Top 10 Movie Moments of 2013

One of the more ephemeral pleasures of reviewing the fading year is summoning the most transcendent or provocative moments that I spent in the dark of a movie theater. From your standpoint, it’s perhaps a more suggestive and democratic endeavor than were I to anoint the 10 best films of 2013: Instead of inciting an argument, I’m encouraging a personal journey. Much more in keeping with the spirit of the season, don’t you think? In fact, I invite you to contribute your favorite movie moments of the last 12 months in the comments section.

Lore
For me, the lingering image of 2013 is a close-up of a perturbed, puzzled face. In a year when lone characters were asked to carry numerous films (All is Lost and, to a slightly lesser degree, Gravity, Blue Is the Warmest Color and Her), drama was often concentrated in a facial expression. Australian director Cate Shortland’s sensuous study of a sheltered acolyte of Hitler Youth compelled to shepherd her siblings overland across Germany in 1945 gave us an open-faced protagonist (bravely portrayed with neither guile nor filters by Saskia Rosendahl) stunned equally by a first kiss and a first corpse. On par with Lore is the anguished Orthodox Jewish teenage daughter (the equally expressive Hadas Yaron) desperately trying to make the right move in Israeli filmmaker Rama Burshtein’s mesmerizing Fill the Void. The final scene, when Shira realizes the consequences of her decision, is sublime and harrowing.

The Act of Killing

The Act of Killing
Joshua Oppenheimer’s exposé of the Indonesian gangsters who carried out the mass murder of their country’s intellectuals and anyone else perceived as Communist or otherwise opposed to the military dictatorship is a unique and shocking documentary. During one typically crazy recreation of decades-old events, a man playing an interrogation suspect breaks down in shame when recalling his reaction to his father’s brutal death: Utterly brainwashed, he had rejected the older man as an enemy of the state — and denied his father’s love and sacrifice. I get a knot in my stomach just thinking about it.

Fruitvale Station

Fruitvale Station
Ryan Coogler’s recreation of Oscar Grant’s last day before he was shot in the back by a panicky BART cop on the Frutivale platform on an otherwise ordinary New Year’s Eve, is, among its many virtues, a terrifically nuanced character study. In one bravura sequence, Oscar (a marvelous Michael B. Jordan) plays with a stray dog while he fills up at a gas station. No one’s around to see this brief interaction, or to witness Oscar’s grief after a car hits the animal and speeds away. As depicted in this essential film, sudden death and helpless anguish are part of everyday life in Oakland.

Stories We Tell

Stories We Tell
Canadian actress (The Sweet Hereafter) and director (Away From Her) Sarah Polley plumbs her family history in this unusually thought-out first-person doc. The mystery at the core of the film revolves around Polley’s deceased mother, and the glimpses we get of her in numerous home-movie snippets (pay close attention, for they aren’t necessarily what they appear to be) don’t draw us closer to a resolution so much as suggest the impossibility of ever knowing another human being.

Museum Hours

Museum Hours
Jem Cohen’s understated yet profound film imagines an ad hoc friendship between a 60-something security guard at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Art Museum and a slightly younger Canadian tourist who finds herself at loose ends during an extended visit to a comatose friend. The movie’s central theme is the tenuous hold of civilization at present, evoked through myriad verbal and visual contemplations of paintings and buildings. Johann and Anne are standing in a nondescript gravel parking lot late in the film, with the camera at a discreet distance, when she gets a call from her friend’s doctor. Johann steps away, allowing Anne a private moment when she gets off the phone. The filmmaker likewise gives Anne her space. Awareness and compassion are as much hallmarks of civilization as works of art and architecture.

Gravity

Gravity
Simply mentioning the title of Alfonso Cuaron’s adrenalized space oddity is enough to summon an image or a sequence. What popped in your head? I propose the seemingly unremarkable moment in the film’s opening minutes when our perspective seamlessly shifts from third person (watching Sandra Bullock and listening to her breathing) to first person (the view from inside her helmet, of scrolling numbers and a gyrating skyscape). Regardless of what you think of the story and the characters, Gravity is top-drawer filmmaking.

Kill Your Darlings

Kill Your Darlings
Period pieces are notoriously hard to pull off on an indie-film budget, but that’s a minor hurdle compared to crafting a convincing portrait of well-known historical figures. Daniel Radcliffe’s marvelous portrayal of Columbia University freshman Allen Ginsberg circa 1944, under the sway of first love Lucien Carr, uninhibited writer Jack Kerouac and certified freak William Burroughs, finds its zenith in a single close-up late in the film. David Kammerer, Lucien’s mentor and lover (and Allen’s ostensible rival for Lucien’s affections) desperately pressures Ginsberg to confide where Carr has gone. Without a word, Radcliffe conveys resentment, self-interest, confusion and, finally, empathy. On second viewing, it’s even clearer that the film, and Ginsberg’s subsequent path as a human being, pivots on this moment.

12 Years a Slave

12 Years a Slave
Saved from a lynching by the plantation overseer, Solomon Northrup is nonetheless left to learn his lesson at the end of the rope. His toes barely reach the muddy earth, and after hours of avoiding strangulation he’s exhausted and dehydrated. The scene has many stages and meanings, but the most revelatory and shocking aspect is the way the other slaves ignore Solomon (or are so practiced at survival mechanisms that they don’t register his suffering). The cruelly dehumanizing effects of slavery are more subtle and devious than I ever realized.

Blue Is the Warmest Color

Blue Is the Warmest Color
As one might expect from a study of an unformed young woman becoming, well, slightly less unformed, Blue Is the Warmest Color delivers a peripatetic stream of intense feelings, intellectual inconsistency and pervasive ambiguity. The image that stays with me, and it could be from any of 20 places in the film, is of Adele’s perplexed countenance. Adele (a brave and generous Adele Exarchopolous) might be trying to make sense of how she fits (or doesn’t) with her school friends, or how to respond to her unexpected feelings of attraction to other women, or how to make and keep her older lover, Emma (Léa Seydoux), happy. Like us, Adele is sussing out her way through a movie comprised of questions rather than answers.

Inside Llewyn Davis

Inside Llewyn Davis
The Coen Brothers’ latest catastrophic comedy conceals the essentially reactive nature of its main character, a talented early-’60s folk singer who’s unfortunately not as smart as he thinks, by putting him on the road. Llewyn may finds himself on the A train, or behind the wheel of a car on its way to Chicago. The bloated jazzman in the backseat (John Goodman) imperiously taps Llewyn with his gold-handled cane, underscoring the barbed rivalry between musicians (who share an obliviousness that they’re out of step with the 4-4 beat of rock ‘n’ roll, which will steamroll everything in a few short years). It feels like a warning, or a premonition, but all Llewyn recognizes is he’s blessedly out of the cold for a few minutes in this winter’s tale of frustrated, uncompromising artists.