The Steak Knives

To be eligible for the Steak Knives, candidates must not have been recognized by the Oscars, the Golden Globes, the Independent Spirit Awards or in the top tier of the IndieWire Critics' Poll. To see the ineligible nominees, click here.

David Cronenberg
Eastern Promises

Everyone in America heard the same first fact about David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises. Well, the third fact. There is a new movie called Eastern Promises, that movie is Cronenberg's new flick and dude, there is this scene at the end where you see Viggo Mortensen's package. Most fans of Cronenberg's films or film buffs in general will defend his latest by saying that the film is more than just a four-minute naked brawl in a bathhouse. But someone who has followed Cronenberg's lovely and perverse oeuvre will know that Eastern Promises is a masterpiece, and also that it is nothing more than a four-minute brawl in a bathhouse.

In The Brood and Videodrome, two of his most interesting early films, Cronenberg is gloriously fixated on the connection between mind and body, always questioning whether they can ever be considered separately. The Brood deals with the physical manifestations of anger: A primal-scream therapy patient begins to physically grow little creatures that enact the violent thoughts she tries to conceal. Videodrome deals, with eerie prophesying, with the stimulation of modern media, our disconnection from one another through these mediating forces and pornography as the connection between the most remote and the most proximal of our desires. The subject of a Cronenberg film often is forced to relate to his or her body in an entirely new way — it becomes different and somehow unfamiliar, and moving on requires reconciling identity itself with this new physical presence — and that's very obviously in these earlier films, where characters spawn tiny fear babies or make love to their televisions with a new orifice. In Cronenberg's later films, however, this idea takes a fascinating psychological turn.

Eastern Promises weaves Cronenberg's sometimes surreal and nightmarish monsters into a totally naturalistic environment. Here the characters must also wrestle with their bodies — they are known not by who they are or what they do, but by the complex system of tattoos that cover their skin. Viggo Mortensen's character, Luzhin, can only advance after he has been marked with a series of tattoos showing his alliance to this Russian crime syndicate. And thus, in that much-anticipated bathhouse scene, Luhzin is attacked after he is purposefully misidentified as the Boss's son. Mortensen needed to be naked, because he needed to be seen not simply as an ego or a character or a set of emotions, but as a human storybook. His character could protest all he wanted, but in the end he was simply the sum of the symbols written on his body. This is why Eastern Promises is no more, and no less, than that single fight scene. It is also why the film represents a level of sophistication in handling some very esoteric ideas that Cronenberg has focused on over his whole career. This sophistication does make the film more palatable for those who would prefer a mob flick with all brawn and no brain. If you want to focus on Mortensen's jibblies in the bathhouse, there are plenty to behold. But for those who love Cronenberg's complicated take on the tight bond between the physical and the mental, Eastern Promises is a powerful and mature example of how we deal with corporeality in a highly psychological age. The film is a great work in itself, but more importantly, it is a slimy, veiny, pulsating jewel in Cronenberg's own crown.

— Aemilia Scott (aemilia at flakmag dot com)

Seth Gordon
The King of Kong

One key to a good documentary is fascinating source material, and sure enough, this titanic battle for the world's highest Donkey Kong score is like a real-life Christopher Guest mockumentary. Reality is stranger than fiction, of course; likewise, Gordon sees his characters on a grander scale than Guest. Guest presents his subjects' fringe-of-fame dreams as desperation for success, happiness or identity. Gordon sees this in the Billy Mitchell vs. Steve Weibe rivalry, but he goes further than Guest: He shapes the narrative into a referendum on America itself.

Gordon comically puffs up the nerdy aspects of the story: A montage of underdog Steve playing Kong to "Eye of the Tiger," video game "referee" Walter Day wishing that pretty girls would walk up and say, "Hi, I see you're very good at Centipede." This is fun, if obvious — but Gordon deviates from this easy path by focusing on the complex character relationships. The first 30 minutes of the film contrasts the arrogant, "establishment" champion and the underdog everyman, but much of the rest of the film fleshes out the relationships of the secondary characters to the two protagonists. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern can even live in an arcade.

Gordon meticulously shows how Billy's weaker satellites protect him when he refuses to play Weibe mano a mano. Gordon then arranges the narrative to show why they protect Billy: Their self-worth is tied to their relationship with Billy; they're too invested in his success because he's the "face of arcade gaming;" he employs his alpha-male charm to manipulate those around him. Gordon shows how Billy's personal charisma allows him to infiltrate and corrupt the governing structure of the video gaming community. Against this monopoly stands Steve, the quintessential little guy who just wants a fair chance. By the end of the film, the battle for Donkey Kong supremacy isn't about jumping over barrels, it's about the promise of America: Can a common man of integrity and skill get a fair shake against a system allied against him? By meticulously presenting elements of this ridiculous story, Seth Gordon creates, not a mock epic, but an actual one.

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)

Curtis Hanson
Lucky You

Poker has received uneven treatment on the big and small screens in recent years. The catalog is effectively limited to Rounders, Casino Royale and ESPN's coverage of the World Series of Poker, which deliver a curious compendium of what to expect. You might lose all your law school money, but you might also shake hands with Jennifer Tilly. You could get poisoned, but you could also shrug off $10,000 because of the experience of getting beaten by people you see on TV. Mix in Ocean's Eleven and Thirteen, and you may find yourself sitting back, waiting for the heist to happen. If you believe these citations, the city is hardly a place to call home, and the ethos of "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" only makes the place seem more and more akin to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe.

Asking Curtis Hanson to take the reins of this wandering pony wasn't necessarily the safest bet. The man who brought us the masterful LA Confidential also delivered the underwhelming The River Wild. The pitch-perfect Wonder Boys was followed by the pitch-questionable 8 Mile and the pitchless In Her Shoes. You might wonder how much of Hanson's success is due to the scripts he was handed.

8 Mile stands out as the best indicator of how Lucky You pans out; the idiosyncracies of music and sport (if you'll permit poker into that camp) are equally difficult to transport to the screen in a way that provides new drama — new to film, new to poker, or both. Eric Roth delivered a script that partially solved the story issues: Poker, through Lucky You's eyes, is neither an addiction nor a hobby but an occupation that puts Eric Bana in the position of an entrepreneur, borrowing with promises of future returns in a cool-handed way.

Hanson couples this with a daring, shocking decision — he makes Las Vegas an equal netherland, firmly in between the glitz and the gulch. Hansen delivers a starkly suburban tale, almost as if this could as easily be Orlando. This framing is a smart reflection of one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation, where the demand for schools is outstripping the ability to provide teachers. Vegas used to be Oscar Goodman's town, but it's sure grown up, and Hanson takes us to the new Vegas, the one your parents visit on vacation. Drama takes place in diners, on golf courses and in stereotypical residential areas far away from the flashing lights.

Hanson also spends ample time in the poker rooms of Las Vegas Boulevard. You may not have noticed, because rather than appearing seedy (Rounders), serious (Casino Royale) or dramatic (ESPN), they appear as they are — well-lit, courteous and even jovial. Imagine that — a poker film that prepares home players for what to expect when they actually wander into the Bellagio. You're not going to bump into Terry Benedict or trade barbs with Mike Matusow. You're going to walk right into Hanson's Vegas, which, absent the theatrics or lighting effects we've grown accustomed to seeing "in Vegas," looks quite livable.

— Andy Stilp (andy.stilp at gmail dot com)

Greg Mottola
Superbad

Knocked Up was quickly regarded as the masterpiece of the Judd Apatow canon, which is a bit like saying Husbands and Wives is Woody Allen's best film — if you want a lacerating, withering view of people in general and lovers in particular, then you're set, but if you want laffs from a vaunted comedian, you could do better. As comedy laced with genuine human insight goes, Knocked Up isn't a patch on The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which Apatow also wrote and directed and which is the best studio comedy of the decade. But among films in this milieu — by which I mean the stuff that Apatow has written, directed or produced that hearken back to his TV drama Freaks & Geeks, which has been the epicenter of not only numerous comedy careers but also the "soulful nerd" aesthetic of the past 10 years — one stands out as, if not the funniest, then the nerdiest, most soulful and best directed.

That would be Superbad, for which Apatow is credited only as produced and whose director, Greg Mottola, has generally been footnoted as industry news focuses on Apatow's hot streak. But what Mottola does, and with the unlikeliest of scripts — one whose first draft was co-written by Apatow trouper Seth Rogen with friend Evan Goldberg when they were 15 — is make a high-school comedy that is not about "types," which was a trap for everything from The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off to American Pie and Mean Girls, but an inside-out look at two flamingly homosocial guys that foregrounds every laugh with the sting of recognition. Well, not every laugh — the movie goes broad, with its joyriding cops and violent house party — but especially when it deal with the interactions of its two protagonists, also named Seth and Evan. Superbad is about these two distracting themselves from their impending separation to different colleges with a quest to procure alcohol for a party at which they hope to lose their virginity, you're drawn in from the first scene by the lived-in nature of Jonah Hill and Michael Cera's performances. Hill was also in Knocked Up, and a quick look at his hijinx in those two movies — there, he contracts pink-eye along with the rest of his college-deferring, porn-reseaching housemates after a cycle of face-farting; here, he's resentful of Evan's girlfriend because in middle school she saw doodlings Seth made during a phase when he couldn't stop drawing penises — is the difference between lowbrow for caricature's sake and lowbrow for character's sake.

This is what Mottola seizes on, finding and emphasizing the humanity in the broad comedy. Some have derided the movie's vulgar patois, but ultimately that's a symptom of the times; since time immemorial, high schoolers have been prepossessed with vulgar things — our bodies, their bodies, sex, pornography, mind-altering substances — and Seth and Evan's gutterspeak is equal parts fascination with, invocation against and indifference to those matters, whereas from another director we might only get one of those dimensions. Listening to Seth and Evan snipe their way through their misadventures lays plain their apprehensions about the maturation that graduation implies. Mottola reins in the performances to the ideal degree to make all of it seem natural, and it's this surehandedness that allows him the classical storytelling trick of making a story that's more outrageous than real life seem truer than a more tame incarnation would be.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)

Sarah Polley
Away From Her

Sarah Polley, the 29-year-old actress previously seen in Go and The Sweet Hereafter, takes an Alice Munro short story and makes from it one of the most mature, tender and well-observed films ever about Alzheimer's. The lead performances by Oscar front-runner Julie Christie as Fiona and veteran character actor Gordon Pinsent as Grant are excellent — in large part because of outstanding direction. The difficulty in portraying Alzheimer's stems from the gradual, then sudden and unpredictable, shifts in recognition and behavior. Polley measures Fiona's downward spiral acutely from scene to scene, getting just what she needs from Christie. When we first meet Fiona, she's a commanding presence that just seems to be having difficulty getting along sometimes. We understand Grant's confusion and suspicion after Fiona is institutionalized; for the most part, she functions as she always has, but her long-term memory is gone. As the movie unfolds, the rest of Fiona's faculties slip away, followed by the inevitable physical deterioration. Polley's film shows this process more exactly than any film before it.

This is, obviously, gloomy material. The mood would be unbearable if filmed under a gray Canadian winter sky, but Polley makes a counterintuitive decision to bathe the film in sunlight. The natural light gives the film room to breathe, and it functions as a metaphor for Grant. As the curtain closes on his wife's mental and emotional life, he sees more clearly how mediocre a husband he's been. Polley composes stunning scenes of Fiona sitting at a card table, sunlight streaming through a bay window at the front of the nursing home, helping a lonely, mostly mute fellow patient (Michael Murphy) sort his gin hand. Cut to Grant, standing in the shadows of the waiting room with a dozens roses she doesn't understand. Eventually, Grant steps out of the shadows of the nursing home to help his failing wife, putting aside all ego and vanity. In the final scenes, Polley contrasts his dark shape against brightly lit hospital-white walls — as if he steps up into sunlight after reaching a snow-capped peak. Polley's cinematic voice expresses what the page lacks.

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)