The Steak Knives

To be eligible for the Steak Knives, candidates must not have been recognized by the Oscars, the Golden Globes, the Independent Spirit Awards or in the top tier of the IndieWire Critics' Poll. To see the ineligible nominees, click here.

Black Book

On the strength of a spectacular World War II film, Soldier of Orange, and a haunting black comedy, The Fourth Man, Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven came to Hollywood and made some great movies, starting with Robocop and including Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Showgirls and Starship Troopers — after which he went back to work in Europe. Perhaps this is because of the wholly undeserved critical slagging he got for these last two features. Verhoeven makes movies — we're not talking Masterpiece Theatre here. He fills his films with sex and violence, extremely bad behavior, gratuitous nudity and bilious satire of Western culture in general, and American consumerism in particular. Having spent some formative years under Nazi occupation he should be forgiven for a slightly curdled view of humanity, and he should be applauded for his unflinching depictions of war, and his scathing indictment of the goose-stepping Cult of Mars — which is alive and all too well today.

Made in Holland, Black Book is a return to World War II, a sort of pendant for Soldier of Orange. But here even Verhoeven's view of the time has darkened. It's set in the final months of the war, the Allied victory already assured, a time of complete uncertainty and moral ambiguity. Even the Nazis are trying to figure out how to survive whatever comes next. Some are cutting deals with the Resistance, some are stealing everything they can to speed them on their Argentinian getaways. The Dutch, meanwhile, exist in a moral vacuum, which some exploit ruthlessly. The film follow a beautiful young Jewess through this period as she tries everything she can to survive, from joining the Resistance to sleeping with the enemy.

As usual we get a bit of everything from Verhoeven, lashings of violence, frank sexuality and arresting nudity, stirring heroism, vile villainy (sometimes by the same character) and for most, lots of escapism, as some characters cope with the awfulness, and some surf it. As usual, this film isn't strictly zoned like suburbia; the cerebral is juxtaposed with the salacious, the sublime with the disgusting. All motives are wonderfully mixed. There are no saints, and even the most piggish Nazi character is given a scene to flourish a wonderful singing voice. Ultimately, some villains escape, some heroes do not, the "liberators" manage to disgrace themselves, and Happily Ever After looks more like a breather between rounds. This is Verhoeven in top form.

— David Essex (djessex@earthlink.net)

The Host

It may have been the biggest movie in South Korean history, but you don't walk into The Host expecting great achievement in filmmaking, any more than you'd go to the Korean store on the corner for grand cuisine. It's the promise of kick-ass monster action that gets you in the door — and in that regard, you leave fully satisfied. But the film's success on other, deeper levels takes it beyond the realm of the popcorn blockbuster, and shows that even the hoariest of genres can deliver high-quality food for thought as well as genuine emotion.

Half a century or so ago, Japanese moviegoers saw nuclear tests by their new American allies give rise to Godzilla, who promptly laid waste to various of their cities our A-bombs had overlooked in the final days of WWII. This ironic sensibility was jettisoned en route to US audiences, rarely to be seen again in the city-menacing monster category, but it is deftly resurrected in The Host, set in a nation divided and defined by cold war rivalries, dueling dictatorships and superpower patrons. The film opens with a real incident: A Korean mortician working for the US military, on orders, dumps bottle after bottle of formaldehyde down the drain. The chaos unleashed by the resulting monster is compounded by a botched response, followed by a virus scare concocted to clear the highly populated area for the release of a highly toxic gas ("Agent Yellow," no less) — a response whose lack of creativity is rivaled only by its indiscriminate lethality. South Korean officials are portrayed as the inept lackeys of brutish, arrogant American representatives. For American filmmakers still struggling to make political content marketable, The Host shows it's possible to make money while making a point.

As if its biting satire weren't enough, The Host is also a poignant and funny tale of family dysfunction. Gang-du, the most hapless possible single father, suffers the worst possible misfortune: He fails to save his young daughter (in her school uniform, for good measure) from a rampaging monster, thus confirming and fulfilling his destiny as the family fuck-up. His father, sister and brother converge at an emergency shelter, their panicked grief made all the more vivid by the unfolding civil catastrophe that surrounds them, a carnival of bumbling officials, hyperventilating media representatives and obtuse street protesters. The individual flaws and mutual antagonisms of the family members suggest The Royal Tennenbaums played less broadly, with much more at stake. Not all survive, yet each who does achieves a certain ersatz redemption: The directionless former student activist resumes throwing Molotovs. The failed competitive archer hits the target when it matters. Even Gang-du becomes a better father — takes his own father's place, in fact, as a new arrival takes his. The final scene is a vision of fragile, vulnerable hope to equal anything in The Road.

Now, about that monster. It's scary, all right, snarfing up screaming civilians and regurgitating their bones in a clattering heap. But it's also beautiful, sleek, swift and graceful in all its dagger-toothed sluglikeness, dully reflecting the concrete grays and rainy skies. While the local authorities and US military are portrayed as willfully incompetent to the point of immorality, the monster is in no way malevolent or vicious; it merely goes about its necessary business with crisp efficiency, stockpiling the dead and near-dead in its sewer nest. Far from your run-of-the-mill guy in a rubber lizard suit, it offers unexpected complexity and nuance, and the same can be said of The Host.

— J. Daniel Janzen (dan at clownyard dot com)

Once

Once creates its own cinematic sub-genre, the musical verité. The actors don't soar into belief-suspending set pieces, nor does a soundtrack artificially overlay the action. Rather, writer/director (and former The Frames bassist) John Carney molds a narrative around songs from Frames' frontman Glen Hansard's 2005 solo album, a collaboration with then-teenage Monrovian musician Marketa Irglova. In the film, they play simply "The Guy" and "The Girl," who meet on the streets of Dublin and, over the course of a week, refine The Guy's break-up ballads into a studio demo. They "connect," of course, as movie characters who make music always do — but, just as the film's style is more "real" than a traditional musical, so is the romance at the heart of the film. Once's achievement isn't just that a coherent narrative is formed from the making of music, but that the story has a literary depth that goes directly to the nature of music itself. In traditional musicals, music is an expression of unspoken attraction between romantic leads, usually underscoring the sexual tension. Movies have conditioned us to cheer for the hook up: They meet, they sing, they kiss, everyone leaves happy.

Once takes the audience on a different journey. The nameless leads seem like archetypes, he the melancholy artist-type and she the spunky girl that breaks his funk. Normally, musicals use music to "connect" these characters, then draw them closer so that they "save" each other. Once turns this arc upside-down. The Girl is one of those rare movie women that doesn't exist solely to "save" the melancholy artist-types. Their musical journey leads them both inward; as they compose, they learn more about themselves, pushing them away from each other romantically even as they grow closer musically. Their bond is romantic without being sexual; it's intimate without being pressured. Gradually, this platonic ideal rubs against our natural, movie-bred tendency to cheer for the Big Embrace — what we would normally consider a happy ending. This tension creates real drama — for once, the audience doesn't know how the story will end, and more importantly, we don't know how it should end. Once's songs sublimate the sexual into the platonic, creating a deeper, more personal and more real resolution that even the best artificial musicals can't achieve.

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)

Ratatouille

What makes a best picture? Certainly sheer scope and braggadocio seem to be a major part of the equation. If you can't step up and say "I am the biggest, baddest, weepiest, sword-swingiest, gun-shootingest, most retarded, Tom Hanksiest film out there" — and deliver — you may as well forget about claming the statuette.

That's a shame, because sometimes there are relatively modest little films that deserve a shot at the laurels. Ratatouille probably doesn't qualify as "little" when you examine its budget and gross revenue ($150 and $620 million, respectively). But it's not a film about empires, or blood feuds; it's about an animated rat named Remy, and his dream to become a great chef.

And as such, it's a sweet, funny. beautifully paced, artfully animated, deeply humane story about plunging headlong into new worlds, balancing the demands of friends and family, challenging oneself, getting shot at by crazy old ladies, and the glories of Paris. That's all fine and good, and makes a strong nominee for Good Picture, or even Really Good Picture. But Best Picture?

That's where the food comes in. In three ways, Ratatouille gets food right in a way that no other film (animated or not) ever has to such an extent.

The film's visual breakdown (and narrative explanation) of how a restaurant kitchen works is essentially flawless. You feel the pulse of the beast; the orders going in, the food going out, the various stations, supervisors and functionaries intimiately involved in the process at all stages. This is one of Pixar's real strengths, as exemplified by Monsters, Inc.: the efficient and entertaining depiction and explanation of relatively complicated systems.

Its explanation of flavors (and the blending thereof) is undertaken with a visual fireworks metaphor that is delight to observe and a simple, thoughtful meditation on the most basic building block of good eating.

But the film's masterstroke is Peter O'Toole's turn as Anton Ego. Ego is the Darth Vader of restaurant critics, a scathing, nasty, relentless critical dreadnought of a writer who feels like an Edward Gorey drawing dropped into a land-locked Finding Nemo world. But … Ego has layers. Lo and behold, he really does understand and care about food. And when Remy's cooking touches him, it does so in a profound and stunning manner that will — will — bring a tear to the eye of anyone who has ever experienced the profound connection between taste, smell and primal memory that food can evoke. Food does more than move Ego, it convincingly transforms him from bete noire to deus ex machina. Ratatouille isn't just a film that captures food; it captures food's connection to life, and that's something pretty goddamned big, and pretty goddamned impressive. Maybe even Best.

— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)

Sunshine

Should we need to head to outer space to save humanity, I hope we're farther along in terms of planning than the silver screen has shown us. Armageddon and Deep Impact are more or less the Sodom and Gomorrah of the genre. In one, you have a refugee Russian cosmonaut randomly joining the crew; in the other, Robert Duvall in space. One, guns on an asteroid. The other, a future fueled by Ensure. Twin spacecrafts. Hugs and kisses. Shouting and tears. Elijah Wood. Daddy issues abound. Is this really how it would go down, our entire planet entrusted to the hands of Owen Wilson?

In light of this (pun intended), Danny Boyle's Sunshine is a refreshing take on the doomsday scenario. The sun is dimming because of some sort of atomic stomach upset, and our intrepid team sails towards it with the nuclear equivalent of Pepcid. While there is an exit plan, odds are it's a suicide mission, and everyone acts as if they've made peace with that — as they well should have. The cast acts like professional scientists and astronauts on a mission. No love triangles, no hand-wringing, no cot-sharing, no joking. This could be a documentary for all we know.

Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland (the 28 Days Later team) assembled a film where all action is predicated on the mission. Sunshine's prime directive is to cure the sun; every point of drama supports that end goal without distraction. The movie presents the kind of people and the kind of response you would expect the globe's best and brightest to produce. Within this framework, Boyle and Garland draft a haunting antagonist — the crew of the original spacecraft who failed the same mission years ago. This crew introduces the predictable variables of the psychology of isolation, the commitment to the greater good, and the handshake with God the mission represents … all of which led to failure, which we would suspect, and all of which are perpendicular to our current crew's resolve, which we should applaud.

To call Sunshine "artful" directed would short-change Boyle's newfound abilities on the galactic stage. Visually, the film is a sort of interplanetary Caravaggio, wordlessly telling tales through its exchanges of light and dark. The CGI, always commissioned in the service of the plot and never an extra effect, is gorgeous, so much so that you mourn its use in pedantic exercises like Jar Jar Binks and Godzilla. Because of the visuals, Sunshine would be a great background film to have on muted during a party. Because of the story, this is a front-and-center masterpiece that's worthy of much more attention.

— Andy Stilp (andy.stilp at gmail dot com)