La Vie en Rose Marion Cotillard should not be forgot come Oscar time: Her performance as the Gallic songbird Edith Piaf transcends acting altogether. She inhabits Piaf, from her start as a starving street singer to her triumphs as a concertizing chanteuse and national icon.
A parallel-universe 10
Speaking of music biopics (
I'm Not There and
La Vie en Rose), Anton Corbijn's
Control - the haunting black-and-white study of the brief, fevered life of Joy Division front man Ian Curtis - almost made my list; another day it would have been on there. If
Walk Hard makes mockery of the music biopic template, Corbijn, a still photographer in his directing debut, figured out how to work around that template, and through it, and capture an era, sublimely.
There are images, too, in Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood - an epic about greed and God, based on the Upton Sinclair novel Oil! - that will stick with me forever. Daniel Day-Lewis, as an early-20th-century prospector rooting around in the dirt and discovering oil, channels John Huston and Humphrey Bogart and I don't know who else in a jaw-droppingly stupendous turn. Even when he goes over the top - and boy, does he ever - Day-Lewis is amazing.
Rounding out my parallel universe top 10:
Sarah Polley's Away From Her, Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited, Pascale Ferran's Lady Chatterly, Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, Mira Nair's The Namesake, John Carney's Once, Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn, and Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's 28 Weeks Later. . ..
It's been a pretty good year, at that.
Contact movie critic Steven Rea at 215-854-5629 or srea@phillynews.com. Read his blog, "On Movies Online," at http://go.philly.com/onmovies.
