September 28th, 2007
20. The Last House On The Left (1972)
Taxi Driver is considered the definitive rebuke of '70s vigilante movies, but it's a laugh-a-minute joy ride next to the vengeful depravity depicted in The Last House On The Left. Drawing from Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, Wes Craven's brilliantly unwatchable first feature is a no-holds-barred depiction of the rape and murder of two teenage girls by a pack of hippie lunatics, and the graphic revenge the girls' parents enact on the murderers. Last House looks cheap and amateurish, which adds to its snuff-film-style realism. Never has the gulf between "great film" and "enjoyable" been so wide.
21. Million Dollar Baby (2004)
The first three-quarters of Million Dollar Baby play like an old-fashioned sports movie, focusing on the heartwarming father-daughter dynamic between coach Clint Eastwood and boxer Hilary Swank. Then (spoiler alert!) Swank suffers a horrible accident in the ring, and Million Dollar Baby is suddenly rich with ripped-from-the-headlines relevance as Eastwood wrestles with the question of whether he should euthanize his surrogate daughter. The decision is appropriately gut-wrenching, and Eastwood's direction is always tasteful, but who wants to ponder the difficulty of putting a loved one out of their misery if fate doesn't require it?
22. United 93 (2006)
Writer-director Paul Greengrass dramatizes the events of September 11 on the ground and in the air with a "you are there" veracity that's gut-wrenching and surprisingly probative. From the initial confusion to the panicked response, United 93 explains what the whole last six years have been like, from shock to violence to exhaustion. But Greengrass' refusal to insert any kind of distancing effects means that viewers get to relive every second of sick horror from one of the worst days any of us will ever experience. A lot of Americans didn't want to see United 93 even once, and it was hard to blame them.
23. Lilya 4-Ever (2002)
Just prior to Lilya 4-Ever, Swedish writer-director Lukas Moodysson made Together, a movie so generous in spirit that a lot of its fans found this follow-up, a comparatively bleak story of a teenage Russian sex slave, too tough to take. Actually, Lilya follows logically from Together as another profound illustration of how people need people. (A little familial support would've prevented most of the movie's string of tragedies.) But in spite of a spectacular lead performance by Oksana Akinshina—and a lyrical final scene that tries to put a happy spin on human misery—Lilya 4-Ever essentially asks its audience to watch the hopes of a bright, pretty girl get crushed one by one. It's powerful stuff that lingers in the memory so strongly that a second viewing may not even be necessary.
24. Nil By Mouth (1997)
Gary Oldman has openly said that he appears in dreck like Air Force One because Hollywood paychecks let him fund his own indie films. So far, though, his only writing-directing project is Nil By Mouth, a gritty, grueling drama in Mike Leigh mode. Like Irreversible, it centers on a protracted, nauseating act of violence against a woman, framed within a nervy, talky plot. But Nil By Mouth is less story-driven; it mostly captures, intimately and unsparingly, the details of working-class life in South London, among addicts and alcoholics. It's an impressively immediate, immersive film, but a hard one to sit through, thanks to its direct look at physical and emotional abuse. Then again, the accents are so dense, and the dialogue flies so fast and furious, that it may be necessary to watch it twice just to follow what's going on. Sometimes even the most exhausting films have to be watched more than once.
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