7. “Brick”
On paper, the concept of marrying hard boiled, stylized, Chandler-esque argot with a contemporary high school setting sounds dodgy at best. However, the debut by writer/director Rian Johnson works because of his dogged insistence to play it straight and let the audience find their way through the archaic dialogue to the mystery at the core. Brilliantly framed and photographed (not to mention captured on the cheap, with Johnson mostly shooting with one or two takes max throughout), and buoyed by fearless performances from his young cast, including a career page turner by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, “Brick” distinguishes itself as one of the most distinctive and original detective stories in years, and heralds the arrival of a major directorial talent.
6. “Half Nelson”
Thoughtfully shot and carefully observed, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s undeniably assured character study of an improbable teacher-student friendship in urban, inner-city Brooklyn is a rare work of restraint and a remarkable debut feature film. Featuring an astonishing, Oscar-nominated performance by a then-twenty-six-year-old Ryan Gosling as a functioning drug addict, basketball coach and history educator, and an equally outstanding turn by newcomer Shareeka Epps as a street-wise middle-school student, the impressive indie drama is a considerate and mannered look at dynamics, race and make-shift families. Marked by an unsentimental, raw lens and a meditative ambient score (featuring instrumental tracks by orchestral rockers Broken Social Scene), Fleck and Boden take a familiar, potentially predictable relationship tale and imbue it with a politically-personal, starkly compelling, yet editorially neutral viewpoint that refuses to take any easy shortcuts.
5. “United 93”
As with any grieving process, Hollywood’s response to the terrible events of 9/11 was gradual — from removing the World Trade Center from the likes of “Zoolander” and “Spider-Man,” to the displaced anger of revenge movies like “Kill Bill” and “Man on Fire.” By the middle of the decade, even golden boy Steven Spielberg was using explicit 9/11 imagery in his tentpole “War of the Worlds,” and it seemed that the time had to come to address the day itself. And we couldn’t have asked for a better filmmaker than Paul Greengrass. Taking a measured, understated docu-drama approach was clearly the right one (particularly when placed against Oliver Stone’s ill-judged “World Trade Center”) — it paid true tribute to the heroes of United 93, while still enabling Greengrass to heighten the tension to almost unbearable levels (we vividly remember several people fleeing our screening while hyperventilating during its final sections).
4. “L’Enfant”
In 1988, Paul Schrader reimagined Robert Bresson‘s classic “Pickpocket” as a crime-drama centering on a narcissistic escort believing himself above the law. Conceptually, his “American Gigolo” works — the protagonist of “Pickpocket” too deems himself a “super human,” and egotism is ultimately his undoing — but where Schrader went wrong was mistaking Bresson’s automatism for emotional vacancy. Nearly two decades later, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne took a stab at their own version of “Pickpocket” with the harrowing “L’Enfant,” a title referring to both the film’s nine-day-old child and the immature young father who sells him — a fatal error that condemns the man’s soul and sets him on a quest for spiritual salvation. There are principle differences in the Dardennes’ approach (long takes with hand-held cameras) and that of Bresson (a master of quick-cut editing), but when “L’Enfant” reaches its “moment of grace” — one strikingly similar to the one in “Pickpocket” — there’s no denying the comparison.
