Reasons 'Why': The Price of Gold

Before she became a villain in one of sports' weirdest scandals, Tonya Harding was figure skating's ugly duckling. Raised in Oregon by a physically and emotionally abusive mother, she was a skater who came from modest means and looked like it. Acted like it, too. Competing in a sport that celebrates elegance and finesse, Harding was rough and tumble. In The Price of Gold, the latest in ESPN Films' "30 for 30" series, Harding is described as coming from the "gutter." She's compared to an "alley cat" and called a "trailer trash ignoramus." Eventually, even Harding gets in on it, noting that the media portrayed her as a "piece of crap" juxtaposed against skating's "princess," Nancy Kerrigan. If life were a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, Harding would have gone to the Olympics in Lillehammer, skated up to her incredible potential, won gold and transformed into a swan in front of our eyes. And maybe then Harding would have liked the sight of her own reflection. Alas, Harding's fairy tale was destined to be Grimm. So instead, the ugly duckling got together with some loons and decided to disfigure the prettiest swan on the pond.

Even in retrospect the Harding-Kerrigan melodrama is stranger than fiction, except that all the players seemed straight out of central casting. The tomboyish, insecure blonde who honed her skills at a shopping mall skating rink. The pretty, poised brunette with the endorsement deals and the (misleading) air of privilege. The scheming husband, with the dark eyes and the mustache almost long enough to twirl. The goon accomplices who looked like they could get lost in a phone booth, assuming they could figure out how to get inside one. All of them came together under the bright spotlight of the pre-Internet Era Winter Olympics. Director Nanette Burstein (American Teen) recounts the events of 1994 with impressive clarity and pace, chronicling not just what happened but the media's frenzied reaction to it, because indeed that was a distinct element of this tabloid-worthy scandal right from the start. Those too young to remember the whack heard round the world will come away with a clear understanding of how it all unfolded. But what's most impressive about The Price of Gold is that it's more than a transcript. It looks beyond the highlights and lowlights to try to understand why.

I'm not sure most of us really considered the "why" back in 1994, which is odd considering that the most indelible image of the entire affair is Kerrigan, a few seconds removed from being clubbed on the knee, lying on the concrete floor of an ice arena screaming that very question. Partly we were distracted by all the questions about what Harding knew and when she knew it. But more than that, I suspect we thought we knew the answer. Why club Kerrigan? Because Harding was insecure about her skating and wanted to eliminate the competition. Simple as that, right? Except Burstein's film makes it clear that it isn't. For starters, even at that point Harding's skating ability might have been the thing she was most confident about. But the bigger misperception is that this was only about sports — about victory, about glory, about being a champion. Harding wanted all of that, but more so she was desperate for what came with it. Validation that she wasn't a piece of trash, for one thing. Financial rewards most of all.

If that sounds shallow, consider that the United States had two viable gold medal candidates in Kerrigan and Harding (Harding had been a 1990 U.S. Champion, and she was the first woman to land a triple axel in competition), and yet the sport seemed interested in marketing only one of them. Kerrigan already had endorsement deals. Harding, on the other hand, had married into more poverty. Then in her mid-20s, this would be Harding's last chance to win the lottery via Olympic metamorphosis. Emboldened by a husband, Jeff Gillooly, who likely saw Harding has his meal ticket, eliminating the stiffest competition with a swift blow to the knee must have seemed like sound financial planning.

Nothing justifies the assault, of course. It was a crime, pathetic and despicable. But in this era of millionaires battling millionaires in professional sports, it's helpful to be reminded that at the Olympics a gold medal can mean the difference between a lot and nothing at all. Harding felt that. And Burstein allows us to feel a measure of sympathy for the poor girl surrounded by poor influences who was marginalized by her sport for not looking the part. No doubt, Harding likely played a role in her ostracism long before she ever met Gillooly, and Burstein makes that clear, too, not with bitter backstage gossip from people who never liked Harding in the first place but with Harding's own damning testimony.

David Frost said that Richard Nixon's fundamental flaw was his "dislocated relationship with truth," and the same could be said of Harding, who continues to insist that she had no prior knowledge of the attack on Kerrigan. Watching her interviews in The Price of Gold is not unlike watching Nixon sitting down with Frost and desperately clinging to a lie that only he believes. But as I watched Harding continuing to proclaim her innocence, repeatedly portraying herself as a victim and even going so far as to argue that Kerrigan is the bitch in this story ("I thought we were friends," she says of Kerrigan shunning her after the attack, "that's rude"), I was repeatedly reminded of The Office's Michael Scott. Because like the beloved bumbling boss at Dunder Mifflin, when Harding talks you can see the wheels turning and spot flashes of genuine pride over what's coming out of her mouth — stuff that sounds convincing to her ears only. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic. In the end, Kerrigan's refusal to be interviewed by Burstein turns out to be both fitting (Kerrigan avoided the talking about the episode even as it was unfolding) and genius. Every minute Kerrigan isn't on screen is another for Harding to be under the microscope. And every minute on screen for Harding adds another inch to the rope she uses to hang herself. As if she wasn't dangling from the noose of public opinion already.

For her crimes of action and denial, Harding deserves all the scrutiny that can be thrown her way. "Wounded Knee" ultimately resulted in greater fame and fortune for Kerrigan than she would have enjoyed otherwise, but if she hadn't been able to win gold only months after the attack she would have been robbed of what to that point had been her life's main goal. Still, Burstein's documentary makes it clear that Harding had been a victim, too. Many times, in many ways. And in its honest examination of Harding's career, The Price of Gold deftly exposes a reality that should make us uncomfortable: figure skating is the rare sport in which we aren't compelled to root for the underdog, because that would ruin the aesthetic. Harding didn't fit the mold, and while she ultimately dug her own grave it probably wasn't the first time someone wanted her buried.

On that note, it's worth recalling that in the first volume of "30 for 30" documentaries, sprinter Marion Jones was held up as a positive example of someone who learned from her mistakes and came clean. But from where I sit, in John Singleton's film Jones followed the same playbook that Harding does here: admit to the stuff there isn't room left to deny and blame the rest on the crooked ex-husband. That's easier for Jones to get away with. She's attractive, charming and well spoken. Harding can't pull it off. She didn't fall from grace, because grace was never hers. She just fell.

The Price of Gold premieres January 16 on ESPN at 9 pm ET. Read other "30 for 30" reviews.

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Coulda Been a Contenda: No Mas

Roberto Duran stunned boxing fans when he put a beating on then welterweight champion Sugar Ray Leonard in their first meeting, "The Brawl in Montreal," June 20, 1980. But that was nothing compared to the shock he provided in their second meeting five months later. In the eighth round, after exchanging a few blows with Leonard, Duran traded hooks and jabs for a move that most in boxing had never seen before: he waved his right glove in surrender. "No mas," he said. No more. One of the most ferocious fighters the sport had ever seen — Joe Frazier said Duran reminded him of Charles Manson — up and quit. The crowd at the Superdome in New Orleans and those watching live on TVs around the world were flabbergasted. From his ringside microphone, legendary broadcaster Howard Cosell summed it up as it unfolded, calling it "the most inexplicable thing I have ever seen in the ring."

The "No Mas" fight transcended sports and instantly became part of the pop culture. (You didn't need to be able to pick Roberto Duran out of a lineup in order to understand a "no mas" joke.) The TV footage was boxing's version of the Zapruder film, with the outcome unmistakable and the cause shrouded in mystery. Why did Duran quit? Did he have stomach cramps, as he insisted after the fight but showed no signs of up until his surrender? Was he out of shape? Had he simply had enough of Leonard's showboating antics? These questions have never been satisfactorily answered. And for all of these reasons, the "No Mas" fight is perfect fodder for ESPN Films' "30 for 30" franchise. But like many boxing bouts, No Mas fails to live up to its self-created hype.

Credit where it's due: director Eric Drath has created a solid retrospective that convincingly contrasts Leonard's golden-boy charisma with Duran's dark-eyed intensity while capably guiding us through all the pre-fight hype, the in-ring battles and the post-fight fallout. He also gets Leonard to do what few elite athletes ever will: admit pain and fear. (Leonard says at one point that the punishment dished out to him in his first matchup with Duran made him feel "close to death.") These aren't small things, and No Mas is consistently entertaining as it looks back into the past. Alas, Drath missteps by trying to recreate that long-ago conflict in the here and now, structuring his documentary around a trip by Leonard to confront Duran in his native Panama that never feels like anything other than what it is: a made-for-TV gimmick constructed by the filmmaker to artificially sweeten the drama.

Not surprisingly, that subplot leads nowhere. When Leonard and Duran literally step into a ring to have their verbal showdown (a goofy concept straight out of reality TV), Leonard doesn't care enough to rough up Duran until he draws blood, and Duran simply falls back on his old excuses without even needing to fully articulate those excuses for the record. As verbal confrontations go, it's less a heavyweight bout a la 2013's unforgettable Winfrey-Armstrong and more like a slap-fight you'd find on an elementary school playground — or on Twitter. In effect, both men throw up their hands and say "no mas" to "No Mas," and we shouldn't be surprised. People nearer to the end of their public lives are just likely (and perhaps more so) to be interested in protecting their reputations as they were in their youth, even though journalists of all stripes repeatedly romanticize the notion that personal revelations are somehow progressive, with the truth always coming out in the end.

Buying into that myth in the first place is mistake enough, but Drath makes another common mistake by falling in love with his original idea, because when the Leonard-Duran conversation resulted in little more than awkward patter, Drath would have been better off cutting the subplot from his film entirely. In the least, he should have recognized that the most significant moment in that exchange seems to be one that he relegates to the closing credits, when Duran wonders aloud why Leonard wouldn't grant him a third fight just a few months after the "No Mas" bout. Leonard's stuttering response could be interpreted as revealing: "It was psychological--- it was psychological warfare," he says, insisting he was trying to get into Duran's head and sounding very much like a guy who always had Duran in his.

Of course, to confront Leonard's avoidance of an immediate rematch would mean confronting Leonard, who Drath mostly treats with kid gloves. It also would have meant being more forthright about the place of "No Mas" within Duran's entire career. Because while Duran suggested he was going to give up the sport after that 1980 fight, he didn't. Far from it. According to statistics provided at the end of the film, Duran appeared in 12 more title matches across three weight classes and won three more titles. As KO Magazine editor in chief Steve Farhood puts it, "(Duran) did enough to prove that ('No Mas') was an aberration. That wasn't the real Roberto Duran, and we think of him as one of the greatest 10 fighters in boxing history. 'No Mas' didn't take that away."

Unfortunately, No Mas almost does. Drath spends more than 70 minutes making Duran look like a one-hit wonder, a jerk who turned into a coward. Then he spends three minutes trying to give Duran the respect his career demands. That's not to say that Duran doesn't deserve scrutiny (his excuses have been inconsistent and unconvincing), or to suggest that the "No Mas" fight isn't worthy of a narrow focus (it's one of the most famous fights in boxing history, with good reason). Still, it's hard to imagine Duran's subsequent redemption being downgraded to a footnote if he had been the American fighter with the golden boy image. Boxing loves villains, and Duran made for a great one, but the value of looking back with hindsight is the chance to see him as more than his 1980 reputation, to look at these events anew within a larger context.

With fresh perspective, Drath might have unearthed an epic tale of a boxer who had little personal fortune, then became an overnight celebrity by beating Leonard, then swiftly fell in love with the spoils of star status and lost his commitment to greatness, only to become an overnight villain when he surrendered in Leonard's rematch, only to slowly but steadily rebuild his career and restore his reputation. As it happens, one of Drath's talking heads essentially tries to point the director in that direction. "As horrible as ('No Mas') was for his image at the time," Farhood says, "it gave (Duran) the opportunity for redemption. And there's no greater story in boxing than the story of redemption." Alas, at that point in Drath's documentary the closing credits are just three minutes away, leaving that greater story to be told by someone else.


I fell off pace with the "30 for 30" series in 2013, but I hope to do better moving forward. Here the ones I have reviewed.

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Under the Circumstances: 12 Years a Slave

In what is already the iconic shot of 12 Years a Slave, Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) digs his toes into the muddy ground his heels can't quite reach in order to avoid being choked to death by the noose around his neck. It's a gruesome yet painterly image, which makes it quintessential Steve McQueen. And as the director is wont to do, he holds this wordless shot for well over a minute so that we might feel Solomon's struggle and notice the nonchalance with which the slaves behind him return to their chores, either disinterested in his fate or painfully aware that they are powerless to intervene. In any movie about any man, this near hanging would make for a striking image, but here, of course, it takes on added meaning because of the significance of the subject matter. In this one shot, McQueen does much to sum up the entire American slave experience in which life was little more than trying to avoid slipping into death.

But after watching 12 Years a Slave for a second time, I wonder if a more significant shot might happen a little later in the sequence — after a fellow slave dares to bring water to Solomon, after the plantation overseer is seen pacing on the nearby veranda, waiting for his boss and Solomon's owner (Benedict Cumberbatch's William Ford) to return to determine Solomon's fate, and after a few slave children are spotted playing in the field behind Solomon, laughing obliviously. It's a shot of the mistress of the house (Liza J. Bennett) standing at the railing of her mansion balcony calmly observing Solomon, whose shoulders and rope-bound neck are out of focus in the foreground. In this one image, only a few seconds long, McQueen does much to sum up the institutionalized indifference that's core to not only America's shameful slave history but to any instance in which human suffering or inequality is allowed to persist in plain view.

In this sequence and others, 12 Years a Slave repeatedly observes the oh-so-thin and often arbitrary line that exists between those relegated to suffering and those allowed to avoid it, even if only momentarily. Solomon, of course, is Exhibit A: a free black man living in a home with his wife and two children one moment, who upon being kidnapped becomes a slave assigned the name "Platt" the next. But consider, too, the early scene in which a well-dressed black man walks into the store where Solomon and his wife are shopping for luggage, seemingly as free as they are until his white master enters, apologizes for the disturbance and leads the man away by the collar as if he were a loose dog. Or the scene in which another man on Solomon's boat toward slavery manages to be saved from that fate by his white owner and races off the boat without looking back. Or the scene in which Solomon, considering escape from the Epps plantation, manages to stumble upon and walk away from the hanging of another black man solely because he's wearing a pendant that marks him as Epps property. Or the scene in which Solomon avoids certain death by convincing the vicious Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender) that he couldn't possibly have written a letter intended for delivery in the north, and Epps, buying Solomon's account that he has been hoodwinked by the duplicitous Armsby (Garret Dillahunt), a white man, says regretfully, "Were he not free and white, Platt. Were he not free and white."

Why are some deemed worthy of deprivation and others not? As Solomon tells Tibeats (Paul Dano), when it is suggested that the wood panels on the clapboard cabin he is constructing are uneven, "It's all a matter of perspective. From where you stand you might see different. ... I simply ask that you use all your senses before rendering judgment." As Mistress Ford gazes from her balcony at Solomon hanging from a tree, we can't be sure exactly what she's feeling, but it seems safe to assume she isn't using all of her senses. And given that Mistress Ford wouldn't have been born with an innate hatred or indifference to people with dark skin, it seems safe to assume that she learned to ignore those senses over time, ultimately seeing the world from a perspective in which the enslavement and brutalization of black people was perfectly appropriate. Solomon, on the other hand, is so aware of an alternative to this perspective that he deduces that his relatively compassionate enslaver, William Ford, must be a victim like he is, calling him a "decent man" who is a slaver only "under the circumstances." It's an assessment that echoes in memory later, after Ford cuts down Solomon from that tree and arranges his transfer to the Epps plantation to avoid the murderous wrath of Tibeats. "Whatever the circumstances, you are an exceptional nigger, Platt," Ford tells Solomon, "but I fear no good will come of it." Bottom line translation: You'll never be more than a nigger.

In that moment, as Ford shows a curious, inconsistent and yet unmistakable affection for the slave lying on his floor, still bound at the wrists and ankles, it's tempting to object to this injustice in light of Solomon's equally unmistakable exceptionality, and because of his documented freedom. (It's so obvious he doesn't deserve to be a slave! How can Ford not see it?) But that's the bait in this movie's trap. Solomon's freedom, of course, is no more justified than that of any other slave, and likewise his enslavement is no more inhuman. Indeed, this much should be obvious, and yet repeatedly Ford and Epps preach the Bible to their slaves while committing their ungodly acts. They get lost in Scripture, property laws, cultures and customs and ignore fundamental truths. And, sadly, these behaviors didn't end with the Emancipation Proclimation.

"It's all a lie," Solomon tells Epps after being double-crossed by Armsby. He might as well be talking about the pretenses we cling to anytime we ignore suffering and inequality around us, which for many of us is pretty often. There is a significant difference, it must be noted, between those who are legally and forcibly enslaved and those who held down "merely" by poverty, prejudice, inadequate education, limited opportunity and so on. Alas, there's less of a difference between those who looked suffering in the face and accepted it 170 years ago and those who do the same today, which is why I'm chilled to think that when I'm looking at Mistress Ford looking at a man hanging by his neck in plain view, I'm looking at me. All that's changed are the circumstances.

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Bests of 2013

2013 was the year that this blog gathered dust. Statistically speaking, I posted nine times, but even that sad number is misleading: three of those posts pertained to 2012 releases, one was my annual Eyes of March celebration and one was my reflection on Roger Ebert upon his death in April. Alas, the only 2013 theatrical release that I reviewed in this space was To the Wonder — the movie the showed me what it feels like to not fall under the spell of a Terrence Malick movie.

This wasn't by design. That is, mentally speaking, I didn't disassemble this blog, put it back in its box and stick it up in the attic for storage, although doing so would have eliminated some clutter in my mental living space. No, rather the blog was always there, never totally out of view, like a piece of exercise equipment once used regularly but now only functional for the purposes of air-drying delicates — a fitting analogy, actually, because on many occasions last year when I thought I was ready to start blogging again I was amazed at how quickly and completely my writing muscles had atrophied.

I won't bore you with the reasons for this hiatus except to say that there were several factors, personally and professionally, that demanded my attention and energies elsewhere. I guess that's my way of saying that it didn't feel like much of a choice. And I mention that now because I can't say I know if 2014 will be a return to earlier years of production or more of the recent trend. I certainly have a desire — and, to a degree, even a plan — for writing more moving forward, because I miss it. Oh, how I miss it. But until things actually change, it's just a fantasy.

All of the above is prologue to this: Not writing about movies has had a considerable effect on my relationship with them. At the most basic level, there's something to be said for the heightened attention of watching a movie with the intent to write about it — and the more I went without writing this past year, the more my mind was prone to wandering. But on a deeper level, this past year I gained a special appreciation for just how much the act of writing about a movie is tied to my basic understanding of it. I mean, it wasn't a total surprise: one of the reasons I've cited over the years for why I write about movies in the first place is because it helps me engage with them. But what I didn't expect was how fleeting a movie's power could be if I didn't make some attempt to write about it, even if "writing about it" meant just scribbling thoughts in my notebook I knew I wasn't going to have the time to reshape in a fully formed review.

The purpose of this post is to take a moment to look back on the new releases I saw this past year, and as I do that I have no doubt — none — that my picks for best movies of the year would be different if I'd written about all of these movies, turning them over several more times in my brain, holding on to their strengths and weaknesses a little longer and arguing about them in the comments section of this and other blogs. (Aside: More than the reviewing, that's what I miss: the written dialogue about movies with other movie fans. It's one of the reasons my conversations series with Ed Howard was so much fun, back before Ed became a father and I fell into this black hole of nonwriting. Comments sections are apparently passe now, which is a shame because Twitter just doesn't cut it, and the 140-character limitation is only part of the problem. There's something about the nature of that social media forum that seems to put as much focus on the who as the what, as if one can't reject or support the content of a tweet without simultaneously rejecting or praising the tweeter, which thus seems to create an environment in which respectful, lively debate amongst established friends is a rareity in that space. But I digress.)

That said, there's an upside to the slightness of my mental notebook: the movies that stand out in my memory stand out for good reason, with the noise of controversy, hype, contrarianism and so on mostly nonexistent. Thus, determining the films that had the greatest effect on me was remarkably simple. (For the first time in more than a decade, I didn't see a single new release more than once, so each movie got a fair shot.) So while I can't look back and remember the nuances of specific trees in the forest as I could in previous years, I gaze upon 2013 as if it's Monument Valley, with prodigious spectacles standing out in plain sight.

So let's do this ...

Of the 46 new releases I saw this past year, several were dull, bloated or uninspired. But thankfully only three movies were aggressively painful for almost their entirety: The Fifth Estate, The World's End and, yep, To the Wonder. The first of those three is brutally written and features a lead performance by Benedict Cumberbatch as Julian Assange that struck me as what it might look like to see Tilda Swinton portraying Manhunter's Francis Dollarhyde doing an impression of Cumberbatch's Khan. The second two films are monotonous, one-trick ponies about soulless robots who look a lot like real people but just aren't.

Just beyond that small collection of memorably unpleasant 2013 movies are several that might have joined them if not for a few standout moments that almost made up for the entire experience. Movies like The Great Gatsby, which is graced by a beautifully orchestrated entrance by Leonardo DiCaprio as the movie's titular bigshot that marvelously weaves the actor's star power with that of the character. Movies like Man of Steel, which is utterly undone by its exhausting action sequences but includes some charming sequences with Kevin Costner, as Superman's earthly father, imparting the kind of tender love and care that you figure Ray Kinsella would have provided if the man of steel had crash landed in his cornfield. Movies like The Lone Ranger, which quite literally had almost put me to sleep when, roughly two hours into the movie, we get our first dose of the William Tell Overture, and I shot forward to the edge of my seat, reminded yet again of the power of a great score.

I won't waste time on all those middle-of-the-road movies, ones like After Earth, where in true M. Night Shyamalan fashion everything has a name and needs to be described, or Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, which takes the quantity over quality approach to comedy and every now and then hits home (a joke about the capital of my home state of Oregon killed me way more than it should have), or The Internship, which made me laugh but left me unable to remember exactly why within 5 minutes of leaving the theater, and so on. Those are the movies capsule reviews are made for — and since I'll be doing nothing more than capsules for my favorite movies of the year, we should move along.

I also won't go into detail on the assortment of movies that I definitely admired and really wanted to love, and in some cases was profoundly affected by here and there, but that ultimately didn't linger with me. Movies like Frances Ha, Fruitvale Station, Her, Inside Llewyn Davis, Mud, Nebraska and The Spectacular Now.

Nope, let's just dive into my top 10 movies of the year (listed in alphabetical order), which I identified as those that left the strongest impression and that, more than the rest, call me back to re-experience them.

12 Years a Slave: Knowing the subject matter, and director Steve McQueen's penchant for viscerally depicting gruesomeness and suffering, perhaps I went into 12 Years a Slave with too many layers of defense in place, because the one thing that's nagged me since walking out of the theater several months ago it is how startlingly unemotional the entire experience was. And yet the film has haunted me, not because of the despair of Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor, excellent as always), or the savagery of the Epps who enslave him (Michael Fassbender and Sarah Paulson, ditto), or any of the moments of grand brutality. No, what really shook me to the core are all those moments of passive cruelty. Much discussed, and rightfully so, is the memorable shot of Solomon hanging from a noose, digging his toes into the mud beneath him to try to avoid choking, as fellow slaves on the plantation go about their business in the background, both because they have no other recourse and also because a slave hanging from a tree isn't an unusual event on the plantation. But equally powerful is the way McQueen repeatedly shows the proximity of the ramshackle slave cabins to the Epps' mansion home, just off the porch, much the way a backyard doghouse might be in view of your living room window. Or the way the screenplay, by John Ridley, allows the slave whose children have been taken from her to remain in constant mourning — in defiance of her enslaver's casual insistence that they will soon be forgotten — because how could someone ever recover from that? It's these comparatively subtle elements that somehow cut deepest, finding skin to crack that hasn't already been scarred over by all our history lessons. As a story of one man, 12 Years a Slave is forgettable. But along the way it challenges us in surprisingly subtle ways to reexamine the vast amounts of suffering we watch happening around us almost every day, just off the edge of our porches, and dismiss in part because it's happening in plain sight.

All Is Lost: Robert Redford's restraint in this picture is remarkable. Not because Redford is an actor known for chewing the scenery. Not because his character hardly speaks. But because Redford is so damn expressive despite almost never even employing many, you know, expressions. You couldn't watch 5 minutes of Homeland this past season without Claire Danes or Damian Lewis getting into a panting contest, but over a 106-minute film in which Redford is almost always on screen he hardly does as much as sigh, and he certainly never mutters to himself. Think about that for a second. No, really. Stop and consider that. Because this is essentially a silent film, but the movie speaks constantly. Redford's character does, too, it just happens through action. I'm not crazy about the ending of writer/director J.C. Chandor's film, but he, Redford and cinematographers Frank G. DeMarco and Peter Zuccarini have created perhaps the most cinematic picture of the year.

American Hustle: My favorite David O. Russell film by a mile. The acting is superb — playful and yet authentic. (Aside: The last two movies I saw this year were Her and American Hustle, and to that I say: Amy fucking Adams, ladies and gentlemen! I can't think of another actress who could play such polar opposites so effortlessly. Even in American Hustle, where she plays a character playing a character, and often struggling to figure out which character is the real one, it never looks like "acting." Phenomenal.) But what really impresses me about American Hustle is its structure. I'm not sure if I should credit the screenwriters (Russell and Eric Singer) or the editors (Alan Baumgarten, Jay Cassidy and Crispin Struthers), so how about all of them, because here's the thing: in the best way, American Hustle feels like one big tangled ball of yarn. One shot and scene leads to the next, and the next, and the next, and somehow none of the scenes feel like standalone pieces that could possibly be cut out. It's all one big lovely cinematic experience, zigzagging here and there and looping back. Fun!

Before Midnight: I can't imagine we'll ever see another trilogy like this one. Each of the films works distinctly on its own. All of the films are elegantly linked. Which is the best? They all are; each film captures Jesse and Celine perfectly in that space and time. It's clear that director Richard Linklater and his stars and fellow architects Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy care deeply about these characters — but somehow they avoid being too precious with them. Each of these films has reveled the everyday ugliness of these characters (their insecurities, their annoying habits, their self-delusions) with a frankness that is tough to match, yet without ever losing compassion for these characters. It's because their faults are so apparent that their love is so moving and heroic.

Blue is the Warmest Colour: Here's all I know about the controversy surrounding this film: Apparently the two main actresses felt that the director treated them with cruelty. I'm sorry to hear that, because the end product is wonderful — one of the most convincing depictions of young love I've ever seen. I believe there also was a degree of controversy (or at least hype) about the length and graphic nature of the sex scenes in this film, and that's not surprising. But in a film almost exactly 3 hours long, those scenes are perfectly balanced with a handful of others that stretch beyond what was minimally required to advance the plot but that ultimately contribute to the film's extraordinary power: the scene in which Adele braves a gay bar and meets Emma; the scene in which Adele is hazed by her friends; the scene in which Adele intentionally loses herself in her party hosting duties because she doesn't feel comfortable amongst Emma's art world friends; the scene in which Adele and Emma scream at one another in their apartment; the scene in which Adele and Emma meet at a restaurant in the aftermath. This movie chronicles this relationship in the same way many of us would chronicle our own experience with love: it obsesses over those defining moments that would linger in memory for years to come. Because of that patience and thoroughness, when the movie ends it indeed feels as if time has passed; Adele has aged before our eyes. The camera loves actress Adele Exarchopoulos (Adele), and she and Lea Seydoux (Emma) provide performances that at least artistically justify their emotional and physical nakedness, if not necessarily their treatment on set.

The Broken Circle Breakdown: I'm not sure any fiction film was quite as moving for me as this one, and yet I'm going to write little about it because of the high likelihood that you haven't seen it. Like some strange combination of Once and Blue Valentine, The Broken Circle Breakdown is a musical and a gut-wrenching tragedy that is as adept at portraying love and passion as it is at conjuring anger and despair. It's certainly not a flawless picture. There are some George W. Bush references, for example, that can be architecturally defended but that in actual practice seem dated, forced and ultimately distracting. But the movie is devastating anyway (in the way I wish 12 Years a Slave would have been). Lead actors Johan Heldenbergh and Veerle Baetens deliver vulnerable performances and mine nuance from the bluegrass music that dominates the film. One example can be found near the end, in a performance of "If I Needed You," which is full of longing, loneliness, pain, disillusionment and desperation far beyond the overt lyrics of the song. There's so much going on between the main characters in that scene that I was stunned when I downloaded the soundtrack afterward and realized "If I Needed You" is but 3 minutes long. I will return to this movie only when I'm ready.

Captain Phillips: "Tom Hanks. Everybody loves Tom Hanks." If you didn't watch the footage of Steve Martin receiving his honorary Oscar, dedicate 20 minutes to it and watch Martin Short's remarks, followed by Tom Hanks' introduction and Martin's acceptance speech, from which I borrowed the quote. It's everything the Academy Awards should be, and while it's frustrating that these lifetime achievement awards have been removed from the program proper and sent to their own ghetto, the upside is that they get more tribute time. But I digress. Yes, everybody loves Tom Hanks, and yet we take his talent for granted. So far as I can tell, he's a guy without established moves. He doesn't do the wide-eyed, loud thing that Pacino does. He doesn't do the squinty thing De Niro does. He doesn't point to his forehead like DiCaprio does. He doesn't shield his face in a moment of embarrassment like Hopkins does. And so on. No, what makes Tom Hanks so superb is that he has the confidence to give each performance exactly what it needs and nothing more. Not all his performances need to be dialed up to 11, and he doesn't try. And in Captain Phillips, a movie that's a nice tight procedural thriller and then starts to lose steam, Hanks salvages everything with what might be the finest 10 or so minutes of his career. Minutes in which he goes there. Goes to 11. Does it in a way that seems utterly new — like nothing he's done before, like nothing that any other actor has done before. It's moving and it's staggering, and it's just pure excellence. And credit to director Paul Greengrass because one of the reasons that Hanks' final scene has such tremendous power is because of who he acts with: a woman playing a military doctor who for all I know is a real-life military doctor portraying herself. The scene works because the doctor is just doing her job — a job she's done before. She doesn't know that she's in a movie, that this is a big moment, that if Steven Spielberg were directing the thing that John Williams would be conducting the orchestra just to her left. Nope, she just does her job, and Hanks goes there, because the moment demands it.

Gravity: This is the weak link in this list. I want to be clear about that. I was tempted to list perhaps Blackfish or The Act of Killing, which got under my skin more than any other movie that didn't make the top-10 here, and certainly more than Gravity did. But even though I wasn't utterly wowed by Gravity, even though it often made me think of two relatively recent science fiction movies I like a heck of a lot more (Steven Soderbergh's Solaris and Danny Boyle's Sunshine), even though I found George Clooney's character to be completely obnoxious, even though I thought director Alfonso Cauron undercut the femaleness of his main character by making Sandra Bullock look like a sexless cyborg and, finally, even though the backstory about Bullock's character is absurdly and clumsily forced into the plot, well, I've found myself wanting to revisit it. So it makes the list. We'll see if that second viewing increases my admiration or the reverse. But despite its faults, yeah, I'm gonna go there: Gravity is pulling me back. (Oh, almost forgot: It's 91 minutes long. Points for efficiency.)

Stories We Tell: Based on single viewings, this is my favorite movie of the year — heartfelt, thoughtful and moving. In theory, this is Sarah Polley's investigation into her own life, into her mother's past. But the effect of her film is far greater. Cable TV has been dominated in recent years by two outstanding shows, Breaking Bad and Mad Men, that have lead characters with dual identities — and much of the fascination of those shows is trying to figure out which of those identities is most authentic. But Stories We Tell deftly demonstrates that we all contain multitudes, and that these multitudes aren't either/or, they're all/always — brought out by context and circumstance. When we face life's challenges we often feel compelled to try to understand what happened, to trace a mystery to its source the way Polley tries to trace her paternal lineage. Stories We Tell shows the pointlessness of that pursuit. Life is too messy, too complex to be tied up with a bow.

The Wolf of Wall Street: It's straight outta Goodfellas and Casino, and thank goodness for that. The Wolf of Wall Street is one of the best pictures of Martin Scorsese's career. (Related: If Yo-Yo Ma stops by your house, hand the guy a cello.) This movie is alive — it oozes confidence and is overflowing with the thrill of great cinema. That some people are interpreting that thrill of great cinema as some kind of endorsement of the characters here, well, it baffles me. The characters in this movie are monsters, and there's not a hint of nuance in that. Do they have a good time? Sure, just like any addict consumed by the high of their drug of choice. Do we have a good time? If you can get high from great cinema, absolutely, which isn't an endorsement of the characters either. The only thing holding this back from being the greatest movie of the year is that it makes the mistake of so many action movies these days and believes that more is more. That said, if you're going to spend more time than necessary watching grand destruction, better to do that with this potent, relatable, weighty picture than amidst the crumbling skyscrapers of so many superhero movies.

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