The Golden Iris Awards

I confess that my time spent at the movies has dwindled in the last year, the cinema having now to share valuable downtime with an ambitious fiction project. But make it to the movies I did, and though I didn't see enough great films to constitute a top ten list, I'll present a simple top three, in medal form, below.

Bronze Medal

Zero Dark Thirty

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow

Bigelow has become one of the most distinct auteurs in American movies. With her last two efforts, 2010's "The Hurt Locker" and this year's "Zero Dark Thirty", she has staked her claim as the sharpest, most prominent voice in the movies with regards to American military policy. Her harrowing, messy, confrontational account of the decade long hunt for Osama Bin Laden works best as a procedural, though her rendition of the raid on the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan is virtuoso film making. "Zero Dark Thirty" is constructed to demonstrate the logistical issues and ethical quandaries that will come to define our nation's long, bloated, costly, successful manhunt, showing first the graphic brutality and repugnance of America's "enhanced interrogation" techniques (torture), as well as their ineffectiveness in preventing an embassy shooting in Turkey, then accepting them to have been a contributing part of the C.I.A.'s overall pool of gathered intelligence. weighing the dangers and rationale behind acting on what was, in effect, an educated guess that Bin Laden had resided in the conspicuous Pakistani compound, and the risk inherent in not acting on that strenuous possibility. Bigelow has positioned herself to be universally polarizing, forcing the hand of everyone she can. In the end, Maya (Jessica Chastain), the film's lone constant in the decade-long search party, is shown alone on a plane, with nowhere to go. Empty and directionless. If there is a rah-rah moment to be found in "Zero Dark Thirty", it does not survive to the credits. Bigelow feels strongly the weight of America's moral sacrifice.

Silver Medal

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Directed by Benh Zeitlin

The performance of the year was given 4 years ago by then-five-year-old Quvenzhane Wallis, who lends heart and spirit beyond her years to a sparse film alive with metaphor. Zeitlin's film about a resourceful father and daughter on an allegorical island outside the tall, walled levies of the Louisiana mainland is, among other things, a biting environmental fable, an indictment of the neglect of the black communities of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and a tale of the radicalized nationalism that has defined many of the recent social, cultural, and political uprisings around the world. It is also, in its own powerful way, a tale of survival. The relationship between Wink (Dwight Henry) and his daughter Hushpuppy (Wallis) is one of intimate and unforgiving frankness. Their dystopian island, the Bathtub, is an intimate and unforgiving place, isolated from a post-apocalyptic America by industrialized stone-wall levies and threatened by rising water-levels from melting icecaps (locals share old fables of great beasts that will descend upon the bathtub when their glacial tombs melt away), Wink's efforts to harden his daughter and equip her to survive without him in a world less and less suited for the effort recalls Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road'. "Beasts of the Southern Wild" is brimming with color and energy. Wallis is a powerful, defiant presence, tearing through this vivid world like a torrent, and Zeitlin's exquisite eye for detail gives the film the universality of self-contained completeness.

Gold Medal

The Master

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

One of the most radical films Hollywood has ever produced, few directors have pursued the mysterious possibilities of their material more deeply, or with more heedless abandon. P.T. Anderson has become one of the most sublimely confident filmmakers of our generation. Drawn to the strangest demonstrations of masculine insecurity and power, he's been willing to follow his characters deep down their tortured rabbit holes. What is there to learn from the bizarre relationship between drunken sociopath Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) and cerebral cult-leader Lancaster Dodd (Phillip Seymour Hoffman)? It is difficult to say. Film's that tell us everything often tell us very little. "The Master" is a vein of ambiguity and  buried meanings, not unlike Dodd's own Cause. It is a film in pursuit of a purpose. It is Freddie Quell. Lost. Adrift. Thumbing through Dodd's lessons as though they were library cards. What we're left with is the cathartic sensation that it was all worth it, or that none of it mattered. To Freddie, those may be the same thing. Even snake oil can be a placebo.