Film Carew's 20 Best Films Of 2013

Your old homie Film Carew saw 290-ish films this year. And boy are my eyes tired. With 2013 nearly done-and-dusted, it's time to look back on the year that's been. Working out what films can-and-will go in any year's countdown is up for debate - there are no hard-and-fast release dates as with albums; and film festivals make when a film is 'out' in Australia even fuzzier - but basically Team Musique took this approach: if it showed anywhere in Australia this year, and I saw it, it was in the mix. Which means some of these things are technically coming to local cinemas in 2014, but are included here; even though there are other awesome things coming to local cinemas in 2014 (like François Ozon's acidic Young & Beautiful and Yann Gonzalez's synth-pop surrealist You & The Night) that were deemed out-of-the-running. Oh, and, whilst we're doing housekeeping: anyone looking for Cristian Mungiu's Beyond The Hills, Julia Loktev's Loneliest Planet, Malgorzata Szumowska's Elles, or Pablo Larraín's No - all of which enjoyed local release in 2013 - they were in the Film Carew 2012 countdown. But that was then, and this is now.

Here are the 20 Best Films Of 2013:

20. Gravity (USA, director Alfonso Cuarón)

It's dubiously-scripted and awfully-scored, but Gravity's zero-g theme-park-ride was 2013's definitive in-the-theatre event. For all Cuarón's digitally-assembled, unbroken 'takes' of pirouetting camera and endless space, this is less a blockbuster space-movie that a cinematic chain-reaction, breathlessly hurtling towards a 90-minute finish-line.

19. Django Unchained (USA, Quentin Tarantino)

Where Tarantino once made empty collages of quoted cool, Inglourious Basterds marked an artistic turning point, from which Django Unchanged used pastiche to deliver an audacious provocation. Turning America's greatest shame into a lurid, bloody, funny genre movie, the filmmaker wrenches the conversation on slavery from the safe realm of sober-history-lesson, and throws it into the populist discourse like a live grenade.

18. Spring Breakers (USA, Harmony Korine)

2013's greatest act of cinematic trolling, Korine's 'crossover' throws itself into the witless, MTV-televised bacchanalia of Florida-in-March. Its lurid parade of fresh flesh and leftover storytelling clichés is montaged into a disorienting, aqueous mosaic that embodies the unreality of the reality-TV era. It's like Trash Humpers turned tone-poem turned portrait-of-a-generation; an auteurist Trojan-horse smuggled into unsuspecting multiplexes.

17. Frances Ha (USA, Noah Baumbach)

As light on its feet as its titular dancer, Baumbach's nouvelle-vague-ish shrine to leading lady Greta Gerwig views her late-20s fuck-up-ery with a non-judgmental eye and a gentle smile. Its loose, episodic storytelling befits its themes, Gerwig's comic turn is sublime, and the arch dialogue is endlessly quotable.

16. Before Midnight (USA, Richard Linklater)

1995's Before Sunrise was a film about two young people passing briefly through each other's lives, gazing towards the future. Before Midnight is its mirroring image: those same two people, lives now wed as one, now looking back in anger. The passage of time has not been kind: the breezy, Rohmeresque romance of two decades prior having sunken into toxic, resentment-riddled, Bergmanesque marriage. Taken with its two predecessors, it's a deep study in the passage of time, and the way people change oh-so-much and not-at-all.

15. Blue Is The Warmest Colour (France, Abdellatif Kechiche)

Come for the girl-on-girl action, stay for the heart-rending three-hour coming-of-age suffering in which Adèle Exarchopolous spends half the time silently crying. Kechiche captures the passion - and obsession - of first love, but his rigorous, process-oriented filmmaking fares far better when depicting the social shame of sexuality, and the ache of first love lost.

14. Camille Claudel 1915 (France, Bruno Dumont)

Dumont's meditation on martyrdom and madness is the culmination of his ascetic auteurism and fondness for stark cinematic cruelty. His seventh feature chronicles - with an oppressive, windswept naturalism - three days in the life of the tragic, titular sculptor; Juliette Binoche submitting herself to the role like its own form of artistic penance.

13. Amour (France, Michael Haneke)

It came billed as Haneke's great human picture, something bordering on a love story. Instead, the Austrian auteur's portrait of aging, suffering, and dying is about the inescapability of mortality; its claustrophobic, single-location apartment slowly suffocating the geriatric paramours, their great love no match for the cruelty of death.

12. Stories We Tell (Canada, Sarah Polley)

Polley's documentary about the search for the identity of her biological father isn't, simply, an excavation of family skeletons for dramatic purposes. Instead, it's an unexpectedly-moving conversation on how time, temporality, and memory get tangled up in the human need for narrative; that desire to turn experiences into anecdotes, and lives into stories.

11. The Act Of Killing (Denmark/Indonesia, Joshua Oppenheimer)

This daring documentary invites now-retired death-squad soldiers - paramilitary men who murdered countless civilians in Indonesia's genocidal 1960s - to dramatically recreate their crimes as a no-budget, mafia-movie-inspired film-within-the-film; tragedy being repeated as farce. History has long been written by the winners, and Oppenheimer's profound piece of activism - a movie utterly horrifying and weirdly hilarious - is about how that story gets told.

10. The Eternal Return Of Antonis Paraskevas (Greece, Elina Psykou)

The Greek Weird Wave continues apace with this duly-odd parable about an aging, debt-riddled TV-personality holed up in an abandoned luxury hotel. In his crumbling ivory tower, the titular “hero” (Dogtooth dad Christos Stergiogiou) descends into a fantastic madness as he watches himself endlessly on TV; Psykou's debut wielding salty symbols of contemporary alienation and self-obsession, and of the state of Greek society.

9. Tabu (Portugal, Miguel Gomes)

“People's lives are not like dreams,” warns a character in Tabu. Maybe not, but their memories are. So, this black-and-white marvel shifts from dull domestic realism to flowery cinematic romanticism, juxtaposing the banality of the present with the mystique of memory. Gomes - a former film critic! - has staged a film both deeply philosophical and saturated in love; a study in the intersection between cinema and memory that plays like a matinée's daffy daydream.

8. To The Wonder (USA, Terrence Malick)

Malick's latest shrine to divinity of cinema is another impressionist mosaic of breathy voice-overs, streaming sunlight, and celebrity actors pirouetting through fields of grass. Malick's rapturous camera gazes at those actors as if in love with them, and To The Wonder captures the breathless quality of how it feels to be in love; be it with another person or with all of creation.

7. Upstream Color (USA, Shane Carruth)

Carruth's follow-up to his egghead sci-fi thinkpiece Primer is a far more philosophical, interpretive, and photographic work, in which its seemingly-abstract clues are slowly revealed as pieces of a grander scheme. It's a beautiful-looking, daringly-cinematic work about the cycle of life and cycles of abuse, about Earth as an ecosystem in which those daring to play God - or even be God - cannot corral the way molecules interact.

6. The Congress (Israel/etc, Ari Folman)

Folman's arch-philosophical follow-up to his wartime memoir Waltz With Bashir, the ultra-meta The Congress is a semi-animated shrine to cinema; to fading formats, the intersection between imagination and technology, and what it means to live in dreams. Starring Robin Wright as a symbolic version of herself, this wildly-ambitious picture is at once Hollywood parody, Israeli parable, and Matrix-esque 'mindblower'.

5. Mood Indigo (France, Michel Gondry)

Blowing in with a crowdpleasing bluster o' cutesy whimsy and twee romance, Mood Indigo initially seems like Gondry bordering on self-parody. Then all the surrealist gimmickry becomes brutal symbolism: this a tragic tale about how hiding wrapped up in your sugary daydreams doesn't protect you from reality. Seeing the original 125-minute version may've been my favourite cinemagoing experience of 2013; but the fact Gondry himself willingly sliced out 30 minutes for a far-weaker 'wide-release' cut kinda taints the memory.

4. Computer Chess (USA, Andrew Bujalski)

Chronicling a three-day computer chess tournament at an Austin hotel in 1980, Bujalski's portrait of 30+-years-ago technology is shot on 30+-years-ago technology: analogue B&W video that's so soupy, wobbly, and washed-out that it renders the familiar alien. It starts out as a quirky comedy-of-nerdery, but soon becomes something far denser; the photography getting far wilder as Computer Chess becomes a philosophical freakout on distinctions between 'man' and 'machine'.

3. Room 237 (USA, Rodney Ascher)

Entirely built from repurposed images from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, this wild piece of cine-philosophy listens to unseen pundits obsessively unpacking their varied theses on the dark secrets of Kubrick's symbolic text. Some viewers'll see the resulting movie as an absurdist comedy - one subject is a conspiracy-theorist who believes The Shining is Kubrick's mea culpa for having staged the Moon Landing footage - but Ascher's documentary is, instead, a mind-altering meta-study on the very nature of film-criticism.

2. Leviathan (USA, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor)

No film has ever looked anything like Leviathan, which with its opening shot instantly thrusts itself into the ranks of cinema's greatest-ever documentaries. Part ethnographic cinema, part psychedelic experiment, it's a masterpiece of pure sight/sound: the filmmakers placing their seafarin' cameras in all kinds of unexpected places; long-haul fishing-trawler life turned into an alien parade of unimaginable photographic images.

1. The Past (France, Asghar Farhadi)

A retrospective of Farhadi's films, which screened at ACMI in March, confirmed that the Iranian auteur is contemporary cinema's greatest dramatist, the new-millennium's master of the moral quandary. His meticulously-made movies slowly reveal glimpses of information so as to shift audience perception; asking viewers to judge the veracity of various characters and their competing 'truths'. The Past, his first film made in exile from Iran, is yet another study in the spectre of secrets: though told entirely in the present, the effects of the past ripple through every frame. It doesn't so much mark the culmination of his craft as its continuation: it's not 'better' than Beautiful City, Fireworks Wednesday, About Elly, or A Separation, but the weight of his past work makes every frame feel multi-layered; this a film - and a filmography - ripe for deep cinematic study.

Notable Mentions

Informant (USA, Jamie Meltzer);The Comedy (USA, Rick Alverson); Drinking Buddies (USA, Joe Swanson); A Field In England (UK, Ben Wheatley); Magic Magic (USA/Chile, Sebastián Silva); Reality (Italy, Matteo Garrone); The Great Beauty (Italy, Paolo Sorrentino); The Stranger By The Lake (France, Alain Guiraudie); Coming Forth By Day (Egypt, Hala Lofty); Viola (Argentina, Matías Piñeiro); All Cats Are Brilliant (Greece, Constantina Voulgaris); It Felt Like Love (USA, Eliza Hittman); Ginger & Rosa (UK, Sally Potter); The Bling Ring (USA, Sofia Coppola); Macaroni & Cheese (France, Sophie Letourner); Vic + Flo Saw A Bear (Canada, Denis Côté); In Bob We Trust (Australia, Lynn-Maree Milburn); Fuck For Forest (Germany, Michal Marczak); Blackfish (Canada, Gabriela Cowperthwaite); 12 Years A Slave (USA, Steve McQueen)