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Toronto 2009: IndieWIRE’s Critics’ Poll

Michael Stuhlbarg in A Serious Man (top); Joel and Ethan Coen (bottom)

Peter Knegt reports that an indieWIRE poll of "more than 25" film critics and bloggers (blogging film critics?) shows that the overwhelmingly favorite film screened at the 2009 Toronto Film Festival was Joel and Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man (not to be confused with Tom Ford’s A Single Man or the Michael Douglas vehicle Solitary Man), a black comedy about a suburbanite (Michael Stuhlbarg) whose life suddenly unravels after his wife asks for a divorce. A Serious Man hits US theaters on Oct. 2.

Colin Firth, Julianne Moore in A Single Man

The best performance was delivered by Colin Firth in A Single Man (not to be confused with either [...]

Best Films of 2008: LA WEEKLY/VILLAGE VOICE Poll

J. Hoberman in The Village Voice:
"All hail Andrew Stanton’s WALL-E — even us! Sometimes, the movies really are universal. And so a major studio’s mainstream, multiplex, mega-million-dollar-grossing, Oscar-friendly “summer movie” resoundingly won the ninth annual Village Voice–L. A. Weekly poll of (mainly) alt-press critics, named on 35 of 80 ballots.
"Unlike last year, when Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood materialized in late December to snatch the prize from the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men and David Fincher’s Zodiac, there was no groupthink stampede. Critics had months in which to cogitate over the eventual poll winner. Pass the popcorn, [...]

indieWIRE’s Critics’ Poll: Top Ten

Mathieu Amalric, Catherine Deneuve in A Christmas Tale

Best Films of 2008: indieWIRE’s Critics’ Poll

#
BEST FILM
Points
Mentions

1
The Flight of the Red Balloon
495
43

2
A Christmas Tale
454
38

3
WALL-E
368
32

4
Wendy and Lucy
366
36

5
Happy-Go-Lucky
346
31

6
Paranoid Park
335
31

7
Still Life
330
31

8
Silent Light
310
26

9
Synecdoche, New York
290
25

10
Waltz with Bashir
283
27

 

Asia Argento in The Last Mistress

#
BEST PERFORMANCE
Points
Mentions

1
Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler
548
49

2
Sally Hawkins, Happy-Go-Lucky
514
46

3
Michelle Williams, Wendy and Lucy
462
46

4
Sean Penn, Milk
424
41

5
Juliette Binoche, The Flight of the Red Balloon
404
38

6
Asia Argento, Boarding Gate, Mother of Tears, The Last Mistress
152
15

7
Melissa Leo, Frozen River
120
12

8
Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married
114
12

9
Guillaume Depardieu, The Duchess of Langeais
104
11

10
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Synecdoche, New York
98
10

Best Films of 2008: indieWIRE’s Critics’ Poll

The most curious thing about indieWIRE’s 2008 poll of 105 North American film critics is that thus far only six of those critics’ top-ten films have gone on to win awards (film/director/screenplay) from US/Canada critics’ groups.
WALL-E has been the top choice in the animated feature category and was even voted the best film of 2008 by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, which, spreading the wealth, also gave Waltz with Bashir their best animated feature prize. Happy-Go-Lucky took best director and best screenplay honors from, respectively, the New York and the Los Angeles critics; Still Life was chosen best foreign-language film in Los Angeles; Synecdoche, New York won a couple of best screenplay awards; while Wendy and Lucy was [...]

Top Ten Canadian Films of 2008

Top Ten Canadian Feature Films of 2008
(in alphabetical order, including future release dates)

Adoration (above) – Atom Egoyan (Entertainment One/Seville Pictures, May 2009)
Before Tomorrow – Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Madeline Piujuq Ivalu (Alliance Films, February 2009)
Ce qu’il faut pour vivre (The Necessities of Life) – Benoit Pilon (Entertainment One/Seville Pictures)
C’est pas moi, je le jure! (It’s Not Me, I Swear!) – Philippe Falardeau (Entertainment One/Seville Pictures)
Fifty Dead Men Walking – Kari Skogland (TVA Films, Spring 2009)
Heaven on Earth – Deepa Mehta (Mongrel Media)
Lost Song – Rodrigue Jean
Maman est chez le coiffeur (Mommy Is at the Hairdresser’s) – Léa Pool (Equinoxe Films)
La Mémoire des anges [...]

The LONDON TIMES’ Worst Films of 2008

A few days ago, the London Times published its list of the top 100 films of 2008. Now, it offers its list of the bottom 100 films of 2008. Here’s wondering if there’ll be much of an overlap.
Below are a few sample comments:
The Hottie & The Nottie (top photo): "The most eagerly hated movie in America is a tongue-in-cheek homage to Paris Hilton that has drawn nothing but poisonous reviews. On IMDb it has been voted the worst film ever made" – James Christopher
Zack and Miri Make a Porno: "Seth Rogen is an amiable and chubby clown, and quite possibly the most unconvincing romantic hero since Adam Sandler. The most soppy and unsexy 18-certificate skin-flick ever made" – [...]

The LONDON TIMES’ Top 100 Films of 2008

Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight (top); Time and Winds by Reha Erdem (bottom)

The London and the Sunday Times critics are apparently quite easy to please. They’ve come up with a list of no less than 100 Best Films for one single year: 2008.
Among the best of the best found in the Times list are masterpieces such as:

Cloverfield ("An hour in I started to sweat. And I nearly threw up trying to make sense of the increasingly chaotic and frightening scenes of the gripping climax" – James Christopher);
Definitely, Maybe ("A romantic comedy with a refreshingly adult sensibility and plot that doesn’t feel that it has been recycled and regurgitated by innumerable Cameron Diaz movies" [...]

Erik Childress’ Top Ten Criticwatch Whores of 2007

Highly recommended reading: Erik Childress‘ "Criticwatch 2007 – The Whores of the Year and the Axing of Pete Hammond" at EFilmCritic.com.
Here’s a snippet from Childress’ piece:
"You may remember from last year that we created a new award for the critic who displayed an incredible amount of supercilious douchebaggery. In 2006 the award went to Good Morning America’s Joel Siegel after storming out of a screening of Kevin Smith’s Clerks II due to an overextension of animal love conversation. We named the award after him to dishonor such critics for years to come. Alas, six months later, after trying to explain the entanglements of reviewing on live TV and subsequently threatening legal action against Criticwatch, Mr. Siegel passed away. To [...]

The Top Ten (Worst) Top-Ten Critics Lists at The Reeler

S. T. VanAirsdale disses "best of the year" listmakers by coming up with his own list of "top 10 of top 10" (worst) listmakers in The Reeler.
Among the ridiculed listers are Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, Ben Lyons of E!, and Transformers fan Sean Elliott of iF Magazine.
Here’s VanAirsdale’s intro:
"As you might expect in a year credited with one of the best cinematic vintages in a decade, 2007 was also a time of unparalleled hype, complacency and obsequiousness among scores of list-making film critics. But it was also a time of reinvention, with many critics adapting their rituals to evolving pressures and preconceptions. In a media era when seemingly everyone has a voice, it’s not how one contributes [...]

VILLAGE VOICE/LA WEEKLY 2007 Film Poll: Javier Bardem, Cate Blanchett

VILLAGE VOICE/LA WEEKLY 2007 Film Poll: Part I
Best Supporting Actor:

1 Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men
2 Casey Affleck, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
3 Hal Holbrook, Into the Wild
4 Philip Seymour Hoffman, Charlie Wilson’s War
5 Paul Dano, There Will Be Blood
6 Vlad Ivanov, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
7 Tom Wilkinson, Michael Clayton
8 Max von Sydow, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
9 Steve Zahn, Rescue Dawn
10 Christopher Mintz-Plasse, [...]

Best Films of 2007: VILLAGE VOICE/LA WEEKLY Film Poll

J. Hoberman, discussing the results of a "best of the year" poll of 56 American critics, in the Village Voice:
"Why shouldn’t we be preoccupied with homicidal sociopaths? America’s been at war for the past four and a half years — with, to cite the top-polling documentary, No End in Sight (#29). War makes you wonder what exactly defines murder and who is enabled to commit it. The morally ambiguous mode known as film noir was born during World War II and, as Jonathan Rosenbaum observed at the time, the national obsession with the cannibal genius Hannibal Lecter coincided with our first Iraq adventure, Operation Desert Storm. Where do these current killers come from? It’s suggestive that both There Will Be [...]

U.S. Critics’ Awards 2007

Josh Brolin in No Country for Old Men

Much has been said about the absence of a front-runner for this year’s Academy Awards. Be that as it may, one film is clearly the favorite among the myriad film critics’ groups in the United States.
Directed and written by Joel and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men has been chosen the top film of 2007 by nearly all critics’ societies, associations, and circles in the US and by the Toronto critics.
What often crosses my mind whenever I look at those award lists is their lack of variety. (That could be the result of the way votes are tabulated; if so, perhaps the rules should be changed.) Generally speaking, the [...]

Critics’ Influence on the Oscars

Kevin Spacey, Mena Suvari in American Beauty

Critics and Awards Season: Part I
It’s too bad that U.S. film critics have such short memories — see Jack Mathews‘ top comment in the previous page — as Once is the type of small, foreign film that needs year-end critics’ awards so Academy members can a) become aware of its existence b) check it out. Here’s wondering if voting "compromises," as mentioned by Mathews in his second comment, ended up leaving Once almost totally shut out of the myriad U.S. critics’ lists.
Both Stephen Witty’s and Scott Foundas‘ articles are well worth a read. I do, however, disagree with Foundas’ statement that the Oscar’s "golden luster" has been badly tarnished in recent years. After all, [...]

Critics and Awards Season

Glen Hansard, Marketa Irglova in Once

Jack Mathews‘ "Next Up in Oscar Race: Voters Who Matter" in the New York Daily News:
"It’s been fun watching the evolution of the awards, as critics’ groups narrowed the field with their collective awards while breaking the hearts of many of the individual members. Movies that will end up on many top 10 lists didn’t even get a nod of collective approval. When the small Irish musical Once opened in May, it received almost universal praise and with an 88 (out of 100) score on the review collating site metacritic.com, it’s the year’s third best-reviewed film. Only No Country for Old Men and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly rank higher, yet Once is completely [...]

The Best Unreleased Films of 2007

At Filmcritic.com, Chris Cabin offers a highly eclectic list of the top unreleased (in the US, that is) films of 2007, ranging from Catherine Breillat’s The Old Mistress (right) to Mamoru Oshii’s The Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters. Some of these titles will get a US release in 2008.
A sample commentary:
"For those with strong stomachs only: György Palfi’s Taxidermia overloads with imagery that suggests an all-night orgy at a timeshare owned by Monty Python, Jim Henson, and Peter Jackson. A spectacle of the grotesque laid over a generational triptych, the set pieces in Palfi’s film range from a pack of wildly-obese eating competitors vomiting into a festering abyss to a Red Army private blowing fire out of [...]

indieWIRE Poll 2007

Via indieWIRE — "The Critics Speak: Best, Worst, the Auteurs and the Underrated." Below are a couple of sample quotes:
"More people in our world will see Juno than 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. More will see 300 than Offside. More will see Saw IV than There Will Be Blood [above]. Yet we fight on, championing those films that really mean something to us. I find this rage against an always dying light both disconcerting and empowering, and I am thankful for filmmakers like Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Paul Thomas Anderson, Jafar Panahi, Sarah Polley, Pedro Costa, Tsai Ming-liang, the Coens, Todd Haynes, and all of the others who consistently reminded me of why I do what I do and [...]

Top Ten Undistributed Films in the US in 2007

Jeon do-yeong in Secret Sunshine

Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE:
"What is it about Korean auteurs that have critics salivating and distributors running for the exits? Last year, Hong Sang-soo’s Woman on the Beach topped indieWIRE’s best undistributed films list for 2007. This year, Hong compatriot Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine was far-and-way the winner of the honor. Thirty-four of the 106 critics surveyed in the 2007 indieWIRE Critics’ Poll put the film on their list as one of the best undistributed films of the year. But, of course, it’s an accolade that cuts both ways: Call it a back-handed compliment, as Caveh Zahedi once did upon receiving his award for ‘Best Film Not Playing at Theater Near You,’ or a paean for the [...]

Critics’ Choices

In Time, Richard Corliss on the New York Film Critics‘ picks:
"I sprinted down the corridors of TIME this afternoon, eager to spread the news of the New York Film Critics Circle voting for the year’s best films. The winner, in the film, director, screenplay and supporting actor categories? The Coen brothers‘ No Country for Old Men, which three different people told me they’d been meaning to see. The runner-up, with wins for best actor and cinematographer? There Will Be Blood, an audience-punishing epic that doesn’t open for another two weeks. Best actress? Julie Christie, in Away From Her [above, with Gordon Pinsent], which earned less than $5 million in its North American release.
"I didn’t even tell them that [...]

British Critics Pick Best British Films

Total Film magazine recently asked twenty-five British film critics to come up with their choices of the best British films ever made. The result is somewhat surprising, with the 1971 Mike Hodges-directed thriller Get Carter chosen as Britain’s very best movie ever. Other top-ten surprises include Monty Python’s Life of Brian, the James Bond actioner From Russia with Love, and Mike Leigh’s Naked. No pre-1945 film made it to the top ten.
Here’s the list:

1. Get Carter (1971)
2. A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
3. Trainspotting (1996)
4. The Third Man (1949)
5. Life of Brian (1979)
6. The Wicker Man [...]

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