Leave it to someone’s doctoral thesis to explain why this year at the movies there are two films that look back on the early days of the art form (The Artist, Hugo) and so many others also focused on the past, from biographies of Marilyn Monroe (My Week with Marilyn), FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (J. Edgar) and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher (The Iron Lady) to fictional accounts of the aftermath of 9/11 (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), World War I (War Horse) and the civil rights ’60s (The Help).
Whether or not history proves this to be a stellar year at the movies — unlikely — I had no problem filling a 10-best list, with such worthy releases as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Moneyball and A Separation just missing the cut.
1. The Descendants — Director Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways) returned triumphantly with his first feature in seven years, the tale of a Honolulu lawyer who learns soon after his wife lands in a coma from a boating accident that she had been unfaithful. George Clooney brings gravitas to the role, learning to be a father to his two distant daughters.
2. The Artist — In these days of high-tech computer graphics, this staunchly retro black-and-white, silent film (complete with text titles) about the early days of talkies delivered a very pleasurable, pure cinematic experience.
3. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close — The emotionally loaded subject of 9/11 hovers over a quirky story of a young boy’s odyssey around New York searching for the meaning of a key left him by his dead father. Bring Kleenex.
4. The Tree of Life — Despite a self-indulgent, dinosaur-laden prologue, director Terence Malick then uses his lyrical style to focus in on the domestic drama of a Texas family with a domineering dad (an impressive Brad Pitt). Note the exquisite available-light cinematography.
5. The Skin I Live In — Masterful Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar reunites with one of his early discoveries, the sensual Antonio Banderas, as a plastic surgeon trying to recreate the image of his dead wife on a woman imprisoned in his basement. Then the movie gets kinky.
6. 50/50 — Cancer becomes the stuff of comedy as Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a guy battling a rare lymphoma. The laughs are not cheap and eventually director Jonathan Levine and writer Will Reiser lower the emotional boom. Anjelica Huston and Anna Kendrick provide sublime support as Gordon-Levitt’s overbearing mother and inexperienced therapist.
7. War Horse — Call it Steven Spielberg’s World War I answer to Saving Private Ryan, wrapped around the loyal friendship of a British lad and the war-bound horse who survives combat despite all odds. Based on a children’s book and the Tony-winning puppet show, it has been transformed again into a heart-rending, exquisitely photographed film.
8. Hugo — As improbable as a Martin Scorsese children’s film sounds, he showed how not to talk down to kids in this tribute to the early days of cinema and its pioneer, Georges Melies. He also demonstrated how to use 3-D correctly, in a kinetic film full of his masterful camera moves.
9. Take Shelter — It is no longer surprising when Michael Shannon (Bug, Revolutionary Road) plays an unhinged soul, but he outdoes himself in this low-budget yarn of a construction worker disturbed by a premonition that a cataclysmic storm is headed his way.
10. The Help — A wryly comic look at the dawning of the civil rights movement, in Jackson, Miss., during the early 1960s, as seen through the eyes of the black domestic help who gain the courage to speak out about their working conditions. In an ensemble of fine actresses, Viola Davis stands out.