Luck, Season One, Episode Two
Written by John R. Perrotta
Directed by Terry George
Airs Sundays at 10pm ET on HBO

“The Ace is back in place.”

To Luck‘s credit, it goes to great lengths to put all of its players on an even keel in terms of representation on the screen; that means the big-deal movie stars don’t get an appreciably greater deal of exposure than the reams of lesser-known character actors on display. With that said, how great is Dustin Hoffman here? More energized and present than he’s been since maybe I Heart Huckabees, though obviously in a very different capacity, Hoffman absolutely tears into his scenes this week, even moreso than in the pilot. When a longstanding criminal associate utters the above line, you’re right there with him. (In interviews promoting the show, Hoffman has expressed a certain disgust for recent Hollywood moviemaking, so maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that he seems so freshly engaged here.)

A showstopping performance like Hoffman’s might actually work against an ensemble piece like this, except that there’s such a learning curve on display here in terms of getting immersed in Milch’s supremely detailed world of backroom dealings and equine intrigue that a certain level of accessible human interest is sort of a necessity. On that score, the other Big Name also does some heavy lifting this week in a crucial scene that makes clear that his Old Man (referred to at one point by another character as “Smith”) acts as the show’s conscience in the midst of so much trickery. Recounting the story of his promising young horse (Gettin’ Up Morning)’s father and his untimely demise at the hands of greedy owners looking to cash in on an insurance policy, Nolte’s reliably gruff delivery helps to sell a character who might seem laughable on paper (a man who’s largely grown disillusioned with the ways of men but still carries an abiding love for horses).

If anyone thought the pilot lacked for Milchian bon mots, “Episode Two” likely put those fears to rest, beginning to really develop the speaking styles of most of the show’s ensemble. (Deadwood fans should remember that just because Milch’s name isn’t on every teleplay, doesn’t make a given hour’s dialogue any less “his.”) Especially distinct this week is ambitious hangdog Renzo, who attempts to make a claim on Bon Gateau following its win last week, but meets only with disapproval from Marcus, who, despite his physical state, seems to possess a kind of thrall that Renzo can only hesitantly break free from. Not that it ends up mattering much, as a behatted mofo named Mulligan (a nearly-wordless W. Earl Brown) winds up winning the horse anyway, even as a dazzled Marcus looks over Bon Gateau’s stunning win at the claiming race, sensing a missed opportunity that flies in the face of his previous judgment.

If there’s a weak link to be found so far, it’s Marcus’s son Jerry. His throughline so far feels “right” in the sense that people who win big often double down on bad habits, but Jason Gedrick is probably the least appealing of the lowlifes, making it hard to get too invested in the character’s exploits as of yet, as we instinctively sense that his minor “win” at the tables this week is likely just prelude to a future breakdown. His pal Lonnie, on the other hand, makes pissing a small fortune away a highly entertaining affair, aided immensely by his hilarious, foolish displays of verbiage. (And while his being played by a pair of forty-something minxes was plainly telegraphed, it was a touch of genius having at least one of them turn out to be a Birther.)

In any case, there’s something immensely satisfying in seeing Luck‘s world really begin to come together. Fully grasping the exact mechanics of its many competing schemes isn’t as important as cluing into the show’s careful development of the racetrack as a kind of singular platform for some of fate’s more momentous designs. If the show’s lingo and general lack of expository hand-holding is a difficulty, however, I recommend checking out the “Inside Track” interviews being published weekly over at HBO.com, wherein Milch expounds a little on some of the show’s trickier plot points. It’s not every day a show is enhanced by extracurricular reading, but that’s Milch for you.

Simon Howell

Long after its world premiere last July at the Fantasia International film Festival here in Montreal sharply divided viewers, Robin Hardy’s long-in-the-works sorta-sequel to his famed cult classic The Wicker Man is finally making its way to theaters – nearly 40 years after the first film opened. Justine, Ricky and Simon offer their takes on the new flick, as well as taking a look back at the 1973 original.

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All music is taken from Paul Giovanni’s original soundtrack to The Wicker Man.

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The Woman in Black

Nowadays, “old-fashioned” is generally meant as a compliment in discussions of contemporary movies, in conjunction with an overarching sense that new films – particularly mainstream films – are not as sharp or high-minded as their counterparts from decades past. In the case of The Woman In Black, though, we can safely revert “old-fashioned” back to its traditional, pejorative meaning; hoary, creaky, outdated, too-familiar. The film’s one-sheet is more effectively creepy than the film itself.

This is doubly disappointing considering the source; James Watkins previously helmed the truly vicious chavsploitation thriller Eden Lake. That film took a familiar genre touchstone – the killer-kids flick – and found a novel, relevant spin. The Woman in Black, meanwhile, is entirely content to recycle plot points seen countless times, and its unconvincing turn-of-the-last-century setting might explain Watkins’s comparative alienation from the material. In his first prominent post-Potter role, Daniel Radcliffle toplines as Arthur Kipps, a lawyer who’s been assigned to tidy up the affairs of a lonely estate in some remote corner of the English-speaking world, a dust-ridden mansion whose only point of access is a lonely road which becomes completely submerged when the high tide arrives. In the nearby village, denizens speak in hushed tones about a terrible tragedy that befell the estate’s former occupants, and only one (Ciaran Hinds) greets Kipps with anything other than bald contempt. With his help, Kipps resolves to set the house in order, spirits and all.

Not unlike Ti West’s similarly misbegotten The Innkeepers, Watkins’s film attempts to resurrect age-old haunted-house tropes, but at least West’s movie felt aesthetically novel in some respects. By contrast, Woman cribs scary-lady framing from decade-old J-horror, only dulled with a sense of numbing repetition; at least a dozen of the film’s creep-out moments consist of placing Radcliffe’s face in closeup to one side of the frame, while a shadowy entity slinks along the background in varying degrees of focus. The “mysteries” at the heart of the estate unravel plainly, with no palpable sense of revelation. (Worse, the film repeatedly shows us the same information, as though we’re too dense to piece together the tale in one pass.) Perhaps most cripplingly, Radcliffe feels like he’s play-acting; all determination and generic torment, he’s a difficult figure to become invested in, yet he’s in nearly every frame. Kipps never feels like more than a collection of attributes.

The stretches of Woman that almost work do so purely on visual terms. Its gothic vistas are presented with a distinct lack of CGI goosing (at least not of the detectable sort); serious credit is due to DP Tim Maurice-Jones. The murky environment is put to good use in a late marshland sequence that, while hardly tense, at least threatens to plunge the film into the realm of the memorable. For the most part, though, Woman is content to recycle with class. It’s unfortunate that we already know Watkins can do better.

Simon Howell

After an admittedly mixed reception at Sundance, Red Lights, the third feature from Buried helmer Rodrigo Cortés, finally has a full-length, non-dubbed trailer so that us punters at home can start to pre-emptively judge it. The paranormally-inclined thriller boasts a stellar cast, including Robert de Niro, Sigourney Weaver, Cillian Murphy, Elizabeth Olsen, and Toby Jones. Check out the new spot below:

Justified, Season 3, Episode 3: “Harlan Roulette”
Written by Dave Andron
Directed by Jon Avnet
Airs Tuesdays at 10pm on FX

It’s still early to make too many predictions about Justified‘s third season, but it’s noteworthy that there are distinct shades of Breaking Bad in this week’s installment, “Harlan Roulette.” The effects of Oxycontin (aka “hillbilly heroin”) on its users begins to become a plot point. A charismatic, disquieting villain lays out a plan to manufacture and sell drugs in a slick, corporate fashion. (“That’s why they call it organized crime.”) Hell, one character even makes a reference to the possibility he might “break bad,” just in case the comparison wasn’t explicit enough. Of course, the two shows are fundamentally different in a lot of ways, but the nod seems to acknowledge that the show plans to encroach on some of that same, deeply perilous territory.

Timothy Olyphant now has such a monopoly on the character of Raylan Givens that it’s hard to imagine anyone else filling the character’s shoes (or, more importantly, hat). Yet the character was portrayed onscreen once before back in 1997, by James Le Gros, in a TV-movie adaptation of Pronto. Le Gros popped up near the end of Justified‘s last season, in a typically sly casting nod, as one of the show’s many colorful lowlifes, Wade Messer. It seemed like a one-and-done appearance at the time, but Messer pops up again this week, and his scene with Olyphant is the hour’s most dryly funny, employing the show’s blend of folksy wit and comic irony to great effect. Now that we know Carla Gugino won’t be back this season (Graham Yost has confirmed as much), it’s nice to have a reminder that the show is great at bringing back its bit players and using them effectively.

And just when you thought Justified couldn’t squeeze in any more Deadwood alumni for its guest spots, “Harlan Roulette” goes and throws in Pruitt Taylor Vince, aka Mose, here playing an Oxy-dealing associate of this season’s Big Bad, Robert Quarles. Vince’s character, Glen Vogel, is a tricky beast, given that he’s one of the most physically intimidating one-off villains the show’s ever produced, and his episode-title-dropping dispatching of a henchman is harrowing stuff, but his final showdown with Raylan actually winds up more funny than tense, with Vogel and another henchman arguing over who can turn snitch and reap the rewards. In the end, Raylan doesn’t even have to lift a finger, let alone the brim of his hat.

The show’s serialized elements are more prominent this week, and well-integrated, but they’re also almost 100% transitional. Dickie finds himself having to answer to the dirty guard who overheard of Mags’s stash of cash, Quarles plots his theoretical drug empire, Wynn Duffy seems quietly terrified (noteworthy in and of itself), and Boyd takes back his brother Johnny’s bar as a base of operations. (Incidentally, it’s great to have David Meunier back in that role.) There are so many elements in play this season that it’s almost frustrating that we spend so much of this hour with the lowlifes-of-the-week. They’re entertaining, no doubt, but it’s surprising how little time we’ve been getting to spend with Raylan, getting to know just where his head is at now that he’s back in the line of fire with a kid on the way.

Of course, it’s hard to complain too much when that corker of a closing scene hits. Raylan finally meets Quarles face-to-face and resumes his “conversation” with Duffy, before dropping a typically quotable threat (“Next one’s comin’ faster”), while Quarles opts not to display or dispatch his little arm contraption. (Another nice touch: Quarles makes the Taxi Driver homage explicit, and then gets cut off before he can giddily explain just where he got the parts: “I was Christmas tree shopping…”) How can you not be stoked to see Givens and Quarles square off another half-dozen or so times?

Simon Howell

Joe Carnahan has been oscillating between smaller genre movies and big-budget blowouts for the last decade, but in this hour we opt out of Smokin’ Aces and The A-Team in order to focus mostly on the first half of that equation. First up is the man-vs-wolf survivalist saga The Grey, new in theaters this past weekend, which we’ve paired up with Carnahan’s gritty 2002 drugs n’ cops thriller Narc.

We did our best to keep this one spoiler-free, but anyone who wants to stay completely pearly before seeing The Grey might want to wait to give our review a listen, given that some discussion of the ending was a necessity.

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Playlist:

X – “The Hungry Wolf”
Fever Ray – “The Wolf”
REM – “Wolves, Lower”

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Justified, Season 3, Episode 2: “Cut Ties”
Written by Benjamin Cavell
Directed by Michael Watkins
Airs Tuesdays at 10pm ET on FX

Moreso than with most “prestige” dramas, seasons of Justified tend to follow a pretty set formula in terms of serialization. After a premiere in which the season’s major players are introduced, we get somewhere between two or three episodes that feel less tethered to the season’s master plot, opting instead to flesh out Raylan’s fellow marshals a bit, and remind us of what Raylan’s day job really entails. (Last season, this was especially true of “The Life Inside” and “The I of the Storm.”) “Cut Ties” hews to that pattern more than it breaks from it, but it’s an interesting installment nonetheless – and for unusual reasons.

In February and March of last year, while Justified‘s second season aired, two Deputy US Marshals were shot dead in the line of duty in separate incidents. That might not seem like such a noteworthy occurrence, given the dangerous nature of the work, but in actuality it had been almost 20 years since the last time that happened. (Last season’s “Brother’s Keeper” was dedicated to their memory.) Considering Justified takes place in a heightened, Elmore Leonard-ified version of reality, any attempt on the show’s part to reflect those grim real-life events without disrespect needs careful calibration, and that sensitivity is apparent early on in “Cut Ties,” in which a Deputy Marshal (not Raylan, duh) is indeed killed.

That Deputy (Michael Harding), is, much like the real-life figures, just doing his job when the shitbird-of-the-week (a sleazy ex-con in witness protection played by Frank John Hughes) takes him down – but it’s noteworthy that the Marshal’s actual death occurs off-screen. (We see him get shot in the leg, but the clearly telegraphed killshot is cut off by the credits.) Both in keeping with Justified‘s seasonal rhythms and the respectful tone of the episode, much of the rest of this week’s gnarly stuff is handled by two more Marshals who aren’t Raylan – his boss, Art (Nick Searcy), and his rarely dispatched co-worker, Rachel (Erica Tazel). The former is actually the one who collars the sleazebag in question, even employing some old-school Southern roughhousing in the process – which, paradoxically for him, makes him a little more similar to Raylan than he might appreciate, but also illustrates the impact of the Marshal’s death. Rachel, meanwhile, slickly protects the remaining witness, with her and Art tag-teaming the anonymous gun thugs who ultimately arrive to take her out. (As far as Rachel-powered episodes go, this one’s a fair sight more credible than “The I of the Storm.”)

Though Raylan notably isn’t doing any of the shooting this week, there’s no shortage of stuff on his plate. Of course, there’s the new deputy director of the Marshals, his old flame Karen “Goodall” (a thinly, and humorously, veiled version of Leonard regular Karen Sisco, a role “not” reprised here by Carla Gugino), who’s on hand to oversee the handling of the dead Marshal’s case, but also to remind us that Raylan has a history in Miami beyond shooting Peter Greene. What she’s not here to do – not yet, anyway – is to provide significant complications in Raylan’s love life; any disgruntled Winona haters that still linger have more to grumble about in that regard.

While Neal McDonough is a no-show this week (he’ll be back in a big way next week, if the preview is any indication), we do get a glimpse of Mykelti Williamson’s character, Ellstin Limehouse, a butcher who holds Mags’s missing fortune, which will no doubt put him in contact with the newly freed Boyd next week. We only get an introduction this week, and though Williamson is fun to watch and a great contrast to McDonough, his scene is weirdly familiar. He threatens a lax employee while carving up meat – hello, Tywin Lannister! – and also brings out a bucket of lye and details its deleterious effect on flesh, which evokes pretty much beat-for-beat a key scene in David Fincher’s Fight Club. Given that the show is rarely lacking for creative menace, we’ll have to mark this one down as an off night in that respect. In all others, a fine, necessary hour, with a few intriguing wrinkles that may inform the series’ future in unexpected ways.

Simon Howell

There’s more than one reason to be curious about The Woman In Black, the gothic horror-thriller opening wide February 3rd. First and more obviously, Daniel Radcliffe stars, making his first post-Potter film appearance. Secondly, the movie’s directed by James Watkins, who previously wrote and directed the vicious, smart UK chavsploitation flick Eden Lake. Third, the film is penned by Matthew Vaughn collaborator Jane Goldman (adapting Susan Hill’s novel, which was itself previously tackled in a 1989 film made for British television), no slouch herself. And hey, we have a shiny double pass for the Toronto premiere of the film, Thursday, January 26th, at Scotiabank Theatre. Just shoot an email to admin@soundonsight.org with the movie’s title in the headline to be entered into a draw. Good luck.

**Update 01/25: This contest is now closed.**

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The Grey

Man vs. nature may be a narrative as old as time, but Joe Carnahan’s The Grey would probably have been most at home in the 1970s. Clocking in at a hefty, patient 117 minutes, boasting as bare-bones a plot as a mainstream feature possibly can, and with a minimum of dramatic showboating or audience-friendly dramatic signposting. The Grey is pleasantly and excitingly out of time.

Liam Neeson, who previously starred in Carnahan’s version of The A-Team, stars here in a very different capacity as Ottway, a sadly adrift figure working in self-exile, as a wolf hunter for an oil company in Alaska. Since the death of his wife, he is entirely without purpose, even entertaining notions of suicide. He doesn’t get that far, though, as his routine is cut short when he and an assorted band of industry workers find themselves utterly stranded in the frigid wilderness following a plane crash. Seven, including Ottway, remain alive once the debris is cleared, but the real threat to their survival is two-fold: the weather itself, unforgiving and unrelenting; and the taunting, almost spectral presence of a roving pack of timber wolves.

Where The Grey diverges from survival thrillers past is in its pronounced existentialist streak. Ottway and his fellow survivors (including Dermot Mulroney and Dallas Roberts) struggle with individual crises of faith (or lack thereof) while simultaneously battling the elements and their own failing bodies. Carnahan keeps a close watch of the film’s tone and intensity level throughout; long periods of pensive observation actually serve to ratchet up the tension, since the creatures have a tendency to emerge suddenly and viciously. What’s more, the more philosophically inclined portions of the film rarely feel heavy-handed or too highfalutin’ for the surrounding chaos; Carnahan and Ian Mackenzie Jeffers’ carefully calibrated screenplay only throws out enough of these moments to lend a pleasing ambiguity to Ottway’s journey, making sure that the film works equally well as straight-up thrill ride as well as allegorically loaded fiction.

And yes, there actually are thrills to be had, especially in the first 45 minutes or so following the crash; if the sight of the barely-torchlit blackness gleaming with a dozen pairs of fearsome eyes isn’t enough, the near-constant sense of dread generated by the tentativeness of the group’s shelter and the general uncertainty of how to deal with the predators (despite Ottway’s expertise) makes for a genuinely nail-biting run. That tension eases up a bit throughout the second half, both thanks to deliberate slowdown and one cliffside sequence that suffers from less-than-convincing green-screen effects, but rallies admirably in the last reel, which culminates in the gutsiest ending to a Hollywood feature in recent memory.

Where the film’s considerable (by contemporary standards) runtime would normally result in significant pacing issues, the drawn-out feel actually serves the material, so that by the time Ottway and the rest are crossing the umpteenth windswept hellscape, the chill has had time to truly set in. While the film does have a few moments of excess sentimentality (perhaps owing to a few too many shots of Ottway’s departed wife), it still manages to feel like a relic from an era when Hollywood films were allowed to meander and to elide cozy resolutions from time to time.

Simon Howell

This is what we like to call the B-sides, a series of podcasts produced and hosted by Sound On Sight staff writers, outside of the regular Sound On Sight radio hosts. On this deportation double feature, Josh Youngerman and Simon Howell review Chris Weitz’s A Better Life with Damian Bichir and Like Crazy starring Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones. They also give their picks for the most overlooked films of 2011.

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Playlist:
“Laura Palmer” – Bastille
“El Jardinero” – Ozomatli
“Dead Hearts” – Stars

Haywire

With the exception of his oft-maligned Ocean’s trilogy, perpetually-retiring journeyman Steven Soderbergh is rarely content to experiment in only one dimension, which makes his latest foray into genre fare, Haywire, yet another left turn of sorts. Besides the casting of a previously unknown quantity – comely MMA star Gina Carano – and a few aesthetic diversions, Haywire is one of his most straightforward movies ever, so singularly concerned as it is with showcasing its star’s fighting acumen (and not much else).

As with his considerably knottier Contagion, Soderbergh ropes in the sort of cast only he seems to have the pull and the Rolodex for. Carano toplines as Mallory Kane, a private special-ops team member with a reputation for exceptional badassery. As the film opens, she’s on the run, with former paramour/co-worker and current alcoholic Aaron (Channing Tatum) in bumbling pursuit. Betrayed by her employers (particularly handler Kenneth, played under a thin layer of slime by Ewan MacGregor), Kane continues to go rogue, accompanied by an overwhelmed civilian (Michael Angarano), to whom she unspools the details of her professional exile. Also floating in the ether: the now-ubiquitous Michael Fassbender, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Mathieu Kassovitz, and a well-cast Bill Paxton as Mallory’s ex-military father, who exhibits the appropriate balance of fatherly concern and strategic acumen.

Reteaming with screenwriter Lem Dobbs, with whom he had a difficult collaboration on The Limey, Soderbergh doesn’t attempt to mimic that film’s blend of genre-playbook action beats and psychological portraiture. (Relying on the screen-green Carano for the same depth of performance as Terence Stamp would, of course, have been a mistake.) Instead, Haywire is strictly about the former, albeit delivered with Soderbergh’s typically dynamic sense of visual and aural variety. An early chase scene is seen exclusively through a monochrome filter and sticks strictly to David Holmes’s 80′s-hued score, for instance. It’s difficult to shake, though, that these aesthetic tics, along with the script’s elaborately jumbled chronology, serve to distract from the fact that Mallory’s plight isn’t particularly convoluted.

Thankfully, the action element of Haywire mostly delivers, thanks in part to Carano’s peculiar blend of soft, even approachable, appearance, and her almost-mythical (in the world of the film) strength and dexterity. The fights are un-fussy, believable, and brutal without being overly stylized. The film also makes great use of her scenes with Angarano, whose perpetual look of disbelief allows for some very effective moments of levity. As for the actual fights, some work better than others; a hotel-room tousle with Fassbender is particularly memorable (and has, thanks to its sexual undertones, the added bonus of acting like a sort of wet-death-dream for his Shame character), and a Dublin foray into parcour is also a standout. The climactic standoff with the author of her troubles fizzles, though, in a manner more suited to one of Soderbergh’s artier outings. (It doesn’t help that, even at only 93 minutes, the last reels drag.)

As enjoyable as most of the action beats are, it’s difficult to shake the feeling that Soderbergh has essentially roped an A-list cast into what amounts to a DTV thriller, albeit a particularly witty one with a very mild experimental streak. If that doesn’t sound appealing, check back with him in six months; semi-retired, retired, or whatever his status is, it’s to his credit that he rarely keeps still for long.

Simon Howell

While we wait patiently for The Walking Dead to return to AMC with the back half of its second season, we’ll be taking a look at some of the previous zombie works that have influenced the series in one significant way or another. This week: Danny Boyle’s not-quite-a-zombie-flick epidemic chiller 28 Days Later, with special guest Shawn Keown from Zero Pretension. In addition, we’ll also be talking about the recent unveiling of Frank Darabont’s original – and ultimately rejected – plan for the Season 2 premiere.

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Justified, Season 3, Episode 1: “The Gunfighter”
Written by Graham Yost and Fred Golan
Directed by Michael Dinner
Airs Tuesdays at 10pm ET on FX

When last we saw Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant), he was bidding an unwitting adieu to Mags Bennett (Margo Martindale), one of the most feted TV villains in recent memory (even giving Breaking Bad‘s Gus a run for his money). That would seem to place Justified showrunner Graham Yost, his writing staff, and producer-star Olyphant in the unenviable position of trying to replace the Bennett clan with an equally compelling force of no good. But that’s not entirely accurate.

After all, runt of the Bennett litter Dickie (Jeremy Davies) is still alive and kicking – in jail, of course (along, thankfully, with perpetual delight Dewey Crowe, played with the usual dim wit by Damon Herriman). Some of the series’ other ne’er-do-wells are still here, too, notably Wynn Duffy (Jere Burns), who’s back in a more permanent capacity this time around. As if they, along with Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) and his cronies, weren’t enough, we’re also swiftly introduced to Robert Quarles (veteran I-know-that-face character actor Neal McDonough), a slick hood from Detroit with plans for Harlan that we’re not privy to just yet and a quick-draw mechanical gun holster worthy of a Bond villain, as well as hitman Fletcher Nix (Desmond Harrington). Oh, and we get another baddie next week, played by Mykelti Williamson. That is a huge stockpile of villains – even if one of them doesn’t make it past the premiere.

The best thing about “The Gunfighter” is the confidence and ease with which it rolls out its (many) introductions, making it clear that Justified‘s third outing is intended to be a knottier affair, replete with competing interests, silently hatched schemes, and serious stakes. It’s an ambitious direction, one that’ll take seriously solid writing to really pull off, but Yost and his crew have earned a measure of trust – and continue to here. It helps immensely that, despite all of the encroaching threats, the show’s distinctive blend of wisecrackery and high-wire tension are completely, blessedly intact. For that, special credit goes to Olyphant, who’s yet to nab a statue for his stellar work as Raylan, and whose behind-the-scenes role has, according to Yost and company, been primarily one of making sure the series’ tone sticks close to Elmore Leonard’s idiosyncratic style. (Actually, a recent Slate piece went as far as to suggest that Justified has beaten Leonard at his own game.)

That careful attention to tone is most apparent in the parts of the episode that deal with Nix, a glass-faced, icepick-wielding, and notably black-hatted (hats are, as ever, very important to this series) creep with a penchant for dispatching victims with a cruel “game” involving quick-drawing. It’s vitally important that, despite Nix’s elaborate MO, we take him seriously as a threat, and we do, thanks to Harrington’s unsettling performance and a well-staged early scene in which we see what it looks like when the game goes his way (as it always does). Raylan’s dealings with Nix are laced with some delicious irony, principally the fact that if he’d done his paperwork, he’d have identified him upon their chance meeting in an elevator – and probably gotten himself killed (he’s not even close to the top of his game, thanks to that pesky gunshot wound from last year’s finale). Raylan’s ultimate standoff with Nix is a thing of beauty, with the newly pregnant Winona (Natalie Zea) wearing just the right expression of carefully managed terror, Nix not wasting much time gabbing, and Raylan coming up with a satisfyingly elegant solution. (Also elegant, though unrelated: Boyd’s little plan to maneuver himself into the same pen as Dickie, with whom he has a serious beef. Well played.)

It’s not perfect. Last season’s most diminished player was Ava Crowder, who got demoted from newly independent, name-taking badass to Boyd’s girlfriend/accomplice. “The Gunfighter” doesn’t do much to solve the Ava Problem; she’s literally back to making dinner for lowlifes, which may be the point, but since we haven’t spent much time with Ava doing anything except helping Boyd out and directing invective at Raylan, it’s hard to get a bead on her motivations.

If Yost and company can get her back on track, and maybe even if they can’t, Season 3 should have no problem hitting the highs of last season, and maybe actually exceed them. It’s still one of the most entertaining, exhilarating hours on TV.

Simon Howell

It’s been a full five years since Wes Anderson made a live-action feature; while 2009′s Fantastic Mr. Fox restored him to critical favor, most felt that The Darjeeling Limited was a less-successful rehash of past glories. Moonrise Kingdom finds Anderson reuniting with collaborators old (Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzmann) and new (Bruce Willis, Edward Norton) for a young-love-themed comic romp that looks to lay on the quirk pretty thick – at least, if this trailer is anything to go by. Also, if you’ve been longing for Anderson’s uniquely pastel-colored frames, you’re in luck. Moonrise Kingdom opens in May.

[via CinemaBlend]

With more movies in limited and general release than ever before, 2011 was a ridiculously crowded year for both casual and discerning moviegoers alike. One by-product of the glut is a refreshing lack of consensus; so many films have been championed in so many corners – while those same films get trashed in others – that our cultural need to rally behind obvious points of praise and awareness have been gloriously undercut. 2011 was the year to see and love films that spoke to you, and to be prepared to argue the case with fellow cinephiles. In other words, 2011 was the year the gloves came off. To say that none of the 30 films on our staff-voted list is universally beloved is putting it mildly; but then, that’s the nature of polls like these.

Every year we’ve run this poll, there’s been a runaway winner; this year, the top 2 films were tied up until the last ballot; three crossed the hundred-point threshold. Only five films earned the support of over a third of the contributors. That’s the sort of year it was. (In the event of a tie, which only occurs when the films get the same number of votes AND points, they share the poll number. Got it?)

Worth noting: Incendies, La Quattro Volte, and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives all made it onto our 2010 staff list.

CLICK HERE TO SEE PART ONE (#30-16)

15. Bellflower (5 votes, 32 points)

The Micro-Indie That Could, Bellflower was one of the most fiercely debated movies of the year; part Mad Max, part Blue Valentine. Director-writer-star-editor-engineer Evan Glodell’s movie drew plenty of ire thanks to the film’s relaxed, naturalistic acting style and its rank depiction of a man who grows to despise the woman he fell helplessly in love with, but its roughshod charms helped it to stand out in a year where indies tended to look and feel slicker and less distinct than ever before.

14. Rise of the Planet of the Apes (5 votes, 34 points)

While the great majority of the year’s blockbusters played it safe, Rupert Wyatt’s unexpectedly bold prequel to the iconoclastic 1970s sci-fi series stood out for its clarity, urgency, and heart. That the last part of that equation was mostly delivered through a performance-captured CGI ape (Andy Serkis, in what might be the first such performance ever to nab an Oscar nod) is only one remarkable feat in a movie that produced a number of the most awe-inspiring moments of any film this year.

13. The Interrupters (4 votes, 38 points)

Steve James made what might be the most critically acclaimed doc of all time, Hoop Dreams, back in 1994, but he hasn’t reapsed the rewards of the genre’s subsequent rise to (relative) prominence. Hopefully The Interrupters, which is equal parts inner-city portraiture and social advocacy piece, re-cements him as a household name. Both heart-wrenching and surprisingly empowering, James’s look at inner-city violence and conflict resolution is never less than riveting.

12. A Separation (5 votes, 40 points)

Asghar Farhadi’s critically adored family drama tensely unravels a dense tale of intra-familial conflict, societal forces, and cruel fate, carefully deploying key revelations (both on- and off-screen) for maximum dramatic effectiveness, but never feeling sanctimonious or excessive. The film is further proof of the continued vitality of Iran’s harshly repressed filmmaking culture.

11. Hugo (5 votes, 44 points)

Early looks at Martin Scorsese’s Hugo suggested that maybe he’d finally go the way of so many other directors and cash in on kiddie-friendly material in the name of blank commercial appeal. Instead, Hugo is Scorsese’s best movie in some time, both a dazzling tribute to early cinema and a hopefully appeal for the medium’s future.  That the movie manages to act as both a buttress for Scorsese’s film-presevation efforts and a beguiling family film in its own right is no small feat.

10. Hanna (8 votes, 46 points)

Saiorse Ronan cuts through the screen in Joe Wright’s unexpectedly playful thriller, which juxtaposes innocence and brutality at will. Ronan is one of the most charismatic and distinctive young actors around, and watching Hanna define herself in a strange and unfamiliar world while danger lurks not far behind was one of the earliest film pleasures of 2011.

9. We Need to Talk About Kevin (9 votes, 51 points)

Possibly the most misunderstood movie of the year, Lynne Ramsay’s long-awaited return is a vividly rendered horror film with a keen sense of subjectivity that seemed to go over a few critics’ heads. Tilda Swinton continues a career-long streak of intense, idiosyncratic performances, and Ramsay’s camera lingers on details both over-the-top and seemingly incidental. The result is demented arthouse for manic-depressives.

8. Attack the Block (11 votes, 57 points)

For those not so keen on JJ Abrams’s nostalgic take on preadolescent adventuring, Attack the Block is a buoyant counterattack; a lean, mean, funny, and surprisingly brutal actioner that balances a keen sense of place (set in the North London equivalent of a housing project) with a genuine feel fro universal themes and accessible characters. Genre fans will likely be keeping a close eye on first-time helmer Joe Cornish for some time.

7. The Artist (6 votes, 58 points)

Michael Hazanavicius shifted his loving, lightly parodic gaze away from the spy spoofs of the Oss 117 series long enough to craft what may end up as the most broadly adored movie of 2011, a love letter to the silent-film era and a showcase for returning collaborator Jean Dujardin, whose charismatic turn as the titular, possibly doomed star has already earned him reams of plaudits.

6. Midnight in Paris (tie; 8 votes, 66 points)

Woody Allen’s umpteenth comedy turned out to be his most warmly received in ages – both critically and commercially. If that means Allen is definitely no longer a New York filmmaker, most didn’t seem to mind, embracing Allen’s new role as a Euro-centric comic chronicler of romantic and existential woe.

6. Martha Marcy May Marlene (tie; 8 votes, 66 points)

Like Winter’s Bone last year, Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene emerged from Sundance early in the year to prove that American indies have more to offer than quirky dramedies and misery porn. Elizabeth Olsen’s fractured title figure is the beating heart of this taut, carefully constructed thriller, whose air of menace and mystery is convincingly ever-present.

4. Shame (11 votes, 71 points)

Steve McQueen’s sophomore feature has had a tough go of it, gaining plaudits for Michael Fassbender’s incredible central performance, but generally enduring a whole lot of grief for its central concept and approach. For anyone willing to engage with the film on its own terms, though, Shame is one of the most effectively gruelling emotional gauntlets in recent memory, while also calling into question the cavalier way we portray and consume sex in the age of porn.

3. Melancholia (13 votes, 103 points)

Danish provocateur Lars von Trier had his, well, von Trier-est year ever in 2011, managing to get himself banned from Cannes while actually presenting one of his tamest films ever. Melancholia manages athe neat trick of annihilating the Earth in its opening minutes, then actually turning out to be one of von Trier’s most weirdly optimistic films.

2. The Tree of Life (11 votes, 111 points)

Terrence Malick’s long-in-the-wings, impressionistic dare of a movie kicks off what appears to be a new and more productive era for the famously reclusive director, who apparently has two more new films more or less in the can. Despite his track record for long breaks, this bit of news isn’t necessarily surprising when you’ve seen The Tree of Life, which feels like the cinematic equivalent of a creative dam bursting, in the best way possible.

1. Drive (17 votes, 133 points)

If 2011 was a year of divisive movies, none polarized audiences and critics quite like Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, a movie so stylistically brazen it both won Refn a Best Director prize at Cannes and inspired at least one lawsuit. A tightly knit patchwork of film and pop-culture touchstones that also happens to fit within Refn’s small oeuvre of idiosyncratic tough-guy flicks, Drive is a movie both of its time and indebted to several others; it might prove to be ahead of the curve, too.

PREVIOUS

The rest:

31- The Descendants (3 votes, 20 points)

32- Cave of Forgotten Dreams (3 votes, 18 points)

33- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two (3 votes, 18 points)

34- Miss Bala (3 votes, 17 points)

36- The Skin I Live In (tie: 2 votes, 15 points)

36- She Monkeys (tie: 2 votes, 15 points)

37- Young Adult (3 votes, 13 points)

39- Incendies (tie: 2 votes, 13 points)

39- Win Win (tie: 2 votes, 13 points)

41- Submarine (tie: 2 votes, 12 points)

41- The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (tie: 2 votes, 12 points)

41- War Horse (2 votes, 11 points)

43- The Turin Horse (tie: 1 vote, 11 points)

43- Salt White (tie: 1 votes, 11 points)

43- Life In A Day (tie: 1 vote, 11 points)

43- Wuthering Heights (1 vote, 11 points)

43- Samsara (tie: 1 vote, 11 points)

44- Headhunters (2 votes, 10 points)

47- Tomboy (tie: 1 vote, 10 points)

47- A Lonely Place To Die (1 vote, 10 points)

47- Way Back (tie: 1 vote, 10 points)

47- Rabies (tie: 1 vote, 10 points)

47- Darwin (tie: 1 vote, 10 points)

47- Policeman (tie: 1 vote, 10 points)

47- Tomboy (tie: 1 vote, 10 points)

47- Mysteries of Lisbon (tie: 1 vote, 10 points)

47- Cafe De Flore (tie: 1 vote, 10 points)

50- I Saw The Devil (tie: 2 votes, 9 points)

50- The Adventures of Tin Tin (tie: 2 votes, 9 points)

50- Poetry (tie: 2 votes, 9 points)

CLICK HERE TO SEE PART ONE (#30-16)

Best Movie Trailers of 2011

Best Movie Posters of 2011

Best Movie Moments of 2011

Best Soundtracks of 2011

Best Documentaries of 2011

Best Horror Films / Thrillers of 2011

Best of TV In 2011