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The movie year is over, and a look back at the past twelve months makes clear
that cinephiles have been spoiled with sterling movies, from blockbuster
superhero sagas and low-budget horror thrillers to bizarre dystopian comedies
and politically oriented foreign imports. With my late-year binge-watching now
complete, this final assessment—which still only scratches the surface of
everything worth watching—proves that, whether at the multiplex or the art
house, filmgoers were blessed with a bounty of great offerings in 2016. Making
this list usually involves trying to find ten movies that aren't a compromise.
This year, the difficulty was in what to leave off. On that note, here are some
honorable mentions, in no particular order.
The Green Room
Edge of Seventeen
Love and Friendship
Pete's Dragon
Cameraperson
The Hunt for the Wilderpeople
Kubo and
the Two Strings
Captain
America: Civil War
Krisha
The Jungle Book
Zootopia (
the best animated film of the year )
O.J. Made in America ( the best documentary of the year )
 10.
ARRIVAL
Director Denis Villeneuve's follow-up to last year's Sicario boasts the same
brand of gorgeous widescreen imagery as well as a female protagonist thrust into
head-spinning territory. In this case, however, the subject isn't Mexican drug
cartels but aliens, who mysteriously arrive across the globe in giant ships, and
who don't communicate in anything like a decipherable human language. Enter Amy
Adams' linguist, who—paired with Jeremy Renner's mathematician—is tasked by the
U.S. government with finding a way to communicate with these extraterrestrials,
known as "heptapods" because of their seven-limbed physical form. What ensues is
a thrilling "first contact" drama that also splits its focus to concentrate on
Adams' protagonist's grief over the loss of her daughter—twin narrative threads
that eventually dovetail into a poignant portrait of the circular nature of
life, and the way in which written and spoken language help connect us all to
our pasts, present, and future.
 9.
THE FITS
No 2016 debut has been as striking as Anna Rose Holmer's The Fits, an
immaculately conceived and executed small-scale indie about a young
African-American girl named Toni (superb newcomer Royalty Hightower) who, while
living in Cincinnati's West End, spends her time working out at a local boxing
gym with her brother, even as she increasingly finds herself drawn to the
championship-winning dance team that practices in the same facility. Holmer's
precise aesthetics echo her protagonist's detachment from both the fight and
dance cliques from which she seeks acceptance, and her slow-motion sequences of
the troupe's rhythmic routines have an overpowering, hypnotic grace and
splendor. Fixated on Hightower's subtly expressive countenance and her spatial
(and emotional) relationship to her peers, the film is more than just a
coming-of-age saga; it's an expressionistic snapshot of a young girl trying to
transcend her estrangement, define her identity, and find a place for herself in
the world.
 8.
HELL OR HIGH WATER
David Mackenzie's outlaws-on-the-run saga concerns two brothers (Chris Pine and
Ben Foster) who embark on a bank-robbing spree in order to raise enough money to
save their family farm from foreclosure—a conceit that lends the film a piercing
timeliness. Nonetheless, the true power of this rugged genre effort comes from
its stars and its attention to both atmosphere and character detail. As yin-yang
siblings compelled to embark upon their mission by need, fury, and inherent
recklessness, Pine and Foster share a compelling chemistry. And they're
complemented (and, in fact, surpassed) in the charisma department by the always
great Jeff Bridges. As the just-about-to-retire sheriff hot on their trail,
Bridges delivers one of his finest performances, radiating both wit and regret
as an old-school relic who—like the criminals he's pursuing, and the beaten-down
land that he roams with his Native American-Mexican partner Alberto (Gil
Birmingham)—is on the precipice of transforming into a ghost from a bygone era.
 7.
THE WITCH
Directorial debuts don’t get much better than what Robert Eggers pulled off with
The Witch, an immersive, atmospheric exercise in the existential dread of the
fanatically devout. Eggers never caters to the lowest common denominator.
Instead, he demands that you sit up and pay attention — and he makes sure you
damn well do by mashing up some baby remains with a mortar and pestle, on
screen, right out of the gate. Eggers sucks you in with a holistic vision of
historical terrors, even having the guts to go with period and regionally
appropriate dialect. The costuming and set design are also picture perfect,
crafting an image of a bleak, desolate place in time where moralism could cost
you everything and cast you out into that dim, grey cold. The Witch is very
about the terrors of the devil but it is also about the lurid attraction of sin
and a sinister life, well lived. After all, what is the point of being pure if
you get nothing but pain for it? The Witch is alternately languid and bursting
at the seams with kinetic frenzy, and that keeps you ever on your toes and the
devil’s pernicious presence spreads through a rigidly puritan family, unhindered
by their devotion. Eggers vision is matched by the talent of his cast,
especially the career-making turns from the young leads Anya Taylor-Joy and
Harvey Scrimshaw, making for the rare, challenging horror film that doesn’t just
shock and scare, but burrows into your mind and sits there to rot.
 6.
SING STREET
There are no two ways about it: "Sing Street" is pure bliss. Writer-director
John Carney's (2007's "Once" and 2013's "Begin Again") 1980s-set musical ode to
growing up and finding one's passion takes place in a cynical world, yet has no
time or patience for cynicism. Uplifted on the winds of great storytelling and
an impeccable understanding of the popular music of its era, the film is a tad
grittier—at least visually—than John Hughes' classic teen pictures, but very
much at one with their bittersweet, ultimately hopeful tone and empathetic
depictions of adolescence.
 5.
THE HANDMAIDEN
South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook has made a name for himself with deliriously
violent, sexually deranged revenge tales like Oldboy, Sympathy for Lady
Vengeance, and 2013's English-language Stoker (starring Nicole Kidman and Mia
Wasikowska). Thus, The Handmaiden finds him back in familiar terrain, given that
it charts a con man's scheme to use a young female pickpocket to help him marry,
and then commit to an insane asylum, a mentally unstable heiress—a ruse that
gets hopelessly complicated the further it progresses thanks to a series of
didn't-see-that-coming twists. Rearranging characters around his narrative
playing board like a devilish chess champion, Park stages his material with
serpentine sensuality and playfully grim wit, all while presenting a vision of
femininity that, true to his prior form, is seductive, sinister and empowered.
Come for the luxurious period décor, uninhibited carnality and ominous
atmosphere, and stay for the octopus.
 4.
THE LOBSTER
Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos' The Lobster is one of the strangest movies in
recent memory—and one of the most hilariously (and surprisingly profound) ones
as well. In this pitch-black future-society saga, a single man (Colin Farrell)
checks into a hotel where, by law, he must find a mate within 45 days or be
transformed into the animal of his choice. (His preference? A lobster.) In that
wacko locale, Farrell's lonely loser pals around with other equally strange
sorts, and tries to forge a romance with a female counterpart, before eventually
fleeing for the woods where anti-monogamy rebels are stationed. A deadpan
dystopian comedy that also functions as a bizarro-world examination of
love, relationships, marriage, and the basic human desire for connection,
Lanthimos' film is that rare thing in today's cinema: an unqualified original.
 3.
MANCHESTER BY THE SEA
Casey Affleck gives one of the year's most affecting lead turns as a Boston
bachelor who, after the untimely death of his brother (Kyle Chandler), is
saddled with custody of his nephew (Lucas Hedges) in Kenneth Lonergan's
stomach-punch of a drama. That situation is created by tragedy, but it's not the
only instance of traumatic loss addressed by this expertly calibrated portrait
of grief and recovery, given that Affleck's loner—divorced from the mother
(Michelle Williams) of his children—is already a deeply scarred individual with
his own agonizing sorrow to shoulder. Affleck's muted embodiment of this
fractured young man conveys volumes about misery, guilt and regret, and he's
matched by a sterling supporting cast that delivers similarly unaffected,
bone-deep performances. They're further aided by Lonergan's natural evocation of
his cold, grim New England milieu, and aided by a script that manages the
not-inconsiderable feat of finding consistent humor amidst so much despair.
 2.
MOONLIGHT
Moonlight is a coming-of-age tale about a homosexual African-American boy living
in Florida. That basic plot description, however, does little to convey the
incisive poetry of Barry Jenkins' film, whose narrative is divided between three
stages in the life of its protagonist, Chiron (aka "Little" as an adolescent,
and "Black" as an adult). From its astounding opening shot on a street corner
circling around a drug dealer (Mahershala Ali) who'll come to be young Chiron's
surrogate father figure—since his mother (Naomie Harris) is a junkie—this
evocative drama captures an overwhelming sense of both place and character. As
Chiron grows up, enjoying fleeting moments of euphoria amidst routine abuse and
neglect, Jenkins charts thorny individual and interpersonal dynamics in which
both salvation and damnation seem to stem from the same (or, at least, similar)
source. Sensitive, subtle, intense and complex, it's a triumph of both
expressive direction and—courtesy of Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante
Rhodes as Chiron, as well as André Holland and Janelle Monáe—nuanced,
heart-rending performance.
 1.
LA LA LAND
Damien Chazelle‘s Whiplash was one of my favorite movies of 2014 so my hopes
were dangerously high for his followup, but the writer-director somehow exceeded
my expectations with his stunning love letter to love, Los Angeles, movies,
music, and movie musicals. It seems so impossibly good and pure of vision, from
Justin Hurwitz‘s infectious score to Mary Zophres uncanny costuming. It has the
power to transport you, to fully captivate you not only in song and dance, but
in the life and love of its duo of dreamers, Emma Stone‘s aspiring actress Mia
and Ryan Gosling‘s jazz devotee Sebastian. Chazelle paints them in bright blocs
of color with a magician’s hand, transforming their oh so common LA-narrative of
big dreams and low means into something singular, and as authentic as it is
universal. La La Land also has an unexpected vein of maturity and pragmatism
underneath all the swooning, a bittersweet insistence on truth even in
grandiosity. The film culminates in a sequence of profound beauty and sadness,
it sweeps you off your feet and breaks your heart at the same time and therein
captures the terrible, wonderful power of love and ambition and the places where
the two may or may not meet. There may have been other movies that were more
substantive, but none that were this perfect. |
