The Screengrab : don hertzfeldt

Trailer Review: Tokyo!

Paul Clark — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

There’s something about omnibus films that always sounds exciting in concept- after all, when you get a half-dozen or so great directors involved in a single film, it would seem to be a sampler platter of awesomeness. Yet how many of these movies are actually any good? Part of the problem is that they generally tap feature filmmakers for these things (rather than short-form masters like, say, Lewis Klahr and Don Hertzfeldt) and not everyone who excels at feature length can translate their skill to the short form. With only three filmmakers involved, Tokyo! would appear to be a safer bet. However, advance word on the film has been mostly mixed, and even negative when it comes to the short by Leos Carax (a shame, considering the guy hasn’t gotten a feature off the ground since Pola X ten years ago). So while I’m eager to see new work by Carax, Michael Gondry, and Bong Joon-ho, this one looks like a wait and see.

Trailer: 9

Paul Clark — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 17:00:00 GMT

A few years ago, I saw Shane Acker’s original animated short 9 as part of one of Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt’s Animation Show programs and was mightily impressed. Rather than aping the look of sci-fi benchmarks like Blade Runner or the style of anime, Acker and his animation team created a unique futuristic vision. But while I’m curious to see whether Acker, now backed by Tim Burton and Wanted’s Timur Bekmambetov, I’m not all that thrilled with this first trailer. Rather than really drawing the audience into the world Acker has created, the folks who cut this trailer together have instead thrown together a montage of images, with plenty of explosions and brief peeks at the characters who drive the story. Don’t get me wrong- I’m still looking forward to Acker’s feature. I’m just not sure Hollywood knows what to do with it.

The Screengrab Holiday Special: Movies We’re Thankful For (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 16:30:00 GMT

PAUL CLARK IS THANKFUL FOR:

BETTY BLUE (1986)

It would be a mistake for me to trace the birth of my love for movies to one film, and if I was foolish enough to do so, a better candidate would be something like Pulp Fiction. But while Tarantino pushed me down the road of cinephilia, I was still a sheltered suburban high schooler for whom subtitled movies were still, well, foreign. So I suppose it makes sense that my first experience with French cinema was motivated by the same factor that has led generations of curious moviegoers to the arthouses and dusty “foreign” shelves at the video store: sex. “Check this one out,” said the pierced twentysomething guy behind the counter to me and my pack of renting buds. “It’s French -- you know what that means.” And in the course of the evening, if anyone didn’t know what that meant, they would soon be educated. It wasn’t just the subtitles or the sexuality though -- Betty Blue introduced me to the sort of woman I’d never seen before in a movie. As played by Beatrice Dalle, Betty was a stark contrast to the teenage girls who mostly snubbed me throughout my high school years -- she was a feral life force, fiercely carnal, both sexy and more than a little scary. But even more than that, Betty Blue was the gateway drug that got me hooked on French cinema, leading me to Truffaut, Renoir, Godard, and all my auteurial pals. Not bad for a movie I watched primarily to see some tits.

BELLE DU JOUR (1967)

Every movie lover has that one movie that speaks to him in ways that defy explanation, and that causes him to cling to it and defend it like a lioness defends her cubs. For me, it’s Luis Bunuel’s late-period masterpiece. Why, you ask? Part of it is no doubt the eternal allure of Catherine Deneuve -- still my favorite actress and movie star -- in the role that practically defined her on- and offscreen persona from that point forward. But Deneuve aside, there’s the film itself, an enigmatic puzzle-box of dreams, fantasies and fetishes that refuses to let itself be pinned down. I must have watched Belle de Jour at least fifty times over the years, and each time something new pops out at me. For one thing, it gets a whole lot funnier the more you watch it, especially the scenes involving Deneuve and the ever-lecherous Michel Piccoli. But most of all, I guess I love how slippery the character of Severine is -- unlike most filmmakers, who boil down their characters to a handful of defining events and motivations, it’s never quite clear what drives Severine, and the extensive flashbacks and fantasy sequences bait us with the possibility of an answer before pushing us away again, confounding us. In the end, it’s nothing but a tease, but as any successful tease can tell you, that’s what keeps ‘em coming back for more.

THE SCARECROW (1920)

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

If I have a favorite filmmaker, it’s Buster Keaton, whose films have brought me more pure pleasure than any other director’s. Of course, his features are magnificent -- especially The General, Sherlock Jr. and Seven Chances -- and the feature form allowed him to sustain his filmmaking brilliance in a way that has set an impossibly high bar for future generations (so far, only Tati has managed to vault it, though Jerry Lewis came close once or twice). However, for pure laughs, give me his short films any day. The lunacy of One Week and the athleticism of Neighbors have their defenders, but for me, it doesn’t get any better than The Scarecrow, which begins with an uproarious scene in a house filled with sight gags and just gets more blissfully inspired from there, wrapping up in a scant twenty minutes. There’s a reason why The Scarecrow has become my most dependable cinematic cure-all -- for me, no other movie can turn around a crappy day faster or more reliably than this one. But don’t take my word for it -- thanks to the magic of YouTube, the entire short can be viewed above.

THE FILMS OF DON HERTZFELDT

It was back in 2005 that I had my first Don Hertzfeldt experience. I headed to the local theatre to watch the first installment of The Animation Show, and sometime during the Hertzfeldt-directed introductory short -- probably around the “Egg!” “Egg!” “Flower!” “Egg!” bit -- it hit me like a slap in the face. “This guy is a stone cold genius,” I thought. And nothing I’ve seen since has dissuaded me from that opinion. Naturally, I love his early work -- the twisted angst of Ah, L’Amour, the tentative dating saga Lily and Jim, the gloriously sick joke of Billy’s Balloon. But Hertzfeldt, to his credit, has never rested on his laurels. Rejected is a blast to be sure -- nominating it for Best Animated Short has to be one of the coolest things the Academy has ever done -- but the incendiary chaos of its final minutes pointed the way to the more experimental films that were to come. And Hertzfeldt hasn’t looked back, first tackling The Meaning of Life, then turning inward with the profound, Raymond Carver-esque Everything Will Be OK. After seeing the latter film, I wrote, “against all odds, Hertzfeldt just gets deeper and better with every film. I'm almost afraid of his next movie.” I only hope that his latest, I Am So Proud of You, makes it to Columbus sooner rather than later to scare the proverbial pants off me.

THE COLUMBUS MOVIEGOING SCENE

For most Columbus residents, Ohio State football casts a long shadow over the local scene. Yet growing up in the suburbs has made me better-equipped to appreciate the city’s more cultured side. For one thing, where I grew up I had to drive for over an hour to attend a movie theatre that played subtitled films. So I’m thankful that I have several in town now, presenting me with a number of tantalizing cinematic possibilities. All right, so maybe we don’t get the artsy stuff until weeks or even months after it opens in New York City. And fine, our local arthouse situation has become somewhat tenuous of late (here’s hoping that the Grandview Theatre can re-emerge better than ever next spring). But by gum, there’s still a lot to love about going to movies in Columbus. There’s the Horror and Sci-Fi Marathons which I’ve written about on innumerable occasions, giving geeks from miles around a chance to converge on Cowtown twice a year. But most of all, there’s the Wexner Center, an invaluable resource to the artistically-minded moviegoer. Not only can I catch up on the latest works from the masters of world cinema, but the Wex also plays plenty of classics, both in its theatre (equipped with the city’s only working 70mm projector) and occasionally in the galleries, where I’ve recently been haunting the Warhol exhibition. I’m still waiting for the day when Columbus takes its rightful place as the Austin of the North, but until that happens, what we’ve got now will do quite nicely, thank you very much.

Click Here For More Thanks From Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Paul Clark

Cartoon Fever: The World's Greatest Animated Shorts (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Last week, it seemed like a good idea to salute The Top 20 Animated Feature Films of all time, which opened a Pandora’s Box of possibilities for this week’s obvious follow-up list: the Greatest Animated SHORTS of all time.

And by “short,” of course, we mean anything from seconds to approximately 40 minutes, which is the length of time when (according to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) a movie officially becomes a feature (which, I suppose, means 1999’s 75-minute Pokémon: The First Movie wasn’t technically a rip-off).

Anyway, as your post host, I should note that most of this week’s Jumbo Shorts list is the work of Screengrabbers Paul Clark and Phil Nugent, who both clearly have a severe case of Cartoon Fever. The condition is highly contagious and not even Acme has a cure, so don’t say we didn’t warn you!

GERTIE THE DINOSAUR (1914)

This film by Winsor McKay, the creator of the comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, is sometimes called the first animated short; it isn't, but it may have been the first to demonstrate that an artist with as much skill and imagination as McKay could create a personable animated character that would charm and captivate audiences as well as any live actor. You can see McKay at the start of the film, and that's supposed to be him talking to Gertie in the intertitles: this is the film version of a live vaudeville act he originally did in which he appeared on stage and played ringmaster to Gertie as the film was projected on a screen behind him.

BAMBI MEETS GODZILLA (1969) and ANIJAM (1984)

Marv Newland was a mere stripling of an animation student when he created Bambi Meets Godzilla, an instant midnight classic and, at a minute and a half in length, one of the all-time great one-joke movies. Fifteen years later, Newland had founded the animation production house International Rocketship Ltd. and used his name and contacts to get twenty-two different filmmakers to contribute their talents to Anijam. The animated equivalent of a comics artists' jam or a game of Exquisite Corpse, the film starred a Newland character called Foska; each animator was given the last frame of the sequence created by whichever animator had preceded him (without knowing anything else about what action had come before or would follow), and the requirement that whatever he did with his thirty seconds of film would end with Foska on-screen; aside from those stipulations, they were allowed to go nuts. The results are a ten-minute film festival that serves as a record of what animators around the world were doing at one fertile moment in the history of their art form.

DUCK AMUCK (1953)

In making this list, we might have selected one of any number of Chuck Jones classics. But honestly, Duck Amuck seems the only suitable choice here. For one thing, it’s funny as all get out, with some of Daffy Duck’s best moments. But what makes it stand out from the rest is the way it carries the self-referentiality that’s present in many of Jones’ Looney Tunes shorts to brilliant extremes. From almost the very beginning, the Warner Bros. animators positioned themselves as the irreverent alternative to the Disney juggernaut. And cartoons like Duck Amuck are the reason why: instead of bowling the audience over with virtuoso artistry and emotional appeal, they won our hearts with wit and no small amount of mischief. And nowhere is this more evident than Duck Amuck, which doesn’t simply break the fourth wall, but has the fourth wall reach out and exact brutally funny revenge on the star.

REJECTED (2000)

Nearly half a century after Duck Amuck, big-budget animation has become more popular than ever, with the style perfected by Uncle Walt remaining the dominant formula. But on the fringes of the medium, there are a number of independent animators keeping the old Chuck Jones spirit alive, and foremost among them is Don Hertzfeldt. Combining absurdist humor, low-fi doodles, and occasionally profound insights, Hertzfeldt (still only 32 years old) has amassed a sizable and extremely vocal cult following. Some of us (okay, it was Paul) proposed the idea of including Hertzfeldt’s most recent masterpiece Everything Will Be OK on this list, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to snub Rejected, the film that remains the animator’s most popular and even garnered him an Oscar nomination, quite possibly the coolest move the Academy has made this century. In a way, it’s Duck Amuck in reverse -- whereas Jones’ film was predicated on the idea of the animator subjecting the cartoon to his every whim, Rejected is about the animator losing all control of his creation. Only it’s way funnier than that. Don’t believe us? Once you’ve seen it, we defy you to watch a baby uneasily walk around without thinking of the convulsively hilarious fate that awaits the tyke in Rejected.

STREET OF CROCODILES (1986)

The accepted masterpiece by stop-motion masters the Brothers Quay takes on the task of adapting Bruno Schulz's unadaptable, surreal writing to the screen, pulls it off, and then keeps going until it turns into its own special, unclassifiable thing. To say that it helped create the look we associate with cyberpunk would be to reduce it to a mere style; it'll still be alive and kicking when the hundreds (thousands?) of music videos and TV commercials and God knows what else that have plundered it for its looks have been reduced to period pieces and covered with dust.

Click Here For Part Two, Part Three, Part Four & Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark

On-Line Highlights from This Year's "The Animation Show"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT

The fourth season of The Animation Show, the periodic mini-festival of animated shorts compiled by Mike Judge (with fellow animator Don Hertzfeldt, who worked as co-curator of the previous collections, sitting out this one), has begun its progress around the country. As in previous years, the selection is widely varyied in both style and content, making room for one elegant illustrated reading of a poem by Billy Collins and three different episodes featuring a creature called Yompi, the Crotch-Biting Sloup. (If you think Yompi's adventures pretty much write themselves, we can only say...well, yeah.) A couple of the most pleasing films are Grant Orchard's Love Sport: Paint Balling (above) and Western Spaghetti from the stop-motion animator PES. Both are simple, short, and eye-popping, which is to say they're also beautifully scaled to the computer screen.

Also included is Bill Plympton's latest short, Hot Dog, the tragicomic tale of a dog who yearns to join the gang at the firehouse. It helps wash away the bitter aftertaste from Idiots and Angels, Plympton's latest misbegotten attempt to stretch his quirky talents out to feature length. The first minute of the new film is available at YouTube, where it's billed as a "trailer":

Video of the Day: Over Time (2006, Oury Atlan, Thibault Berland and Damien Ferrie)

Paul Clark — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 17:00:00 GMT

One newly-released DVD I neglected to mention in Tuesday’s DVD Digest was Paramount’s The Animation Show 3. A yearly program of shorts presented by Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt, The Animation Show 3 played in a number of theatres in the United States last spring, and included such memorable shorts as Run Wrake’s Rabbit and Hertzfeldt’s masterful Everything Will Be OK. Many of the same shorts that played in theatres are also on the DVD, but one notable omission for the home audience is Oury Atlan, Thibault Berland and Damien Ferrie’s Over Time. A tribute to the life and work of Jim Henson, Over Time is a beautiful work, one that somehow manages to be simultaneously eerie and moving in a way that might make Tim Burton envious. But why take my word for it? Here, through the magic of YouTube, is Over Time.

DVD Digest for May 13, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week: two new Criterion DVDs, the comeback effort of a master filmmaker, and the Chairman of the Board all compete for your DVD dollar. Who will win? Why, DVD buyers, of course!

DVD of the Week: For sheer comprehensiveness, nothing can touch Warner’s 22-film, 5-box-set tribute to the one and only Frank Sinatra. For all of Sinatra’s success as a recording artist, he was also a talented actor, given the right role, and this week sees the release of a number of his finest films. Among these are his Oscar-nominated performance in Otto Preminger’s The Man With the Golden Arm and Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running, both of which are included in the Frank Sinatra: The Golden Years box set. But if you prefer Sinatra the fresh-faced young crooner, check out Frank Sinatra: The Early Years, which includes such early-career titles as Step Lively, It Happened in Brooklyn, and The Kissing Bandit. Or see Sinatra match his pipes with Gene Kelly’s nimble feet in The Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly Collection, comprised of the classic musicals On the Town, Take Me Out to the Ballgame, and Anchors Aweigh. And if special features are your thing, there’s always The Rat Pack Ultimate Collector’s Edition, which finds the Chairman at his least inspired vehicles but leaves plenty of room for gawking at swingin’ celebrities of yore. Heck, Warner is even releasing 1993’s miniseries Sinatra on DVD this week, in case you want your Sinatra without all that Sinatra. All that’s missing is Sinatra’s two most acclaimed films, The Manchurian Candidate and From Here to Eternity. But I’m guessing you already own those, right?

As previously mentioned, this week also brings the release of two brand-spankin' new Criterions, Louis Malle’s The Lovers and The Fire Within. Also of note in classics on DVD: The Big Trail: Fox Grandeur Special Edition; the Godard double-feature of La Chinoise (Kino) and Le Gai Savoir; a new edition of Anthony Mann’s Man of the West (Fox); Saturday Night Live: The Complete Third Season (Universal); and the Fox Western Classics Collection, which includes the new-to-DVD titles Garden of Evil, Rawhide, and The Gunfighter. And in shameless cash-in news, this week brings new DVDs of all three Indiana Jones films, with a few added extra features so that buyers won’t feel completely ripped off.

In more recent films, today brings the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth (Sony, also Blu-Ray), his first official directorial effort in a decade. The film was generally regarded as a critical and popular disaster, but I found it fascinating- flawed to be sure, but intriguingly so- and I believe it’ll finally be appreciated for what it is on DVD. Also this week: Diane Lane in Untraceable (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Diane Keaton, Katie Holmes and Queen Latifah in Mad Money (Anchor Bay); and the French horror film Frontier(s) (Lionsgate). The other major new release this week is the DVD debut of The Animation Show 3 (Paramount), last year’s touring program of animated shorts presented by Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt. The DVD includes Hertzfeldt’s latest masterpiece Everything will be OK, as well as sixteen other shorts, some of which have been added especially for the DVD release.

This week’s Blu-Ray only releases are: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Fox); Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Fox); Mrs. Doubtfire (Fox); and just in time for this weekend’s new blockbuster, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Which brings me to this week’s Huddleston corner, in which we sigh over the lonely release of Warner’s One Missed Call on HD-DVD. I mean really, guys- you’re just kidding around now, right?

Top Ten of 2007: Paul Clark

Paul Clark — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Note: Like Leonard, I don’t live in one of what Hollywood would consider a major cinematic market, so I have yet to see some of the year’s best-reviewed films, such as There Will Be Blood and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. But I think it’s better to post this now rather than waiting until I’ve seen all the major movies, which for all I know won’t happen for months.

10. The Hunting Party

It’s been said before, but I’ll say it again- 2007 was a damn fine year to be a movie lover. Because of this, there were probably a dozen films competing for the final spot on this list, but in the end I had to go with a sentimental favorite, one that deserves much more love than it’s gotten so far. Richard Shepard's darkly comic tale of three journalists (Richard Gere, Terrence Howard, Jesse Eisenberg) searching for a Bosnian warlord succeeds not so much because of its story as for its salty, unironic portrait of male friendship. As in Shepard’s last film The Matador, The Hunting Party is a story about men drawn to violence who booze and bond in outposts far off the beaten path. At a time when Brokeback Mountain is still a punchline, it takes real chutzpah to write a scene in which one man tells another, “that’s why I love you,” without going for a laugh.

9. Time

Korea’s prolific and controversial director Kim Ki-duk has become something of a whipping boy for the cinematic cognoscenti, but there’s no denying that the guy’s got skills. Time, his best film to date, appears on the surface to be a response to Korea’s plastic-surgery craze, but at its heart it’s a story of amour fou, like Seconds played for tragedy rather than thrills. In Kim’s hands, plastic surgery becomes a metaphor for how self-conscious we’ve become, so insecure in our skin that we’re no longer able to simply give ourselves over to others, not even those we love. Also, Kim’s gift for astonishing imagery is as keen as ever, especially in his use of a seaside sculpture park.

8. I’m Not There

The premise- six actors playing six different versions of Bob Dylan- sounds like an academic exercise only a semiotics major could love. But each onscreen Dylan is only a pawn in the game of director Todd Haynes, a piece of the puzzle that has become the Dylan mythos. With his ingenious structure, Haynes highlights the contradictions, tall tales, and outright fabrications of Dylan’s legend, revealing him to be less a self-conscious chameleon reinventing his image for the public as a lifelong searcher who cared little whether we wanted to follow. The wonder is that I'm Not There is so much fun- sometimes electrifying, sometimes goofy, but always fascinating.

7. Offside

The idea that Iranian women aren’t allowed to attend soccer games would seem to be the setup for a dour polemic, but director Jafar Panahi has other plans for their story. In Panahi’s eyes, the law isn’t so much an injustice as a colossal pain for all involved, and by highlighting the absurdity of the situation, Offside becomes the stuff of high comedy. And a rousing crowd-pleaser to boot- Panahi shot much of the film in the bowels of the stadium during an actual World Cup qualifying match, and even at a distance from the field, the energy is palpable. In the end, football is a uniter, not a divider, and once the detained women escape their captors to mingle with their celebrating countrymen, they’re able to share in the victory that their laws had tried to deny them.

6. Joshua

In a year that saw Rob Zombie’s Michael-heavy remake of Halloween, one might be excused for wondering what an evil-kid thriller was doing on my list. But George Ratliff’s Joshua is another breed altogether- a genre movie in the abstract, but a particularly chilly and thematically-rich one. Moreover, Joshua is very much an of-the-moment bad seed, not some pint-sized supernatural boogeyman but the product of ineffectual and indulgent parenting. Jacob Kogan is creepy in the title role, but the real revelation is Sam Rockwell, giving the performance of the year as his father, a man whose parenting skills are limited at best, and who is ill-equipped to deal with a son whose behavior goes so sharply against his own. When he finally realizes what he’s up against it’s too late to stop it, and thanks to Ratliff and Rockwell, this realization hits with the power of a gut punch.

5. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

In Assassination, director Andrew Dominik plays a tricky game- to make a Western that doesn’t so much de-mythologize the genre as re-mythologize it by making explicit the undercurrent of mythmaking that was always a part of the West. It could have been a disaster, but somehow it works beautifully, thanks not only to the beauty of the filmmaker but also the performances. Brad Pitt is fine as a Jesse James who is all too mindful of the larger-than-life figure he cut in the West, but the film belongs to Casey Affleck as Ford, the youngster whose boyish hero worship festered into violent obsession. Ford was foolish enough to believe that he could create his own legend, but all he did was to be swallowed up by Jesse’s, and because of Affleck’s performance this reviled figure becomes downright tragic.

4. The Host

The best giant monster to attack theatres this past year didn’t stomp Tokyo, but Seoul, in the superior Korean creature feature The Host. With a flair for showmanship and populist storytelling that nearly equal those of Spielberg in his Jaws days, director Bong Joon-ho has made a monster movie to stand alongside the greats in the genre. Part of the credit should go to the effects wizard who created the disgusting yet somehow lovable monster, but I dare say the movie wouldn’t work so well if not for the endearingly flawed family at the movie’s center. Even on a list this full of darkness and despair, there’s always a place for pure, unadulterated entertainment, and The Host gave me more sheer moviegoing pleasure than any film of 2007.

3. Gone Baby Gone

Most of the praise for Gone Baby Gone has centered on the film’s performances- especially the much-feted Amy Ryan- and the surprising amount of thematic resonance to be found in the film. But I think director Ben Affleck deserves a great deal more credit for how powerful this film is than he’s been getting. Most obviously, Affleck has a real feel for his setting- a working-class South Boston neighborhood- and the people who inhabit it. But while this location seems at first like backdrop to a mystery involving a kidnapped child, it eventually takes center stage in the story, which turns into an breathlessly compelling study in the consequences of tribalism. “Guys take pride in where they’re from, like it was something they did,” states protagonist Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck- again!) in the film’s opening voiceover. The tragedy is that Kenzie- thinks himself above it all- buys into this idea as much as anybody.

2. No Country for Old Men

For most of its running time, No Country for Old Men works primarily as an uncommonly exciting chase thriller, in which the overmatched Lewellyn Moss struggles to stay ahead of stone-cold killer Chigurh (Javier Bardem). But while first two acts of the film are enough to mark it as the Coen brothers’ best work in years, it’s the final act, which avoids the expected confrontation between Chigurh and Lewellyn in favor of something more philosophical, that the film to another level of greatness altogether. An observer for most of the story, Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) suddenly comes face to face with the idea that even if you run from the evil that you fear may be hiding behind one door, there’s no guarantee that it won’t be waiting for you behind another. “You can’t stop what’s coming,” indeed.

1. Zodiac

From the beginning, David Fincher’s evocation of the still-unsolved case of the Zodiac killer has been something of an anomaly. It’s a serial-killer movie that practically never goes for cheap thrills, and a three-hour fact-based period piece that’s almost bereft of epic sweep. In short, it’s tough to put my finger on what exactly makes Zodiac such a masterpiece. For me, the most awe-inspiring aspect of the film is its near-obsessive attention to detail, one that’s downright fanatical even by the standards of the true-crime genre. But using the thousands of tiny clues and incidental pieces of business that surrounded the Zodiac case, Fincher immerses us fully in the world of the case, one in which the crime-solving technology and interdepartmental procedures of the day were always several steps behind the schemes of the killer.

Also worth mentioning: Everything Will Be OK (sorry, no trailer)

When I was making this list, I decided to restrict myself to feature-length films. However, taking into account all new movies I saw this past year, none hit me quite as hard as Don Hertzfeldt’s thrilling new animated short, Everything Will Be OK. In little more than fifteen minutes, Hertzfeldt tells the story of a man who is doomed to die. His doctors give up on him, his mother moves in to help, and the man himself goes off the deep end. And then, without warning, he suddenly gets better, much to everyone's annoyance. Everything Will Be OK has the feel of an especially good Raymond Carver story, both in its sense of irony and its reliance on small but significant detail, but the twisted sense of humor and unique animation style is all Hertzfeldt. Call it number zero in my top 10.