer an accurate portrait of Wallace I have no idea, but they make for an absorbing film experience.
Museum Hours. Much of this film takes place in the Kunstehistorishes Museum in Vienna, where a tall, middle-aged guard named Johann sits on a bench thinking his private thoughts (in voice-over) as the patrons pass by. Just when we’re beginning to think we’re watching a genuine slice-of-life documentary on the order of Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery, Johann makes an effort to help a stranger, Anne, who has arrived in town from Montreal to visit a relative she hardly knows who’s in the hospital. She has little money, doesn’t know the city, and returns to the museum repeatedly as a way to fill her idle hours. Anne and Johann are both gentle souls, lonely but also widely curious, and they slowly begin to open up to one another as the empty days go by. This plot line—it would be a misleading to call it a romance—serves as an effective counterpoint to the seemingly random but mildly engaging images the camera draws our attention to both within the museum and also on the city streets, which include bored children and cawing crows, streetcars in the snow, and closeups of Grand Master paintings. At one point we listen for several minutes to a lecture being given by one of the docents about the work of Breugel, and the parallels between his peasant-oriented work and the film we’re watching become clear. One remark that she makes could stand as the theme of Museum Hours: a painting’s ostensible focus and its actual point of interest are not necessarily the same thing.
Theeb (United Arab Emirates). Theeb is a tale of a man, the son of a sheik, who agrees to lead a British soldier across the wastes of Saudi Arabia along an old pilgrim trail, now mostly used by bandits, in search of a well. The Arab doesn’t know what the soldier is up to, and perhaps doesn’t like him much, but he’s obliged by the unspoken rules of hospitality to take on the assignment. Matters are made considerably more difficult for him when his baby brother, Theeb, decides the follow the little caravan out into the desert. Theeb bears some similarity to American westerns where the countryside is magnificent, danger is always near at hand, the law is nonexistent, and it’s sometimes hard to tell friend from foe.
Ida chronicles a few weeks in the life of Anna, a young Polish novitiate who is about to take her vows. Before before doing so, her superiors demand that she pay a visit to Wanda, her single surviving family member—an aunt whom she’s never met. Wanda turns out to be a sullen, hard-drinking woman who informs Anna almost immediately on arrival that her real name is Ida Lebenstein. She’s Jewish, and her parents were murdered during World War II. Ida has been in the convent since infancy and knows very little about the world. She seems astonished simply to be traveling on a bus, and it takes a while for her to digest this new information about herself and the evils of the wider world. Wanda agrees to help her niece find her parents’ burial site—a mission that eventually takes them to the bedraggled farmhouse Ida’s parents once owned. It’s now inhabited by God-fearing Poles who claim that “Jews never lived here.” Wanda knows they’re lying, and they know she knows.
The film’s black-and-white cinematography is extraordinary, and the pace is slow enough to allow us to savor it scene by scene. Forests, crumbling buildings, Wanda’s stylish apartment, city streets, a well-lit dance hall. The luminosity of the footage acts as a welcome counterweight to the sometimes grim drift of the plot. We see the world afresh through Ida’s limpid but strangely unfathomable eyes, both the good and the bad.
Papusza (Poland) Did the Polish film industry run out of color film, or what? First Ida, and now Papusza. Not that I’m complaining. Papusza tells the story of the gypsy poetess of that name and the gadja (i.e. non-gypsy) who comes to live with the band, recognizes Papusza’s talent, and later shares her poetry with the wider world. The film is rich in long-shots of campfires by the river in the moonlight, caravans slowly crossing fields of stubble, and riotous parties at which the gypsy musicians have been invited to play. But if the cinematography romanticizes Roma lifeways to a degree, the plot-line exposes their patriarchic cruelty and xenophobia. Things do not end well for Papusza. Her big mistake was to learn how to read and write.
Tangerine takes place in a wooden valley in Abkhazia, a sub-region of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. Georgia is now an independent state, but some of the residents of lower Abkhazia consider themselves more Russian that Georgian, and they’re fighting for their independence. The film’s central character, Ivo, is Estonian, and now that Estonia is no longer part of the USSR, many Estonians are inclined to go home, but Ivo and his friend Margus have decided to stay on until they’ve harvested the tangerines. They’ve arranged for a local militia to escort the produce to the market, and even, perhaps, help them pick the fruit. Their tranquil agricultural pursuits are shattered when a firefight takes place on the country road outside their farms, and Ivo finds himself taking care of two wounded soldiers, one Georgian, the other a Chechnian mercenary fighting on the side of Abkasia and Russia.
In Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh adds new shades of meaning to the phrase “warts-and-all” biography. His portrait of the famous English painter during the final decades of his life (Turner died in 1851) is spectacularly robust—the streets, the wharves, the salon galleries, the artist’s studio have all been vividly recreated, like a Dickens film without a plot. It’s no wonder the film garnered Oscar nominations for both costume and production design. The acting is first-rate. Timothy Spall, in the title role, mumbles and grunts his way across the screen like a cretinous lout (good enough for Best Actor kudos at Cannes), and various relatives, servants, and artist-friends also fix themselves in our imagination immediately. Marion Bailey is worth singling out for her portrayal of a jolly boarding-house matron, twice-widowed, who possesses an unaffected intelligence and sensitivity that Turner finds appealing. Yet unlike most “period” English dramas, Mr. Turner is devoid of romantic sentiment, and could hardly be said to have a plot. In one scene Turner sits in a music hall while actors on stage lampoon both his canvases and the way he paints them. A few scenes later, someone is offering him a hundred thousand pounds for a few of them.
A Royal Affair. In France they had a revolution. In Denmark, a few years earlier, a physician of enlightened convictions (Mads Mikkelsen) got the ear of the slightly-mad king and launched a series of progressive reforms. The film’s title suggests a back-stairs romance at a decadent court, with harpsichords, wigs, candles, and carriages, and there’s some of that, too, as Mikkelsen and the young queen (played by the Swedish beauty Alicia Vikander) pursue a private agenda. Wrap these elements together and you’ve got a film with more grip and pull than Ridicule, The Madness of King George, Marie Antoinette, Start the Revolution Without Me, La Nuit de Vanennes, or any costume drama you could name.
And did I mention the story is true?
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan once remarked, “The problem with Hollywood is the audience expects to get the answers like a pill. They expect to know not just whodunnit, but the motives of the characters, the how and why. Real life is not like that. Even our closest friend—we don’t know what he really thinks.” It would be difficult, I suspect, to make a good film about what we don’t know about people, but in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Ceylan gives it a shot. He has made a film in which we get to know people almost in spite of themselves, as twelve men, including a murderer and his brother, a doctor, a prosecutor, an urban and a provincial policeman, and a couple of laborers with shovels, traverse the barren hills of rural Turkey in the middle of the night trying to locate a body based on a few hazily-remembered landmarks. Though parts of the film have a ludicrous humor reminiscent of Almadóvar or the Coens, its overall tone might better be described as Chekhovian.
A Separation is an unsavory gruel of overheated conversations, long-standing resentments, deep familial affections, hopes for a better life, unshakeable religious faith, and economic desperation. The plot thunders on like an express train and though the violence involved, in the end, amounts to little more than a few slaps and shoves, every frame carries an uneasy current. As the film opens, eighteen months have passed since the Iranian couple at the center of the action applied for a visa to leave the country. The visa has now, finally, come through, but Nader is unwilling to leave without his father, who’s suffering from dementia. His wife, Simin, considers it imperative to leave Iran for the sake of their daughter, Termeh, a bright and seemingly docile adolescent who’s obviously taking in every angry work exchanged in the apartment. The two-hour film, shot with natural light in apartments and on the streets of Tehran, goes by in a flash, and as we leave the theater we’re likely to have Aristotle’s theory of poetic catharsis running through our heads: a sense of purification after the release of pent-up or horrific emotions.
The Tree of Life is a rendering of childhood in the 1950s, in Waco, Texas. It’s also a visual history of the universe. Through much of the film three brother shout, torture frogs, wrestle in the weeds, hang out with their deviant friends, play the guitar, obey their domineering father (Brad Pitt), fall in love with their charming mother (Jessica Chastain), go to church, go down to the creek, challenge and test one another, and climb trees. Most of the time their conversation consists of murmurs and mumbles. Much of the time it seems we’re hearing what they’re thinking, rather than what they’re actually saying.
Malick frames this central focus on childhood experience between two specific events, one small, the other large. No point in mentioned the small event here. The “large” event is the creation of the universe and the development of life on planet Earth. There is extended footage of cosmic events—nebulae expanding, volcanoes erupting, micro-organisms developing—with ethereal religious music sounding in the background. It all seems a bit like a cross between that BBC series Planet Earth, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. Only better.
The Social Network. I guess I have a soft spot for films set on college campuses. Young women and men are in the midst of what, for many, is the first flush of quasi-independence; they’re being challenged to show their stuff intellectually in the classroom while engaging in animated conversations at local watering holes after hours. The Social Network, is similarly well-endowed with late-night drinking, over-bright students, odd-ball personalities, and winsome coeds. It tells the story of Mark Zuckerman, the inventor of Facebook, and the plot-line would fall squarely into the category of implausible wish-fulfillment fantasies if it didn’t happen to be largely true. Though Zuckerman comes across as unbearably snarky, and treats his intellectual inferiors with bored distain, the path by which he hones the features of his networking website is fascinating to follow.
I Am Love is a lavish Italian production that has been compared to the best works of Lucino Visconti. Director Luca Guadagnino adopts a “fly-on-the-wall” point of perspective on the comings and goings of a wealthy multi-generational Italian family. Tilda Swindon attends to the concerns of her three children, her square-jawed and lackluster husband, and her mother-in-law (Merisa Berenson). The scenes flow one into the next; we’re not sure which threads are the important ones, and that’s what makes the film so interesting. It’s as if the director wants us to see the paintings on the wall, the tile on the floor, the glaze on the shrimp, and the insects buzzing amid the clover. He’s equally interested in the shape of the distant hills, the health of the family’s clothing factory, and the aroma rising from the fish soup.
The Secret in Their Eyes is a police procedural, in so far as it deals with an investigation of a brutal rape-murder on the part of a middling investigator and his brilliant but alcoholic sidekick. Yet the story is made richer by the response of the victim’s husband to the loss of his beautiful young wife, and also by a romantic subplot concerning the investigator’s boss, an equally beautiful but conservative and seemingly unapproachable young woman from the upper classes. It’s difficult to discuss a film of such quiet richness without giving away too much, but suffice it to say that in an era of fascist ascendancy, justice is not entirely served by due process, and at a certain point, life becomes dangerous for the investigator himself.
Particle Fever (2014) follows scientists making use of the newly launched Large Hadron Collider to recreate conditions that existed just moments after the Big Bang hoping to detect the presence of the legendary Higgs Bosen. Or not. It’s a red-hot scientific documentary more fascinating than any sci-fi film you’ll see this year, edited by master Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, The English Patient, The Godfather trilogy).
How I Ended This Summer (Russia, 2010). Two bored and antagonistic men stationed at a lonely military outpost above the Arctic Circle, counting the days until their tour of duty is over. Check it out—if you dare.
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