The films Melancholia and Margaret starring Alexander Skarsgård (Eric Northman) and Anna Paquin (Sookie Stackhouse) respectively have been creating a lot of buzz lately. They’ve both made best films of 2011 lists this year including LA Weekly and Movieline most recently.
Margaret placed number 5 on Movieline’s list with writer Allison Willmore saying:
“Messy, vivid and wonderful, Kenneth Lonergan’s difficult production has become a critics’ cause, in part because of how tough it’s been to actually see. It’s worth the trouble, and in some ways better because of the long wait in reaching the few theaters it did — it now looks less like a movie about post-9/11 New York and more one about the city in all of its anonymous, chaotic glory, about a teenage girl’s first horrific brush with mortality and about the strange places that life leads us.”
LA Weekly focused more on the performances featured in Margaret, making film editor Katrina Longworth’s #1 pick:
“Margaret, written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan (You Can Count on Me), starring Anna Paquin with key supporting performances from Matt Damon and Mark Ruffalo, is the best film of 2011. Chances are very, very good that you haven’t seen it — or weren’t even aware that it was something you could see. And right now, it isn’t — at least, not in LA. ”
Melancholia in contrast topped Willmore’s best of list at #1. Alexander plays leading lady Kirsten Dunst’s groom in the film, (and yes he cleans up quite nicely!):
“The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference, and in Lars von Trier’s film it’s the awesome force of Kirsten Dunst’s depression-fueled disinterest that exudes a gravitational drag on everyone around here even before the arrival of the destructive planet of the title. Before the breathtaking apocalyptic imagery appears — the object looming closer in the sky, the static sparking from fingertips – Melancholia is already a devastating look at an illness that leaves you unable to connect to what life has to offer, even on an extravagant wedding day that seems to compress half a lifetime into a night. But it’s that the film turns to offer a sympathetic eye to Charlotte Gainsbourg’s anxious sibling in the second half that makes it great, and that gives it a soul. As she struggles to hold everything together in the face of approaching disaster, even Dunst’s depressive is moved to offer her a conciliatory gesture as the world ends.”
The Lars Von Trier epic ranked high on LA Weekly’s list as well at #2 only edged out by Margaret:
“The sheer beauty and personal depth of Lars von Trier’s triangle of depression, anxiety and cosmic apocalypse have been well documented. What has been overlooked, I think — and what pushes Melancholia into masterpiece realm, for me — is its subversion of Hollywood’s two primary currencies: the special effects epic, and, in the casting of Kirsten Dunst as von Trier’s alter ego, the celebrity confessional.”
Congratulations to both films and to their respective casts!
Are you going to see Melancholia or Margaret? Have you already seen them? Tell me what you think about the films in the comments!
Sources: Movieline.com- “Margaret, Melancholia and More: Alison’s Top 10 Movies of 2011″
LAWeekly.com-”LA Weekly’s Top Films of 2011″
Image Credit: Zentropia Entertainment
