The Best Movies of 2013 (So Far)

Early last month, Steven Spielberg and his old friend George Lucas made headlines when, during a televised symposium held at the University of Southern California, the former predicted that the movie industry is heading towards an "implosion." Spielberg's point was simple: Eventually, the catastrophic flops of multiple $200 million-plus studio films will cause a drastic change in business practices, and not for the better. As he put it, "There's going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen mega-budget movies are going to go crashing into the ground, and that's going to change the paradigm." Added Lucas, referring to his pal's recent Oscar-nominated biopic, "I think eventually the Lincolns will go away and they're going to be on television."

On one hand, you can read this and scoff, saying, "Hold up—Spielberg and Lucas are largely responsible for Hollywood's blockbuster problem." But you should also take heed, since, like it or not, those two guys know a lot more about the film biz's inner machinations than any of us. As they see it, ticket prices for flicks like Iron Man 3 could gradually rise to $25, and fewer movies will be made per year, leaving more room for the limited releases to stay in theaters for upwards of 365 days and follow a "Broadway model."

If that doesn't frighten you, just look at our list of the best movies of the 2013 (so far). Save for a few major studio releases, it's predominantly a collection of the year's finest independent films, because, well, they've just been that much better. The smaller films that populate the following countdown also need your eyes, support, and word-of-mouth chatter more than, say, Man of Steel. Piggybacking off of Spielberg and Lucas, studios will always find ways to produce the next big superhero movie, action bonanza, and comic book adaptation, but do-it-yourself indie movies? That so-called implosion, if it ever happens, could destroy them.

And as this list makes clear, movie lovers will be living in a bleak world if the Ben Wheatleys, Amy Seimetzs, and Harmony Korines of the game aren't able to create.

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Director: Marc Forster
Stars: Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, James Badge Dale, David Morse, Fana Mokoena, Peter Capaldi, Daniella Kertesz

What everyone thought would be the summer's biggest disaster turned out to be, as July kicks off, the season's most satisfying big-budget genre flick. We're just as shocked as everyone else.

Plagued by months of bad pre-release press, speculating on everything from its bloated price tag to reshoots and director/star beefs, World War Z premiered last month to critics and industry insiders ready to eviscerate it, but then the unbelievable happened—Brad Pitt's $200 million zombie action movie delivered on all of its promises. The pace is breathless, the zombies badass, and the massive set-pieces (particularly one set on a airplane that's suddenly overrun by infected ghouls) are executed with go-for-broke zeal by director Marc Forster (Quantum of Solace).

Now, those haters are left tongue-tied. Moviegoers seeking a visual extravaganza this summer, meanwhile, have World War Z at their disposal, an expensive spectacle that's far superior to the likes of Man of Steel. —MB

Director: Sofia Coppola
Stars: Katie Chang, Israel Broussard, Emma Watson, Taissa Farmiga, Claire Julien, Leslie Mann, Gavin Rossdale, Georgia Rock, Carlos Miranda

There've been a lot of complaints about Sofia Coppola's latest look into privileged Hollywood culture, a familiar favorite topic of hers, namely the fact that it lacks a point of view, showcases "bad" acting, and fails to pass judgement on the criminals on her part. To which we would say, "Yes, yes, and yes." And the film works because of this. It's as if US Weekly pages were ripped from the magazine and splashed onto the big screen (albeit with Coppola's elegant style). Like Somewhere, her study of boredom, her form fits the content. —TA

Director: Megan Griffiths
Stars: Jamie Chung, Beau Bridges, Scott Mechlowicz, Matt O'Leary, Mariana Klaveno

One of the year's most delightful revelations was former Complex cover girl Jamie Chung's performance in the hard-edged drama Eden. The beautiful actress' post-Real World days have been spent populating unbearable comedies (Grown Ups, The Hangover Part II) and providing eye candy in critically panned action flicks (Dragonball: Evolution, Sucker Punch); given her first chance to hold down a leading role in Eden, though, she rises to the occasion in eye-opening ways.

And she's been given one hell of a role to inhabit. Based on the real-life experiences of Chong Kim, Eden follows a sweet, naïve, brace-faced Korean-American teenager (Chung) as she's kidnapped, placed into a secret prostitution ring, and forced to work her way up the ranks, from sex provider to glorified receptionist, for over a year.

Griffiths and screenwriter Richard B. Phillips present the underground world of human trafficking with unflinching harshness; one scene, in which Chung's raised arms are cuffed and a whip comes out, is especially disturbing. To the film's credit, scenes of that nature are also never lurid, resulting in a poignant thriller, not graphic exploitation. —MB

Director: Olivier Assayas
Stars: Clement Metayer, Lola Creton, Felix Armand, Carole Combes, India Menuez, Hugo Conzelmann

Olivier Assayas, one of France's most consistently exciting directors (go stream Carlos on Netflix right now), contemplates his adolescence in his latest, Something in the Air. (The French title is Après mai, which translates to After May—it's far more evocative than the blandness we were stuck with.)

Assayas' gorgeous, meandering movie opens not long after the May '68 student revolt in Paris. His high school-age stars want to keep the fervor burning, and so they vandalize and riot, meet to talk about radical politics and art practices. Gilles (Clement Metayer), a brooding kid with a mop of hair and a blank look-book face, can't decide whether he'd rather paint, protest, or just hump around. When a security guard at his school is seriously injured by Gilles' and his band of bougie rebels, the group scatters across Europe, the better to lay low in the wake of the altercation.

Something in the Air is part road movie, part reflection on the complex relationship between political action, political art, and artistic innovation, and part coming-of-age tale. The film succeeds because, though everything from the stars to the scenery is very beautiful, Assayas doesn't douse the proceedings in sentiment. These are kids who are probably going to grow up to be the middle-class types they hate, and their aspirations are driven as much by fashion and hormones as anything else. And yet their shifting radical convictions do seem real, too. By refusing to parse the mess, Assayas gets at something like the truth. —RS

Director: Peter Strickland
Stars: Toby Jones, Tonia Sotiropoulou, Susanna Cappelaro, Cosimo Fusco

Peter Strickland's wonderfully strange Berberian Sound Studio doesn't have much going on in terms of story—a nebbish British sound technician named Gilderoy (the great Toby Jones) abandons his usual ho-hum movie jobs to work on the sound effects for an Italian giallo film, a.k.a. the latest in Italy's signature brand of gruesome, stylish horror, titled, brilliantly, The Equestrian Vortex. And while surrounded by the production's colorful array of filmmakers and actors, Gilderoy slowly loses his mind.

And, story wise, it's as simple as that. But, technically speaking, Berberian Sound Studio is anything but simple. Strickland utilizes a large arsenal of visual and sonic trickery so that the film itself mirrors Gilderoy's fever dream reality. It's a horror movie that isn't interested in scaring its viewers, but, rather, hypnotizing them into a state of dark, twisted confusion. Which, thanks to Strickland's talents and Jones' dynamic performance, it accomplishes tenfold. —MB

Director: Adam Leon
Stars: Ty Hickson, Tashiana Washington, Zoe Lescaze, Meeko, Sam Sighor, Joshua Rivera

There's a moment nearly halfway into writer-director Adam Leon's feature film debut Gimme the Loot where its two leads, teenage NYC graffiti bombers Sophia (Tashiana Washington) and Malcolm (Ty Hickson), debate the efficiency full-member-sized condoms. Malcolm thinks that rubbers should just cover the "head," like a "fitted cap"; Sophia, as in most of their chats, thinks he's full of shit. It's a funny exchange that doesn't feel scripted, mainly because of the actors' naturalistic performances, and that's what lifts Gimme the Loot above the threshold of excellence as a whole: The film always feels in-the-moment and real.

Living in the Bronx, and, as a result, pledging allegiance to the New York Yankees' pinstripes, Sophia and Malcolm hatch a plan to "tag" the Mets Home Run Ball at the Queens-located Citi Field, an incredibly ambitious scheme that's halted when Sophia gets robbed by members of a rival spray-can-toting gang. The theft inspires Malcolm to hatch a heist of his own, one that involves jacking a case of expensive jewelry from an upper-class floozy (Zoe Lescaze) to whom he recently brought drugs.

In Leon's vibrant, warm, and consistently amusing film, the characters' sticky-fingered, urban adventure itself ranks secondary to Gimme The Loot fluid direction and breathlessly witty dialogue, spoken by a squad of first-time performers who uniformly come off as real-deal people, not fictional creations. It's every bit as authentic in spirit as Larry Clark's similarly presented Kids (1995), only, with its amiability, it's much more accessible. —MB

Director: Rob Zombie
Stars: Sheri Moon Zombie, Bruce Davison, Meg Foster, Ken Foree, Jeff Daniel Phillips, Judy Geeson, Dee Wallace, Patricia Quinn, Maria Conchita Alonso

Steeped in European horror sensibilities, writer-director Rob Zombie's The Lords of Salem is his most ambitious and befuddling work yet—befuddling in positive ways comparable to the least comprehensible, yet no less enthralling, films from, say, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Dario Argento. Except that The Lords of Salem is unmistakably a Rob Zombie vision, one that never suffered the same big-wig interference that befell his Halloween studio assignments. Given total creative freedom from mega-producer Jason Blum (Insidious, the Paranormal Activity series), Zombie holds nothing back.

The outcome is about as close to modern-day audiences may ever come to experiencing the midnight-movie weirdness of films like Santa Sangre and Alucarda. The Lords of Salem opens with naked and flabby witches performing a wild Satanic ritual, so there's never any doubt as to what kind of movie you're viewing, and Zombie completely uses that license to his advantage. The film's parade of grotesqueries will definitely repulse some, if not have them laughing for all the wrong reasons. Chances are, though, anyone who voluntarily seeks out "video nasties" and prefers the lurid over logical will happily kneel before Zombie's strange altar. —MB

Director: Noah Baumbach
Stars: Greta Gerwig, Mickey Sumner, Adam Driver, Michael Zegen, Grace Gummer, Patrick Heusinger

Noah Baumbach begins many of his movies with a line of dialogue that acts as a kind of summary or central thematic statement. The first words spoken in his divorce drama The Squid and the Whale, for instance, are, "Mom and me versus you and Dad."

Frances Ha, his funny valentine to his girlfriend, Greta Gerwig, opens with a long montage of Frances' life in New York. She's a twenty-something with aspirations to dance, and she lives with her best friend, Sophie (Mickey Sumner), who works in publishing. In the montage, Frances reads aloud to Sophie about attacks on sincerity in art. Those of you who simply hate the social milieu of middle-class white Brooklynites who dream of doing something creative, this is your cue to leave.

Like a great episode of Girls (minus the body art), Frances Ha examines friendship between young women in New York, 2013. Baumbach cares for Gerwig, and it's clear in the film. Though the characters around Frances make comments that skewer themselves and their specific sub-culture (shout out to everyone working on a Gremlins 3 screenplay), her own faults are celebrated. Frances is socially awkward and self-sabotaging, and she is lovely and loved by the film's camera and screenplay (which Gerwig wrote with Baumbach). In the hands of other filmmakers and stars, this could become numbing satire or something equally lifeless. Instead, it's exuberant, a pristine black-and-white snapshot of love and the city. —RS

Director: Jeff Nichols
Stars: Matthew McConaughey, Tye Sheridan, Reese Witherspoon, Jacob Lofland, Sam Shepard, Michael Shannon, Sarah Paulson, Joe Don Baker, Paul Sparks

If Mud's writer-director were to ever turn his excellent screenplay into a book, it'd be the perfect summer-reading assignment for kids entering high school.

A modern-day Huckleberry Finn of sorts, Nichols' follow-up to 2011's darker, more psychologically unnerving Take Shelter is the kind of young-adult adventure tale that, frankly, doesn't seem to exist anymore. The film centers on Mississippi youngster Ellis (Tye Sheridan, a fine young actor), who, along with his awesomely named buddy Neckbone, befriends the grizzled yet charismatic Mud (Matthew McConaughey) on a secluded, backwoods island. While helping Mud reunite with main squeeze (Reese Witherspoon) and further hide from the men out to kill him, Ellis learns valuable lessons about trust, love, and what it means to be a man.

Mud's emotional impact, however, is deeper than its coming-of-age themes. Nichols, quite cleverly, uses the film's genre elements to fashion one hell of an allegory for how kids process weighty, potentially devastating issues like divorce, betrayal, and heartbreak. —MB

Directors: Mark Christopher Covino and Jeff Howlett

When people think about punk rock, a few usual suspects come to mind: the Ramones, Bad Brains, and the Sex Pistols, for example. But, as Howlett's film points out, the Detroit-based group simply known as Death (siblings Dannis, David, and Bobby Hackney) were just as, if not even more so, trailblazing as those aforementioned iconic acts. The only problem was, Death's Motown roots left record label heads and fans confused when it came time to listen to their 1974 demo: Why weren't these three black brothers from the D crooning harmonies? Why all of the aggressive, nihilistic rock?

Similar to last year's Oscar-nominated Searching for Sugar Man, A Band Called Death is all about redemption. Thirty years after the siblings recorded their failed demo, they found a fan base; and now, courtesy of filmmakers Jeff Howlett and Mark Christopher Covino, they've been given a superb platform to inspire music fans and family-minded viewers alike.

A Band Called Death thankfully doesn't posit the group, like less music documentaries would, as a recording industry treasure that people have unfairly slept on, even with on-camera commentary from Death fans like Kid Rock, Questlove, and Elijah Wood—Howlett and Covino focus on the Hackney family's deep, personal bonds. Through that, the film resonates as poignant character study, not a glorified Behind the Music episode. —MB

Director: Amy Seimetz
Stars: Kate Lyn Sheil, Kentucker Audley

Everybody's got baggage. Some folks just have the kind that can get you the death penalty in Florida. In the unconventional road trip movie Sun Don't Shine, Crystal (Kate Lyn Sheil) and her boyfriend Leo (Kentucker Audley) drive tensely from Jacksonville to Tampa trying to keep a trunk full of trouble secret so they can lighten their load, literally if not mentally, in the Everglades.

Carried by Sheil and Audley's stellar performances, which are believably trashy, self-defeating, and hopeless, Sun Don't Shine feels like a crime documentary following two people who, as criminals, are fish out of water (a theme that is paralleled charmingly in scenes at a real-life roadside mermaid attraction, about which filmmaker Amy Seimetz made the 2008 documentary short We Saw Such Things). As Crystal's dim-witted inability to recognize the stakes, and her jealousy of a woman Leo seeks help from, threaten to ruin them both, their bond and the fantasy of happily ever after begins to melt under the stifling sun.

A native Floridian, Seimetz does a magnificent job capturing the flavor of central Florida. Watching her marvelous film, you can practically feel the dirt caking on your face, then streaking down muddily as you sweat in the kind of oppressive heat that causes blood to boil and leads people to do very bad things. —JM

Director: Jordan Vogt-Roberts
Stars: Nick Robinson, Gabriel Basso, Moises Arias, Nick Offerman, Alison Brie, Megan Mullaly, Mary Lynn Rajskub

It'd be easy to pigeonhole Jordan Vogt-Roberts' The Kings of Summer as another coming-of-age teen comedy just based on its premise and trailer. Three teenagers, tired of their controlling parents and looking for a change of pace, spend their summer vacation living in a house they've built in the woods. Fueling any Superbad-minded allusions is the fact that there's even an eccentric, McLovin-esque kid in the mix named Biaggio (Moises Arias).

A strange, unexpected thing happens while you're watching The Kings of Summer, though: It's tone moves from slacker comedy to scenic wonderment, something like early David Gordon Green, then back to wacky comedy and suddenly into avant-garde strangeness.

First-time director Vogt-Roberts uses the familiar kids-being-funny motif as a lynchpin for experimentation, subverting preconceptions and directing his characters into unpredictable, sometimes painfully dark places. That he's consistently able to undercut all of The Kings of Summer's quirkiness with a strong sense of warmth and heart makes Vogt-Roberts a filmmaker to watch. —MB

Director: Shane Carruth
Stars: Shane Carruth, Amy Seimetz, Andrew Sensenig, Thiago Martins

Upstream Color—writer-director Shane Carruth's long-awaited follow-up to his bewildering 2004 time-travel knockout Primer—is a textbook example of a movie that's best seen with little to no prior knowledge of its plot machinations. We'll restrict the explanation to this: Two morose strangers (Amy Seimetz and Carruth) meet on a train, slowly begin seeing each other, and have no idea that they share a common past experience that neither one of them truly understands. Somewhere not all that far from their city, meanwhile, resides an eccentric farmer with a giant pen full of pigs.

How all of those pieces connect is what Carruth challenges audience members to formulate for themselves—the necessary details are there, but laid out in such a way that posits Upstream Color as a slightly less menacing relative of Mulholland Drive. Carruth is working on several artistic levels here. The film's core is the whirlwind romance, but, true to his idiosyncratic form, Carruth surrounds that beating heart with other particular influences, including body horror, bleak drama, and (bizarre) biology. Which, on the whole, could leave viewers cold if not for his ability to capture moments of sublime beauty.

Even at its most impenetrable, Upstream Color is a superb technical achievement. —MB

Director: Park Chan-wook
Stars: Mia Wasikowska, Nicole Kidman, Matthew Goode, Jacki Weaver, Dermot Mulroney, Alden Ehrenreich, Lucas Till

To fully appreciate Park Chan-wook's campy and downright insane English-language debut, Stoker, one needs a high tolerance for presentation over coherence. As in, the capability to abandon any interest in a tight, well-crafted screenplay.

If you're ready to revel in perverted horror that ODs on inventive visuals, though, Stoker will inspire euphoric giddiness. Staying true to the stylized violence, taboo-busting turns, and macabre sense of humor on display in earlier efforts like Oldboy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Chan-wook uses his exceptional directorial talents to elevate Miller's otherwise lackluster script. He's also able to pull career-best performances from two of his stars: Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland), who' simultaneously shifts from quietly eruptive and tenderly fragile in nearly every scene, and Matthew Goode (Watchmen).

In past interviews, Chan-wook has said that seeing Alfred Hitchcock's classic Vertigo was what motivated him to become a filmmaker, a factoid that's prescient here since, from top to bottom, Stoker is full of unsubtle nods to Hitch's oeuvre, everything from the close-up of cop glasses in Psycho and a character's unfortunate amount of time spent inside a phone booth, a la The Birds. Chan-wook, whose prior films balanced heightened visuals with intelligent stories, must have read Miller's script, felt the Hitchcock vibes, and decided to go to town.

Stoker—which features such masterfully staged craziness as a piano-playing session that turns into an orgasmic freak-out and a literal "coming" of age conveyed through a horrific yet provocative montage—brings the shallow goods with delightful recklessness. —MB

Directors: Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead
Stars: Peter Cilella, Vinny Curran, Zahn McClarnon, Bill Oberst Jr.

Speaking loosely, Resolution is a horror movie. But first-time directors Justin Benson (also the screenwriter) and Aaron Scott Moorhead had too many wild influences in their heads while assembling this bizarre, clever, and meticulously ambiguous genre mash-up to simply lump it into the horror lane.

Besides, lead actors Peter Cilella and Vinny Curran—the former playing a worried friend who forces his drug-abusing best friend (Curran) into a makeshift rehab inside a run-down cabin—are too damn funny to leave viewers just unsettled. That task is left to Benson's subversive script, a sneaky baffler complete with allusions to Lovecraftian mythos, Native American customs, and meta supernaturalism.

A do-it-yourself indie that's low on finances but high on ambition, Resolution deserves a chance to confound more viewers once it hits DVD later this year. —MB

Director: Rodney Ascher

Oh, you're a big fan of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining? Prepare to see the iconic director's Stephen King adaptation in all new, mind-bending ways, thanks to documentary filmmaker Rodney Ascher's bewildering, deconstructive knockout Room 237. Using the committed, albeit seemingly delirious, voiceovers from five Shining obsessives, Ascher's endlessly fascinating film pulls apart every minute detail within Kubrick's horror masterwork to present a series of crackpot theories that, by the picture's end, actually sound probable.

As in, The Shining was Kubrick's way to atone for staging the Apollo 11 moon landing; or, Kubrick's masked commentary on both the Holocaust and the genocide of Native Americans in our beloved U.S.A.—sounds batty, right? With Ascher's stellar craftsmanship and slick editing to thank, the strangely hypnotic Room 237 begs to differ. —MB

Director: Ben Wheatley
Stars: Steve Oram, Alice Lowe

Last year, the incredibly disturbing horror flick Kill Listsolidified British filmmaker's Ben Wheatley's status as one of the most exciting on-the-rise talents, capitalizing on the promise he showed with his 2009 debut, the dark crime comedy Down Terrace. But we haven't seen anything yet. Sightseers cements Wheatley's place atop the pile of currently working directors, nationality or experience levels aside.

Brilliantly written by stars Steve Oram and Alice Lowe, Sightseers exists in the same space as Natural Born Killers, though its morbid sense of humor and quirky characterizations are singularly unique. On a "holiday" road trip, a three-months-in couple (Oram and Lowe, both superb) work through their relationship's kinks while several others die gruesomely, from getting run over to having their heads bashed into huge rock. And it's all in good, twisted fun, a dose of macabre humor from a totally in command Mr. Wheatley. —MB

Director: Justin Lin
Stars: Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Dwayne Johnson, Michelle Rodriguez, Luke Evans, Jordana Brewster, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Gina Carano, Joe Taslim, Sung Kang, Gal Gadot, Elsa Pataky, Shea Whigham

Say what you want about how dumb and burly the Fast and Furious movies are, but truth be told, they're the most fun you can have at the movies in 2013. Led by a diverse cast of action heroes and comedic performers, Fast 6 brought back everything you've grown to love about the franchise—sweet rides, epic, unimaginable chases, and Vin Diesel channeling his ultimate cool guy. This franchise knows what it is, what its fans want, and it delivers. —TA

Director: Carlos Reygadas
Stars: Adolfo Jimenez Castro, Nathalia Acevedo, Willebaldo Torres, Rut Reygadas, Eleazer Reygadas

Post Tenebras Lux, the fourth film from divisive Mexican director Carlos Reygadas, is tough to talk about and, at times, watch. The experience is not unlike listening to someone describe their dreams to you, in that the images and details are, ultimately, not for you to understand. Post Tenebras Lux, Latin for "light after darkness," illuminates the inside of Regadas' brain, but the director does not provide a map for the territory. It helps to know that much of the film was shot in the director's home, and that the children of the film's protagonist are played by the director's children. It might help to know that the director attended a British boarding school as a young man. But these facts only go so far.

The plot, as such, revolves around an affluent couple who live in rural Mexico. The husband (Adolfo Jimenez Castro), a man prone to unfathomable violence, has a strained relationship with the townspeople, who are of Indian descent and not wealthy.

Shot, at times, with the majesty of Terrence Malick, Post Tenebras Lux is a deeply personal epic, a massive look at the interior. You lose yourself in the images—a young girl plays with dogs as storm clouds gather; a neon red devil wanders through a family's home; a man commits suicide in an impossible way—and you stay lost. —RS

Director: Alex Winter

Now that online music providers are so readily available and simple to use, it's easy to forget about the cyber revolution that started it all: Napster, the file-sharing creation of a Massachusetts teenager named Shawn Fanning. Along with his co-founder, Sean Parker, and their trusty staff of mostly same-aged and similarly brilliant buddies, Fanning drastically altered the entire music industry, angered the likes of Lars Ulrich and Dr. Dre, and empowered young people by showing them that the Internet was theirs to inventively utilize, not their elders.

In his pulsating and well-reported documentary Downloaded, actor turned filmmaker Alex Winter recounts Napster's unexpected rise and inevitable fall through firsthand accounts of all the major players, namely the reclusive Fanning and his more outgoing ex-partner, Parker. Upholding a balance of fairness, Winter affords nearly as much talking time to Fanning's enemies as he does to the Napster mastermind himself, interviewing several record label executives (including Columbia Records President Donny Iner) and musicians (Noel Gallagher, Beastie Boys member Mike D., Henry Rollins).

Many of Downloaded's best moments come from the clever ways in which Winter and his editor, Jacob Craycroft, weave in their surplus of archival footage—big laughs come from dated interviews with two out-of-touch Spice Girls and the pre-cyber-boom ignorance displayed by Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel as to what this whole "Internet" thing is all about. That's what makes Downloaded so fascinating: It reminds us that, merely a little over a decade ago, the World Wide Web was an open terrain for any and all whiz kids to explore.

Without the efforts of Fanning and his colleagues, there'd be no Myspace or Facebook-thus, in a way, Winter's film is the much-needed, real-life prequel to The Social Network. —MB

Director: Richard Linklater
Stars: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy

With each entry, Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, and Ethan Hawke's Before series gets better. What began in 1995, with Before Sunrise, as a small film about two strangers meeting in Vienna and falling for each while walking and talking through the city has grown to become one of the most important cinematic works about love ever made.

Before Midnight opens in the present. Celeste (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) have been living together for years. They have children together, two twin girls. Jesse left his previous marriage in America to be with Celeste in Paris, but his unhappiness about his long-distance relationship with his son from that marriage is becoming a problem.

Linklater doesn't alter the style of the first two films for Before Midnight; the characters have long, discursive conversations about time, memory, and love in extremely long takes, and those conversations always lead back to their relationship. The care placed in this dialogue, in particular the argument Celeste and Jesse have in a hotel room near the film's end, is unmatched in American cinema this year. The dialogue is hyper-realistic, sounding superficially like regular speech but with such subtext and intelligence, it's not at all like how people talk. The lengthy scenes make you look at editing with fresh eyes. Each cut in this film means something (pay close attention to a shot of a cup of tea late in the game).

But the real reason you're here is to check in on the relationship between two characters movie lovers have come to care about over the course of 18 years. They aren't falling in love here; no, they're testing the limits of their relationship and their own happiness, exploring what sacrifice means between partners of many years. You'll be surprised by how funny so much of this winds up being, but it's also so painful, you might not have it in you to laugh. —RS

Directors: Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg
Stars: Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, James Franco, Craig Robinson, Danny McBride, Jonah Hill, Emma Watson, Michael Cera

The first trailer for This Is the End, released in April, was the first taste anyone got of co-writers, and first-time co-directors, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg meta apocalypse comedy, and the reaction was split. Those who liked what they saw welcomed the chance to watch Rogen and his colleagues/friends James Franco, Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel, Danny McBride, and Craig Robinson berate each other indoors while the Devil brings the motherfuckin' fire-and-brimstone ruckus outdoors. McBride finding it hard to believe that "James Franco didn't suck any dick last night?" Bring on the jokes.

But two hours' worth of famous people lampooning themselves? Those who weren't as responsive to This Is the End's trailer feared the worst—meaning, an excuse for Rogen and his buddies to cash easy paychecks while simultaneously massaging each others' egos.

Good news: There's no figurative dick-sucking among the rich and famous here, only jokes about it. This Is the End isn't just the year's funniest movie to date—it's also worthy of sitting alongside last year's The Cabin in the Woods in the annals of great horror-comedies. Rather than derive all of the film's laughs from tons of inside-baseball one-liners delivered by actors making fun of other actors, This Is the End applies the Shaun of the Dead tactic of playing all of the horror elements without any irony or silliness—the humor comes directly from how everyone responds to the horror. Dick jokes and all. —MB

Director: Franck Khalfoun
Stars: Elijah Wood, Nora Arnezeder, Jan Broberg, America Olivo, Liane Balaban, Morgane Slemp, Genevieve Alexandra, Megan Duffy

Maniac shouldn't be as great as it is—it's a serial killer movie starring the pint-sized dude who plays Frodo Baggins, directed by the filmmaker behind the lame 2007 parking garage thriller P2, and, on top of that, it's yet another horror remake. And yet.

With its simultaneously retro and haunting score, impressive use of first-person POV camerawork, and Wood's multi-layered performance as a perverse sociopath, Maniac hits on every possible level. Wood's character, Frank, stalks beautiful young women, murders them, scalps them, and then places their severed head-tops on mannequins…and, through it all, he remains impossibly sympathetic. Maniac isn't a slasher movie, or a monster movie, as much as it's an urban tragedy, one that, mind you, is sadistic and voyeuristic.

For genre fans looking for something special, though, it's also a nasty crowd-pleaser. It's rare to find a new horror film that's an audacious, form-bending exercise in style matched with, not placed over, substance. Maniac is exactly that. —MB

Director: Sarah Polley

Sarah Polley's remarkable Stories We Tell deserves multiple "best of the year (so far)" superlatives. It's the year's best documentary, best family film, most heart-wrenching work, craftiest mystery, and most quietly ambitious experiment. Simply, Stories We Tell is a powerful masterwork from a gifted filmmaker who's gradually positioning herself as the indie scene's strongest female voice.

Through several interviews with her own family members, Polley investigates the true identity of her birth father, a question that's been on her mind for years and yields raw, earnest, and often amusing anecdotes from everyone on camera. Stories We Tell shows how shared memories aren't always recalled in the same ways by each individual, that truths often lie in the beholder's eyes.

Once Polley reveals the film's biggest gut-punching twist, Stories We Tell becomes a different kind of film, one that'll make you question reality and, even more profoundly, want to hug your loved ones. —MB

Director: Harmony Korine
Stars: James Franco, Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine, Gucci Mane

Guns, bikinis, and a Riff Raff-esque James Franco—it's a fix you didn't even know you were fiending for. The most divisive film of 2013 so far, Harmony Korine's ecstasy trip follows three former goody-two shoes from the Disney channel and Korine's wife as they embark on a drug-fueled spring break trip gone so wrong, but so damn right.

Sick of their boring bumblefuck nowhere college life, the foursome save up some cash to travel to St. Petersburg, Florida, with the rest of the topless and twerking borderline-alcoholic students of the south. A party gone wrong lands them in jail, only to be bailed out by a corn-rowed rapper/dealer named Alien, James Franco. What follows is a nasty crime thriller that could make any parent send their kid to Jesus Camp.

Top it off with synchronized dance with rifles as props performed to Britney Spears "Everytime," with Franco on a white grand piano, and you've got the most deliciously batshit movie of the year. —TA