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6. The Revenant

I became a big admirer of Alejandro González Iñárritu when he made his first hit, the Mexican nominee for Best Foreign Film, “Amores Perros,” but he somehow lost me until the second and third times I saw Birdman and realized he possesses a brilliantly subtle narrative genius. It was with The Revenant, however, that I became an unerring fan. As I wrote in my review last week, The Revenant is a multifaceted story of revenge and love, crisscrossing themes from gun and aboriginal violence, to revenge and resilience, all on top of stunning cinematography, an eerie soundtrack, and flawless directing. The story of The Revenant, itself, is not particularly innovative: man gets hurt, man seeks revenge.

But it is Innaritu’s love of craft, and his suspenseful, honest, and brutal story-telling that make the movie compelling, nail-biting, and, of course, a bit gut-wrenching. On top of the superb technical elements, add two awards-worthy performance by the criminally overdue Leo DiCaprio and the rising star Tom Hardy, and you have what is basically the serious, conversation worthy version of the much more questionable Dancing With Wolves - a movie that shows that the filmmaker and his team truly deserved all the accolades they received for Birdman last year.

5. Spotlight My coverage of this movie during TIFF should speak for itself, but I could not resist putting it on this list, as much as I wanted to give space to other movies that may have less of an audience than the still-presumptive Best Picture front-runner has. But Spotlight just works on so many different levels, and is too hard to ignore. It doesn’t step falsely; every moment has a purpose. As I’ve said, the movie admits of no easy and convenient truths, but instead spreads blame around for a tragic problems in sometimes unexpected ways. In what is arguably the climactic scene, it delivers the emotional punch that many Oscar bloggers unfairly says it lack by showcasing the effects of the tragedy at the center of the story through the eyes of those who broke it. The acting is one of a kind, Todd McCarthy’s directing is unobtrusive and guided, the soundtrack is powerful, and the overall cohesion of its elements make a movie that may be somewhat greater than even the sum of its parts.

4. Ixcanul (Volcano)

Guatemala’s first ever entry into the Best Foreign Language film, Ixcanul (Mayan for volcano), is undoubtedly one of the most surprising movies I saw all years. This movie first surprised me at TIFF, with its focus on the relationship between two Mayan women, mother and daughter, and the problems that befall them when they come into contact with local, non-Mayan society. Itself interesting, the story is infinitely buoyed by the purposefully long, quiet, drawn-out scenes of contemplation, the involved acting, and the accessible screenplay.

As beautiful as many a panoramic widescreen shot from The Revenant, Mad Max, or any of the other movies up for cinematographic accolades, Ixcanul was shot almost entirely at the foot of an active, live volcano. The volcano was life and the volcano was death, figuratively and literally, and if the analogy sounds too over-wrought, then see for yourself how captivatingly it isn’t. On top of that layer, the infinite meanings about womanhood and motherhood, about birth, and life, about the destruction and rescue that all of these can cause, make the at times eerily silent movie strangely compelling. At bottom, it demonstrates that a relatively small amalgam of simple, powerful scenes can make for an overall powerful picture. It does not have to be more complex than that, and Ixcanul is perfectly exact in that sense.

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