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Movies like all these sleepless nights12/21/2023 Loktev hasn’t made a movie since then, but her two features together speak to the unique anxieties of this present moment - what it means to experience a sudden shock to the system, and then linger in the fallout, uncertain what to do next. The tension bursts into the story and then sits there, like an open wound, while its extraordinary performances address the rich thematic depths of each disquieting scene. The encounter lasts mere seconds, but its unspoken impact lingers as the campers roam from one location to the next, uncertain about their future together and how to address it.Ī few years later, Ruben Östlund would enter similar terrain with the masterful dark comedy “Force Majeure,” but Loktev probes her conundrum in pure cinematic terms: Her movie deals with the assumptions about trust and companionship that so often go unquestioned until they’re forced into the open, but it never states its themes outright. “The Loneliest Planet” transplanted the filmmaker’s unique storytelling instincts to a quieter setting, as a wayward couple (Gael Garcia Bernal and Hani Furstenberg) on vacation in the wilderness of Georgia encounter a sudden attack at gunpoint that changes the nature of their relationship. Julia Loktev’s narrative debut “Day Night Day Night” was a sharp revisionist approach to the slow-burn thriller that followed a suicide bomber wandering the streets of New York City. THE-LONELIEST-PLANET “The Loneliest Planet” (Julia Loktev, 2011).Forget “Boogie Nights” and the illusion of American possibility, “Inherent Vice” burrows into the feeling that we’ve already let it get away from us - that we’re all out there chasing our own tails and waiting for the fog to burn off. Sportello (a magnificently frazzled Joaquin Phoenix) and his ex (a bittersweet Katherine Waterston) is achingly well-realized in just a few short scenes, while the pervasive sense of a country in decline is suffused into the atmosphere like so many “patchouli farts” (to borrow one of the best insults from a film that has dozens to spare). But while the plot may be hard to follow, PTA compensates by making the film’s emotional underpinnings as clear as Doc Sportello’s view of the California coastline. Per genre tradition, the central mystery is actually several different mysteries all knotted together good luck untangling what a heroin addict’s missing husband has to do with a real estate developer named Mickey Wolfmann and a drug cartel that calls itself the Golden Fang. noir like “The Long Goodbye,” but it’s sillier and more sentimental than Philip Marlowe ever was. Shot like a faded postcard, and as untethered from reality as its source material requires, this rare Thomas Pynchon adaptation borrows a lot from sun-dappled L.A. So dense and hazy that it was probably destined to be the most under-appreciated of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films, “Inherent Vice” is a strung-out noir odyssey through the fog of late capitalism that grows a little clearer every time you watch it. INHERENT-VICE “Inherent Vice” (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014).And our week-long celebration list of the Best Films of the 2010s has us more excited than ever about what they might be to you tomorrow.Īs the week goes on, we’ll be posting lists of the decade’s best performances, scenes, scores, and posters, as well as a timeline of the news stories that shaped the last 10 years, and interviews with the filmmakers who made it all happen.īut for now, IndieWire is proud to kick things off with our list of the 100 best movies of the 2010s. If the most vital work of the 2010s has made one thing clear, it’s that movies have never been more things to more people than they are today. And while the decade will no doubt be remembered for the paradigm shifts precipitated by streaming and monolithic superhero movies, hindsight makes it clear that the definition of film itself is exponentially wider now than it was a decade ago. Cinema is in a constant state of flux, but it’s never mutated faster or more restlessly than it has over the last 10 years. Perhaps the arrival of James Cameron’s “Avatar” in the waning moments of 2009 could have been seen as a harbinger of strange things to come, but no one in Hollywood has ever lost sleep over a movie that grossed nearly $3 billion. DVD sales were strong, Netflix was still just a sad little envelope at the bottom of your mailbox, and China was starting to give studios the biggest safety net it ever had. It came with the added benefit of making the people in charge comfortable with the idea that cinema’s future wouldn’t look all that different from its past. That idea was inflexible, and supported by a century of precedent. Ten years ago, it seemed like we all had a pretty solid idea of movies - what they can do, who they’re for, and where they’re watched.
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