Travel back with me to 2016, the long-gone days where we
still held a smidgen of hope for our country, and when we were treated to,
arguably, the best two films of the last five years. I always resist making
annual top ten lists because I hate the implication that the discussion for the
year in film ends at #10. I found 2016 to be such an enjoyable year for film
that I was compelled to write about 39 of them. (Yes, you get 14 bonus picks
after my Top 25. You lucky dog.) Somewhere in the following five thousand words
you’ll find a thought or four about nearly all of the year’s most acclaimed
films, except for the four I didn’t like: Fences
(it was a stage play done in front of a camera, with virtually no
resemblance to cinematic art), Hacksaw
Ridge (too fetishizing of its violence and too religious in its allegory), Paterson (too sedate), and Silence (I can’t figure out what that
movie was even trying to say, or, frankly, why it needed to exist). And,
because I’m writing this four months late (of course), 17 of the films have
already made their way onto streaming services, which I make sure to point out.
Without further adieu, we’ll kick things off with the
prevailing reason that my taste allegedly sucks.
1. La La Land (Directed by Damien Chazelle)
The most difficult film-related question
I’ve had to field over the last six months is why I like La La Land better than Moonlight.
I’ve struggled with it. There seems to be an unsaid implication that this
opinion exposes me as an un-fully woke human. “He likes the movie about white
people explaining jazz more than the movie about the abused gay black kid
seeking acceptance.” Yes, I suppose I do. Moonlight
is (probably) a more insightful work about the human condition than La La Land, but La La is both more joyous and, to me, a (slightly) more amazing
display of cinema craft. You’re not wrong if you think that the human meaning
inherent in Moonlight makes it a
greater work, or that excellence in message is a higher calling for a work of
art than excellence in technique. Under most circumstances, and in most years,
I’d probably agree.
And yet, La La Land’s craft didn’t just amaze me, it helped me understand
why I fell in love with cinema all over again. It’s use of color and lighting;
it’s composition of frames; it’s choreography not just of humans, but also of
camera movement; it’s appropriation of A Flock of Seagulls that somehow makes
them retroactively cool; the way its production design uses false surfaces as a
visual motif (which I didn’t even notice until my girlfriend pointed it out to
me); the unabashed love of a nearly-extinct film genre and a nearly-extinct
music genre to comment on how great art must move forward, but also sort of
doesn’t always have to; and that tour de force final sequence that creatively gave
me everything I could possibly want even as it was about the importance of not narratively
giving us what we want. For a movie whose financial success largely depends on
the perception that it will be a crowd pleaser, don’t underestimate how daring
it is to so defiantly take a hard turn against pleasing the crowd.
Since the Oscar nominations first came out
and La La Land tied the all-time
record, it’s become cliché to call it grossly overrated, or to say that the
singing and dancing were sub-par, therefore it sucked. You know, as though
those are the only two metrics by which we judge films or something. The worst,
most reductive thing you can possibly do to La
La Land is say some equivalent of “Meh, they’re no Fred Astaire and Ginger
Rogers.” Really, who else are Astaire and Rogers? Do we look at every great
acting performance and say, “Meh, it’s no Brando or Daniel Day-Lewis”? Somehow,
because La La Land is a musical,
there’s a temptation to only judge it as such, as though it ceases to be a film
in any other sense, or with any other calling. But make no mistake; La La Land is one of the most perfectly
created films I’ve ever seen. And three viewings in, I only appreciate it more
and more.
2. Moonlight (Directed by Barry Jenkins)
The least difficult film-related
question I’ve had to field over the last six months is when someone, upon
finding out I like La La Land better
than Moonlight, asks me why I hate Moonlight. I don’t hate Moonlight, I think it’s a masterpiece. I
just think it was the second-best masterpiece of 2016. Some years have more
than one. I love Moonlight for so
many things—its triptych structure; the devastating power in showing a child
fearfully asking “Am I a faggot?”; the way it alternates between having a
camera walking behind its characters to sometimes bathing their faces in dark
light; its distinctive, jagged violin score that sounds emotionally combative
yet utterly beautiful; the way it steadfastly refuses to resolve or reconcile
its most painful moments. Indeed, the only thing I don’t love about Moonlight is the belief it ingrains in
others that I’m supposed to love it the most. Our tastes are fickle, and no
one’s opinionative history displays a perfect thru-line to universal
objectivity. But man, do I fucking try.
3. Toni Erdmann (Directed by Maren Ade)
When I first saw Toni Erdmann at Toronto last fall, I did
so purely out of a sense of duty; it was, after all, the best reviewed film at
Cannes a few months earlier, by quite a wide margin. I definitely wouldn’t say
I was excited for the movie. Toni Erdmann
is a nearly 3-hour German comedy about a businesswoman’s strained relationship
with her eccentric father, and his efforts to force himself back into her life.
So tell me, after reading that description, how excited are you to see Toni Erdmann? And yet, what a film! First
of all, it’s the funniest film of the year. It is undoubtedly the longest
comedy I’ve ever seen (comedies are almost never over two hours), but I was
still laughing uproariously in the final 20 minutes. It also has a
show-stopping moment set to a Whitney Houston song, and it has the most, ummm… unique nude scene I’ve probably ever
seen. (Borat aside.) But above all
else, it is, simply, an unforgettable portrait of a father trying to show his
daughter he cares, in every terrible, hopelessly misguided way he can think of.
4. I Am Not Your Negro (Directed by Raoul
Peck)
I
Am Not Your Negro isn’t as much a documentary as it is a visual essay. It
seeks not to educate its audience about the facts or events of a topic, but
rather to present ideas and provoke mental interaction with them. In this case,
the ideas come from unfinished James Baldwin writings about the presentation of
black people in (then) modern society. With Samuel L. Jackson (in the most
subtly measured performance he’s ever given) narrating James Baldwin’s words,
the film portrays contemporary thoughts and ideas of what society believes and
expects black people to be, and attempts to ask why those same thoughts and
ideas exist. What drives those expectations, and why do we need them? What do
their perpetuated existence say about us? Ultimately, Baldwin tells us the
answers must come from within ourselves, but only if we’re willing to truly ask
the questions. This is a necessary film for anyone that seeks to understand
race in America.
5. Hell or High Water (Directed by David
Mackenzie)
There’s a scene midway through Hell or High Water where two characters
go to a restaurant in a small Texas town and encounter a very old, very ornery
waitress, and she proceeds to rudely tell them what they’re going to order. It’s
a funny scene, but the film isn’t a comedy. The scene has no bearing on the
plot whatsoever. Rather, the scene is only there to immerse us into the world
of the characters. Most films only care to do this at the beginning, before
getting on with the story, but most films never feel as authentic as Hell or High Water. Written by Taylor Sheridan
(Sicario) and directed by David
Mackenzie (of the criminally under-seen Starred
Up), the film is, on the surface, about two brothers who start robbing
banks in small towns across the Texas countryside. But what’s really being
dealt with are the universal themes of how our lot in life can define our
opportunities, and how the past ain’t ever truly done with us—both of which will
haunt you in the film’s incredible, unconventional denouement.
6. Captain Fantastic (Directed by Matt Ross)
Currently streaming on Amazon Prime
First thing’s first: No, this is not
a superhero or comic book movie. It’s just a poorly titled film about (vaguely)
realistic people. Viggo Mortensen stars as a father of six, raising his kids in
the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest, teaching them to live off the land, as
well as teaching them multiple languages, history, literature, philosophy, mountain-climbing,
that “interesting” is a terrible adjective, and that “Noam Chomsky Day” is a
less-capitalist alternative to Christmas. Then the kids are forced back into society and are confronted with how unprepared for the real world they really are. The funniest joke I heard about Captain Fantastic is that it’s “the
origin story for the most annoying kid in your freshman dorm.” That’s probably
true, but it’s also too reductive for a story that really has a lot to say
about the range of choices parents make, good and bad, and how no matter what
you do, no matter how noble, your kids are always losing something in the
equation. You’re always, directly or indirectly, making them bad at something. Other
than La La Land, no 2016 movie purely
delighted me as much as Captain Fantastic.
7. Manchester by the Sea (Directed by Kenneth
Longergan)
Only once every few years do we see
an acting performance that will get watched and studied for generations. Casey
Affleck’s portrayal of a Boston janitor harboring a tragic past in Manchester by the Sea is that kind of
performance. As an emotional journey into the way pain shapes us, Manchester by the Sea is every bit the
equal of Moonlight, and maybe even
its better. But Moonlight, through its
craft (shot composition, color, score, lighting, editing), allows you to watch
it in such a way that you can be dazzled by what it’s doing independent from
the story that it’s telling. Manchester doesn’t
do that; it doesn’t ornament its story with any stylistic flourishes (other
than a few moments of humor) that allow the pain to come in second place. It’s
just there, gurgling up from the center, ready to consume you. That doesn’t
make it an objectively worse film, but it does make it a film I’ll have less
interest in revisiting over the years.
8. Don’t Think Twice (Directed by Mike
Birbiglia)
Sometimes the simplest stories are
the ones that deal with the widest, most complex sets of emotions. When a
tight-knit NYC improv troupe sees one of their members get hired by Saturday Night Live, the rest of the
group are left to question why they aren’t the ones getting the big break. Don’t Think Twice is really an
exploration of the various reasons that people don’t “make it.” For some it’s self-sabotage
and fear of success. For some it’s laziness. For some it might simply be bad
luck. And for some, it’s facing the hard truth that they just aren’t quite good
enough. Don’t Think Twice stays
fairly light-hearted, and it avoids getting too philosophical or preachy about any
of the avenues it travels. That’s because this isn’t a movie interested in
telling you what to think as much as it wants to just remind you that those
thoughts and fears are lurking within you.
9. Arrival (Directed by Denis Villeneuve)
Few films feel more important in
Trump’s America than one about a woman solving an international crisis through her
intellectual expertise and her unwavering compassion. Villeneuve’s Prisoners and Sicario were two of my favorite films in the last few years, so I
felt confident he was primed to break out as a major director. And yet, Arrival represents a major change in
theme from his other work. Villeneuve’s previous films have largely been about
people justifying their worst natures to themselves. Arrival, on the other hand, is about everyone else doing that, while the main character finds her best
self at the moment she can do the most good. It’s almost like, after years of
exploring humanity’s worst tendencies, Villeneuve emerged through the other
side with a renewed belief in our capacity to love one another and do the right
thing. Hey, I guess that’s another reason we needed this story in 2016.
10. The
Nice Guys (Directed by Shane Black)
Currently streaming on HBOGo and HBONow
Like Woody Allen, Shane Black doesn’t make
new movies as much as he just rewrites his old ones. The Nice Guys is every Shane Black movie—it takes place in LA; it
involves mismatched partners who only begrudgingly tolerate each other; there’s
an investigation into a missing girl; it inevitably involves the porn industry and
a huge party at a mansion in the Hollywood Hills; and nearly every major plot
development happens by accident or coincidence. Black even made an Iron Man movie and still (mostly) fit it
to his singular formula. So yeah, The
Nice Guys isn’t showing us anything new. But it is showing us the best
possible version of something we’ve seen (and loved) before. Ryan Gosling has
never been funnier (it’s his best acting performance of the year, and yes, I
realize what film I placed #1 on this list), the fashion and facial hair have
never been more questionable, and the coincidences that drive the story have
never been more ludicrous. The Nice Guys is
the most purely fun movie of 2016.
11. The
Founder (Directed by John Lee Hancock)
One of the true mysteries of the 2016
awards season, at least to me, is why the Weinstein Company declined to mount
an Oscar campaign for Michael Keaton and The
Founder. While the story of Ray Kroc, the man who brought McDonalds to the
world, might not seem like the most cinematic tale, I found it to be one of the
great depictions of that specific, sinister breed of totalitarian capitalism
that only seems to come from America. Keaton, in his inimitable “Come on, let’s
get nuts!” kind of way, perfectly captures the subtle pathos of Kroc, whose
Mid-western grit and earnestness inspire you to root for him, right until he
stands revealed as the Michael Corleone of the fast food industry. The Founder is also a deceptively visual
film; the scene where the McDonald brothers tell Kroc how they designed their
kitchen is brilliantly staged.
12. Hidden Figures (Directed by Ted Melfi)
Similar to The Martian last year, Hidden
Figures is one of those rare movies that show what modern Hollywood can
still do when it’s really firing on all cylinders. It’s a wonderful, rousing piece
of entertainment, with movie stars at the top of their game, snappy dialogue,
and a feel-good depiction of brilliant people using their brilliance in inspiring
ways. Hidden Figures is a crowd
pleaser in the truest, most honorable sense of the term.
13. Green Room (Directed by Jeremy Saulnier)
Currently streaming on Amazon Prime
When a hardcore band witnesses a
murder after being unwittingly duped into playing a white supremacist rally in
the woods, they’re suddenly trying to escape with their lives. The high concept
boils down to punks vs. neo-Nazis, but there’s never a single moment in Green Room where you’ll feel like you’re
watching something contrived, or even something that’s trying to rely on an
unearned sense of edgy coolness. After 2014’s underrated Blue Ruin showed us the torture that Jeremy Saulnier was capable of
inflicting on just one main character, he clearly enjoys the wider net of
sadistic possibilities afforded to him by a large ensemble cast. But everything
that happens feels completely logical within the context of the film. Green Room is the most intense film of
the year, and no one, including the viewer, comes through unscathed.
14. Indignation (Directed by James Schamus)
Currently streaming on HBOGo and HBONow
Indignation,
based on the Philip Roth novel, is
sort of about being an atheist at a small college in the 1950s, and it’s kind
of about getting a blowjob on the first date. With both circumstances, the film
explores the way we brand behaviors as uncouth and attribute labels to their
perpetrators. And these pigeonholings have consequences upon us. They alter our
lives and they sap our dignity. Logan Lerman gives the year’s best “I didn’t
know he had it in him” performance—I now expect him to be a major actor of his
generation. There’s a long, show-stopping scene in the center of the film where
Lerman goes toe-to-toe with Tracy Letts (the Pulitzer-winning playwright, here
playing a college dean) that’s as good as nearly any other scene from 2016.
15. The
Edge of Seventeen (Directed by Kelly Fremon Craig)
It took nearly ten years of
waiting, but the Superbad-for-girls
comedy we’ve all been pining for is finally here. And I don’t mean a raunchy
comedy where the high school girls talk about what porn subscriptions they’ll
order once they’re in college; No, I mean a movie from a teen girl’s
perspective that, like Superbad,
depicts the exact moment where your best friend lets you down in order to
pursue the opposite sex. Writer/director Kelly Fremon Craig, in her directorial
debut, announces herself as a major filmmaker to watch, and Hailee Steinfeld
finally comes through on the immense potential she showed in True Grit.
16. A
Monster Calls (J.A. Bayona)
This pseudo-fantasy story, about a bullied
British boy who imagines a giant monster to help him cope with his rage at his
mother dying of cancer, doesn’t always work; it’s probably the most flawed film
on this list. But it also has scenes that are so gorgeous (the animated
sequences that portray allegorical tales the monster tells him) and so devastating
(the finale) that it demands recognition as one of the year’s best. While Manchester by the Sea is one of the
greatest portrayals of an adult dealing with insurmountable pain, A Monster Calls is nearly its equal in
portraying how a child deals with it.
17. The
Witch (Directed by Robert Eggers)
Currently streaming on Amazon Prime
I believe great horror must do two
things—immerse you in the world, and then take its damn time. In The Shining, for example, by the time
Jack Torrance loses his shit, you can just about draw the entire blueprint of
the Overlook Hotel. So it is with The
Witch, a film with a 17th century New England setting so
meticulously researched and created that it almost feels like a documentary at
times. And unlike most horror, The Witch spends
much of its time in daylight (though always overcast and dreary), and in
wide-open spaces. It doesn’t rely on the cheap thrills of corners and darkness;
instead, it convinces you that knowing your surroundings, yet still feeling unmistakably that
something menacing is out there, is the scariest circumstance of all.
18. Land
of Mine (Directed by Martin Zandvliet)
Just when you think there couldn’t possibly
be new angles for an anti-war film, Land
of Mine presents a great one, and it’s a true story: in the summer of 1945,
just after the Nazi surrender, German POWs in Denmark were forced to defuse the
two million landmines the Nazis had planted along the Danish coast. Many of the
POWs tasked to do this were teenagers, and about half of them lost their lives
in the process. The film takes the perspective of a Danish sergeant in charge
of the POWs, who begins to question the barbarism of his orders, and the
senseless loss of life still resulting from a war that had theoretically ended.
While the narrative is fairly straightforward, the imagery and pacing straddles
a delicate emotional line which neither milks the deaths, nor desensitizes the
viewer to their consequence.
19. Jackie (Directed by Pablo Larraín)
Don’t think of Jackie as a biopic of the titular icon. Rather, it’s an attempt to
see the hours and days following JFK’s assassination through the eyes and
emotions of someone who was always present, but not really given a voice or any
semblance of control during the ensuing maelstrom. It reminded me a lot of
Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (a
film I liked far more than most), just without the punk soundtrack. Both films
are about the emotional interiors of theoretically rich and powerful women who
actually felt no power at all.
20. The
Lobster (Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos)
Currently streaming on Amazon Prime
The Greek absurdist behind 2008’s
Oscar-nominated Dogtooth made his
English-language debut with The Lobster,
which tells the story of a near-future society that sends its single people to
an isolated hotel in the woods, where they’re obligated to find a romantic
partner within 45 days or be turned into an animal of their choice and released
into the wild. What ensues defies pretty much any explanation, and must be seen
firsthand. I wasn’t quite as high on the film as several people—the second half
lost a lot of steam, and I thought the film would have been better served by
ending about two minutes earlier than it did. But even still, The Lobster is one of the most unique
films of the decade, and it will give you plenty to dwell on about the concessions
we make to our individuality for the sake of pairing up, and the ways in which
we convince ourselves we’ve found the “right” person.
21. Nocturnal Animals (Directed by Tom Ford)
Fashion icon Tom Ford made one of
the best directorial debuts in recent film history with 2009’s A Single Man, but no one expected to
wait seven years for a follow-up, let alone one that was so dark. Nocturnal Animals seems to have divided
critics (The New York Times’ Wesley
Morris said it was the worst movie he saw in 2016), and I’m not convinced it’ll
retain its power on a second viewing, but I found it to be an utterly hypnotic
descent into the darkest Lynch-ian corners of the mind. And, to the surprise of
no one, Ford sure knows how to compose a great visual.
22. 20th
Century Women (Directed by Mike Mills)
Something Mike Mills does better
than any other contemporary filmmaker is figure out how to visually
contextualize how his characters were shaped by when they grew up. I’ve been harping
for five years that Mills’ previous film, 2011’s Beginners, is the best film of the decade that almost no one saw. Beginners was about Mills’ father coming
out of the closet in his ‘70s, while 20th
Century Women is about the way Mills’ mother raised him. In both cases,
Mills contrasts his parents’ perceptions of normalcy with his own using
historical footage, old Polaroid photos, and sociological facts of the day.
That probably sounds sufficiently unexciting, but Mills deftly figures out how
to keep the proceedings lighthearted with great lines and great tunes (there
are multiple Talking Heads ear-sightings). While 20th Century Women doesn’t come together in quite as
lovely a way as Beginners did, Mills
has forged himself a unique niche that feels almost like Wes Anderson embracing
realism.
23. The
Eagle Huntress (Directed by Otto Bell)
In the desolation of rural Mongolia,
nomadic tribes have selected and trained men to hunt with eagles for hundreds
of years. But in this uplifting documentary, a 13-year-old girl named Aisholpan
convinces her father to train her (against the wishes of the tribe elders). She
then becomes the first female to enter the competition at the annual Golden
Eagle Festival, and I know you won’t believe this, but she wins. I make the
proceedings sound formulaic, but this wasn’t dreamt up in a Disney boardroom. The Eagle Huntress is a documentary, and it’s an incredibly
inspiring one. Every man with a daughter between the ages of 7 and 15 should be
required to watch this movie together.
24. Sing
Street (Directed by John Carney)
Currently streaming on Netflix
John Carney already won our music
hearts with 2007’s Once, and then
proved he wasn’t a one-hit wonder with 2014’s underrated Begin Again. Sing Street,
about a teenager in ‘80s Dublin who forms a band to impress a girl, finds a
middle ground between Carney’s two previous musical gems—it’s as bright, fun,
and lively as Begin Again (actually
more so), and it takes us back to the personal setting of Once. But what Sing Street does
best is give us a wonderful set of songs. As the band cycles through different
‘80s pop influences (Duran Duran, A-ha, The Cure, etc.), the songs they write
legitimately sound like they could have been hits from the bands they’re
emulating. Indeed, the year’s biggest Oscar tragedy is that the climactic song,
“Drive It Like You Stole It,” wasn’t among the Best Original Song nominees.
25. Rams
(Directed by Grímur Hákonarson)
Currently streaming on Netflix
In this comedy set in the wilds of rural Iceland, two rival sheepherders live next door to each other and haven’t spoken in 40 years. Oh, they also happen to be brothers. When a disease breaks out amid the area’s livestock, the ensuing ridiculous behavior is all kinds of stubborn, but also full of honest familial emotion.
14 Other Films I Recommend (alphabetically)
The 13th (Directed
by Ava DuVernay)
Currently streaming on Netflix
Our country’s over-incarceration of
African-Americans won’t (or at least shouldn’t) come as a surprise to you, but
the way this documentary tells the story—and the numbers it throws at you—will
sear into your brain.
Denial (Directed by
Mick Jackson)
2016 was the perfect year for a
dramatization of a real British libel trial from the ‘90s brought by an infamous
Holocaust denier. The film acts as an interesting, and timely, commentary on
how we prove the existence of fact.
Everybody Wants
Some!! (Directed by Richard Linklater)
Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and Hulu
This pseudo-sequel to Dazed and Confused isn’t as revelatory
as its predecessor, but it’s nearly as fun.
Eye in the Sky
(Directed by Gavin Hood)
Currently streaming on Amazon Prime
Films about drone strikes are
becoming a bit tiresome, but this is the best one so far—a nearly real-time
thriller that features Helen Mirren and the late Alan Rickman, in one of his
final performances.
The Handmaiden
(Directed by Chan-wook Park)
Currently streaming on Amazon Prime
It’s the year’s best Korean lesbian
period piece sex mystery. And it had one of the best trailers ever.
Hunt for the
Wilderpeople (Directed by Taiki Waititi)
Currently streaming on Hulu
Kiwi accents make everything
better, especially in this tale of a fat orphan on the run in the woods with
his crazy foster uncle (a never-better Sam Neill) and their dog, Tupac.
Jason Bourne
(Directed by Paul Greengrass)
The Damon/Greengrass/Bourne combo
has me at hello.
Lion (Directed by
Garth Davis)
This classic weepy defies you not
to fall for it, and reminds us all of technology’s capacity to bring us
together.
The Man Who Knew
Infinity (Directed by Matthew Brown)
Currently streaming on Hulu
It’s a stuffy British period drama
about mathematicians. Yet, somehow, quite good.
Miles Ahead (Directed
by Don Cheadle)
Currently streaming on STARZ
Not exactly a biopic (of Miles Davis),
and probably not even remotely true, but it’s an interesting approach to
capturing a legend.
Rogue One: A Star
Wars Story (Directed by Gareth Edwards)
It’s very slow to get going, but once
you get through the not-particularly-well-handled character intros, it turns
into the year’s most rousing adventure flick. And the last 20 minutes are
nearly everything you could want from a Star
Wars yarn.
Star Trek Beyond
(Directed by Justin Lin)
Three films into the reboot and the series continues to be exciting, sophisticated entertainment. Plus, it features the best use of a
Beastie Boys song you’ll ever see in a movie.
Tickled (Directed by David
Farrier & Dylan Reeve)
Currently streaking on HBOGo and HBONow
In the strangest documentary you
will ever see, a journalist
from New Zealand gets caught up in the secret underground world of “competitive
endurance tickling,” and finds himself an unwitting target of the shadowy
leader of a secret tickling-fetish empire. You’ll have to remind yourself
several times while watching this film, Yes,
this really happened.
Under the Shadow
(Directed by Babak Anvari)
Currently streaming on Netflix
Exorcist/Rosemary’s Baby–style mother/child
horror, but set in 1988 Tehran against the backdrop of the Iran/Iraq war.
