Philip Seymour Hoffman and The Beginning of a New Year

To your right, you will see the incredible new poster for my film Jake the Cinephile by the endlessly talented Benjamin Dewey. Ben designed the beautiful posters for With Love, Marty and The Wheels, as well, and I was thrilled to have him design this new poster. 

Jake the Cinephile had its film festival premiere on Sunday, March 9th at the Beacon Film Festival (Freeze Frame) in Beacon, New York. I was so honored to screen the film in the Beacon, where we shot all of the movie theater scenes for the film. I travelled up to Beacon for the screening, where I was thrilled to see posters for the festival in many of the store windows along Main Street. Outside the Beacon Theater, they had pictures posted for each film (which you can see in the picture below).

The film screened on its own (rather than part of a short film program), and I was very excited to participate in a Q&A onstage after the screening. I had the opportunity to spend some time in Beacon after the screening, as well, which was great fun.

The festival received some wonderful publicity, including a large story in the Poughkeepsie Journal, where Jake the Cinephile not only received a mention, but the newspaper also featured a picture from the film (see a picture of the article below). The film and I were also mentioned in the Philipstown newspaper in an article about the fourth annual Beacon Film Festival and our film shoot in the Beacon.

If you're in New York City on Wednesday, April 16th, Jake the Cinephile is screening at 8:00 PM as an Official Selection of NewFilmmakers New York's Short Film Program at Anthology Film Archives! It will be very exciting to screen the film at Anthology, which is an incredible screening space. Check out our film's profile on NewFilmmakers New York's website here. 

On September 23rd, I was honored to screen Jake the Cinephile at Rutgers University for one of its largest audiences yet, as part of a special screening for Professor John Belton's film class. Professor Belton, a brilliant film writer, has been such a champion of this film, and I was thrilled that he not only invited me to screen the movie in his class, but that his entire afternoon lecture was dedicated to screening the film and a Q&A with the class afterward. More than any other screening, I was really amazed by how the movie was received by the students here. It's been fun screening this particular movie (there was even an unofficial sequel made in Yemane Demissie's summer Sight and Sound: Film class - where I screened the movie for the class - that ended up in the Tisch School of the Arts Sight and Sound showcase).

Thanks to our Executive Producer Steve White, we also now have our poster on the Jake the Cinephile IMDB page.

Richie Donnelly, one of my late father's best friends and another Executive Producer of Jake the Cinephile, passed away in December. One of the kindest people I've met, Richie was a loving and supportive presence in my life with his wife Susan Morris. From telling me stories about my father to coming to my plays in high school, Richie's support and love means more to me than I can ever say. I know my dad is overjoyed to see his old friend. Richie's memorial page and obituary can be found here, although how can these brief paragraphs ever begin to capture the beauty of someone like this?

It's been a terrible few months for losing genius talents. Peter O'Toole, one of the finest actors in cinema, brought an intimacy and emotional complexity to a four-hour epic with David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Lawrence is unlike any other screen protagonist I can remember, and this was just the first leading role for an actor who would give so many more genius performances. Roger Ebert's 2002 interview with O'Toole is worth checking out. 

Harold Ramis was a master, giving us some of the funniest movies of all time, including Groundhog Day (1993), National Lampoon's Vacation (1983), Caddyshack (1980), Ghostbusters (1984) and Analyze This (1999). I hope his dark thriller The Ice Harvest (2005) is rediscovered. And his performances - from Stripes (1981) to Knocked Up (2007) to Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007) - are golden.

The great Lou Reed, Marcia Wallace, Pete Seeger and James Rebhorn (who wrote his own very moving obituary) are among the many other wonderful artists who have passed away in recent months.

I've wanted to write a tribute for some time to one of the greatest actors the world has ever known, but the thought of articulating all of my love and appreciation for this man into one neat article seems impossible. So, I will continue to write about the work of Philip Seymour Hoffman in future posts, as he has changed the world of film and theatre so tremendously that it's impossible to write about great works in either medium without mentioning at least one of his performances.

Not only was Hoffman the finest actor of his generation, he was also an incredibly gracious person. I'll never forget meeting him and congratulating him the week after he won his Oscar for Capote in March of 2006 (this was at the ninetieth birthday party of Horton Foote). His work onstage in the Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman was the most powerful stage performance I've ever seen, and his openness with the Tisch Dean's Scholars when he talked to us last April was inspiring. He was the master. 

I was honored to be have been interviewed for an article on Mr. Hoffman's extraordinary legacy for Newsday, who also published a picture of our Dean's Scholars group with Mr. Hoffman (along with the article itself) in amNewYork. There have been a number of lovely tributes to Mr. Hoffman, including this moving montage of his work on Vimeo, a wonderful tribute by film critic Michael Phillips, a tribute from his Almost Famous director Cameron Crowe, memories from the staff at RogerEbert.com (Ebert always said that he wanted Hoffman to play him in a movie) and even a cartoon from The New Yorker that brings a tear to my eye.

I first became aware of Mr. Hoffman and his incredible range as an actor in 2002, around the time I became a more adventurous theatrical moviegoer. That fall alone, I was amazed by his extraordinary performances in Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love, Spike Lee's 25th Hour and Brett Ratner's Red Dragon. The following spring, after reading Roger Ebert's rave four-star review of Owning Mahowny (2003), my mom and I sought out the wonderful independent film at the Regal Westgate in Austin (back when Austin multiplexes screened independent films). In the film, Hoffman plays a compulsive gambler, and in any other actor's filmography, this would be their greatest performance. For Hoffman, it's one of many buried treasures that I hope people will continue to discover when delving into his rich filmography.

By that time, I had started watching his brilliant performances in earlier films that were changing my life and still remain among my favorite movies, including Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous (2000) and Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia (1999) and Boogie Nights (1997) - not to mention coming to appreciate his hilarious turn in Joel and Ethan Coen's The Big Lebowski (1998), which I had first watched with my dad (who was a Lebowski fan before it was popular, for what it's worth), even more than when I first saw the movie. 

I was overjoyed when he won the Best Actor Oscar for his monumental performance in Bennett Miller's Capote (2005). It was clear, more than ever, that Hoffman was the finest working actor, on par with De Niro, Pacino, Nicholson and Penn and never anything short of brilliant in every single role. In the next few years, audiences were treated to the best of both worlds - Hoffman gave towering leading performances in contemporary masterpieces such as Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007), Tamara Jenkins' The Savages (2007), Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York (2008) and John Patrick Shanley's Doubt (2008), while still remaining the finest character actor alive in Mike Nichols' Charlie Wilson's War (2007), Bennett Miller's Moneyball (2011), George Clooney's The Ides of March (2011) and J.J. Abrams' Mission: Impossible III (2006). 

And then there were his stage performances. I was lucky enough to see Mr. Hoffman onstage twice - in 2009's Othello at NYU's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, and in Mike Nichols' production of Death of a Salesman on Broadway in 2012. Death of a Salesman left me devastated in a way no live theatre production has in my life. When I met Mr. Hoffman for the second time less than a year ago with the Tisch Dean's Scholars, I was near the end of my own thesis film shoot, and I asked him about the communication and notes shared between actor and director while shooting a film. We were so fortunate to spend time with a genius who has forever changed cinema and theatre.

I haven't mentioned so many of his other wonderful performances - in Cold Mountain (2003), Flawless (1998), Pirate Radio (2009), The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013) and, in perhaps his greatest screen role, Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master (2012). Many of the best films of the last twenty years were anchored by Mr. Hoffman's genius, and watching his performances on film and stage influenced me in no small part as an aspiring actor, too. His characters felt so vulnerable and authentic, and losing him feels like a great personal loss to so many people. I don't know how to comprehend a world without Mr. Hoffman. 

Since the heralded premiere of her film Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq at the 51st New York Film Festival in October, I have had the privilege of continuing to work as an assistant for Emmy-winning director Nancy Buirski. Her new film, on which I worked as a researcher and production assistant, had three incredible screenings at the New York FIlm Festival.

The distributor Kino Lorber picked up Afternoon of a Faun for distribution shortly after the end of NYFF, and earlier the year, I was fortunate to attend several meetings at the Kino Lorber offices to discuss the release of the film. Here is the official trailer for the movie, which opened on February 5th at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

In October, we screened Afternoon of a Faun with UNICEF on World Polio Day (October 24th) at the United Nations. Following the screening, Nancy spoke on a panel dealing with Polio in the 21st Century with David Oshinsky, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Polio: An American Story; Peter Crowley, Global Polio Team Leader; and journalist and U.N. correspondent Irwin Arieff.

Over the holiday break, I discovered that my grandmother, Lucille Kyser, attended the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in St. Louis in 1945, 1946 and 1947, which included ballets choreographed by George Balanchine and danced by Alexandra Danilova and Maria Tallchief. Nancy and I were thrilled to share pictures from the original programs to our Facebook followers (as my grandmother still has the programs in her collection after all these years).

On the Monday evening before the film opened in cinemas, there was a wonderful premiere of Afternoon of a Faun at the JCC in Manhattan, followed by a dessert and champagne reception at the home of Richard Lorber. 

On its opening weekend, Nancy was actually out-of-town for the film's International Premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival (also at Berlinale - Scorsese's New York Review of Books documentary). I assisted with the opening weekend Q&As at Lincoln Center, which included talkbacks with Jacques D'Amboise, Randy Bourscheidt and Arthur Mitchell. Among the many ecstatic reviews the film received, my favorites are the rave from RogerEbert.com and Owen Gleiberman's Grade A review in Entertainment Weekly (not to mention Stephen Holden's outstanding review in The New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle's four-star review). And after two months in theaters, Afternoon of a Faun is still at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.

On its opening weekend, Afternoon of a Faun topped the Specialty Box Office. "With perfect first positioning by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Afternoon of a Faun certainly blasted off this weekend - we're all thrilled and getting ready to pirouette into national release in the coming weeks," Gary Palmucci of Kino Lorber said in this article from IndieWire. Since then, the movie has continued to do incredible business.

In early March, I had the incredible honor of serving as an Associate Producer on a two-day film shoot in which Nancy interviewed legendary dancer Jacques D'Amboise. We spent two days in a studio at the National Dance Institute in Harlem listening to Mr. D'Amboise's incredible stories - he is one of the most energetic storytellers around, and I was honored to be a part of this shoot.

In addition to getting its run extended for several weeks at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, Afternoon of a Faun also opened at Cinema Village on 12th Street later in February. The movie continues to expand across the country as the rave reviews keep coming in - please visit the film's website to check out its upcoming theatrical playdates. Not to overwhelm you with links, but here is Nancy's interview on NPR from February, and her brilliant piece from The Daily Beast on the film and Tanaquil Le Clercq's story. Coming up, Afternoon of a Faun is a Center Frame screening at the Full Frame Documentary FIlm Festival. The film will screen at 4:00 PM this Friday, with Nancy and Jacques D'Amboise speaking after the movie.

On Monday, February 24th, I was lucky enough to attend the Tribeca Film Institute's 20th Anniversary benefit screening of Robert De Niro's directorial debut A Bronx Tale (1993) at the Village East Cinema. After the screening, De Niro participated in an incredible Q&A with the audience. This wasn't the first time I had seen my lifelong hero in person, but as I sat in the second row of the Village East's large auditorium, it was the closest I had ever been to the man who, along with Martin Scorsese, has shaped my life in an extraordinary way.

De Niro had so many words of wisdom, including a response to a question about Method Acting that drew applause from the entire theater. In short, it was a wonderful opportunity to see my hero in person speaking about one of his finest films.

Earlier this year, I was thrilled to support Steve James' new documentary Life Itself, based on Roger Ebert's memoir, which raised money on IndieGoGo. The film was executive-produced by Martin Scorsese and, as a perk of contributing to the movie, I was able to watch it simultaneous to its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Life Itself moved me to tears - my heart swelled with love for Mr. Ebert, who changed my life, and I cannot wait to write more about the movie when it receives a theatrical release later this year.

In other recent screening news, my film The Wheels was selected as one of three student films to screen on Friday, March 28th at the NYU Student Film Showcase, presented by The Motion Picture Club at NYU and the Humanities Ambassadors. The event ran from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM in NYU's Kimmel Center, and it was followed by a discussion of the films and answering questions about the making of these movies. As always, it was a joy to get to screen my work for others.

There's much more to cover in my next blog post, including my thoughts on this year's Academy Awards and awards season in general. Nothing will ever equal seeing The Wolf of Wall Street for the first time with Martin Scorsese laughing uproariously a few rows behind me, but I spent Christmas Day the way any self-respecting Scorsese fan would - taking the family to see this certifiably insane masterpiece again. DiCaprio blows the roof off the theater every time I've seen it, and Scorsese doesn't let anyone off the hook easily. The way the music shifts in the wedding scene alone is genius - from Sharon Jones singing Goldfinger live onstage to the creeping in of Six Mix a Lot's Baby Got Back to the hard cut to Bo Diddley's howlingly devilish Pretty Thing - well, I could go on (which reminds me - here's a dang good list of the year's best soundtracks). But I have to agree with Wesley Morris when he says "it's rare that a tracking shot brings a tear to [his] eye." As Scorsese would put it, the film is big and ferocious.

I'll end by writing that my Advanced Production class was treated to a wonderful dinner at the home of our professor Yemane Demissie in February (I've included some pictures from this evening throughout this post). It was a fantastic meal and a delight to spend time with our mentor as we all complete or near completion of our senior thesis films.

Films In and Around The 51st New York Film Festival: Afternoon of a Faun, The Age of Innocence, The Immigrant, Nebraska and more

On Monday, September 30th, Nancy Buirski’s Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq had its World Premiere at the 51st New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, the first of three sold-out screenings at the festival. I started working as an assistant for Ms. Buirski in June, and I have had the honor of assisting with this wonderful film for the past few months, leading up to its premiere at one of the world’s greatest film festivals.

It has been an amazing experience working on this movie, which is my first professional credit out of college (I am credited as a Researcher and a Production Assistant in the end credits), as well as assisting with the New York Film Festival screenings of the film. Additionally, I have helped promote Afternoon of a Faun by running its Facebook and Twitter pages, posting many of the wonderful interviews with Ms. Buirski and the incredible press surrounding the movie, including glowing reviews from Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.

The official synopsis for the film reads: Of all the great ballerinas, Tanaquil Le Clercq may have been the most transcendent. With a body unlike any before hers, she mesmerized viewers and choreographers alike - her elongated, race-horse physique became the new prototype for the great George Balanchine. Amazingly, she was the muse to not one great artist but two; both George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins loved her as a dancer and as a woman. Balanchine married her and Robbins created his famous version of Afternoon of a Faun for Tanny. Tanaquil Le Clercq was the foremost dancer of her day until it suddenly all stopped. At age 27 she was struck down by polio and paralyzed. She never danced again.(Above photograph by Misun Jun.)

The film features interviews with many of Tanny's best friends and luminaries in the dance world, including Jacques d'Amboise, Arthur Mitchell, Randy Bourscheidt and Barbara Horgan, all of whom attended the premiere (I had the opportunity to meet Mr. d'Amboise and Mr. Bourscheidt, which was very exciting). Also in attendance at the premiere were legendary filmmakers D.A. Pennebaker and Frederick Wiseman, actor Michael Stuhlbarg (who provides the voice of Jerome Robbins in the film) and author Fran Lebowitz. After the screening, Kent Jones conducted a wonderful Q&A with Ms. Buirski that you can watch here on the Film Society of Lincoln Center website. 

Not only was it very exciting to help organize the screening and the after-party, it was also a wonderful opportunity to see many of the incredible people who work at Sikelia Productions, who have always been so supportive. 

At the film's second sold-out screening at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, I was honored to receive a special thanks from Ms. Buirski in her opening remarks on the film.

The popularity of the film at the festival was amazing – a third screening was added to the final day of screenings by popular demand (in the esteemed company of Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave, no less). 

I also attended the NYFF51 Live: Spotlight on Documentary Filmmakers event at Lincoln Center, where Ms. Buirski and acclaimed documentary filmmakers Allison Berg and Francois Keraudren (The Dog) and Jehane Noujaim (The Square) spoke about their films.

Moving forward with the film, Afternoon of a Faun will be screening with UNICEF this upcoming Thursday at the United Nations on World Polio Day. There is an upcoming theatrical release planned for the picture, and it will air next year on PBS as part of the American Masters program. (Photograph to the right by Misun Jun.)

The night after the premiere of Afternoon of a Faun at the 51st New York Film Festival, Ms. Buirski won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Historical Programming for her film The Loving Story, an amazing documentary that has won several awards over the past year, including a Peabody Award and a Gabriel Award. 

The New York Film Festival is an amazing event, and I was very lucky to get to attend a few other screenings at the festival. On Thursday, October 10th, I attended the twentieth anniversary screening of one of my favorite films, Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence, at the Walter Reade Theater, with Scorsese introducing the film beforehand with Kent Jones. It was a beautiful restoration of a heartbreaking and powerful masterpiece. You can watch Scorsese's introduction here (I was in the second row of the theater).

I want to write in depth here about three other masterful films I saw at the festival - James Gray's The Immigrant, Alexander Payne's Nebraska and Steve McQueen's 12 Years A Slave, as well as two extraordinary films I saw outside of the festival - Paul Greengrass' Captain Phillips and Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity. 

Spoiler warning for all films reviewed below.

“You Are Not Nothing.” – James Gray’s The Immigrant

The first thing that struck me about James Gray’s The Immigrant, which I saw at the Francesca Beale Theater at Lincoln Center, were the faces of the actors in the film - so many haunted, gaunt and pale faces. People looked different in 1920s New York than they do today, and this is one of many important details that lend a great authenticity to this movie. One of the most beautiful-looking films I've seen in some time (photographed by Darius Khondji), the burlesque houses, crowded tenement buildings and spectacular magic shows for Ellis Island immigrants deeply rooted me in a time and place unlike anything I’ve seen since Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002).

Gray, one of my favorite filmmakers, participated in a Q&A with the audience after the screening. The film is full of breathtaking, sweeping images of 1920s New York, and yet, like all of Gray's work, this is a very intimate movie. I asked Mr. Gray if, when writing the film, he was thinking about the number of large set pieces compared to the more intimate scenes with only a few actors. Gray answered that The Immigrant is the kind of film United Artists might have released back in 1978, but these days, it is, of course, very difficult to secure funding for a large-scale, dramatic period piece of this nature. So, yes, he did write thinking about the number of expansive scenes versus the intimate ones, and tried to include many of the larger set-pieces in the opening of the movie, allowing the picture to slowly grow more intimate.

As the film opens, sisters Ewa (Marion Cotillard) and Belva Cybulski, immigrants from Poland, arrive at Ellis Island. Belva is very ill from tuberculosis, and immigration officials escort her away to an infirmary. When their American aunt and uncle fail to meet them at Ellis Island, Ewa is nearly shipped back to Poland, before she crosses paths with Bruno Weiss (Joaquin Phoenix), a brothel-keeper on the Lower East Side. He offers Ewa a helping hand and a place to stay – provided that she work at his brothel and serve as a prostitute. Desperate to earn enough money to get her sister out of Ellis Island, Ewa agrees.

Ewa is referred to early on in the film as a ‘woman of low morals,’ as her behavior and promiscuity on the boat to America are called into question. Throughout the film, we watch as Ewa battles with her own sense of morality and what she feels she deserves. She tests her morality by continually engaging in behavior she feels certain will send her to hell, but in order to survive in America, she has no other choice. Late in the film, Ewa asks her aunt, “Is it a sin to want to be happy when you know you’ve done so many things wrong?” I felt myself growing an extreme distaste for Bruno, who subjects Ewa to so many awful experiences.

But in the same way that the characters in Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975) defy our expectations of who will rise to the occasion*, so, perhaps, does The Immigrant subvert our expectations of Bruno. Though both the audience and Ewa may initially revile Bruno, my heart ultimately broke for him by the end of the picture, because he is, I believe, a good man. He is truly and hopelessly in love with Ewa and is trying, in his own flawed way, to earn her love. The jealously, longing and fury in Phoenix’s performance is breathtaking; this is a great companion piece to his extraordinary performance in Gray’s masterpiece Two Lovers.

Jeremy Renner, as Orlando the Magician, enters midway through the movie and changes the dynamic entirely. Imbued with a bit of magical realism, his character shows Ewa that there’s something beyond the dreary life of prostitution. Again, though, our expectations are challenged and a harder truth sets in – while the dashing and charming Orlando appears to have all of the answers and offers Ewa a way out of this life, does he really love Ewa like Bruno loves her? And, ultimately, is he really looking out for Ewa any more than Bruno? 

There are not easy answers to these questions, and as the film goes on, the relationship between Ewa and Bruno grows more and more complex. Is Bruno taking advantage of her, or is he offering the best version of the American Dream of which he knows? Talking about the movie after the screening, Gray described the relationship between Bruno and Ewa as strangely “co-dependent." In the final scene of the movie, there is a forgiveness and understanding between these two that moved me deeply. The beautiful and haunting last shot of the film illustrates their separation and their connectedness. 

I came away from The Immigrant feeling so much for both of these characters. Joaquin Phoenix's Bruno belongs on a list with other recent characters in cinema who, for whatever reason, stay with me and earn such an unexpected amount of empathy (I think of Greta Gerwig in Frances Ha, and, further back, Ryan Gosling in Blue Valentine). After the screening, I told Mr. Gray that I think his work is incredible - between The Immigrant and Two Lovers, he has made two of the finest movies of the last decade.

*(In her review of Nashville, Pauline Kael wrote, ‘Who watching the pious Haven Hamilton sing the evangelical ‘Keep a’ Goin,’ his eyes flashing with a paranoid gleam as he keeps the audience under surveillance, would guess that the song represented his true spirit, and that when injured he would think of the audience before himself?’)

Alexander Payne's Nebraska

There seems to be a unique and unspoken sadness in the lives of many Midwesterners. Perhaps it’s their taciturnity and the dry wit that covers up any trace of sorrow – they don’t necessarily talk about their problems with each other in great detail or neurotically analyze their anxieties and fears. They make for wonderful film characters because they ask for no pity whatsoever, and yet the sadness buried beneath their eyes endears us to them. How many filmmakers besides Alexander Payne make movies about these kinds of people?

Even on its first viewing, Payne's new film Nebraska feels like an old, warm friend. Filmed in beautiful black-and-white by Payne’s cinematographer Phedon Papamichael (the film looked absolutely astonishing on the large screen at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center), Nebraska has many of the qualities that make Payne’s work so distinct and memorable (most notably, it's a road-trip movie, one of my favorite sub-genres and a Payne specialty). We are introduced to many characters who at first seem like slightly satirical Midwestern send-ups, but are revealed, with time, to have “private fortitude and sadness all their own,” as Nick Pinkerton so elegantly wrote in his 2011 Village Voice interview with Payne. 

Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) of Billings, Montana believes he has won one million dollars, after receiving a letter in the mail from a Publishers Clearing House-like company informing him of his fortune. Chided by everyone around him as crazy and senile, Woody insists on traveling to Lincoln, Nebraska to collect his money - even if it means walking there by himself. Full aware that the letter is a complete scam, his son David (Will Forte) reluctantly agrees to drive his father to Lincoln, hoping for Woody to find some kind of happiness in his final years.

It takes some time before we get a full understanding of how Woody’s family and friends marginalize and take advantage of him (although Nebraska certainly acknowledges Woody’s own faults, as well). Bruce Dern’s performance here is amazing because it slowly sneaks up on you. His most moving moments are entirely wordless; he has a kind of quiet understanding about his situation and how people perceive him, even though he is, by all accounts, decidedly deluded in his quest for his million dollars.

It’s these quiet moments – none of which ever come close to looking anything like 'acting' – that we see into Woody’s soul. We come to understand how important this money is for him and how his dignity is invested in collecting this million dollars.

I mention this because I don’t think I became entirely aware of the power of Dern’s performance until the end of the movie – this is a performance that could have simply been a man falling into incoherence and dementia. But in Woody, we see so much more – so much lost time, so many dreams deferred, so many regrets and yet that same Midwestern reticence. During the scenes in which the large pack of men in the Grant family stare at the camera as they all watch television together, even the smallest of small talk seems like a word too many.

Late in the film, when someone who works at the Publisher's Clearing House-like company in Lincoln asks David if his father suffers from dementia, David replies, “No. He just believes what people tell him.” That seems to be Woody’s weakness – he’s willing to take any and every thing at face value, and has allowed himself to be stepped on over the years.

Up until about two-thirds of the way through the film, we’ve only seen Kate (June Squibb), Woody's wife, humorously degrade and belittle her husband, and, like in many of Payne’s films, we think we have her figured out. But then Payne blindsides us. When the time comes, Kate stands up for Woody and defends him passionately to other members of his own family. In that moment, we see that she loves him deeply. The characters in this film are deeply full of love; most of the time, it's just masked and deflected by dry humor and a kind of laconic attitude. I see this in my uncles from East Texas. It makes me want to reach out and hug them tightly.

Roger Ebert once wrote that he does not "cry during sad moments in the movies, only during moments about goodness." During these moments, he experiences what he calls elevation when watching a movie - not exactly crying, but rather "the welling up of a few tears in [his] eyes, certain tightness in [his] throat, and a feeling of uplift: Yes, there is a good person, doing a good thing." There’s something to be said for the fact that nearly all of Payne’s movies, particularly About Schmidt, have this kind of effect on me. Nebraska continues the tradition. The end of this film has a moment of such genuine kindness and uplift that I struggled to keep it together. Payne knows how to end a movie. Everything I love about about Sideways, About Schmidt, The Descendants and Election is all here.

I want to acknowledge the amazing score by Mark Orton. Rarely is a director’s tone so well-served by such moving and sometimes hauntingly mournful music. It’s never an outright sad score; like Rolfe Kent’s beautiful work on About Schmidt, it just feels honest. Papamichael's work is also amazing - one of the many reasons Nebraska is so powerful is because of the visual poetry and beauty of this part of the country. And the screenplay by Bob Nelson will surely win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Nebraska is my favorite film of the year so far.

Steve McQueen's 12 Years A Slave

I don't have much to write about Steve McQueen's powerful new film 12 Years A Slave, if only because watching the movie is such a deeply visceral experience. It has four 'long-takes,' as it were, that I thought were truly extraordinary, including two scenes, one with Chiwetel Ejiofor, Paul Giamatti, Benedict Cumberbatch and Adepero Oduye, and the other with Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Lupita Nyong'o and Sarah Paulson, that are uniquely horrific, brilliantly staged and performed by everyone involved. The other two shots that deeply affected me (both of which are long close-up shots of Ejiofor) further illustrate why McQueen is the perfect filmmaker for this material - as he proved with Shame, he is an unflinching director.

Paul Greengrass' Captain Phillips

Of the films I've seen recently, the one that took me by the biggest surprise was Paul Greengrass’ Captain Phillips, starring Tom Hanks as Captain Richard Phillips of the MV Maersk Alabama, which was attacked by armed Somali pirates in 2009.

Though the entire film is brilliant, the ending of Captain Phillips is as emotionally and politically complex a piece of filmmaking as I’ve seen. There is a sort of doomed inevitability that hangs over the characters in the second half of this film – Phillips knows, and actively tells, his captors that the United States would rather sink their lifeboat and kill all of them than let the Somalis win by reaching the African coast. And so Phillips becomes almost a kind of pawn in the larger game of American foreign policy.

Greengrass has always been a very experiential filmmaker – he’s determined for his audience to experience exactly what something feels like, often using the immediacy of handheld camerawork to achieve that effect (he is also interested in the minutia of how a ship works and how the crew would realistically respond to an attack like this, which lends the proceedings an unnerving authenticity). I have never been more affected by his style of filmmaking than I was here (Captain Phillips rivals 2006's United 93 as Greengrass' finest film). I felt like I was in that lifeboat with Phillips and the Somali pirates, and I felt the complex moral stakes for all of them that most other filmmakers would have ignored. They were are all human beings in that lifeboat. I don’t mean to indicate that I ever sided with the pirates, but I felt an overwhelming sense of despair for them, and for Phillips, as well. They don't ever stand a chance against the American warships following them.

In the last five minutes of this film, Tom Hanks does some of the finest acting of his career. Overcome with shock, Hanks breaks down as the American medical team examines him. But it’s more than just shock. It’s an indescribable kind of sadness that creeps in whenever an experience ends so suddenly – his life had become living in that lifeboat with these four men. And in an instant, the three remaining pirates in the lifeboat are shot dead. Although Phillips is safe, he's covered in the blood of the men with whom he's spent the past few days fighting, obeying and, at some points, understanding. It’s a victory, but it’s also strangely horrifying. I’ve never felt quite like this at the end of a movie.

In those closing, cathartic minutes of the film, I was suddenly able to grasp the horror of what I had just seen over the past two hours - as if the rest of the picture were an old memory, almost too immediate and unnerving in the moment to fully comprehend.

The ending of Captain Phillips embraces all of the moral ambiguities inherent in such a story, and struck me similarly to the ending of Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty – it's a triumph for the United States, but at what cost for the film’s protagonist? Captain Phillips is one of the best films of the year. Watch Hanks and Greengrass talk about these moving final five minutes of the film here, and click here to read the amazing story of actor Barkhad Abdi, who gives a great performance.

Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity

Seven years ago, I staggered out of the theater after seeing director Alfonso Cuarón’s breathtaking film Children of Men. With his first movie since Children of Men, the awe-inspiring space opera Gravity, Cuarón has done it again. Sandra Bullock and George Clooney star as astronauts Ryan Stone and Matt Kowalski, who are stranded in outer space after an accident destroys their shuttle. 

Gravity marks the third consecutive year in which a masterful American filmmaker has used 3D as a storytelling technique and advanced the technology to new heights (Martin Scorsese’s Hugo in 2011 and Ang Lee’s Life of Pi last year are, along with Gravity, the finest uses of 3D I’ve encountered). But the technical achievements in this movie go far beyond the outstanding use of 3D.

The very concept of space in Gravity is fascinating, because Cuarón – who is famous for his long takes – essentially stages the film in a small number of unbroken shots, which not only give a fluid sense of what it must feel like to move around in outer space, but also allow for a kind of operatic beauty to every movement in the film (like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, there are many scenes in which Gravity resembles a kind of ballet). There’s an incredible majesty to nearly everything we see in this film, thanks to the camera movement (the cinematographer is the brilliant Emmanuel Lubezki, who shot Children of Men and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and The New World) and the exquisite choreography of the actors.

All of this would be impressive as technical achievements alone, but the real brilliance of Gravity is how camera and actor choreography are used so effectively in the service of storytelling. In order to really be immersed in a film, you have to know where you are and understand the physical geography of the space in the movie. This is a particularly tough task for a film that takes place in outer space, and yet I cannot think of a recent film that so fluidly kept me aware of where I was, and therefore connected me so deeply to what our protagonist is experiencing.

The performances here by Bullock and Clooney are amazing. Although the film has its loud moments, Gravity is also a picture that understands the power of silence. Most big-budget Hollywood entertainment is aggressively loud and oftentimes feels like an assault on the audience, but Cuarón holds us captivated as we are confronted with the eerie quiet of space. Gravity is an extraordinary film.