Home Featured Content

10 Great Movies From 2013 That You Probably Missed In Theatres

More than 600 movies received a theatrical release in 2013, which means that if you went to see a new movie every day this year, you still could not cover the whole cinematic spectrum. 2013 was, in this critic’s opinion, one of the best years for film in recent memory. Of the 80 or so films I saw this year, I enjoyed about two thirds of them. The titles that I can recommend heartily range from big-budget extravaganzas (among them, Gravity and Star Trek Into Darkness), as well as modest films that did not last long in theatres. If the diversity of the picks from early awards and critics prizes attest to anything, it is that the variety of quality films was vast this year.

[h2]5) Leviathan[/h2]

Leviathan

Recommended Videos

A virtuoso experiment from two members of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL), Leviathan is a disorienting journey into the abyss of the world of commercial fishing. There is no dialogue or identifiable characters. Instead, it is a chaotic whirlwind of a documentary that spends its entirety on a fishing vessel in the Northeastern Atlantic. It is something between a hallucination and a nightmare, like if Gaspar Noé directed Moby Dick.

This film is not recommended for those who get seasick, but those daring enough to watch men gut hundreds of fish will find Leviathan wrenching and reckless. A purely visceral ride, the filmmakers from SEL, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, attached the camera to the chains and the nets as the boat bounces through the waves. Be prepared for when schools of fish splatter on the deck, and their executioners come to do their dirty jobs.

Leviathan is a sickening trip but a remarkable documentary, one that plunges the viewer right into the world of commercial fishing with results both stunning and horrifying. Several cameras pick up the day-to-day work of workers, with many sequences – even those that fluctuate between on-deck and underwater – capturing the horror in one take. In one striking moment, the camera whips around a massive flock of seagulls cawing right above the water. The birds get so close to the camera, you feel that they will peck at the lens. It is a glorious piece of violent piscine pornography.