QUOTABLE CULT CLASSIC I think Libby Mae said it best: Corky St. Clair has a vision. Or at least, Christopher Guest does — and since he cowrote, directed, and starred as Corky in Waiting for Guffman (1997), I'd say it's fair to make the connection.Read more »

FILM Hollywood always exploits the space between plausibility and fantasy, but rarely with such fluidity as in the films of the 1940s and '50s. Some of the era's darkest refractions of the disquieted American belong to Jerry Lewis, but generally we look to film noir for the cynical postwar imagination.Read more »

FILM The 2009 Toronto Film Festival encompassed, as usual, much

of what would turn out to be the year's major award bait: Up in the Air, Precious: Based On the Novel Push By Sapphire, A Serious Man, new ones by Herzog, Almodóvar, Haneke, etc. But probably the best, and certainly most enjoyable, movie seen there was well off the official radar of must-sees. Perhaps because it centered on the adventures of plastic toys?Read more »

CULT FILM The year of cinematic enlightenment was 1967, with movies as disparate as Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, I Am Curious (Yellow), The President's Analyst, and Week End all proclaiming the dawn of a truly adult era. Of course, not everybody was on that page. Some quite possibly couldn't make out the text if they tried.Read more »

YEAR IN FILM "We could live like this forever." Josephine, the serious young woman in Claire Denis' gorgeous chamber drama 35 Shots of Rum, whispers this line to her father while they're camped out on the beach. It's unclear, however, whether she's referring to this particular sandy spot or the rituals of home and work that structure the film. As with Chris Chong's remarkable short, Block B, 35 Shots of Rum (a ritual in the title itself) is set in a superficially unattractive apartment complex. Read more »

YEAR IN FILM I will follow him. The opening moments of Pablo Stoll's Hiroshima convey that sentiment's dedication in a single shot, a lengthy behind-the-shoulder look at Stoll's brother Juan Andres as he traverses a suburban street in Uruguay. Such a simple film, Hiroshima: a day-in-the-life structure; silent film intertitles instead of spoken dialogue; "only" one brother's look at another. Read more »

YEAR IN FILM This year was scary enough — what with the collapsing economy, rising unemployment rate, a summer of celebrity deaths, and new lows reached by reality TV programming — that going to see a horror movie became a kind of respite from the constant feed of depressing shit plastered across news crawls, posted to blogs, and bolded in headlines. Who wouldn't take the escapist thrills of the Saw VI's elaborate, Rube Goldbergian endgames over the quick, "painless" death meted out by a pink slip? Read more »

YEAR IN FILM More than $10 billion in movie tickets were sold in 2009 — a new all-time high in a year stuffed with so many all-time lows, cinematic and otherwise. Many of those tickets, I'm afraid, provided entry to the garish, ghoulish Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, far and away the year's top-grossing release, though the top 10 did include at least one movie I can recommend (Star Trek) without feeling like a sellout. Nestled at No. Read more »

YEAR IN FILM The defining adjective for Woody Harrelson is hard to pin, but I'd nominate ... limber. Not just because he's a deft physical comedian — in The Late Henry Moss, a star-encrusted but not very good Sam Shepard play that premiered in San Francisco in 2000, he stole the show from the likes of Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, and Cheech Marin with a 20-minute bit as a cabbie stuck in a front door. But also because he undergoes gymnastic changes from one screen role to another without ever seeming to break a sweat, or lose

his essential congeniality.Read more »

YEAR IN FILM As the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq nears its second decade, the question of its influence on modern American cinema has been redoubled by this year's sampling of seminal combat films. Not only were Quentin Tarantino's epical Inglourious Basterds and Kathryn Bigelow's anti-epic The Hurt Locker two of the best releases of 2009, they represented a startling mutation in the zeitgeist's popular narratives of geopolitics, absenting the requisite leitmotifs of nationalism, ethic, and archive. Read more »