Five Short Recommendations, Available on Netflix

A friend of mine who just finished school asked me if I could suggest some films for him to watch on Netflix Instant. I've written a number of annotated recommendations for him, so I figured I may as well share slightly edited versions here as well. I'll roll these out every so often, and I may write longer pieces on any of these in the future. Each of the films below were available on Netflix Instant in the USA at the time this was published.

House of Pleasures
L'Apollonide (Souvenirs de la maison close) / House of Tolerance
2011, France
Bertrand Bonello

You could spend an entire day coming up with adjectives to describe this film about the young women, their madame, her children, their clients, and the ghosts that inhabit a Parisian whorehouse at the dawn of the 20th century: beautiful, frightening, elegant, decadent, erotic, mysterious, haunting, radical, moving, difficult, luminous, and so on. But none of those words could accurately describe the total experience of watching Bertrand Bonello's unshakeable masterpiece.

With: Noémie Lvovsky, Alice Barnole, Céline Sallette, Adèle Haenel, Hafsia Herzi, Iliana Zabeth, Jasmine Trinca, Laurent Lacotte, Xavier Beauvois, Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, Jacques Nolot, Judith Lou Lévy, Anaïs Thomas, Pauline Jacquard, Maïa Sandoz, Joanna Grudzinska, Esther Garrel, Pierre Léon, Jean-Baptiste Verquin, Michel Peteau, Marcelo Novais Teles, Guillaume Verdier, Justin Taurand, Damien Odoul, Paul Moulin, Henry Lvovsky, Paolo Mattei, Frédéric Epaud, Anaïs Romand, Vincnet Dieutre, Bertrand Bonello, Pascale Ferran

Domain
Domaine
2009, France/Austria
Patric Chiha

In what was John Waters' unexpected (but not unusual) favorite film of 2010, Béatrice Dalle, still a smoldering presence onscreen twenty years after Betty Blue, plays an alcoholic mathematician who is also a sort of mentor to her beautiful gay teenage nephew (Isaïe Sultan). It's neither a coming-of-age story nor a PSA for addiction, but instead a rather intimate portrait of the alternately tender and toxic relationship between these two misfits. There's a great club scene a little over half way into the film where a bunch of people dance bizarrely in a smoke-filled, infinitely negative space.

With: Béatrice Dalle, Isaïe Sultan, Alain Libolt, Raphaël Bouvet, Sylvia Roher, Bernd Birkhahn, Udo Samel, Tatiana Vialle, Manuel Marmier, Gisèle Vienne, Gloria Pedemonte, Thomas Landbo

Flirting with Disaster
1996, USA
David O. Russell

Flirting with Disaster was a film I couldn't appreciate at a young age for a variety of reasons, but revisiting it as an adult had me crying with laughter. David O. Russell's brand of humor is a unique blend of chatty New York high-brow and slapstick-y absurdism, which you can also see at work in I Heart Huckabee's, a film I've changed my opinion on at least three times. While Ben Stiller is easily replaceable in the central role of the new daddy who wants to find his birth parents before naming his son, the entire supporting cast is priceless, particularly Mary Tyler Moore as Stiller's high-strung adoptive mother, Téa Leoni as the hapless psychology student documenting the eventual reunion, and–above all–Lily Tomlin, who steals the show.

With: Ben Stiller, Patricia Arquette, Téa Leoni, Mary Tyler Moore, George Segal, Alan Alda, Lily Tomlin, Richard Jenkins, Josh Brolin, Glenn Fitzgerald, Celia Weston, David Patrick Kelly

Mademoiselle
1966, France/UK
Tony Richardson

It would be too easy to dismiss Mademoiselle as simply a historical oddity. The screenplay was originally written by Jean Genet as a present to actress Anouk Aimée, but he reportedly sold it unbeknownst to her, and it was eventually reworked by author Marguerite Duras to be the first (and only, I believe) French-language film by director Tony Richardson, starring the one-and-only Jeanne Moreau (for whom the closeted bisexual Richardson left wife Vanessa Redgrave) and, at some point, Marlon Brando, though his casting never actually panned out. All that bizarre history aside, Mademoiselle is perfectly wicked, and Moreau is flawless as the child-hating, sexually repressed, arsonist schoolteacher, whose loins become inflamed when she meets a strapping Italian woodsman.

With: Jeanne Moreau, Ettore Manni, Keith Skinner, Umberto Orsini, Georges Aubert, Jane Beretta, Paul Barge, Pierre Collet, Gérard Darrieu, Jean Gras, Gabriel Gobin

The Lovers on the Bridge
Les amants du Pont-Neuf
1991, France
Léos Carax

Les amants du Pont-Neuf was a highly-ambitious project from French auteur Léos Carax–whose latest film Holy Motors (which stars his usual leading man Denis Lavant alongside Eva Mendes and Kylie Minogue!) is supposed to be absolutely spectacular–one which involved numerous reshoots, delays and eventually an entire reconstruction of the Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge across the Seine. There's probably no more appropriate way to describe Carax as an artist other than a visionary, and this is (not counting Holy Motors, which I haven't seen) his magnum opus, a small tale of a romance between a street performer (Lavant) and a painter (Juliette Binoche) who is going blind, told with dazzling opulence in grand measure. WARNING: Unfortunately, Netflix seems to be streaming a cropped version of the film. It looks like it's in 1.33:1 ratio, when it should be 1.85:1 (see the photo above). Such a shame for a film that utilizes the entirety of its frame so beautifully.

With: Denis Lavant, Juliette Binoche, Daniel Buain, Edith Scob, Klaus-Michael Grüber, Marion Stalens, Chrichan Larsson, Paulette Berthonnier, Roger Berthonnier, Georges Aperghis, Michel Vandestien

The Decade List: L'intrus (2004)

L’intrus [The Intruder] – dir. Claire Denis

In what Claire Denis described as her own mood piece inspired by Jean-Luc Nancy’s book of the same name, The Intruder is the most ecstatically puzzling of her career, a haunting exploration of a man dying of heart failure (Michel Subor). Denis subtly takes you into the mind of Louis, blending his fantasies into the already challenging narrative. What we do know is that he has a son (Grégoire Colin) he barely sees, a failing heart and is visited by a young Russian woman (Katia Golubeva), to whom he owes a large sum of money and might be a manifestation of his imagination (or “the Angel of Death,” as some have speculated).

I don’t think I’m alone in claiming The Intruder to be Denis’ most difficult in deciphering (nor in my total fascination with it). And still, it’s somehow everything I want out of one of her films: frustration, bewilderment and atmosphere. Similar to Beau travail, my other favorite film of hers, The Intruder only seems to strengthen through memory, even if returning to it still proves to be an extremely complex endeavor.

With: Michel Subor, Grégoire Colin, Katia Golubeva, Bambou, Florence Loiret-Caille, Alex Descas, Béatrice Dalle, Lolita Chammah, Kin Dong-ho, Henri Tetainanuarii, Jean-Marc Teriipaia, Anna Tetuaveroa
Screenplay: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau, based on the book by Jean-Luc Nancy
Cinematography: Agnès Godard
Music: Stuart Staples
Country of Origin: France
US Distributor: Wellspring

Premiere: 9 September 2004 (Venice Film Festival)
US Premiere: 18 March 2005 (Rendezvous with French Cinema)

The Decade List: À l'intérieur (2007)

À l’intérieur [Inside] – dir. Alexandre Bustillo, Julien Maury

There are only a few horror films from the ‘00s that will stand the test of time, and nearly all of them come from Europe. Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s home invasion nerve-racker Inside will most certainly be one of them, stemming from the great French tradition of studying the Hollywood model and discovering the way to crack it. Set during the riots of 2005, a pregnant young woman (Alysson Paradis), widowed a few months earlier in a car crash, returns to her home on Christmas Eve only to have her night-in brutally infringed upon by a mysterious, hostile woman in a black gown, played ferociously by Béatrice Dalle. A sanguinary game of cat-and-mouse begins.

Inside re-imagines our understanding of terror under the familiar pretense of the slasher film. It teases us with its juxtaposition of the riots and makes us consider the sort of psychological disorder a woman who would terrorize a pregnant woman might have. But what lies beneath its crimson surface is a deep, swirling crevasse of emptiness, even if the directors provide a swift, forgettable motive for Dalle’s character in the end. The sort of emptiness that echoes through Inside is not to be confused with the inept laziness of American gore-fests like Wrong Turn, to give one example of many. Its core is one of relentless, nauseating, bleak nothingness, presented in a world where some of the most awful things can come without warning and without mercy. The first-time directors should thank Dalle for infusing Inside with one of the most horrifying and chilling performances I’ve ever seen. She captures a shade of menace that’ll make you shiver just thinking about it.

With: Béatrice Dalle, Alysson Paradis, François-Régis Marchasson, Nathalie Roussel, Jean-Baptiste Tabourin, Nicolas Duvauchelle
Screenplay: Alexandre Bustillo
Cinematography: Laurent Barès
Music: François Eudes
Country of Origin: France
US Distributor: Dimension

Premiere: 24 May 2007 (Cannes Film Festival)
US Premiere: 17 October 2007 (Screamfest Film Festival)

The Decade List: Clean (2004)

Clean - dir. Olivier Assayas

[Edited from an earlier post]

Someone over at the Internet Movie Database, a horrible source for user activity and input, has decided to throw around the word "cliché" on the subject of Clean as if it were... yes, going out of style. A drug-addicted mother (Maggie Cheung) has to straighten out her life before getting custody of her son. Yeah, we’ve seen it before, which always begs the question as to whether we need to see it again. No, we really don’t need to. Yet, this “reviewer” (or "reviewers") never really wants to question the intention or whether or not, with these said clichés, the film works.

Well, it does. Approaching melodrama the same way he did with the various genres at work in demonlover, Assayas doesn't wish to breathe new life into tired notions but to find meaning within those confines. Clean's tale is a familiar one, build on pre-established motifs of stylized drug sequences and/or cinema vérité rawness, both problematic in their usual depictions. In cautionary tales of addiction, stylized drug sequences tend to glamourize the lifestyle they wish to condemn. By now, cinema-vérité has become something of a filmic decoration, a spurious creature that no longer suffices. Clean is not a medium between these two, but a longing and observant alternative. Nothing is magnified, glamorized, or exploited; Clean is level-headed and intimate, without sickening us with its closeness or getting so close as to hit the characters, or us, with the lens.

Cheung's performance, which won the Best Actress prize at Cannes, is exactly what you don’t expect it to be. This is not to say she doesn’t cry or stare pensively into the distance, because she does. The magic, however, of her performance is not because of this, but because we don’t register it as a “performance.” It's maybe significant that between Assayas and Cheung's two collaborations, the other being Irma Vep in 1996, the pair had married and divorced, giving their cinematic relationship a separate meaning altogether. Was Clean the last thing the former spouses had to give to one another? Cheung would retire from acting after a double-showing at Cannes in '04 with this and a brief reprisal of her role in Wong Kar-wai's sequel to In the Mood for the Love, 2046. It's been rumored that her scenes in Quentin Tarantino's upcoming Inglourious Basterds were cut (we'll know for sure later this month), so if Clean is in fact Cheung's swan song, I couldn't have hoped for anything more.

With: Maggie Cheung, Nick Nolte, James Dennis, Béatrice Dalle, Jeanne Balibar, Don McKellar, Martha Henry, James Johnson, Rémi Martin, Joana Preiss, Tricky, Dave Roback, Metric
Screenplay: Olivier Assayas
Cinematography: Eric Gauthier
Music: Brian Eno, David Roback, Tricky
Country of Origin: France/Canada/UK
US Distributor: Palm Pictures

Premiere: 21 May 2004 (Cannes Film Festival)
US Premiere: 18 March 2005 (Rendez-vous with French Cinema)

Awards: Best Actress - Maggie Cheung, Technical Grand Prize - Eric Gauthier (Cannes Film Festival)

Jean-Jacques Beineix on DVD (Updated)

Cinema Libre announced the first two DVD releases of their Jean-Jacques Beineix collection, Roselyne and the Lions [Roselyne et les lions] on 14 July and IP5: The Island of Pachyderms [IP5: L'île aux pachydermes] on 18 August. As Eric pointed out, the studio is re-releasing Beineix's most famous film Betty Blue, with Béatrice Dalle and Jean-Hughes Anglade, in theatres before a DVD release next year.

As for other DVD announcements, PeaceArch will release Marianna Palka's Good Dick on 1 September, as well as Valentino: The Last Emperor, on DVD and Blu-ray, 15 September. MPI is releasing Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel's Deadgirl on both formats 15 September. James Cotton's La linea, with Andy Garcia and Ray Liotta, will be out through Maya on 10 November. Facets is set to re-release Wojciech Has' trippy Saragossa Manuscript on 28 July. Oscilloscope will add Treeless Mountain to the already crowded 15 September street date. And sometime in October, Water Bearer Films will be releasing Philippe Vallois' We Were One Man [Nous étions un seul homme] for the first time on DVD in the US.

On the Blu-ray horizon, a couple of noteworthy titles have been announced. Shout! Factory will have Takashi Miike's Audition on 7 October; from Sony, The Craft on 13 October; and from Dark Sky, John McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer on 29 September... all in time for Halloween. That's all for now. I'll resume the Decade List soon. I've taken a needed break from it by revisiting Six Feet Under.

UPDATE: Thanks to Jeremy at, of course, The Moon in the Gutter for finding this. Cinema Libre has the dates set for all of their Beineix releases, including a box-set with all of them on 1 December. According to their site, a DVD of Beineix's Locked-In Syndrome [Assigné à résidence], a documentary about Jean-Dominique Bauby who was the subject of Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Otaku and his first short Mr. Michel's Dog [Le chien de Monsieur Michel] was released today, but I didn't find it on Amazon.com. Mortal Tranfer [Mortel transfert], also with Jean-Hughes Anglade, will hit shelves on 22 September, and The Moon in the Gutter [La lune dans le caniveau], with Nastassja Kinski, Gérard Depardieu and Victoria Abril, will be out 20 October. It also didn't dawn on me that the studio's theatrical release of Betty Blue would be the first time it's officially been shown in its full version in the US. Betty Blue will be on DVD on 17 November.

The Decade List: Trouble Every Day (2001)

Trouble Every Day - dir. Claire Denis

Of Claire Denis' many talents, the meticulous dispersing of the narrative is probably her strongest attribute. She understands the power in mystery, the sort of mystery that permeates without concealing or withholding. Her cinema is not born of deception but of a deliberate vision, one that doesn't concern itself with unnecessary disclosure. This approach worked in her favor with Beau travail and later L'Intrus [The Intruder], but there's some question to its success in Trouble Every Day, something which will probably never be agreed upon. Even the film's biggest admirers hint toward doubts to their fondness as the film is so oblique one begins to wonder if it only truly works through cerebral compensation. This is somewhat contradictory to what Denis presents with Trouble Every Day, which above all else concerns itself with the flesh.

What can be deciphered from the narrative is that American newlyweds Shane (Vincent Gallo) and June (Tricia Vessey) are honeymooning in Paris. Shane, a respected scientist, has ulterior motives to their Parisian destination, hoping to track down former colleague Léo (Alex Descas) and his wife Coré (Béatrice Dalle). Léo has left his medical post in order to care for his wife, who suffers from an unnamed affliction which drives her to crave the taste of flesh and which forces Léo to barricade her in their bedroom. Shane shares Coré's affliction, though he hasn't fully descended into her state of carnality.

Often associated with the so-called New French Extremity "movement," Trouble Every Day takes a deconstructive approach to its horror genre, similar to Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms, a film that's met with a comparable amount of hostility. Denis keeps dialogue and color to an absolute minimum, stripping the film to a state of naked vulnerability, a tableau for critique. On one hand, it's a horror film without pretense; on the other, it's an artifice for which Denis can explore her recurring themes of race, class and sexuality. She doesn't concern herself with mythology, as science and its incapacities are the film's driving/collapsing force. The film's nakedness refuses the allusion to vampirism or cannibalism, and all the history that comes with them. They can only be explained through allegory, with Shane's greed, lust and class all possible triggers for his sickness.

"You like money, don't you?" a fellow scientist (Marilu Marini) asks Shane. This is the only moment where the possible subtext is addressed in the foreground. Shane's capitalistic, opportunistic ideas of his own profession provide the clues to some of the film's questions. Has his greed begun to desire human flesh? Does he choose the chambermaid (Florence Loiret-Caille) as his prey because her social status ranks below his precious, white-as-snow wife? Is this why he rejects June's sexual advances to masturbate in the bathroom? The cause for Coré's affliction is more ambiguous. Did one of them give it to the other? Or does she merely symbolize the grinding weight white people still place on the black community?

The nakedness also functions on a visceral level. Aside from Shane's airplane fantasy of his wife drenched in blood, it isn't until an hour into the film that we actually witness carnage. Trouble Every Day's silences and desolate spacial landscape build to this point, in which Coré devours the flesh of a curious, horny neighbor boy (Nicolas Duvauchelle) in explicit fashion (her previous victim was killed offscreen). The scene is stirring and unnerving, as Dalle laughs like a hyena while picking at the boy's flesh. It's an audible and visual assault, one which is certain to provoke discomfort in the viewer. This discomfort strips the viewer to a state of vulnerability, the same daunting exposure with which Denis adorns the film. If this act gives Denis the capacity to explore both genre and her own obsessions, it's the hope that the same ability for dissection would arise in the viewer.

But maybe this is all bullshit. Both Denis and Dalle claim Trouble Every Day is a love story, and that's something I've never taken from the film. If the love story they're referring to is between Shane and June, which I'm pretty sure is, we would have to believe Shane has atoned for whatever caused his sickness, or whatever he thinks caused it. I find this hard to swallow, as the sparing of June from his cravings doesn't feel like an act of salvation as much as it does the preservation of his own evils. Does he seek closure to his past proclivities for her or to just exercise whatever is lurking inside of him? No matter your disposition toward these questions or the film itself, Trouble Every Day is Denis' most perplexing film, one whose power (or is it the opposite?) I will likely never shake.

With: Vincent Gallo, Béatrice Dalle, Tricia Vessey, Alex Descas, Florence Loiret-Caille, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Raphaël Neal, José Garcia, Aurore Clément, Hélène Lapiower, Marilu Marini
Screenplay: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau
Cinematography: Agnès Godard
Music: Tindersticks
Country of Origin: France/Germany/Japan
US Distributor: Lot 47 Films

Premiere: 13 May 2001 (Cannes Film Festival)
US Premiere: 30 November 2001 (Los Angeles)

2009 Notebook, Volume 2: Expanded

There's a scale I use to place a certain type of film - the micobudget, tongue-in-cheek horrorcomedy. The scale slides along a plane with Terror Firmer (or Citizen Toxie) at the highest pole and Gutterballs at the furthest. Most of these films flutter around the Gutterballs arena with their tasteless (and humorless) gore fests, but Yeti: A Love Story is probably one of the few that sits on high. It's intermittently amusing, particularly in its coining of the sexual term "Mellancamping," which is described by the douchebag frat guy who eventually falls in love with the yeti as "making one hurt so good." Though heavy on beastial sodomy, it never reaches the brilliance of Toxie giving birth to his mother in Terror Firmer, but color me amused.

Queer cinema has always been my focal point in writing about the medium, which forces me to endure some of the most scathingly awful pieces of celluloid (or, more likely, consumer-level video). Piccadilly Pickups is easily one of the most taxing endurance tests I've undertook in this realm. Starring a pre-op Alexis Arquette as a porno film director named Henri de la Plus Ooh Arrgh, the film crawls its way through thankless gender-fucking sex scenes like Bruce LaBruce's two-legged puppy. It doesn't deserve any of the words I'm using for it, which is about the biggest crime I can give any film, and if you need perspective, I dedicated at least twenty-five pages of my thesis to Another Gay Movie.

On a happier note, I finally got around to Christopher Larkin's seminal A Very Natural Thing, one of the first American films to explicitly deal with the love life of a gay man, played by Robert Joel who also starred in Russ Meyer's Up! Megavixen. A Very Natural Thing is appropriately flawed by its mix of documentary and fiction footage, the former of which containing interviews with individuals at the 1973 New York City Gay Pride Parade. However, its intentions are always just, and its vision is always surprising. In addition to the film's final, breathtaking slow-mo nude run across a beach, A Very Natural Thing hits so many right notes in terms of narrative disposition, a brilliant precursor to some of queer cinema's more recent high points (Presque rien being the most obvious).

Christophe Honoré is such a perplexing figure in French cinema. He's absolutely inferior to his co-patriot peers (François Ozon, Sébastien Lifshitz), and yet there's still some sort of attraction in his glaring failures. While Les chansons d'amour suggests he might be heading in the proper direction (his more recent film La belle personne was bought by IFC Films last year), his directorial debut, 17 fois Cécile Cassard, is a giant mess of a film. Supposedly divided into seventeen "moments" of a woman's life, surprisingly downplayed by the wonderful Béatrice Dalle, the film begins awkwardly with Dalle speaking to her dead, naked husband (Johan Oderio-Robles), rear-projected into her otherwise empty bedroom. Every "moment" in not just this film but all of his others excluding Chansons and Tout contre Léo has been done before more successfully by finer directors like Arnaud Desplechin and Jean-Luc Godard, whom he embarrassingly emulated in Dans Paris. And yet, there's still something mildly compelling here. With the benefit of enlisting actors who are too good for their material (Dalle, Romain Duris, Jeanne Balibar), Cécile's confusing journey to Toulouse after abandoning her young son seems guided by good intentions, even if the overall result is a bit lackluster. None of the characters make much sense in their life decisions. Why did Cécile abandon her son and become Toulouse's resident fag hag all of a sudden? What exactly does Duris see in his friendship with Cécile anyway? Like Ma mère and Dans Paris, it's easier to just allow for Honoré to thoughtless throw the occasional juicy sequence to hide the dramatic shortcomings.

The morbid curiosity of witnessing Tony Ward, model and former love interest to Madonna, expose himself in just about every way is the only thing that keeps Jochen Hick's Sex/Life in LA interesting. His attempts to name-drop the icon at every given moment, including a story about her burning him with a cigarette, are just as curiously desperate as allowing the director to film him jerk-off in a bathtub. Nothing about Sex/Life in LA, or its sequel Sex/Life in LA 2: Cycles of Porn, is particularly revelatory or enlightening, even though it stands as a weird Behind-the-Music exposé of many of the people involved with Bruce LaBruce's Hustler White. Along with Ward, performance artist Ron Athey, co-director and photographer Rick Castro and irritating surfer boy porn star Kevin Kramer are all featured here, alongside shitty sub-porn music and under no worthy direction at all.

Poor Anne Hathaway. She's just begging to keep that Oscar out of her grasp. After giving me (and probably many others) justification for liking her in Rachel Getting Married, she's following that up with films like Passengers and Bride Wars. Though I don't think I can bring myself to watch anything with Kate Hudson in it, I did sit through Passengers which finds Hathaway treating the reluctant survivors of a terrible plane crash. With Hathaway finally finding the shoe that fit in Rachel, her role choices of bland romantic leads and professional women feel even more out of place. Under the pretense of being a mystery, Passengers waits until the end to reveal its cop-out "twist," which almost pushes the film into Seven Pounds territory. Strangely though, Rodrigo García actually has dramatic reasoning for the shitty rug-pull he does, and even though it doesn't work on the dramatic level he wanted it to, the fact that he didn't just want to pull the strings of his audience keeps Passengers from being the utter failure it might have been. You've seen it before, trust me.

I'm not planning on speaking at length about any of the 2000-and-beyond films I'm revisiting, as many of them will turn up on my planned best of the decade list, but I've learned a thing or two about myself with another viewing of Vicky Cristina Barcelona. I know Woody Allen has a pretty large fan base, and I know most of which has lost faith in the director's recent oeuvre, but falling in love with Vicky Cristina Barcelona all over again just proved that I will never have my finger on the pulse of America. I saw Vicky show up on plenty of top 10 lists this year and I've enthusiastically suggested many of my friends to go see it, and I have yet to find anyone I know personally that shares the relief and elation I felt with both viewings. It's so ravishingly complex in terms of characterization, narration (which is brilliant, despite many people's gripes about it), visualization and humor that I just can't wrap my mind around all the people I know who thought it was "good, but didn't blow me away." More on Vicky around the month of November, for sure. PS: It's my dark horse candidate for a Best Picture Oscar nomination.

2008 List #4: 25 (or so) Great Performances

Acting will always be something that fascinates me from afar, and nothing I'd prefer to talk about at any length. There's something scary about the whole process of becoming someone else, something that's beautifully mirrored in Juliette Binoche's performance in Abel Ferrara's Mary. And then there's the whole Heath Ledger thing. I didn't include him on this list, partially because he's making everyone else's lists, and partially because that shit is scary. The following list of 25 (or really more, as I've included some multiple performances for the year) is in no special order and has minimal annotation (because writing about acting for any length of time is sure to induce a pretty bad headache).

Sally Hawkins - Happy-Go-Lucky

As successful a writer/director Mike Leigh often is, Happy-Go-Lucky hinged on her entire performance. No matter how worthwhile his screenplay was, Hawkins' believability made the film.

Rebecca Hall - Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Although the film didn't completely rest on her shoulders, Hall's performance worked in the same way Hawkins did, as she accepted the challenge of making "natural" what seemed so "fake." Her Vicky thrived upon a façade of happiness (I realize, for Hawkins, it wasn't a mask), and when everything fell out of place, it just made Hall that much more radiant.

Michael Shannon - Shotgun Stories; Revolutionary Road

Like J.K. Simmons in Burn After Reading, Shannon was the only thing to really fuck-start the whole fiasco that was Revolutionary Road (more on that later), and in Shotgun Stories, he made his untrained co-stars look all the more inexperienced.

Juliette Binoche - Flight of the Red Balloon [Le voyage du ballon rouge]

Binoche makes acting look effortless, and Flight of the Red Balloon is probably one of her most complex, nuanced endeavors in a career full of brilliance.

Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Ralph Fiennes - In Bruges

Rethink all the bad stigma you attach to Farrell (honestly, he wasn't the worst part of Alexander). All three actors are as good (or better) as they've ever been here.

Asia Argento - Boarding Gate

Yeah, she made a striking turn in The Last Mistress, but it was in Boarding Gate that Argento was given the best platform for astounding. More on this when I publish my best of the year.

Frank Langella - Frost/Nixon

It ended up not mattering much that Langella didn't resemble Tricky Dick physically or vocally, which is tremendous for playing someone ingrained so deeply in the public's eye.

Sean Penn, James Franco, Josh Brolin - Milk

If I had more space or time, each of these actors would deserve their own inclusion. Harvey Milk could end up being the role best associated with the often over-the-top Penn. The chemistry between Penn and Franco was intense (even if the film could have gone a little bit deeper), and Brolin, as I'm sure you've already heard or witnessed, gives remarkable shape to what could have been a one-dimensional, unsympathetic individual.

Inés Efron - XXY

In XXY, Efron is perfect, in both her demeanor and chilling despair. It’s the sort of performance you see, without knowing much about the actress, and assume, “Well, the director must have found her on the street and knew she was exactly what was needed for the role.” However, XXY is her fourth film, and not only is her role sizable in its challenges, Efron is both delicate and rough and handles the conflicting femininity and masculinity like an actress twice her senior. Fabulous stuff. (Taken from a post I wrote earlier this year)

Tilda Swinton - Julia; The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

In both leading and supporting roles, Swinton has the capacity to captivate no matter how long she's onscreen.

Richard Jenkins - The Visitor; Step Brothers

As excellent as he was in The Visitor, look for his "emotional" speech near the end of Step Brothers. Thanks to both films, Jenkins should no longer remain an untapped resource.

Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Devos - A Christmas Tale [Un conte de Noël]

As they did in Desplechin's Kings and Queen, Amalric and Devos again play lovers, this time in the present tense, and it's quite a compliment to stand out in a cast this impressive.

Béatrice Dalle - Inside

Perhaps inspired by the flesh-eating nymphomaniac she played in Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day, Inside flipped the coin on her usual persona of being sexy (but a little bit scary) in making her scary (but a little bit sexy) as the black-donning, scissors-holding home invader in Inside. It's probably one of the most frightening performances in a horror film that I've ever seen.

Anamaria Marinca - 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

As the roommate of the pregnant girl, Marinca was mesmerizing, devestating and even a little bit funny.

Emily Mortimer - Transsiberian

In looks, Mortimer might not have what it takes to pull off the former bad girl, but in Transsiberian, she's absolutely believable and utterly captivating.

Jason Patric - Expired

Hysterically rude, Patric was like the broken down version of his character in Your Friends & Neighbors.

Julianne Moore - Savage Grace

Taking on roles as difficult as that of Barbara Baekeland is what lifts Moore into the masterclass. Though Savage Grace is quite flawed, there's nothing at all wrong with her (you could say the same about Blindness, though she's more effective here), and, as I said before, I don’t think any actress today can utter the word “cunt” with as much ferocity as Moore, and after you see the film, try to think of another actress who would have even tried to pull of that scene.

Jürgen Vogel - The Free Will

Serving as co-writer as well, Vogel is shattering the film's serial rapist in one of the year's most troubling performances.

Michael Fassbender - Hunger

It would be too easy to applaud Fassbender for pulling a Christian Bale and losing an ungodly amount of weight for the second half of Hunger, so it certainly helps that he would have been commanding at any weight. I'll even forgive him for being in 300.

Rosemarie DeWitt - Rachel Getting Married

In the less showy performance, DeWitt is the rock of Rachel Getting Married. Again, more on this when my best films list rolls out.

Penélope Cruz - Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Cruz lights my F-I-R-E, as you probably know by now, but who knew she could be as savagely funny as she was in the role of Maria Elena? Cruz and Hall were so night-and-day that I had to include them separately.

Peter Mullan - Boy A

Though Andrew Garfield was also quite good in the title role, Mullan was Boy A's shining light as the social worker who assists Garfield's rehabilition in society.

Michelle Williams - Wendy and Lucy

You can see Wendy's entire world buckle under inside Williams' face. She's a revelation here, and one of the most promising actresses of her generation (surprising from a girl who rose to fame on Dawson's Creek and lasted the show's entire run).

Mickey Rourke - The Wrestler

No matter how you feel about The Wrestler (yes, more on that later), it's hard to resist Rourke's career-capping turn as a faded pro "wrestler." Whether this leads to a string of roles or not is unclear, but he definitely deserves all the accolades that have been thrown upon him thusfar.

Sigourney Weaver - Baby Mama

Too often (even in my case) does appreciation for dramatic work overshadow the great comedic performances of any year, which are (so I hear) a lot more difficult a task to pull off. Weaver, as the owner of the surrogate adoption agency, isn't just hilarious on her own, but she does what every lead actor wishes the supporting players would do and makes them even funnier. Tina Fey's reaction to finding her in the hospital with a set of twins is the highlight of the whole film.