January 1, 2017--Every year, we as film critics struggle to wrestle down a list of all the films we see (for me, it’s often well over 200) to the very cream of the crop (for some reason, the “top 10” has long-since become the norm, despite Ebert’s efforts to eschew the tradition in his later years). Last year, I noticed so many parallels between my favorite movies, I finally gave in and came up with a kind of categorical top 10 in which I attempted to shine a light on the films I loved which had things in common.
This year was a bit more all over the map, though there are still some parallels. Of course, as always, the point of any “best of” list is to give some good recommendations for streaming or rentals or (in some cases) things to venture to the cinema to see. So without further ado…!
This year was a bit more all over the map, though there are still some parallels. Of course, as always, the point of any “best of” list is to give some good recommendations for streaming or rentals or (in some cases) things to venture to the cinema to see. So without further ado…!
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The Top 10: |
1. Sing Street / La La Land |
My two favorite films of the year concern two flip-sides of the same creative/musical coin and the intertwining yearning for love that comes with.
I have yet to have a more purely joyous time at the movies this year than with writer/director John Carney’s brilliant and fun (and autobiographically-inspired) evocation of 1980s Dublin revolving around a teen who finds respite from a borderline abusive Catholic school and troublesome home life in the formation of a high school glam rock band and in filming clunky home-made music videos inspired by the likes of Duran Duran. It also affords him the opportunity to fall for and, ultimately, seduce an older neighborhood girl who fancies herself a model and aids and abets his music video efforts. The songs are catchy, the emotions universal. (tie) If Carney’s film is a sort of adolescent fantasy imbued with all the promise of tomorrow, then Damien Chazzelle’s latest (his award-aiming and critically-acclaimed follow-up to his 2014 Oscar winner Whiplash) is like the cold splash of adult reality which almost feels like a stark rebuke, never quite losing its sense of wonder and whimsy and creative freedom all the while. Ryan Gosling is Sebastian, a jazz-loving old soul with a penchant for attempting to conserve history and tradition. Emma Stone is Mia, an aspiring actress who has spent five years in the City of Angels seeking her big break while busting her hump at a barista job on a studio backlot just to feel closer to her dream. That these two first meet in passing in a traffic jam which turns into the opening musical number “Another Day of Sun” (in which similarly dream-heavy and light-footed souls jump from their cars and sing and dance around a gummed-up LA freeway and sing of their desire for their big break, leaving small towns and relationships in the process in pursuit of their dream) seems sorta inevitable the more you think about it. The film only has a few bits of music and songs repeated throughout, but they’re all catchy and memorable, and what’s more, of great import to the telling of the tale, which culminates in a sort of melancholy yet wondrous what-if scenario. Dazzling, frequently funny and, yes, beautiful, Chazzelle’s film coasts on the chemistry of its stars, the nimbleness of the camera, the spirit of the music, the feelings it evokes, and yet ultimately stays with you because of what it says about relationships when they go right and wrong, and what kinda person you can be in their wake. |
2. Hell or High Water |
No “serious drama” this year was more engrossing and entertaining than David Mackenzie’s neo-Western crime drama about a pair of brothers (the always excellent Ben Foster outdoes himself; the underrated Chris Pine is revelatory) robbing banks in West Texas. Of course, it’s more complicated than that, and the screenplay by Taylor Sheridan (Sicario) proves thornier and more labyrinthine than we at first know (the brothers are simply stealing from the bank that is attempting to foreclose on their family homestead in the wake of their mother’s death), and provides memorable roles from the very top (the brothers are vigorously pursued by a bickering couple of Texas Rangers played by a career best Jeff Bridges and a wonderful Gil Birmingham) to the smallest corner of the supporting cast (wonderful bits include the opening robbery with Dale Dickey as a somewhat ill-fated teller; Katy Mixon as a big, busty waitress who gets a huge tip and refuses to turn it over to the officers; and Margaret Bowman as an elderly and mean-spirited waitress – the opposite end of the spectrum). The result is the most powerfully involving thriller in years.
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3. 20th Century Women |
Writer-director Mike Mills (Thumbsucker) previously made a charming effort to depict his father’s coming out of the closet in old age and the effect it has on a semi-estranged son (Beginners, from 2011). Now, with the help of an astonishing Annette Bening as a grande dame of a single mom and a solid supporting cast (Greta Gerwig, Elle Fanning, Billy Crudup), he depicts a young man (Lucas Jade Zumann) growing up in Santa Barbara in 1979 who, with the help of the older women around him (and one handy older man), discovers punk rock, modern feminism and, ultimately, who he wants to be. This film feels like slip-streaming in and out of memories as vivid and colorful as an old photograph, yet one that could’ve been taken yesterday. It gets things so stunningly perfect and right on what it’s like to be raised by a strong, single woman who simultaneously wants to help you become a man, and wants to keep you her little boy (the reaction Bening has to her son’s desire to please a woman is priceless and pure). A tribute to mothers everywhere.
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4. Arrival |
Denis Villeneuve has quickly made a big name for himself since his 2010 French-Canadian Oscar nominee Incendies (still, I think, his strongest work) and jumped all over the genre map ever since, specializing in enigmatic and hypnotic thrillers which run the gamut from the revenge-tinged (Prisoners) to the female-centric and politically-motivated (Sicario) and even the mysterious and sci-fi/noir-ish (Jake Gyllenhaal’s doppelganger drama Enemy). With his latest, he begins a potential unofficial sci-fi “trilogy” (he’s also in development on 2017’s Blade Runner 2049 and rumored to be reworking Frank Herbert’s previously “disastrously” adapted Dune). Amy Adams stars as a linguistics professor in Montana who is sought out by a military commander (Forest Whitaker) to attempt communicate with aliens who come to earth in gigantic, sideways football-shaped saucers across the globe. Partnered with a scientist (Jeremy Renner), she must sort through their perplexing symbolic language messages and also a profound sense of grief and loss (the less said about which, the better). The effect is haunting – one of surprisingly emotional and thoughtful intelligence.
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5. Hail, Caesar! |
If the joy of the creative process was the subject of my two favorite films of the year, then the Coen Brothers’ evocation of the 1950s Hollywood studio system may be the ultimate cinephile’s wet dream. A shaggy dog of a noir-ish/political thriller-tinged plot involving the kidnapping of a movie star (George Clooney) and the efforts of a studio fixer (Josh Brolin) to track him down and bring him home safely is just a clothesline on which to hang movie reference after movie reference, from the Western and Western/musical hybrid to stage-adaptations of costume dramas, from Busby Berkeley-esque water ballet and even tap dancing numbers, to (of course) the Biblical Roman Empire-era epic which lends the surrounding film its title. It’s also an excuse for your friendly neighborhood (and never too self-serious) Coens to experience pure filmmaking joy while giving us yet another existential exploration of morality in the bargain. The joy is infectious.
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6. The Lobster |
Visionary Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth, Alps) has a pretty unique and even odd worldview and it’s on full display in his latest, a bizarre pitch-black comedy of ink-dark proportions in which an Irish resort hotel seeks to match lonely-hearts with potential mates in a world where seemingly everyone balances a borderline-Autistic sense of social awkwardness with an aching need to be accepted and, yes, loved. On the outskirts of the resort, hiding in a forest, are the army of “loners” who the guests must hunt in their spare time. Oh yeah, and after a brief stay, if one hasn’t found a potential mate, they must undergo a procedure to turn them into an animal of their choosing (hence the title). The film is surreal, deadpan and brilliantly astute about what people will do to themselves and others to be in a relationship, about how we as a society choose to succumb to the systems we create and enslave ourselves within them, beyond all reason.
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7. Nocturnal Animals |
Susan is a disaffected, emotionally dissatisfied art gallery owner (Amy Adams) struggling through her financially and romantically-stilted marriage to a handsome businessman (Armie Hammer) until her world is quietly, subtly turned upside down by the arrival of a manuscript from her ex-husband Edward. Tony is a pascifist (some might say wimpy) husband and father (Jake Gyllenhaal) rendered helpless when his wife (Isla Fisher) and daughter are taken by a gang of West Texas backroads crazies (led by Aaron Taylor-Johnson) that feels like something straight outta Straw Dogs, resulting in his seeking out help from a local detective (Michael Shannon, hypnotic) to seek first justice and then revenge for their horrific fate. As Susan becomes more involved in her reading of the manuscript, she begins to flash on memories of her brief and ultimately painful marriage to Edward (also Gyllenhaal), reflecting upon the hurtful and irreparable damage she ultimately must have caused him. Fashion designer turned auteur-in-the-making Tom Ford’s sophomore effort (the first since 2009’s A Single Man) juggles these threads in a similarly exquisitely-acted and immaculately-designed literary adaptation, a neo-noir-ish portrait of art as provocation (from the stunning opening credits to the final gut-punch scene), trust in a relationship going to rot, and the need for (albeit rather sophisticated) revenge that one must seek on one’s ex afterwards. I’ve seen this three times now and it never gets old. It’s stayed with me…like a painful relationship.
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8. Silence |
Martin Scorsese’s nearly 30-years-in-the-making passion project is the master’s quietest, most restrained work in ages, and yet powerfully and startlingly affecting. An adaptation of the novel by Shûsaku Endô, the plot concerns two Portuguese Jesuit priests (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) going to Japan in the mid-to-late 1600s to search for their mentor (Liam Neeson), who is reputed to have “apostetized” (that act in which a person of faith denounces the Church by stepping on a picture of Jesus or spitting on a crucifix or whathaveyou). The young priests encounter many horrors deep within the heart of darkness on the way to searching for their own personal “Kurtz,” including converted Japanese Christians crucified and/or waterboarded to death and villages of Christians burned to death in torturous fashion – often at the hands or behest of an evil inquisitor (Issae Ogata, a somewhat colorful villain recalling the work of Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds). Scorsese’s camera is often at rest here, watching things from a largely dispassionate and lengthy distance, with nary a “God’s-eye-view” shot in sight, and editing and music to match. The effect is one of a filmmaker at peace with himself and his faith.
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9. Swiss Army Man |
Has there been a more original film this year than this controversial Sundance sensation from first-time writer/directors “the Daniels” (that’s Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert)? A heavily bearded, lumberjack-dressed Paul Dano stars as a suicidal man alone on an island who gets interrupted in his mission by a corpse washing up on shore. The corpse belongs to a young man (Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter fame), who gradually begins to move and speak. The two form a quick friendship at first inspired by Dano’s desire to get off the island and back home and Radcliffe’s special abilities (hence the title). Then their bond shifts. It’s hard to explain the effect this film has, or what it ultimately means. But it affected me like almost no other film this year. For that matter, the film makes it difficult to point to anything it reminds one of. It’s that original.
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10. The Witch |
Writer/director Robert Eggers’ Sundance-winning stunner is like a throwback to a cinema that has never fully existed. Long on atmosphere and slow-burning, low-key style and short on the kinds of shocks and cliches most horror films languish comfortably in, this haunting and haunted tale concerns a Puritan family cast out from their village for unspecified reasons in 1630s New England, which takes to a farm on the outskirts of the woods, only to find themselves the victims of a possible witch. Anya Taylor-Joy is the big bruised heart of the film, a young girl constantly the (if you’ll pardon the expression) scapegoat for all the family’s sudden and nigh-on inexplicable ills who, to the degree she can, must face all the hardships of someone on the verge of womanhood in that time and place and then some. The kind of nervy, tough-minded and spiritually thoughtful work that Bergman, Dreyer and Tarkovsky might’ve appreciated, announcing the arrival of a very important filmmaker.
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Special Jury Prize
At Cannes and other festivals, a “jury prize” is offered as a sort of equal first, to films that deserve a place beside the winners. |
In 2010, my second favorite film of the year (after The Social Network) was Fish Tank, Andrea Arnold’s disturbing slice-of-life about a British teenager facing a troubled home life and welcome advances from her mother’s boyfriend (Michael Fassbender, pre-fame). It had a magnetic pull and a raw, stunning quality throughout. Now, Arnold is back (after a similarly loose, contemporary-feeling Wuthering Heights adaptation a few years back) with this epic road movie exploration of the American dream via a teen (newcomer Sasha Lane) with a similarly troubled home life who sets out with a roving tribe of millennial magazine salesmen across the American mid and southwest and takes up with a mentor figure she’s deeply attracted to (Shia LaBeouf). Driven by a ripped-from-the-iPod soundtrack of all the latest hip-hop (and, yes, the titular Lady Antebellum song) and a restless and wide-open camera that paradoxically uses its 1.33:1 (square “full-frame” Academy) aspect ratio to literally box its characters in and watch them squirm (and dance, and sing, and sleep together, and yes, sell magazines), Arnold’s vision is all-American, all-encompassing, and all too of-the-moment.
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Runners-up |
Here are the rest of my "top 25" of 2016, a mixed bag including many strong female performances and other films that moved me in often surprising and startlingly effective fashion... |
Note: Of course, I am always seeing new things (I missed a surprising amount that I still hope to stream at some point) and so, with many critically-acclaimed 2016 holdovers still unseen by me hitting PDX theaters in early 2017, this list will certainly change...