newjerseynewsroom.com

BY JOE TYRRELL

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

MOVIE REVIEW

It has been a great year for movies and movie acting, although not necessarily for Hollywood, as old masters recovered their mojo, new talents did whatever it took and sci-fi morphed into a new category, Apocalypse Noir, in which the cosmic collided with the quotidian.

Under that alignment of stars, our reviewers have rushed forward with a few recommendations at the end... of the year. After all, the world may well look significantly different come Oscar time.

In keeping with New Jersey Newsroom's metaphysics, what follows is a list of only the top fiction films that actually played in the Garden State this year. For many of our readers, they have the advantage of being available, either at the moviehouse, in video on demand or on disk.

This approaches adds some strong earlier releases. Unfortunately, it also excludes worthy contenders like "A Separation" and "Coriolanus." Nudged aside here are worthies like "Rise of the Planet of the Apes," "Hugo" and "Contagion," but in the expectation that we will be talking more about them come Academy Awards time.

It also means that a strong collection of documentaries such as "Buck," "Cinema Komunisto" and "The Cave of Forgotten Dreams" is excluded. Some have not yet played the state, and all deserve their own future spotlight.

“The Tree of Life” - Most movies leave the impression that theirs is a derivative art: oh, look, someone got a camera and filmed those dancers, those singers, those actors doing that script from this play or that book. With "The Tree of Life," Terrence Malick again offers something new and unfettered. All those other arts have their strengths, but none match Malick's ability to put us in the middle of family minutiae and cosmic cycles. When we experience a child's sense of his mother and discovery of the world, we know what comes before and after on this planet of waving grasses and chirping birds. This film benefits from the presence of Brad Pitt, who also deserves your consideration for "Moneyball," and Jessica Chastain, who deserves your consideration for almost everything. But the sheer movieness of Malick's work expands our perception of what this art form can be.

“Incendies” - Canadian director Denis Villeneuve's brilliant version of Wadji Mouawad's play "Scorched" deserved an Academy Award in 2010, but only made it to New Jersey this year. With riveting performances by Lubna Azabal and Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, this drama combines the twists of an Elmore Leonard detective story with the brutality and clarity of a Joseph Conrad colonial inquiry. Montréal twins Jeanne and Simon are shocked at the reading of their mother's will to learn they have a brother. Jeanne presses on to their mother's homeland—unnamed but clearly Lebanon—and learns more than one secret. The facts are horrific, as her mother's mystery takes Jeanne into the heart of a take-no-prisoners war with the sort of casualties far beyond our sanitized headlines. Despite this dark matter, "Incendies" testifies to the resilience of the spirit, illuminating corners of the human condition often left in darkness.

“Another Earth” - Please watch this movie. Brit Marling may not get nominated for an Oscar, but even in a year of astonishing performances by actresses, she deserves to win for her work as a once promising, now marginalized young woman. Working from a script she co-write with director Mike Cahill, Marling makes this tiny budgeted movie hum with mix of human feeling and cosmic questions paralleling Malick's—but more pointed. The excellent William Mapother provides strong support as a damaged widower. Cahill stretched every dollar—using his parents' house, shoveling excess from an ice-making plant to serve as snow— so "Another Earth" demonstrates how imagination can transcend circumstance. The great ending is at once surprising, fitting and open-ended.