Hollywood doesn’t produce too many movies like this, and when it does, it doesn’t know what to do with them. Playwright Kenneth Lonergan’s long-awaited, troubled follow up to You Can Count On Me is a volcanic, raw, turbulent drama that went unreleased for six years (it was shot in 2005).
Seventeen-year-old Lisa (Anna Paquin, from True Blood) is rocked with guilt after a woman is killed in a traffic accident (she had inadvertently distracted the driver). But that’s only one thread in a teeming social tapestry this intense, passionate teen must negotiate as she comes of age in a time of contradiction and confusion.
Wildly ambitious… embraces big and rich themes and sumptuous tones and moods with a remarkable scope and nuance… For all its awkwardness and uncertainty, the film is a city symphony, romantic yet scathing, lyrical with street life and vaulting skylines, reckless with first adventure, and awed by the abstractions, both intellectual and poetic, on which the great machine runs.
Richard Brody, The New Yorker
Bursts with ambition and specificity… Paquin deserves the highest accolades for her ferociously committed performance…The film has a cumulative power – solidified by a devastating opera-house finale – that’s staggering. This is frayed-edges filmmaking at its finest.
Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York
Ambitious, affecting, unwieldy and haunting, it’s an eccentric, densely atmospheric, morally hyper-aware masterpiece.
Ann Hornaday, Washington Post
Paquin creates that rarest of things: a profoundly unsympathetic character who is mysteriously, mesmerically, operatically compelling to watch.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Kenneth Lonergan
Anna Paquin, J Cameron Smith, Jean Reno, Mark Ruffalo, Jeannie Berlin, Matt Damon
USA
2011
English
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Credits
Screenwriter
Kenneth Lonergan
Cinematography
Ryszard Lenczewski
Editor
Anne McCabe, Michael Fay
Original Music
Nico Muhly
Production Design
Dan Leigh
Art Director
James Donahue
Also in This Series
These movies speak to our times and push the boundaries of the art form — the true modern classics we’re confident will withstand the test of time.
In the Mood for Love
Wong Kar-wai's most acclaimed and popular film is a love story about two neighbours (Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung) who are drawn together by the long absences of their respective spouses + a newly released short companion piece from 2001.
Paprika
A device capable of transmitting dreams falls into the wrong hands in this dazzling anime meta-movie from visionary filmmaker Satoshi Kon. The imagery here is never less than overwhelming; it's probably the greatest scifi movie of our times.
Margaret
Seventeen-year-old Lisa is rocked with guilt after a woman is killed in a traffic accident. But that’s only one thread in a teeming social tapestry this intense, passionate teen must negotiate as she comes of age in a time of contradiction and confusion.
Certain Women
Spare, incisive portraits of four Montana women (Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart and Lily Gladstone) brushing up against the everyday wears and tears of difficult men, their own circumstances, and the desire for something better.
Melancholia
Lars von Trier squares up to the end times with this grandly luxuriant but surprisingly punky sci-fi, set in an imposing country mansion house, where Justine (Kirsten Dunst) blows up what's supposed to be the happiest day of her life.
Moonlight
Moonlight is many things -- a portrait of a young black man coming of age in Miami in the 1980s, a film about fathers and sons, about mentorship and about the scourge of drugs -- but it is also one of the most piercing movie romances of the last decade.
Lady Bird
Greta Gerwig's first film as writer-director is a delightful, painful comedy about "Lady Bird" McPherson (Saoirse Ronan), a Sacramento teen on the point of swapping high school for college, and her hard-working mom, Marion (Laurie Metcalf).
Silence
This sober, probing examination of faith, ego, cruelty and compassion is the most underrated film from the often under-valued latter half of Martin Scorsese's brilliant career; a passion project, about Catholic missionaries in 17th Century Japan.
Synecdoche, New York
Charlie Kaufman wrote Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind -- all great, all successful -- then turned director with Synecdoche, which is a masterpiece and which basically went unseen. It's overdue rediscovery.