1. A Serious Man (Joel and Ethan Coen)
Burn After Reading turned out to be a palate cleanser for this abstraction of the essence of their greatest films – their entire filmography consummated in its memorable final images. But it is also the most Rabbinic film I have seen, its narrative mechanics Midrashic riffs on Job, David, and the existential rigor of Torah. From a Religious Studies perspective, the film is a marvel of mid-20th century Midwestern Jewish phenomena. Otherwise, the film is a fractal whirlwind, a numerological terror, an evisceration of the fraudulent forms of wonder epitomized in films like American Beauty. We can now say with Heisenberg certainty that the Coen brothers tried to be serious filmmakers.
2. Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas)
3. Hunger (Steven McQueen)
4. Munyurangabo (Isaac Lee Chung)
5. Revanche (Götz Spielmann)
6. Lake Tahoe (Fernando Eimbcke)
7. Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson)
8. Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso
9. The Sun (Alexander Sokurov)
10. 35 Shots of Rum (Clair Denis)
A Few More:
Lorna’s Silence (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
Gomorra (Matteo Garrone)
The Spine (Chris Landreth)
You, The Living (Roy Andersson)
Bad Lieutenant (Werner Herzog)
Jerichow (Christian Petzold)
Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel)
Il Divo (Paolo Sorrentino)
Where the Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze)
Non-distributed highlights:
Canary
Around the Bay
Hell is Other People
Game of the Year
Notes on Marie Menken