2011 Film Releases** (US) that pleased me.
I think these pictures are notable for their direction - that is to say, the choreography of framing, lenses, visual effects; editing style and sound design; art direction and actors’ performances (in varying ratios of importance).
A director is only one member of the crew (as everyone but especially my production friends knows), but sometimes you can find a dominant intelligence or aesthetic in a finished film. It is a wonderful thing to experience a story told well with a noticeably satisfying design.
I’ve excluded other films - Tinker, Tailor, for example, or Shame or Hugo - when I found the direction of the work out of step with the finished film; when, for example, there are a series of arresting images that didn’t for me add up to or earn its intended emotional register. (And I don’t mean to blame or praise a director as the only author of a films’ artistic success - I’d say there are significant flaws in the scripts for the films I mention above - but it’s direction I’m thinking of right now.)
The Trip (Michael Winterbottom) - Sometimes Winterbottom is so understated it’s hard to assert he has a style. But This Is How Michael Caine Speaks.
The Double Hour (Giuseppe Capotondi) - Heist, hauntings, double lives
Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn) - Getaway
Jane Eyre (Cary Fukunaga) - I am a free human being with an
independent will, which I now exert to leave you.
The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodóvar) - My favorite.
Coriolanus (Ralph Fiennes) - “Hate”.
The theatrically staged scenes are offset by unforced performance and fine camerawork by Barry Ackroyd.
A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg) - Caveat: I completely disagree with the film’s psychoanalytic politics.
The pre-credit sequence of Melancholia (Lars von Trier) - but after the credits, I think Bergman’s Persona and Vinterberg’s The Celebration do a better job treating similar themes.
