Dennis Lim’s Top10

Two crossroads films about human nature and the nature of truth. Viewed from a certain angle, they seem to hold all the possibilities—even as they acknowledge all the limits—of cinema.

Maximalists of affect, Cassavetes and Anderson are always asking versions of the same question: How much emotion can a movie contain? Or maybe: How many emotions? These two films run the gamut, moving in surges of joy and sorrow, erasing the line between tragedy and comedy.

Frampton’s structural riddle (nostalgia) and Akerman’s city symphony News From Home are brilliant experiments in self-portraiture and sound-image relationships that both derive their power from paradox. His film enacts a tug of war between memory and anticipation; hers conjures an indelible sense of both place and displacement.

Dramas of entrapment and enervation—sly, haunting, eternally strange—from two of the most singular and most class-conscious directors the cinema has seen.

Oshima is often likened to Godard, but I think the true kindred spirit is Fassbinder—for the restless intellect and furious productivity, and the rage, wit, and lucidity with which they probed their respective national psyches. These are also two of the most devastating films ever made about racism.

Decades and cultures apart, these two masters invented languages of their own, reshaping our sense of filmic space and time, all in the service of a deceptively modest domestic cinema of the everyday.

The defining patriarchs of American cinema—as embodied by James Mason and Dennis Hopper in these towering performances—are, fittingly, also the most monstrous.

Enigmatic portraits of anomic drift and modern soul-sickness that are also crystalline dissections of their moments (postwar industrialization, the AIDS era), featuring two master classes in screen acting by Monica Vitti and Julianne Moore.

Self-reflexive absurdist psychodramas, overflowing with big ideas and confrontational energy. The failings of independent American cinema, embattled from the start and struggling to remain relevant, are too numerous to list. But one thing it could use is more films like these.

Antiheroines on anti-odysseys: Two bracing films that find freedom in refusal, rejecting both the strictures of the social world and the romance of the open road.