Top 10 Favorite Horror Films

Horror, it's not a genre that's a favorite of mine, but one that nonetheless has given us some great movies. I was inspired to make this list by my fellow blogger over at Guy with a Movie Blog who did his top horror movies in honor of Halloween. We are collaborating on some upcoming posts, so I thought I'd match his horror list with my own.


1. Psycho (1960)

Almost an afterthought as a #1, I almost downgraded it just for its obvious greatness. There's not a lot left to be said about it, other than that the shower scene has lost none of its power, and even though things like the doctor's long explanation of Norman's behavior is unnecessary, there's so much greatness in it that little quibbles like that don't matter.


I would, however, like to address Gus Van Sant's 1998 remake, which I think is one of the boldest experimental films ever made. When asked why he wanted to remake it, Van Sant (riding high off the success of Good Will Hunting) said "so no one else will have to". I thought at the time that that was just a funny, flippant kind of answer. But the more you look at the experimental nature of what Van Sant did after Psycho you see that he was really trying something narratively with his remake. He was trying to see if there was a certain indefinable magic in Hitchcock's movie that could be recreated by recreating the movie, or if the indefinable thing stays indefinable even if painstakingly recreated. Now, of course the movie is a failure, an awful imitation of a masterpiece, but it's still an admirable experiment and we now definitively know that there is just magic in some movies.


2. Don't Look Now (1973)

I almost didn't put this on the list because it's an untraditional horror movie. This is really more of a psychological thriller disguised as horror. But it does have psychics, serial killings, supernatural things we and the characters don't understand until the most emotionally impactful moment. And above all this movie is haunted by death. That strange, labyrinthine city of Venice seems colored by death in every frame. It hangs like a raincloud over this movie so that even if we see very little death on screen, we feel it in the movie.


Most famous for the extended sex scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, Don't Look Now is so much more than that. It has even been voted by Time Out magazine as the greatest British movie ever made.


3. The Haunting (1963)

Hopefully everyone has forgotten about the atrocity against movies that is the awful remake of Robert Wise's masterpiece, because the original take on Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House is a flat out amazing movie. The great ghost story of all-time, The Haunting works because it spends a little bit of time setting up its characters so that we care what happens to them. Then, the haunting of the house starts slow and builds and is sometimes inexplicable, but always affecting. I got goosebumps multiple times when watching this. One of the great horror movies, and one of the great movies, period. To think, this is one of two movies Wise made between West Side Story in 1961 and The Sound of Music in 1965, what filmmaking range!

4. The Shining (1980)

Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is a movie that didn't frighten me until I was older. When I first saw it as a teenager I wasn't paying enough attention for it to work on my nerves the way Kubrick made it to do. With his steadicam flowing throughout the haunted hotel, Kubrick plays on our minds as well. The twins, the blood gushing down the hallways, the frantic frazzled performance from Shelley Duvall offset against Jack Nicholson's descent into madness. It's all carefully controlled, and all the more chilling because of it. Stephen King, unhappy with Kubrick's take on his novel, later oversaw a TV miniseries adaptation that is just terrible. After making that, King has conceded that The Shining is likely the best adaptation of his work, even if its more Kubrick than King.


5. The Devil's Backbone (2001)

Guillermo del Toro is a master visual storyteller, whether in his action hero Hellboy movies, Pan's Labyrinth, or this, which he calls Pan's brother movie. A ghost story set in Franco-era Spain (just as Pan is), it has some of Del Toro's best visuals, including a huge unexploded bomb, a creepy orphanage, or the ghost of the boy which drives the story. Again, like all of my favorite horror movies, this is about mood and atmosphere more than it is monsters or jump scares. You feel this movie while you watch it. Del Toro draws you in. When the main character has his first encounter with the ghost, it's one of the only times I can remember going cold and feeling my stomach drop in a movie (the finale of Don't Look Now is the other one that I can remember).


6. The Thing (1982)

John Carpenter's career has been hit and miss. He's had huge hits like Halloween, and then movies like The Thing, which failed commercially even if its become a classic since then. One of the great creature features, The Thing boasts strong work from its cast, especially Kurt Russell and Keith David. The endless snow as our background gives a terrific and seemingly inescapable setting for the movie, which thankfully has risen in popularity and prestige every year. While it wasn't in my top 10 of the 80's, it has to have a place here in the top 10 horrors.


7. The Fly (1986)

David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly didn't have to compete at the box office with the juggernaut of E.T. the way that Carpenter's remake of The Thing did, and so thankfully he had a huge hit on his hands with his body horror masterpiece. Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis are wonderfully awkward and real in the lead roles, making Goldblum's gradual descent into becoming a human fly have an emotional resonance behind it instead of just the great makeup and horror elements we'd expect. Cronenberg's movie was latched onto as a metaphor for AIDS at the time, something to which he's said it could certainly apply, as he'd meant it as a metaphor for the affects of aging and cancer on the body that he'd seen on his parents. No matter how deep you take it, The Fly works on the surface and below and might be the best work of Cronenberg's career.


8. Alien (1979)

One of the more famous movies on the list, I don't care how popular Alien is, it's just a really good movie and one of the best sci-fi/horror flicks ever. Ridley Scott's impeccable visuals sending us to a new planet in the beginning even if we end up spending most of the time in a space ship, with the alien picking everyone off Agatha Christie style. It still works so well, and gave us one of the great badass female roles in the movies, in Sigourney Weaver's Ripley. Many prefer the more oppressive and bigger/louder/gorier oriented sequel, but not me.


9. Eyes Without a Face (1960)

One of the least seen great horror movies ever made is this disturbing little poetic horror movie from France. The story is that of Christiane, who was in a horrible car accident that left her face scarred and disfigured. Her father, whose fault the crash was, Dr. Genessier and his assistant kidnap young women who have similar features to Christiane. The doctor then tries to take off their faces and graft it onto Christiane's so that his daughter can be beautiful again, which would absolve him of his guilt over the crash. Meanwhile, Christiane wears a nearly featureless mask that ended up being the inspiration for Halloween's Michael Myers. Seeing just the pain, loneliness, and oncoming madness through her eyes in the mask, the movie engenders a lot of complex emotions in us. We sympathize with the doctor and his guilt, as well as Christiane and her impenetrable sadness. The face grafting scene can still be disturbing for many audiences, and is not for the faint of heart, but that's to the movie's credit.


10. Masque of the Red Death (1964)

I debated not putting this in here and swapping it for something like George Romero's Dawn of the Dead or Bong Joon-ho's The Host, but the more I think on this movie the more it works itself into my mind as an unconventional and great horror movie. Adapted from Poe's short story, director Roger Corman, working with cinematographer Nicolas Roeg (who went on to direct Don't Look Now among other masterpieces), creates a forbidding mood headed by Vincent Price's nasty Prince Prospero. The prince holds grotesque and occasionally Satanic parties in his castle while the common folk outside succumb to the ravages of plague. Wonderful sets used as leftovers from the same year's Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton starrer Becket, and sometimes garish colors thanks to Roeg's photography, plus the unpleasant and torturous behavior of the guests of Prospero all combine with the sinister turn by Price as the prince. With none of the wink and nod he could often bring, Price is frightening and affective in the lead role. The best work of his great career in one of the great movies of the horror genre, which I'd previously put as one of my top 10 of the 1960's.


Honorable mention for the work of producer Val Lewton, whose movies like I Walked with a Zombie, Cat People, and The Body Snatcher are masterpieces of classic era mood horror. The kind that gets in your brain and really haunts you like a good horror movie should. Check out Scorsese's great documentary Val Lewton – The Man in the Shadows for a retrospective of his work.

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

Tony Wilson: Why "Tristram Shandy"? This is the book that many people said is unfilmable.
Steve Coogan: I think that's the attraction. "Tristram Shandy" was a post-modern classic written before there was any modernism to be post about. So it was way ahead of its time and, in fact, for those who haven't heard of it, it was actually listed as number eight on The Observer's top 100 books of all time.
Tony Wilson: That was a chronological list.
Steve Coogan: Yeah.


But I'm getting ahead of myself. Tristram Shandy, in the 18th century comic novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, tries to narrate to the reader the story of his life but keeps going off on tangents and sidetracks to give context and background to the things he says. So much so that he doesn't even reach his birth until Part IV, hundreds of pages in. By the end, he's covered very little of his life and none of his opinions. So it should be no surprise that in this "adaptation" of the novel, we start out in the dressing room of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon getting ready to film their parts as Tristram and his Uncle Toby, respectively. We get a half hour or so of the novel, and then the next hour mostly of the struggle to make the movie, with costume fittings, makeup, historical accuracy, personal lives, and the seeming notion that only a handful of folks have actually read the book.

Tristram's birth happens about 20 minutes into the movie, while Tristram is both narrating and playing his father. Not Steve Coogan playing the father, but Tristram, in the course of his narration, taking on the playing of his father during Tristram's birth. He also tells us of his conception, but didn't start out with it because "I thought we should wait until we knew each other better." The book never really gets around to what it sets out to do, and neither does the movie, in the best possible way. It doesn't finish adapting the book into a movie, it sidetracks into the struggle of adapting the book into a movie. It's a bit like Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze's Adaptation, in that way. But where Adaptation becomes the movie Charlie didn't want to adapt the book into, A Cock and Bull Story never really becomes a movie in the first place.

Coogan is hilarious, especially in the passive-aggressive insults he hurls at Rob Brydon. But Coogan also lends a nice weight to the dramatic parts without becoming too much. We see him struggle between his flirtation with his assistant Jennie (Naomie Harris) and the new fatherhood he's experienced with his girlfriend Jenny (the predictably wonderful, but sadly underused Kelly MacDonald), all while trying to contain a story of a recent drunken night with a stripper, and the amorphous adaptation of the novel.

The movie was made by Coogan with his 24 Hour Party People director Michael Winterbottom, and it's a really terrific movie. It never gets too heady about its subject, the failing adaptation of an unfilmable novel nor the failing of the movie-within-a-movie adaptation of an unfilmable novel. It's funny, occasionally moving, always engaging, and ends not on a note of conclusion but on a note of ".....well, I guess that's it." before we see Brydon and Coogan hilariously arguing over the end credits after they've just watched the movie.

Mad Max: Fury Road

We got a new Mad Max movie this year, the 4th, with a new Max in Tom Hardy, taking over the role that made Mel Gibson a star. Sadly, Hardy doesn't have Gibson's charisma, humor, or unhinged anger hiding just below the surface (and sometimes on the surface). He's a fine actor who's done great work before, but he doesn't make much of an impression here. Thankfully, and oddly, Max isn't really the main or most memorable character in Mad Max: Fury Road, that honor belongs to Charlize Theron's Imperator Furiosa. And in it Theron gives a performance of great power and surprising depth. It's surprising because action movies aren't usually known for their acting. But this isn't any action movie, it's one of the great and most inventive ones ever made.

We catch up with Max as he's captured by a group of War Boys, the underlings of our villain Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, who was also the villain Toecutter in the first Mad Max movie back in 1979). Joe rules over The Citadel, a city of people who are starved, thirsty, and mutated from some kind of nuclear holocaust. He also has groups of women he keeps as Breeders, and is surrounded by innumerable deformed children. Furiosa leads the War Rig on a run to get gas and bullets, but instead she has secretly snuck out Joe's wives and plans to take them to The Green Place, where she was born and where they'll be safe. Max becomes involved through a War Boy named Nux (Nicholas Hoult) for whom Max is being drained of his universal donor blood. Essentially what follows is an hour and a half of chase scenes in the two hour movie. And it's the best chase action movie since Children of Men.

Writer/director George Miller has created a disturbingly grotesque world with the Mad Max universe. Since Miller is a filmmaker with class, he thankfully hasn't made a gross movie trying to trade on the monstrous creations he's come up with. He created a new type of post-apocalyptic world, and in it he's dropped an extraordinary and almost relentless action movie. I say almost because there is a startling amount of depth here. Furiosa is a fascinating character, presumably barren since she's the only woman in The Citadel we see who's not a breeder or wife. Her anger and intelligence bubbles underneath every action. And her hope and determination drive the story more than anything Max does. She's a wonderful creation by both Miller and Theron.

Fury Road is also, despite the grotesquery, a gorgeous movie to look at. Cold steel blues at night, bright sun baked desert in the daylight, strange shadowy swampland, and a sandstorm for the ages. Miller has crafted a truly wondrous visual creation. He's said he wanted a lot of color in the movie, since most post-apocalyptic movies goes for a washed out palette. He decided to go the opposite route, and we are the better for it as viewers. It earns its R-rating with its endless violence, but again Miller never dwells on it nor does he show anything gratuitous, never lingering on any violence. This is a good, old fashioned, action movie, not a horror flick despite the sound and look of Joe and his servants. It may not be the best action movie ever made, but it has to be on the shortlist.

Inherent Vice

Like all of Paul Thomas Anderson's movies, Inherent Vice is too long. It's messy, unfocused, bordering on directionless. I've not been a fan of his movies until his previous one, The Master, though I've been suspect that I only liked it because it served as a palette cleanser immediately after sitting through Baz Luhrmann's atrocity of The Great Gatsby. Inherent Vice, however, is simply a good movie. No exceptions, qualifiers, or anything else, it's just a good movie. Don't get me wrong, it's messy, unfocused, and bordering on directionless, but still a good movie.

The first movie adapted from the work of celebrated author Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice is a slightly comic noir that would've starred Humphrey Bogart in the 1940's, but instead stars Joaquin Phoenix and is set in 1970. Phoenix's Doc Sportello is a private investigator that is tasked by his ex-girlfriend Shasta (Katherine Waterston) with looking into goings on involving real estate developer Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), and blah blah blah, things go down the rabbit hole of detective noir from there. Plot rambles and twists and turns in all manner of ways. Anderson handles this with a tricky tone, as the movie is a drama, but with an often comedic tone to scenes in a way that never goes over the edge into being a comedy.

The cast is large, and does good work here, as tends to be the case in Anderson's movies. Phoenix does terrific work, as he tends to do. Doc is just as tricky a character to pull off as Anderson's tone for the movie, and Phoenix nails it just like Anderson did. Doc is intelligent but hiding it, funny, ridiculous but entertainingly so, a Sam Spade for the hippie times and Phoenix gives one of his better performances in the role.

The supporting cast of Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, Benicio del Toro, Joanna Newsom (who is wonderful and also serves as the sadly unnecessary narrator), Martin Short, and Reese Witherspoon are uniformly great. Witherspoon especially injects a lot of life, humor, and character into her small role. I wish there'd been more of her.

It is too long. Around the time it should've been wrapping up, it had about 45 minutes left. The dialog, most particularly in the narration, is sometimes overwritten as can be the case with noir movies sometimes. But here it can just seem distracting. But the movie is gorgeously shot by PTA regular cinematographer Robert Elswit. And the soundtrack and score are perfect at setting the mood and never intruding on the plot or characters or pushing for effect.

I've always said that Paul Thomas Anderson was an obviously talented filmmaker who just hadn't put it all together into a total package yet. Weird that I think even with his usual drawbacks, he's succeeded here. It's PTA's least showy movie yet, directorially, and since it's his first that I like without hesitation, I guess that's a good thing.

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser

Werner Herzog's 1974 film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser was his follow-up to the all-time great Aguirre, the Wrath of God, starring Klaus Kinski, and Herzog's first of two collaborations with Bruno S, the other of which (Stroszek) I recently reviewed. These leading men are two of the most remarkable, impressive, intriguing, and fascinating of actors. Neither could've really made their mark in history starring in movies other than those by Herzog. Sure, Kinksi was in literally hundreds of movies, but how many non-Herzog roles is he remembered for? Bruno pretty much starred only in these two Herzog movies, and yet that was enough for him to become a known name in movie history. And it is with good reason.

I wrote of Bruno in Stroszek "He seems particular. There was only one of this guy made" and spoke of his "extraordinary performance of great focus and intensity" "with a look of intense and impenetrable depth" and that much is true of his work as Kaspar Hauser as well. Kaspar is a real historical person, found in 1828 in Nuremberg holding just a Bible and an anonymous note with vague details of his life. He spent the first 20 or so years of his time on Earth locked in a cellar, no interactions with other people or animals or nature, a toy horse to play with, and only a man in a black cloak and top hat who would come give him food. One day that man releases him from this prison after teaching him the concept of writing, and teaching him the phrase "I want to be a gallant rider like my father was before me." He otherwise has no concept of speech, animals, even eating, until the kind people of the town take him in and he begins to learn. But much like his character arc in Stroszek, it seems like this world might be too much for this man.

It's a very sad story, filled with profound, odd, and strangely affecting observations from Kaspar. "It seems to me that my coming into this world was a very hard fall." "The music feels strong in my heart... I feel so unexpectedly old" or when the gentle family he's staying with is giving him his first bath in years "Mother, my skin is coming off" or even the omniscient opening caption "Do you not then hear this horrible scream all around you? This scream that men call silence." It's peculiarly haunting in much of its time. Bruno being teased by the drunk local men, spending time being shown off in a circus attraction, or in high society as a different kind of circus attraction. Kaspar thinks and feels deeply, but doesn't have the lifetime of experience to have learned how to process everything around him. It lends a childlike wonder and stubbornness and fear to him.

This is, aesthetically, a rustically beautiful movie, as Herzog's always are. He has a way of finding wonderful images and ones that stick in our minds. Here, I'm thinking of the painterly boat ride Kaspar takes while a lone swan swims in the distance. Or of his dreams, sometimes slightly out of focus, of nature scenes. Also Kaspar's dream of innumerable people walking up a foggy mountain to find Death at the top, before walking back down. Herzog's movies play in our minds in an unspoken way much like music. His work worms it way into our minds in the best possible manner. It's what makes him one of the truly singular and best of filmmakers.

Take Care of My Cat

2001's Take Care of My Cat is one of those movies that doesn't sound like it'd be extraordinary, but it is. It's about a group of 5 young women in South Korea, just out of high school, and how they grow, work, and basically how they handle the world at such a transformative age. It has no love story, but contains characters that I want to see more of. It's just under 2 hours long, and that times flies by. Coming-of-age movies are one of my favorite genres, and this is right at or near the top of the heap.

The friends, as can happen in school and sadly not so much later in life, are all of differing social classes, and may even sound like clichés, even though they're not. There's the rich girl Hae-joo (Lee Yo-won), the poor girl Ji-young (Ok Ji-young), the dreamer Tae-hee (played by the amazing Doona Bae, from The Host and Cloud Atlas), and the twin sisters Bi-ryu and Ohn-jo (Lee Eun-shil and Lee Eun-jo). The sisters get the short stick, development wise, but the other three are really wonderfully drawn and played by the actresses. They grow and change and develop in perfectly believable ways, never a false note or false drama, though there were many times it could've gone that way. It's a great trio of leads, even though I can't quite put my finger on why it's so good.

And that's kind of the whole thing about the movie. Writer/director Jeong Jae-eun has crafted a startling movie that has nothing startling in it, really. It's just SO good. The music is impeccable, the framing of the shots, the cinematography, everything is top notch. I want to see this movie over and over again throughout my life. I know it's going to be one of those that really stays with me. Which is a remarkable thing to say about the movie because what do I know or can relate to about being a 20-ish Korean girl? Nothing whatsoever. Yet I was moved by these actresses and their story. Jeong has created herself a truly amazing movie that plays on us like music. We may not be able to articulate what makes it special, it just is.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Wes Anderson makes movies like no other. They don't look like other filmmakers' movies, they don't feel like other filmmakers' movies, and the characters don't talk like other filmmakers' characters talk. I've been hit and miss on his movies over the course of his career, loving a few, hating one, and the others falling somewhere in between. I've often said that the Wes Anderson-ness of his movies keeps them at a distance from real emotions and characters and thus keeps us in the audience at a distance from his movies. The Grand Budapest Hotel is the most Wes Anderson-y of his movies yet, and his most extraordinary.

Reminding me a bit of The Saragossa Manuscript in its Russian doll-like unfolding of the story, though not nearly as down the rabbit hole as that movie can be, we eventually arrive at the central story of Monsieur Gustav, who is played by the great Ralph Fiennes in what might be his greatest performance. Gustav is funny, profane, intelligent, well put together, and always in control. His protégé Zero (Tony Revolori) narrates a good part of the story, even though it's done by the older Zero, played by F. Murray Abraham. What follows is a series of funny, exciting, ridiculous, thrilling filmmaking of the highest order.

Anderson assembles a great and large cast, as always. But this is his largest, and greatest cast yet. All of the regulars are here, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, and others, but thankfully even when they're mere cameos (as they are by those actors) they fit within Anderson's crazy world of a movie. And he gets wonderful work out of all of them, most particularly Abraham, Revolori, and Fiennes. This is also, by far, I think, Anderson's best looking movie. That the budget for this movie is listed at $30 million is ridiculous when thinking about how distinct every part of this movie is, and how bland movies with many multiples of that budget are. The sets, costumes, locations, everything is impeccable and I wouldn't have been surprised if I'd seen a $100 million budget attached to it. But Anderson does so much with what he has, proving that cinematic creativity isn't dependent on budget in the slightest.

I laughed out loud many times while watching this movie. It is simply a delight from start to finish. I found myself resisting a bit at first, almost even thinking I may not be in the mood for a Wes Anderson movie right now, but he won me over with this magical, wonderful movie.

The Jerk

I'm a big fan of Steve Martin. But The Jerk, often his most acclaimed movie, even though a couple of the gags work, mostly just sits there assuming it's funny inherently. The opening works thanks to Martin's ability to lovably and believably play the idiot. There are many funny bits in the beginning, as Martin's Navin finds out that the black family that raised him actually adopted him when he was a baby "You mean I'm gonna stay this color?" he whines. Good stuff. Or when he decides to start his hitchhiking to the big city of St. Louis from the white picket gate of his family's front lawn, his family having dinner inside hours later wonders if Navin is doing okay, and they're able to just call out the window and ask him if he's alright. There are a few bits like that in the opening section that really sing.

Speaking of singing, the sweet scene of Martin and Bernadette Peters singing "Tonight You Belong to Me" on the beach is really wonderful. But the previous stuff of Martin working in the carnival, about 90% of it doesn't work. And that's how it goes for the rest of the movie. It doesn't outstay its welcome, the movie is only 94 minutes long, but it doesn't zip along either. And that's because so little of it is funny. The really funny bits are there ("Just this ashtray... And this paddle game. The ashtray and the paddle game and that's all I need... And this remote control...) but they're sandwiched between stuff that isn't funny. Martin is brilliant at playing the idiot, but that really only gets us so far. Steve Martin the writer really lets down Steve Martin the performer in that way. And the direction from Carl Reiner is simple and unimpressive in any way.

Seeing this movie for the first time in a long time has made me hesitant to revisit beloved Steve Martin movies from my childhood like Three Amigos! or The Man with Two Brains, although I know I still love movies like Bowfinger, Roxanne, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, having seen them many times as an adult. But I was sorely disappointed by my revisiting of The Jerk.

Lessons of Darkness

Werner Herzog is one of the great filmmakers we've ever been given. His Lessons of Darkness is about 50 minutes long, and one of the best science fiction films I've seen. Herzog filmed in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion of Kuwait in the early 90's, showing bombed out buildings, oil fields aflame, broken people, and more remnants of the destruction of war. No special effects. How Herzog frames the story, however, is that of an expedition onto a foreign planet, and seeing the destruction that a war has brought to this strange land.

Many of the images are barely recognizable as our planet. Others you don't want to recognize as something we've done to each other and ourselves. Herzog narrates in that odd, beautiful Bavarian accent of his, but the narration is minimal. Mostly he uses classical music pieces from Wagner, Schubert, Verdi and others. It's a really extraordinarily transportational experience, as Herzog takes us to another land and an often breathtaking and heartbreaking journey. Another filmmaker could've easily made this movie feel exploitative of the war, but Herzog makes it allegorical. He shows us ourselves by trying to show us something else. He plays on our emotions and our imaginations, making the movie even more impactful than it would've been as a straight documentary about the war.

I found myself speechless and slightly disturbed by the movie, in a good way. It's quietly operatic, contemplative without being boring or too heady. It's a simple movie. Extraordinary in every way. One of Herzog's best, and that's really saying something.

Interstellar

I have been a big fan of Christopher Nolan's movies since I first saw his backwards told Memento in 2000 or 2001, and although each of his movies is flawed in certain ways, I've liked or loved them all. That doesn't really change with his latest movie Interstellar, which I only caught up to now a year later, but I wish I loved it. I won't bother with a plot description, since most people who are going to see the movie already have. So let's jump into it.

The movie boasts a lot of things: flawless special effects, fine performances (from a tremendous cast all doing great work), and an interesting plot straight out of the spirit of classic science fiction literature. My biggest problem with the movie is actually aesthetic, and it's that Nolan just isn't a visual artist. He has the soul of an engineer or a puzzle builder, but not a poet or a painter. And I think in the translation to cinema, space exploration sci-fi needs visual inspiration. It needs the awe that Spielberg, Herzog, or Kubrick (in their various ways) bring to their work for it to really achieve transcendence. Nolan has created some great images in his time, the shot of The Joker hanging out of the cop car in The Dark Knight, or the rotating hallway in Inception. But this movie is very flat, visually. There's not a single image in the 169 minutes that I'll vividly remember. There's no curiousity in the creation of the thing. Nolan already has the answers and he's just telling it to us, which gives everything a certain sense of inevitability and of being controlled within an inch of its life that prevents the movie from expanding our minds or imaginations beyond what is on the screen at any given moment.

All of that said, I do think it's a really good movie. I don't always buy Matthew McConaughey as the smartest guy in the room, picking up downed drones to reprogram into farm equipment and whatnot, but he still sells things overall. The women really shine nicely though, Anne Hathaway is terrific at displaying intelligence and determination while also projecting a sensitivity and emotion. It's a tricky performance that has gone really undervalued in the assessment of the movie by most people. And the 3 actresses that play Murph at the different stages of her life (Mackenzie Foy, Jessica Chastain, and Ellen Burstyn) are all wonderful and real and impressive. Not just because Foy and Chastain look like they could be mother and daughter, they really inhabit an intellect, and the most curious of the characters. Matt Damon, surprisingly, considering I think of him as one of our finest star actors, is underwhelming in his supporting role as a rescued astronaut. There was something about that performance that was just a bit off.

Another drawback for me was that Nolan's dive into the area of sentimentality isn't quite something he can pull off. He isn't sentimental, though all of his movies have moments of (often tragic) emotion, the lovingly sentimental is trickier. Even the King of Sentiment, Spielberg, doesn't always pull it off successfully. But ultimately, it's a minor quibble. I know it sounds like a lot of complaining and maybe even nitpicking, but I really do like the movie. It has interesting ideas in its head, and that's more than can be said for most major Hollywood blockbusters. I just wish Nolan was more of a dreamer and less of a thinker.