CBS Films

The audition, Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

Inside Llewyn Davis is a film that views creativity as a long, repetitive process defined by failure that often yields nothing of note. The Coen brothers’ movie finishes where it starts, with the struggling folk singer Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) getting beaten up in an alley. In between, he goes on a cross-country odyssey in search of a cat, money, and any sign of life for his career. The film has the directors’ trademark dark humor and their skill with making the most circular conversations sound like deep philosophical discourse. Until this decade, the directors had rarely made art about making art; of late, as Hollywood’s output has further homogenized, it’s seemingly become all they care about. In Inside Llewyn Davis’s best and most crushing scene, Llewyn auditions for the imperious manager Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham) by pouring his soul into an impassioned solo performance. “I don’t see a lot of money here,” Grossman replies, with sad but blunt finality. Llewyn returns to the Village and keeps performing, even as his situation stays the same. That’s his creative process—hoping that perhaps, one day, things will change.

Paramount Pictures

“I’m not leaving,” The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

When Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) takes the microphone in front of his stockbroker employees late in The Wolf of Wall Street, he has already admitted to financial fraud and arranged a deal with the Securities and Exchange Commission. He’s never shown much of a skill for anything except supreme self-confidence, which translates into the ability to sell worthless stocks to dopes over the phone. Jordan is the ultimate avatar of the pitiless power of wealth—because he has acres of money, he can behave like a god, and all of life’s punishments seem to slide off him as a result. That’s the mind-set that convinces Jordan that even though he’s a criminal who pleaded guilty, he’s not going to quit. Standing in front of his minions, Jordan channels his defiance into a scream of pride, one that rallies his troops around him in an orgy of self-delusion. The Wolf of Wall Street just might be the most trenchant film made about America’s past decade.

Paramount Pictures

Messages from home, Interstellar (2014)

Christopher Nolan has long been obsessed with the ways in which film can stretch, squeeze, and reorder time. His breakout, Memento, had twin plots, one running backwards and the other forward, before meeting in the middle; his 2010 smash hit, Inception, followed a dream heist in which time dilates more the deeper you get into someone’s mind. Interstellar, Nolan’s purest and best work, is about the trials that await humanity in the future. So it makes sense that the film’s greatest villain is time, marching forward and claiming our lives, no matter what we do. In a pivotal twist, the hero, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), is punished by the power of relativity. After a failed space mission near a black hole, Cooper returns to his craft to learn that 23 years have passed on Earth in his past few hours. He then watches message after message sent by his family, seeing his son’s entire adolescence flash before his eyes. It’s Nolan’s most human scene, girded by cold, scientific logic, and it’s performed beautifully by McConaughey.