"We immediately became friends because of the holy communion of movies," Cocks says. "I found in him someone who loved movies even more than I did and had seen even more than I had -- and I thought I'd seen a lot."

Scorsese's career-long editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, was similarly impressed when she met the director a few years earlier. She had responded to an ad in the paper for a six-week summer course at NYU, where Scorsese was putting the finishing touches on his first short, "What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?"

After graduating, Scorsese and Schoonmaker cemented their friendship working on the Oscar-winning documentary "Woodstock" and other projects with former NYU classmates Michael Wadleigh and John Binder.

"Marty had already been watching the films of the masters that went before him on television from a very young age, so he was incredibly knowledgeable and able to express his thoughts about filmmaking and what he hoped to do as a director," says Schoonmaker, who credits Scorsese with teaching her everything she knows about editing. "He's such a great teacher because what he does is excites you and makes you want to run out and watch movies."

It was the late '60s -- an exciting time to be living in New York City for hungry young film fans. Every week seemed to bring fresh offerings from the likes of Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa and the French New Wave, and the young cineastes spent their evenings between the New Yorker and the Thalia moviehouses on Gotham's Upper West Side devouring the latest offerings.

Cocks remembers Scorsese tagging along for nearly all the press screenings he attended. "Marty can find something positive in almost any movie," the former film critic says. "His incredible eye and generosity of spirit toward almost any filmmaker really moderated my Time-magazine wise-guy instincts. There are a lot of movies that got the benefit of Marty's input to me, movies that I might have dismissed or had little patience for."

Because Scorsese had started to make movies and Cocks wanted to write them, "we connived to get the rights to a book called Time Out of Joint' by a then-unheard-of science-fiction writer named Philip K. Dick, and we would sit in my office at Time and cook up scenes," he recalls.

The screenplay didn’t go anywhere, but Cocks later helped write several of the director’s passion projects, working on “The Last Temptation of Christ,” “The Age of Innocence” and “Gangs of New York.” “All the ones that Marty and I hook up with seem to be decades in the making,” says Cocks, who is currently adapting Shusaku Endo’s “Silence,” about a Jesuit missionary in 17th-century Japan, for the director.

In 1971, Scorsese moved to California to work on "Medicine Ball Caravan." Cocks introduced him to John Cassavetes, who admired Scorsese's feature debut "Who's That Knocking at My Door" and, after seeing his Roger Corman-produced exploitation pic "Boxcar Bertha," advised the young talent to make more personal films -- encouragement that catalyzed his semiautobiographical breakthrough, "Mean Streets."

While living in Los Angeles, Scorsese continued to gorge on classic cinema. "Back at LACMA (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), when he was going there a lot, he was starting to see films that were fading and turning pink, and he was very upset about it, so he began asking questions," explains Schoonmaker, whose non-union status prevented her from collaborating with Scorsese again until "Raging Bull."

By that time, Scorsese had become so passionate about the need for film preservation that he used the "Raging Bull" publicity tour to speak all over the world about the urgent need to salvage disintegrating films. As Scorsese's star rose, he leveraged his profile to champion the helmers who came before, whether that meant establishing the Film Foundation to salvage endangered classics or tracking down and meeting with the filmmakers who had personally inspired him.

In the mid-'70s, Scorsese traveled to England to find Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, helping to restore their standing -- not to mention their films, culminating in the 2009 Cannes bow of three-strip Technicolor classic "The Red Shoes." He even introduced Schoonmaker to Powell, whom she married.

As it happens, the matchmaker was also present for Cocks' first date with future wife Verna Bloom. "We went to a movie, naturally," Cocks says. "It was a Susan Sontag movie called 'Duet for Cannibals.' Two out of three of us fell asleep in the movie. Guess which of the three remained awake."

[This feature originally appeared in Variety.]

Had those four films been released a decade earlier, moviegoers almost surely would have scratched their heads in confusion. What is Bruno exactly (or Borat before it), with its unique mix of scripted material and Candid Camera-style stunts? But the Hollywood aesthetic has changed radically in the 10 years since The Blair Witch Project -- a span that saw the rise of reality television, a boom in theatrical documentary attendance and the advent of YouTube -- and audiences are savvier for it.

"That was (director Neill Blomkamp's) approach from the get-go," explains District 9 d.p. Trent Opaloch. "Even before there was a script, he had the aesthetic elements in place. There are two aspects to what he's doing: There's a technical aspect, where you buy the integration of CG work and live-action elements (now possible with state-of-the-art vfx tracking software). But the most important thing is that he wanted to present this fantastic situation in a way that people would receive as reality."

To accomplish this effect, District 9 alternates between an array of simulated documentary witnesses. The multisource strategy (which also uses talking-head interviews to convey key exposition) is most intense in the first act of the film, giving way to more clearly staged footage once audiences have bought into the eyewitness conceit. But it comes back whenever plausibility is most at risk (as when Blomkamp splices in a shot from a local news chopper of the shuttle taking off, subliminally cuing auds that "this really happened").

"It's a classic strategy of, 'Look ma, no artifice,'" explains film scholar David Bordwell, author of the Observations on Film Art blog and more than a dozen textbooks on film style. "From a historical perspective, this appears to be cyclical. At a certain point, a number of filmmakers decide that artful messiness is quite engaging. This is a style that gains its sense of sincerity from opposition to a clean, well-behaved movie. But if every movie starts to look like it's from YouTube, then (the strategy) loses its edge."

District 9 producer Peter Jackson was originally more comfortable with the loose ENG-style camerawork (meant to mirror raw electronic newsgathering, with its handheld energy and on-the-fly lens adjustments), while dramatic scenes were meant to have a more "pushed" (or saturated) Ridley Scott-like look -- "so you would have these two contrasting approaches," Opaloch explains. "When we started doing that, it felt really wacky and artificial, so pretty much every time we got into (the objective scenes), the cameras would come off the dollies and just go handheld."

Of course, filmmakers didn't wait until 2009 to experiment with documentary techniques. As Bordwell points out, "From World War II on, nearly every country had some sort of neorealist impulse." In America, the crime genre combined docu-style shooting with voice-of-God narration in such late-'40s/early-'50s entries as The Naked City and Panic in the Streets. Later, directors who got their start in documentary, including Stanley Kubrick and William Friedkin, incorporated verite-based techniques in such films as Paths of Glory and The French Connection. "It reaches a culmination in Medium Cool, where you have that immediacy of filming in the Chicago riots," Bordwell adds.

Nearly 40 years later, Brian De Palma advanced the hybrid form with his 2007 Iraq War thriller Redacted, weaving jihadi websites and Al Jazeera-style footage into a tapestry of "found footage" not unlike the elaborate collage of District 9. By comparison, Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker seems downright conservative, even though it marks a radical departure from the director's more classically constructed earlier work. To achieve the immersive effect she wanted, Bigelow turned to cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, whose background in documentaries had served him well with such verite-inclined directors as Ken Loach (Ladybird Ladybird) and Paul Greengrass (United 93).

"The reason she got in touch with me was because of United 93. She wanted that sense of immediacy and urgency," explains the d.p., who coached Bigelow in Greengrass' strategy of shooting long, continuous takes and letting the action move from one camera to the next. While the actors played close to the script, the camera crew was encouraged to improvise and avoid ever repeating the same take. "If in the end, the shot is out of focus, that's the equivalent of a beautifully framed shot because it betrays the emotion in it," Ackroyd says.

Some films, like Paranormal Activity or Cloverfield, take the documentary conceit literally, limiting themselves to footage captured by the characters, while others aim for realism while cheating through what Bordwell calls "camera ubiquity," where a series of invisible cameras see all (except for one another). The spontaneity comes from setting up the cameras at the right spots within an environment and then reacting to the action as it happens.

Perhaps the best evidence of how ubiquitous docu tactics have become is James Cameron's Avatar, which co-opts a docu-style vocabulary of impromptu zooms and fluid handheld lensing to "sell" the reality of its highly artificial environments. Gone is the dolly-and-crane style of Titanic, replaced by an in-the-trenches approach contemporary audiences seem to find more credible.

"The filmmaking process now is so varied and flexible that television has become more cinematic, and, almost in reaction to that, cinema has become slightly more documentary," says In the Loop director Armando Iannucci, who rejected stagey compositions to convey a fly-on-the-wall view of top-level politics. While his actors improvised from an ever-evolving 240-page script, the cameras also became part of the action.

Whether they realize it or not, reality TV-trained viewers have learned to judge not only the actors' performances, but the camera operators' as well. District 9's Opaloch has a term for it: "I think of it almost like Method operating," he says. "It's an immersive camera -- to me, that's the whole idea of filmmaking: You want to put the viewer there. I think that engages the viewer in a very visceral way."

When done right, audiences don't even see it. But study District 9 or Bruno shot-for-shot and you realize how complex -- not to mention impossible -- the realities they create really are.

[This essay originally appeared in Variety.]

1. In the Loop
This mockumentary-style political satire from British comedy savant Armando Iannucci brings the fast-talking BBC Four series The Thick of It inside the Beltway, as bellicose “don’t ever call me fucking English” party enforcer Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi, playing the full-body equivalent of a throbbing neck vein) preys on the ego and incompetence of his fellow lawmakers to spin both nations into declaring war on an unnamed country. Applying the unfussy fly-on-the-wall approach of The Office to a screenplay that would’ve made Paddy Chayefsky proud, Iannucci intends merely to update Yes Minister for the Iraq era, but in the way that only comedy can, manages to tap into something deeper. As profound as it is profane, the whirlwind of witty barbs and bureaucratic nonsense demands to be seen twice as it poses the terrifying question, What if the principles of showbiz (where nobody knows anything) governed government?

3. Avatar
Originality is overrated. For many critics, it’s the thing that matters most, and small wonder given the sheer number of films they see a year. But for audiences, novelty (at the narrative level, at least) isn’t necessarily what we seek when going to the movies. There’s a reason certain stories endure — just ask Joseph Campbell. Or Shakespeare, for that matter. The Bard didn’t invent the plots of his plays, but he did manage to advance them through verse. James Cameron does so by creating Pandora. But it’s not just the photo-real effects that excite me about Avatar; Cameron’s archetypal plot follows the stages of the monomythic “hero’s journey” beat for beat to illustrate the still-revolutionary notion that empathy (specifically, seeing the world through the eyes of the Other) is key to cohabitation among cultures — and nature as well. In essence, Cameron has made a $300-million hippie movie, where aliens fear humans, not the other way around.

4. Summer Hours
A return to form for gifted French director Olivier Assayas, Summer Hours hails from the same Musée d’Orsay-sponsored series that produced last year’s Flight of the Red Balloon. Designed to celebrate the role of art in 21st-century life, this quiet, classical film finds three grown (and potentially ungrateful) children pulled away from their busy lives to decide how they should handle the family estate — not just the idyllic summer home where they spent their childhoods, but also the numerous objets d’art amassed by their late uncle. Though the film has a none-too-subtle agenda (implying that a museum would be a better steward of these treasures than the distracted heirs), it coincided with my own decision to redirect my nest egg into buying several original paintings. Especially resonant was the idea that one’s legacy may have as much to do with what you collect as it does the things that you create.

5. The Cove
Why should audiences care about dolphins? Turns out, we already do, and The Cove makes an excellent case for the special bond between humans and these incredibly intelligent mammals, weaving the impassioned testimony of iconic dolphin trainer Richard O’Barry (of Flipper fame) throughout. But The Cove is no mere talking-head documentary. Yes, it aims to educate us about the sinister side of marine parks and the highly toxic dolphin meat market, but director Louie Psihoyos (co-founder of the Oceanic Preservation Society) has more ambitious intentions, assembling a special team to infiltrate the private site and expose the cruel process of dolphin captivity and slaughter that occurs each year in Taiji, Japan. The result is a tense operation as exciting as any spy movie, with the film expertly calibrated to reflect the nerve-racking real-life mission and its prize: devastating footage captured in the cove itself.

6. Two Lovers
If Joaquin Phoenix is serious about quitting the business, he couldn’t have picked a better project to go out with. Reteaming with director James Gray for the third time, the actor lays bare the soul of a troubled romantic torn between settling for the “right girl” (a fetching family friend, played by Vinessa Shaw, with the maternal instincts to handle his depressive tendencies) and chasing after the wrong one (Gwyneth Paltrow, delivering her most nuanced performance yet as a woman whose allure rests in her very unattainability). Less ambitious in scope than The Yards or We Own the Night, Gray’s latest is free to burrow into the psyche of these self-destructive characters, exploring the dark side of a premise that might easily have sustained a romantic comedy. It’s startling to see obsession treated so candidly (as in one particularly grueling rooftop encounter), and yet I’ll take this film’s insights over others’ escapism any day.

7. Antichrist
The thing about Dogma 95’s “Vow of Chastity” and the films that grungy aesthetic inspired is how easily we forget the expert way Danish director Lars von Trier worked within the polished, classic Hollywood style before swearing off those conventions to make Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark and Dogville. Perhaps the greatest shock of Antichrist, then, is how masterfully it manipulates the old-school tools of cinema, toying with us through sound, music and ever-so-subtle tweaks to Anthony Dod Mantle’s cinematography even as it steers the content into extreme new territory. Much can be said about the director’s intent, politics or psychology — in that respect, Antichrist is rich enough for you to go as deep as you please. I’m more enraptured by the way it made me feel, using the tropes of so-called “torture porn” to create a roiling emotional journey about a couple coming to grips with tragedy.

8. Ponyo
What I love most about animation maestro Hayao Miyazaki is just how intuitively audiences of any age and culture can follow his surrealistic imagination. Many have called Ponyo his “most Japanese” film yet, but I challenge anyone not to fall under the spell of its Little Mermaid-like story, in which a young boy rescues a magical goldfish in a tide pool near his home, inspiring the young underwater princess to transform into his sunny young playmate. I don’t throw the word “masterpiece” around casually, but Miyazaki’s wonderfully impressionistic tale stands as a culmination of all that has come before in his career, encompassing ecological themes (the threats of pollution and overfishing), an acute sense of modern family (the dynamic between Toshi’s working mom and faraway father perfectly captures contemporary domestic challenges) and his unrivaled capacity to see the world through childlike eyes (was any 2009 scene more enchanting than Toshi’s toy boat ride?) — rendered all the more remarkable in that every frame is drawn by hand.

9. District 9
Not unlike Avatar, here is another alien invasion story that promotes understanding the Other through the process of becoming one of them, only this time, instead of it being a cripple who finds his higher purpose defending a bunch of blue-skinned Na’vi (and who wouldn’t prefer these E.T.s’ hyper-sexualized looks and tree-hugging ways?), District 9 goes the monster-movie route, with its milquetoast hero tearing off his fingernails and slowly, painfully transforming into a 10-foot cockroach-looking creature. I don’t quite buy the South African film’s apartheid allegory, which serves to dress up an otherwise routine Robocop-style noble-loner-vs.-Daddy-Warbucks action plot, but director Neill Blomkamp is innovative enough with his pseudo-documentary approach that the format alone was enough to win me over. Basically, Blomkamp (and producer Peter Jackson) use our media-saturated sensibilities to sell the moment-to-moment “reality” of their far-fetched story, embracing the grab-and-go style directors like Paul Greengrass have brought to the 21st-century blockbuster and evolving it to the next level.

10. Sugar
A Dominican baseball trainee can all but taste the American Dream in this poignant tribute to our nation’s favorite pastime. A more accessible, yet no less independent portrait than directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s Half Nelson, Sugar tells the story of a talented young pitcher who’s trained his entire life for a shot at the Major Leagues, then balks just shy of the big time. The movie simmers with the energy of the game, but is ultimately about what becomes of all those starstruck immigrants once they leave the field. This kid’s dream isn’t what we expect, but baseball gets him there all the same. Perhaps its reductive of me to lump Sugar in with two other terrific race-related indies, but I also loved Goodbye Solo (about a Senegalese cab driver who befriends an older white man he believes to be suicidal) and Medicine for Melancholy (a Before Sunrise-style running conversation between two African-American hipsters).

Honorable Mention: Bronson
Last year at Sundance, everyone was talking about this midnight movie in which some naked guy spends the entire movie pummeling people in prison. The whole thing sounded pretty unpleasant, so I back-burnered the movie for five months. What I didn’t realize (although those original rumblings clearly conveyed as much) is what an incredible character this virtual one-man show provides for actor Tom Hardy, who’s been called the Next Big Thing, but before never really followed through on that promise. Until now. Here, he delivers a performance on par with Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood in what proves to be an audacious movie to boot. In a novel twist, Nicolas Winding Refn interprets the tabloid-seeking antics of notorious British con Michael Peterson (aka Charlie Bronson) as a form of performance art. Where other prison movies focus on jokers trying to break out, Bronson tells the story of a man crazy enough to want in.

So, without giving ties, I’ve managed to sneak three extra titles into my top 10. Here’s a dozen more 2009 favorites, rounding out the 25 best films of the year: Away We Go, The Beaches of Agnes, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, The Informant!, Inglourious Basterds, The Men Who Stare at Goats, Precious, Revanche, Rudo y Cursi, A Town Called Panic, The White Ribbon and You, the Living.

I lied. These aren’t the worst movies of the year. More like my five biggest disappointments, movies that promised the world and delivered a fraction of their potential. To me, that’s far more upsetting than a bad movie, because they’ve squandered the opportunity, and now no one can go back and do it right. You probably won’t agree with my choices (maybe you went into Where the Wild Things Are expecting to be annoyed and came out enraptured — that actually happened to me with co-writer Dave Eggers’ other 2009 release, Away We Go), but these picks were meant to be personal. Here are five letdowns that could have been so much more:

1. Funny People
Let’s face it: No one’s better than Judd Apatow at raunchy-sincere relationship comedies, and I kicked off 2009 covering a day of shooting on Funny People for Collider, so my expectations were sky-high for what looked to be Apatow’s most personal film yet. It also suggested another shot at Serious Acting from Adam Sandler (I’ve been patiently waiting for him to give us more of that Punch-Drunk Love mojo). The stars, as they say, were in alignment. What we got, however, was a long, rambling and deeply self-indulgent powwow between a bunch of talented comics. The characters dress and talk and slouch like us (making this what exactly, a big-budget Mumblecore movie?), but I couldn’t have felt less connected as Apatow struggled to decide whether the movie was about a young joke-writer (Seth Rogen) trying to make it or an old hand (Sandler) trying to make good.

3. The Twilight Saga: New Moon
OK, I’ll admit it. I like Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight books, and I thought Catherine Hardwicke took a crap script and managed to inhabit it with living, breathing teenagers in the first movie. You could see it in the details: the way Bella would roll her eyes, or the passive-aggressive interactions between classmates in the school cafeteria. The film felt alive. I had pretty high hopes for the sequel (after all, I’m technically “Team Jacob”). After all, Chris Weitz is also good with teen stories, and those early photos of a shirtless Taylor Lautner ... well, let’s just say they brought out the 13-year-old girl in me. But could a more ponderous, lead-footed potboiler possibly be made from New Moon? Shooting almost entirely in close-ups, Weitz turns this into a stuffy soap opera (a friend keenly called it a “training bodice ripper”). Let’s hope Hard Candy’s David Slade can rescue it with Eclipse.

4. Nine
It wasn’t until this year that I finally caught up with Federico Fellini’s gonzo self-portrait 8 1/2 (here’s why), so the movie was fresh in my mind when I entered this ill-conceived musical. Yes, the original 1982 show beat Dreamgirls (the adaptation of which topped my 2006 list) for the Tony, and the cast is to die for (these divas have more Oscar bling between them than Meryl Streep), but the bigscreen version amounts to a Cliff’s Notes version of 8 1/2 interrupted every so often for a forgettable song from one of the ladies in Fellini’s life. We’re meant to revel in the sheer star power (because we sure as hell can’t believe the badly reworked Sophia Loren as Fellini’s mother), while Chicago director Rob Marshall fixates on all that is fabulous about Italy in the ’60s. The result reminds me why I’d rather see CQ than the making of Citizen Kane.

5. Police, Adjective
You’ll find this obscure Romanian film on a lot of top 10 lists (even some “best of decade” ones) from critics I really admire. That’s partly because the Romanian New Wave is a force to be reckoned with (the films aren’t easy going, but if you haven’t seen 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days or The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Netflix them forthwith). So things looked good when Cannes picked 12:08 East of Bucharest director Corneliu Porumboiu’s latest for competition. But the film is a dud. I get what he’s up to, depicting detective work in long, static takes as the dreary work that it is. And there’s a terrific 20-minute scene at the end in which the police chief schools his underlings in the literal definition of their jobs. Porumboiu has attempted to make a film about language, but he’s gone about it in the least cinematic way possible.

I was floored. What were these films? Of the 61 winners to date (counting the eight pics honored before the category was officially introduced in 1956), I'd seen maybe 15. There were landmark films by the likes of Fellini (a four-time winner), Bergman (three), Kurosawa (two) and Truffaut (one), whose titles I knew, yet never managed to see. And what about such unfamiliar and enigmatic-sounding winners as "Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion" (1970) and "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears" (1980)?

Surely this was a sign. I vowed to track down and watch every Oscar foreign-language winner (no easy feat, as many are unavailable on DVD). My project began in earnest the first week of 2009 with Vittorio De Sica's "Shoe-Shine" (1947) and proceeded in more or less chronological order at a pace of roughly a film a week for the entire year, culminating Dec. 1 with a special Academy-facilitated screening of that most elusive title, 1982's "Volver a empezar."

It actually went that way for a while. Special-award winner "Shoe-Shine" is nothing short of a masterpiece, indicating a willingness on the Academy's part to celebrate Italian Neo-Realism despite the fact that the movement itself rejected Hollywood style for working-class stories, non-professional actors and location-based shooting, followed by honorary trophies (chosen by a committee that included representatives from each studio) for such deserving films as "The Bicycle Thief" (1949), "Rashomon" (1951) and "Forbidden Games" (1952). For all intents and purposes, these were the early days of foreign cinema exhibition in the U.S. (not counting the pre-war silent boom), with the Hollywood Antitrust Case of 1948 relaxing the studios' control over the exhibition business.

In 1956, the Academy created an official category for foreign-language cinema, and though the rules have evolved quite a bit over the years, it remains the one category in which the pics are not required to play U.S. theaters in order to qualify. Instead, each country is allowed a single submission, which is then screened by a special Academy committee that determines the final five nominees — the World Cup of cinema, as it were.

That first year, eight countries participated. Federico Fellini's "La Strada" won (no complaints there). The next year saw five new countries join in. Fellini won again, this time for "The Nights of Cabiria" (while Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" was conspicuously shut out). Each year seemed to bring new countries into the mix, with Sweden winning two years in a row for Bergman's "The Virgin Spring" (1960) and "Through a Glass Darkly" (1961).

These were clearly exciting days for international cinema, and though the foreign pics I personally respected most from any given year seldom won the prize, Italy, France and Japan submitted daring films by their most celebrated directors: Alain Resnais' "Last Year at Marienbad" (1961), Michelangelo's Antonioni's "La Notte" (1961) and Yasujiro Ozu's "Late Autumn" (1960), to name just three examples.

And then a curious thing began to happen. Questionable winners started to sneak in. Mushy French melodrama "Sundays and Cybele," a Stateside hit in 1962, won (submitted over Francois Truffaut's far superior "Jules et Jim"). De Sica's overripe "Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow" (1964) trumped the existential masterpiece "Woman in the Dunes," while massive French phenom "A Man and a Woman" (1966) bested "The Battle of Algiers" and so on.

The category was fast devolving into a popularity contest, with the B.O. sensations beating what many thought was their more deserving competition. Great films carried the category into the next decade, including De Sica's heartbreaking foiled-by-WWII romance"The Garden of the Finzi Continis" (1971), Truffaut's playful meta-movie "Day for Night" (1973) and Kurosawa's pensive non-samurai epic "Dersu Uzala" (1975). But corruption allegedly set in as well, which might explain how "Black and White in Color" (1976) beat "Seven Beauties" and "Cousin, Cousine" when those two films were nominated for five other Oscars between them.

My two most satisfying discoveries — 1978's "Get Out Your Handkerchiefs," a nutty menage a trois from French provocateur Bertrand Blier, and 1985's "The Official Story," a wrenching look at the children of political dissidents put up for adoption during Argentina's Dirty War — fall during this questionable period.

"There were a lot of really odd things that went on in the '80s," Academy executive director Bruce Davis tells me, and anecdotal evidence indicates a certain coziness between committee members and potential nominees, with voters being invited to parties at the various consulates, mingling with the filmmakers and accepting trinkets.

Though the Academy cracked down on such practices, the org also had to contend with the fast-growing number of qualifying submissions, which made it increasingly difficult for anyone other than retired Academy members to find time to screen all the eligible films. That might explain why WWII stories and heartwarming tales featuring wide-eyed urchins and their geriatric guardians came to dominate the category (as it turns out, I'm a sucker for the latter category as well, counting "Pelle the Conqueror," "Casino Paradiso" and "Antonia's Line" among my favorite winners), while critic-lauded pics languish (consider the oversight of 2007's gritty Romanian abortion pic "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days").

With more countries in the mix — 41 in 1995, 51 in 2001, and 63 by 2005 — it became harder for me to extrapolate lessons from the winners. By the Academy's model, this was a huge success, with submissions arriving from nations that hadn't even existed a few years before (the former Yugoslavia was now permitted to submit five, while France was still stuck sending one), and yet it also belied the fundamental flaw in the category: Everything depends on the film each country selects, and those decisions are fraught with politics.

An exceptional film that had exhausted its commercial run might be passed over in favor of one that could benefit, provocative or controversial films were shot down, top directors were forced to sit out a few years after having a film submitted in order to give others a shot, etc. And then there were disqualifications: Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Red" (one of the 10 best films of all time, in my book) was deemed not Swiss enough, "The Band's Visit" featured too much English — never mind that 1968's winner, Sergei Bondarchuk's seven-hour "War and Peace," was released dubbed in the U.S.

At a certain point, foreign films became common enough in U.S. theaters that they were eligible to compete in other categories. Algerian conspiracy thriller "Z" (1969) was the first to earn a picture nomination (not counting 1938's "The Grand Illusion"), and several others — including Bergman's "Cries and Whispers" (1973) and Miramax-backed "Il Postino" (1995) — followed suit, even when not being submitted by their native countries.

Meanwhile, they were surprisingly hard to find on DVD. A great many of these winners are virtually lost (while an impressive number of others have been wonderfully preserved by Janus Films, Rialto Pictures and the Criterion Collection). Cannes Grande Prix-winning samurai sudser "Gate of Hell" (1954) and superstylized political satire "Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion" exist exclusively in bootleg form; several can only be hunted down on out-of-print VHS tapes; and Rene Clement's "The Walls of Malapaga" might be lost entirely, but for the exhaustive collection at Eddie Brant's Saturday Matinee.

In short, more countries than ever are making movies, but the audiences for them seem to be dwindling. Miramax enjoyed a four-win run from 1988 to 1991, and Sony Pictures Classics has released its share of winners (including their biggest hit ever, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"), but the record of these works — masterpieces and mediocrities alike — is in danger. Anyone interested in repeating my experiment certainly has their work cut out for them.

[This essay originally appeared in Variety.]

Both the cult-canonized MacManus brothers and director Troy Duffy were just getting started when vigilante tale The Boondock Saints debuted a decade ago. But fate (in the form of the Columbine shootings) and ego (if behind-the-scenes expose Overnight is to be believed) intervened, sending the movie to DVD heaven and Duffy to director jail. Now, he picks up the original's open ending in The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, which feels larger in scope yet sorely lacking in originality, not unlike the 10-years-on reunion special it is. The audience is there, yet the limited release suggests a homevid strategy.

Continue reading "Boondock Saints" at Variety.com

Anyone looking to kick off a teen fantasy franchise can draw several valuable lessons from the failure of Universal's Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, the first (and likely the last) cinematic adaptation of the popular Brit neck-biter series. First, if you're counting on a property's built-in fan base, don't stray too far from the source. Second, make sure the opening entry stands alone; there's no point wasting energy to set up sequels that'll never happen. Finally, like brother Chris (The Golden Compass), director Paul Weitz seems better suited to comedy than to big-budget make-believe.

Continue reading "Cirque du Freak" at Variety.com

Napoleon Dynamite seems perfectly well-adjusted (not to mention downright charismatic) compared to homeschooled mama's boy Benjamin Purvis in Gentlemen Broncos, the latest oddball character portrait from one-trick helmer Jared Hess. This time, the misfit in question is an aspiring science-fiction writer easily upstaged by his idol, a pompous (but published) fantasy author, played by "Flight of the Conchords" star Jemaine Clement like the cosmic love child of Tim Curry and Orson Welles. Pic tickled its target demo at Fantastic Fest, though it's hard to imagine Fox Searchlight reaching enough geeks in theaters to come anywhere near Nacho Libre's $80 million.

Continue reading "Gentlemen Broncos" at Variety.com

Call it the best '80s babysitter-in-peril movie never made. The House of the Devil delivers about as much as one could reasonably hope from the not-quite-alone-in-the-house category, with the bonus of authentically re-creating the low-budget look and feel of that era's classic horror entries. Still, talk about setting your sights low, as the pic seems content to polish a subpar subgenre. Nevertheless, auds seeking a stripped-down retro spine-tingler that builds to an intense climax will appreciate what director Ti West has accomplished, with strong on-demand interest for the Magnet title leading up to its Oct. 30 theatrical release.

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What has 12 legs, three heads and a single digestive tract? The disagreeable creation at the center of Tom Six's The Human Centipede: First Sequence, a beyond-twisted body horror experiment in which a mad surgeon, renowned for separating Siamese twins, kidnaps and conjoins three unlucky tourists mouth-to-anus for no reason other than to satisfy his own sadistic whims (and the morbid curiosity of a certain type of moviegoer). Only real payoff is seeing the monstrosity assembled, and though that will surely earn the Dutch writer-director a cult reputation on the genre circuit, "going there" does not a movie make.

As featured in Variety

Tut tut, it looks like a hit for Sony Pictures Animation. Eye-popping and mouth-watering in one, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs spins a 30-page children's book into a 90-minute all-you-can-laugh buffet, expanding the premise of a town where it rains ketchup and hot dogs to disaster-movie proportions. With drooling tongues in cheek, tyro helmers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (whose only previous directing credit was cult MTV toon Clone High) bring a fresh, irreverent sensibility to bigscreen computer animation, using 3D projection to maximize their sky-is-falling scenario. This box office and concession-stand draw should make exhibitors very happy.

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But as luck would have it, the release coincides with a traveling Oshima retrospective organized by James Quandt of the Cinematheque Ontario, which helps put the film in context. And a good thing, too, because In the Realm of the Senses is an extreme case — the story of an amour fou between a hotel owner and one of his maids that builds to strangulation, S&M and the most personal of keepsakes (perhaps the only art film capable of challenging Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist in the genital-mutilation department) — and I’d hate to imagine going through life thinking all of Oshima’s films were like that.

Ritchie makes a point of this in his commentary, pointing out that Oshima seemed to reinvent himself with every film. The director varied shooting styles, formats (switching between b&w and color, sometimes within the same film) and even aspect ratios (one project might be 1.66:1, while the next would be in widescreen). For those curious enough to sample a second film, Criterion has also put out a restored version of Empire of Passion, Oshima’s follow-up to In the Realm of the Senses, made for the same French producer, Anatole Dauman, who helped introduce the West to the director’s cutting-edge erotic sensibilities.

Watching one after the other, it’s not immediately clear that the two films were directed by the same person. Where In the Realm of the Senses depicts a true story of extreme sexual intimacy (inspired by an actual case) with an almost detached attitude, Empire of Passion applies a more atmospheric, softcore approach to the familiar Japanese ghost story genre: A traveler (played by Senses star Tatsuya Fuji) strikes up an affair with a married woman, convincing her to poison her husband and dispose of his body, only to find they can’t be rid of him so easily.

But certain common themes certainly emerge, and as I ventured deeper into Oshima’s oeuvre (seeing another half dozen of his films, thanks to retrospectives hosted at the American Cinematheque and Los Angeles County Museum of Art), I came to find that one after another returns to the issues of brutal crime, liberated sexual relations and rape. And digging into Oshima online, I find Audie Bock’s Japanese Film Directors: “in every Oshima film at least one murder, rape, theft or blackmail incident can be found, and often the whole of the film is constructed around the chronic repetition of such a crime.” Maybe not every Oshima film, though the generalization certainly applied to most of the ones I saw.

In Death by Hanging, the director weaves an absurdist Dr. Strangelove style satire around a police interrogation in which cops go to great lengths to force a fresh confession from a convicted rapist after he survives his execution. Violence at Noon concerns a serial rapist whose latest victim refuses to reveal his identity to the police, a decision whose explanation lies in her personal connection to the perpetrator. In Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, a mock rape between two revolutionary young lovers turns real when they encounter a gang of street thugs. Teens eager to join a gang interrupt two young lovers smooching by the water, killing the guy before raping his girlfriend. And so on.

As a narrative device, rape clearly functions differently in Japanese culture than the West (Kurosawa’s great Rashomon deals with it as well, to name just one example), and Oshima’s approach radically diverges in each film, but his persistent preoccupation with the subject is strong enough to raise eyebrows (just as one begins to question Todd Solondz’s personal interest in pedophilia after the issue surfaces in all his movies). It came as an enormous personal relief, then, to stumble upon Boy, an exception that is every bit as audacious as Oshima’s other work and yet focused on a completely different arena. (If I had any sway with the Criterion staff, this is the film of his I’d request on DVD, not that I object to Oshima’s other fascinations, but because he handles this new material so well. With any luck, Criterion will assemble a few more of his restored films into one of their Eclipse sets.)

In Boy, a 10-year-old youth and his parents travel around the country scamming hapless drivers by pushing the kid in front of moving cars and conning them into covering his hospital bills. It’s a wonderfully twisted setup from which to explore how a boy raised under such conditions, where abuse is a way of life, is spared a degree of that pain simply because he knows no alternative. In that sense, Boy reminds me of Nobel winner Imre Kertesz’s semi-autobiographical novel Fateless, which looked back on the harrowing teen years spent in a Nazi concentration camp, but still managed to find windows of genuine joy amid the hardship.

Just as he stripped the sexuality in his other films of conventional notions of romance, Oshima demonstrates a refreshingly unsentimental attitude toward childhood here, which makes Boy’s deep, underlying tragedy all the more effective. The surface emotion is easy enough to follow, but the subtext runs deep (one scene in particular, where the boy builds an effigy out of snow and then tears it down, serves as a wonderful metaphor for his mental transformation).

As a filmmaker, Oshima represents the Japanese analog for the jumpy, avant-garde feel of early Goddard, but Boy feels more lyrical than his other work, offering foreigners an unlikely yet effective tour of his home country alongside its sober coming-of-age scenario. So, while I’m glad to have been initiated into to Oshima through In the Realm of the Senses (even if it means never being able to rid my mind of its final emasculating image), I don’t necessarily consider it a must-see in the way that I do Boy. It’ll take some detective work or luck to track it down (last I heard, the entire Oshima retrospective was headed to Venice), but should the opportunity ever present itself, seize the chance to see Oshima’s rare, rape-free masterpiece.

Top 10 of 2008

1. Wall-E
There are some who refer to “the Pixar formula” as if consistency of quality were a bad thing. The way I see it, Wall-E raises the bar for not just animation but movies in general. From the beginning, the studio rejected singing forest creatures and fairy-tale source material, always looking for new ways to tell stories. This time, director Andrew Stanton creates a staggering photoreal future — a planet overrun with trash — and finds both a love story (Pixar’s first) and hope for humanity in the rubble. The movie’s unassuming lead character, a rusty trash-compacting robot with eyes and arms and no other immediately relatable features, evokes the pure animation magic of Luxo Jr., the expressive lamp featured in the company’s logo. That we invest so much emotion in that little fella merely proves the extent of their talents. When Buzz Lightyear said, “To infinity and beyond,” this is no doubt the kind of constant innovation his creators had in mind.

3. Man on Wire
James Marsh has made a heist movie disguised as a documentary — or perhaps it is the other way around. Either way, he has brought the kind of energy that makes your palms sweat to the story of a most amazing caper: In 1974, a team of French acrobats breached the World Trade Center’s security, climbed to the top and extended a wire between the two towers. What performance artist Philippe Petit did next broke the laws of nature, gravity and, of course, New York City, stepping out into thin air 110 stories above his street-level audience. Through a mix of archival footage, fresh interviews and b&w reenactment, Marsh recreates Petit’s insane exploits and, without coming right out and saying it, reminds us that there are those who would bring these towers to the ground, and others who embraced the structures for putting them a quarter mile closer to heaven.

4. Gomorrah
The title refers to the Camorra crime syndicate, which has infiltrated nearly every aspect of life in Naples, Italy, but it couldn’t be more appropriate in that Matteo Garrone’s expose of the region’s squalor and corruption suggests Hell on Earth. Gone is the handsome, semi-aspirational quality of gangster movies like The Godfather and Scarface, replaced with a gritty, disorienting aesthetic influenced in equal measure by Italian neorealism and the Euro-crime exploitation movies of folks like Fernando Di Leo. Others have compared the film’s complex, interwoven approach to HBO’s “The Wire,” and the analogy works: Garrone throws his audience behind enemy lines, never slowing down for routine hand-holding or exposition. He expects us to keep up — not easy, given the unfamiliar turf — as he reveals the System’s toxic reach into every aspect of life, from sanitation to the fashion world, drug dealing to otherwise respectable businesses. Welcome to Dante’s ninth circle.

5. The Order of Myths
At first glance, this insider’s view of Carnivale from Mobile’s own Margaret Brown functions as a sharp critique of centuries of American racism, documenting the city’s still-segregated Mardi Gras celebrations and their deep-running ties to less enlightened times. But Brown’s documentary never lectures; its most telling details can be observed in the background of other scenes, such as how the only black faces at one relatively modern-minded debutante’s party are the hired help serving champagne, or the genuine enthusiasm with which an older white woman pauses to thank the uncomfortable black king and queen for attending their coronation ceremony. Progressive audiences will surely cluck their tongues and ask why the black and white contingents don’t fuse their respective pageants into a single parade, but the big revelation here is that neither side is especially eager to subvert their proud 300-year tradition for the sake of a more politically correct event.

6. Vicky Cristina Barcelona
To call Woody Allen’s latest his least neurotic film in ages doesn’t mean its characters aren’t saddled with the same second-guessing self-analysis for which he’s known, but there’s a refreshingly impulsive quality to the romance this time around. On vacation in Spain, Scarlett Johansson’s Cristina has no trouble succumbing to her impulses, allowing the local surroundings and swarthy men (namely, impassioned painter Javier Bardem) to seduce her, while engaged-to-be-married Vicky (Rebecca Hall) could stand to be a bit more unbuttoned in her affairs. It is a delirious period of experimentation for both women, which the narrator (a vaguely condescending Christopher Evan Welch) affectionately dismisses from the sidelines — though Allen clearly puts more stock in their naive emotions than his voiceover does. That contradiction makes for a perfect tension in which Allen himself may be old enough to know better, but his heart is with characters still too young to care.

7. Shotgun Stories
On the surface, Jeff Nichols’ debut sounds like simple hixploitation: A standoff between two sets of Arkansas siblings with separate mothers but a father in common spirals into violence and tragedy. What sets Shotgun Stories apart is that Nichols chooses to tell the story from the side that would normally be the villains in such a tale, revealing more in the quiet moments between confrontations than the outbursts themselves, which unfold largely off-camera. When you think about it, it is lead character Son (played by Michael Shannon) who turns up at his dad’s funeral, spits on the coffin and slanders the man’s good name in front of his new family, pushing the longstanding tension between the rival clans to a tipping point. Yes, the four redneck brothers on the other side are just as bloodthirsty and mean, but Son remains the one character with the power to stop the violence.

8. Hunger
Is there any less appealing subgenre than the I.R.A. movie? Violence begets violence, hate breeds hate and all that — it all makes for bloody tiresome cinema. And then comes Steve McQueen, a multimedia artist making his first foray into feature directing, to examine the phenomenon sideways. Like Julian Schnabel before him, McQueen’s unique perspective suggests how much these art-world darlings have to offer the silver screen. Hunger breaks its story into three sections, the first detailing the sheer brutality with which Irish prison guards treated the “terrorists” in their custody. The middle portion presents an impossibly long conversation between Bobby Sands (played by Michael Fassbender) and his priest, in which the former lays out his plan to hunger-strike for political status. The last recreates Sands’ slow and painful starvation for his cause — a form of nonviolent protest more effective than all the car bombs and assassinations depicted in more sensational I.R.A. films.

9. The Visitor
Walter Vale is the type of man whose blood pressure never rises far above barely-there, until the mild-mannered economics professor comes home to his seldom-used New York apartment to find that two illegal immigrants have moved in. Rather than freak out or call the cops, Walter befriends the couple and allows them to stay. With no scenery chewing to speak of, it’s an unlikely role-of-a-lifetime for talented character actor Richard Jenkins, and yet the film’s low-key quality supports an incredibly nuanced performance. Credit writer-director Thomas McCarthy, whose script treads close enough to all those movies that exploit our fear of the other that Walter’s simple generosity toward his guests manages to constantly surprise, even as the story steers into more overtly political territory. As a follow-up to his wonderful debut, The Station Agent, this equally perceptive study cements McCarthy’s place as one of the great humanists working in American independent cinema.

10. The Dark Knight (with honorable mention Quantum of Solace)
Two of the most enduring characters in pulp-to-screen history came into their own this year, as the second installments in the newly rebooted James Bond and Batman franchises burrowed into the fractured psychology of their respective protagonists. The Dark Knight was obviously the more popular of the two, pitting the Caped Crusader against Heath Ledger’s ingeniously anarchic Joker, though few seem to appreciate how effectively Quantum of Solace builds on the loss of Bond’s beloved Vesper Lynd and makes the action genre’s “this time it’s personal” cliché mean something for once. Of course, neither film could stand alone had the groundwork not been so effectively laid by Batman Begins and Casino Royale, but it’s intensely satisfying to see both heroes taken seriously after being used to sell kid-friendly action figures so recently in their careers. For those who complain that Quantum has the weaker villain, I counter, but Bond is (finally) the more interesting hero.

Everybody knows wrestling is fake, but those are real professionals throwing Mickey Rourke around the ring and real staples piercing skin in one particularly grisly fight.

Thrust into the Oscar spotlight after winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Fest, The Wrestler features one of those exceptional, born-to-play roles by Rourke, relying just as heavily on the former heartthrob's background in boxing as it does on the off-screen mileage he has endured en route to this comeback.

As Randy "The Ram" Robinson, Rourke owns every scene in the film, training intensely to master the choreography of wrestling but also capable of baring his soul in private moments. For Randy, wrestling represents an escape from blue-collar anonymity. He's estranged from his daughter (Evan Rachel Wood, in a heartbreaking turn) and clumsy in his romantic advances toward a stripper with dreams of her own. As the exotic dancer, Oscar winner Marisa Tomei has physical and emotional demands that rival Rourke's.

There's both dignity and tragedy in Randy's situation — not the combination of ingredients one might expect from screenwriter (and former Onion editor) Robert Siegel. Director Darren Aronofsky also surprises, rejecting the rigorously storyboarded approach of "Requiem for a Dream" and "The Fountain" for a naturalistic style, one that called for shooting at real matches with genuine wrestlers.

The result is a portrait powerful enough to warrant nominations in all those categories.

[This article originally appeared in Daily Variety.]

In 1993, coming off Unforgiven's Oscar win, Clint Eastwood made a little movie called A Perfect World in which he played a lawman who dreams of apprehending a kidnapper without firing a single shot — a far cry from the director's trigger-happy Dirty Harry days.

But that perfect world, Eastwood would probably be the first to tell you, simply doesn't exist (as was the unfortunate case in the titular film). Where Eastwood lives, laws have their limits, rules are seldom adequate and justice tends to be subjective. But the notion that forgiveness, for the first time in his career, wasn't entirely out of the question marked a significant change for Eastwood (just think how different Million Dollar Baby might be if his character spent the rest of the movie getting even).

Though Eastwood seems to leave thematic interpretations of his work to the critics (releasing four films within a 15-month period leaves little time for navel gazing), such issues surface throughout his late-career hot streak, with each film's resolution typically raising more questions than it answers: What price vengeance, how to manage grief and victimization without doing more harm than good, as well as other matters of ethics and morality.

Consider Walt Kowalski, the surly soul at the center of Gran Torino. He's a man set in his ways — a Korean War vet none too pleased that his old neighborhood is being overrun by Hmong families. The Asian residents bring back negative memories of his time in the service, until run-ins with a local gang force him to reconsider his prejudices, especially toward the teenage boy next door. Here, both Kowalski and the Hmong kid serve as outsiders, and the film sees the tough old vet atoning for past wrongs by protecting his young neighbor.

"In keeping with his desire to continue progressing as a director and an actor, this script takes all the other characters he's played -- like the Dirty Harrys and William Munny of Unforgiven -- and evolves them a little further," Lorenz says.

Eastwood didn't direct Dirty Harry, but he was a powerful enough star at the time to pick Don Siegel for the job. In the realm of genre entertainment, the series makes for extremely pointed social commentary. The Dirty Harry mythology paints Eastwood as the one man willing to cross the line to bring the scum of society to justice while revealing the character's own bigotry by pairing him with African-American, Latino and female partners.

But can justice really be dealt at the end of a .44-caliber Magnum? Later projects raised even more complex questions about the relationship between those who write the rules and the little people they exploit, exposing corruption everywhere from the wild West (Unforgiven) to the Oval Office (Absolute Power).

"He likes stories where it's one person standing up against society for what is right," explains Changeling screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski.

"I love historical things anyway," Eastwood says of Straczynski's script, about a single mother in 1920s Los Angeles who fought City Hall after the disappearance of her son. "As we were doing it, you were constantly reminding yourself that this actually happened and a woman went through this dilemma."

The Los Angeles of Changeling may give the impression of a civilized modern city, but in many ways, it still reflects the lawless frontier of Eastwood's many oaters.

"When the chief of police says: 'I want criminals taken off the streets. I want them brought in dead, not alive,' that's right out of the L.A. Times," Eastwood says. "If you said that nowadays, people would say, 'Oh, my God, where's the ACLU?' "

But unlike the victimized females in Pale Rider and Unforgiven, Angelina Jolie's character Christine Collins isn't waiting for a grizzled gunslinger to drift into town and clean things up. Instead, she takes matters into her own hands.

"We all try to find lives where courage isn't necessary, where nothing extraordinary will be required of you, and the only problem is, that isn't possible," Straczynski says. Even after bringing down the mayor, the police department and the criminal responsible for stealing kids off the streets, Collins continues to search for answers. "When you have an ambiguous ending, it requires the audience to participate on a moral level or an ethical level," Straczynski says.

Collins may be Changeling's central underdog, but the key victims are the children themselves. Nothing irks Eastwood's sense of justice like the betrayal of innocence, and both Changeling and Gran Torino explore that idea in ways that have intrigued the director before.

Mystic River tells of a life destroyed by childhood sexual abuse. Though Brian Helgeland's script is incredibly faithful to the original Dennis Lehane novel, Eastwood did allow for one small but critical change: The abductor seen at the beginning wears a church ring — an indictment of the scandals shaking Boston's Catholic church at the time.

"I must say, I think crimes against children are the most deserving of whatever punishment can be meted out," Eastwood says matter-of-factly. "I just have no tolerance for that."

[This article originally appeared in Daily Variety.]