2013 was a great year for open, generous filmmaking that explored ordinary humanity with an eye that was critical but unjudgemental, treating its subjects and characters with a care and tenderness that does not preclude putting them through the ringer. Aside from these that follow, honorable mentions must go to Harmony Korine’s State of the Nation address Spring Breakers, the wildly entertaining You’re Next and Much Ado About Nothing, and the sweet-but-not-sickly childhood tale I Wish.
Computer Chess is an entirely unique, completely unexpected film, and whilst I’m super happy you’re here, I would strongly urge you to watch it before reading any further so as not to spoil any of its surprises!
Andrew Bujalski is, to the few people who actually have heard of him, famous for his mostly improvised, painfully realistic, artlessly artless depictions of the lives of young hip people as they go through perfectly ordinary, life-sized problems – his first film, Funny Ha-Ha, was one of the very first films of the “mumblecore” movement and went a long way to legitimise that style of filmmaking as something that could express the kinds of stories they were telling in a new way. He and his peers, filmmakers that have gone on to make films on a much larger budget like Joe Swanberg, the Duplass Brothers and Lynn Shelton, found a form that perfectly expressed the lives in which they lived: shaggy, low-budget, and with meandering, barely-there focus. Not all mumblecore films worked, but all of Bujalski’s films did, due to his superior understanding of his characters and their interpersonal relationships which kept you invested even when the conversations were mundane due to the sheer recognizability of the types of people he wrote about.
The Blank Projector 