2016 was rightly deemed as a shit year for much of the human race, with Brexit, Aleppo, the North Dakota pipeline fiasco, the rise of Trump and countless other affronts to our collective decency as a species. However, one thing we can all be grateful for is a surplus of brilliant and challenging movies to see a release towards the end of the year. You’ll notice I’ve included twenty-five overall picks as opposed to my usual ten: an indication, should any be needed, that 2016 was far from the cinematic death rattle that someone like Bret Easton Ellis might proclaim it to be.
While it’s true that small-screen serialized storytelling has become a new platform for creatives looking to take risks with formulas that have proven to work, 2016 saw the release of films that shook up the culture (“Moonlight”), possessed unusual crossover appeal (“Manchester by the Sea”) and cemented the legendary status of aging cinematic icons (“Paterson,” “Silence”). There was also the arrival (hey, “Arrival’s” on this list too) of some brand-new talent in the form of kids like Trey Edward Shults and Fede Alvarez, while under-the-radar filmmakers like Kelly Reichardt, Jeremy Saulnier, Barry Jenkins and Pablo Larraín gave us their best work to date.
This is all another way of saying that 2016, in spite of its overall shittiness, was indeed another great year at a the movies. I hope you enjoy this list, and that it potentially compels you to seek out some of these terrific films if you haven’t already.
25. “Hail Caesar!,” Joel and Ethan Coen.
Many critics didn’t necessarily go for Joel and Ethan Coen’s latest, an unapologetically madcap ode to Hollywood bullshit artists that revels in its milieu whilst mercilessly mocking it at every opportunity. Of course, “Hail, Caesar!” has the unenviable task of following up “Inside Llewyn Davis,” one of the brother’s best and most soulful pictures. After that mournful masterpiece, perhaps anything would have seemed like a disappointment. Even still, “Hail, Caesar” belies its frothy, often cartoonish exterior with cutting instances of real darkness, like when Josh Brolin’s guilt-ridden Hollywood fixer Eddie Mannix strikes a starlet in a sozzled rage, or later, when he’s even summoned by a faceless bureaucrat who hopes to lure him to Lockheed Martin just in time for America’s Cuban Missile Crisis. Even if “Caesar” is a little glib, the dynamism of its performances cannot be denied: Josh Brolin mesmerizes as the woefully imperfect but fundamentally noble Mannix, Scarlett Johansson displays a newfound talent for broad comedy, George Clooney yuks it up as another Coen brothers moron with matinee idol good looks and Channing Tatum nearly steals the whole show as a Gene Kelly-esque movie star who’s hiding a career-crippling secret. What makes “Hail, Caesar” more than just another riotous lark from the Coens is its bizarro thread of theological subtext: this is a film that truly believes in cinema as gospel, and has no problem knocking down the knuckleheaded zealots who worship at its altar.
24. “The Nice Guys,” Shane Black.
God Bless Shane Black. Any other year, his foul-mouthed, smart-dumb buddy cop opus “The Nice Guys” would just be another star-studded smash, coasting on the charisma of two wickedly talented leading man and the signature machine-gun patter that Black has made millions off of in films like “Lethal Weapon” and “The Last Boy Scout”. But in this dire landscape of Marvel versus D.C. and endless remakes of television properties that nobody asked for, “The Nice Guys” feels like a genuinely retro throwback to a simpler, less complicated time at the movies. It doesn’t hurt that the film is actually, literally set in 1977, in a smoggy Los Angeles that’s like James Ellroy by way of Mad Magazine. Really, the plot doesn’t matter a lick — it’s the same post-Hammett mish-mash about dead hookers, mistaken identities and shadowy power elites. So, what does “The Nice Guys” have? Far too many genuinely hysterical moments, the electric chemistry between Russell Crowe’s boozy, bitter lug and Ryan Gosling’s wound-up stooge and, surprisingly, a lot of heart. If nothing else, “The Nice Guys” will be remembered as the film where Gosling revealed his skills as a physical comedian on par with early 90’s Jim Carrey. Don’t believe me? Watch the scene where he accidentally falls down a hillside, only to land right next to a rotting corpse. Like a lot of what’s in “The Nice Guys,” you’ve seen the variations on the situation before — but never quite like this.
23. “Krisha,” Trey Edward Shults.
Trey Edward Shults’ “Krisha” is a movie that almost sadistically works your nerves. It cranks its discordant, eerie score up to feverish volumes. The camera seems dead-set on invading the space of the actors occupying the story. Scenes end abruptly while others seem to open in the middle of a conversation, one where it’s almost impossible to tell who is talking to whom, or what about. If sheer audio-visual disorientation were this movie’s one concrete goal, “Krisha” would be a masterpiece for the ages. As such, it’s merely a very good movie, and a particularly impressive debut for its immensely talented young writer-director. Borrowing the homebred hysteria and wandering camera of John Cassavetes, the lump-in-the-throat unease and atonal harmonies of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Punch-Drunk Love” and the anything-goes black comedy of early Jonathan Demme, “Krisha” is not a movie you shake off or forget about days later. This deeply troubling drama about a broken woman and her ill-fated reunion with her estranged family is a work of transgressive fringe art that is engineered to upset you. To which I say: let this movie get under your skin. Let it bother you, let it unsettle you, hell, let it make you feel fucking weird. In an independent film landscape where even purportedly “edgy” somehow feel made by committee, a film as genuinely freakish as “Krisha” qualifies as some kind of minor miracle. Plenty of filmmakers have shown us large-scale, end-of-the-world destruction this year in tired blockbusters like “Suicide Squad,” but few films actually concluded with what felt like an apocalypse. “Krisha” manages that last feat with ease. The best feel-bad movie of 2016.
22. “Don’t Breathe,” Fede Alvarez.
Well, chalk this one up to a pleasant surprise. “Don’t Breathe” is the B movie of the year: a pedal-to-the-medal ode to drive-in horror movies that’s blessedly bereft of the directorial quotation marks and hyper-ironic fanboy posturing that someone like Quentin Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez might have brought to the table. The film has been helmed by Fede Alvarez, who made an earnest and faithful remake of Sam Raimi’s cabin-in-the-woods shocker “The Evil Dead” that saw heavyweights in the horror world singing the young man’s praises. Of course, Alvarez’s “Evil Dead” remake was nowhere near as good as the original — how could it be? And yet, the film clearly displayed that the director has a deeply fucked-up imagination to go with his impressive technical skills. “Don’t Breathe” benefits from a.) not being tied to a pre-existing cultural property and b.) forgoing plot complications almost entirely to focus on a nitty-gritty, pared-down home invasion thriller with one of the most memorably evil third-act twists that I’ve seen in a mainstream movie in quite a while. And yet, in spite of the film’s knowingly junky tone, Alvarez displays a sophisticated understanding of building suspense and sustaining tension that eludes his contemporaries, and suggests that he may one day make a classic. “Don’t Breathe” isn’t exactly great art, but it is brilliant trash, if that makes sense. It’s a movie to see with a big crowd: one who’s ready to laugh, scream and holler, particularly during the movie’s genuinely appalling, rock n’ roll finale.
21. “Certain Women,” Kelly Reichardt.
God damnit, when is the American moviegoing public gonna wise up and give director Kelly Reichardt the props she deserves? Perhaps because Reichardt — like Jeff Nichols, another director on this list — favors quietude and subtlety over ostentatious tracking shots and directorial gimmickry, film snobs are less inclined to give her the time of day. And yet, Reichardt has proven time and time again — in tender, low-key works of n0velistic drama like “Meek’s Cutoff,” the staggering “Wendy and Lucy” and the meandering eco-thriller “Night Moves” — to be an adroit chronicler of a certain kind of blue-collar America that you don’t see portrayed honestly in much film or television. “Certain Women,” her wisest and most mature movie to date, is a loving ode to three women in varying stages of life and loss that takes on the structure of a great book of short stories, one that only blossoms in its emotional impact as the film winds along its unusual path. Laura Dern holds down the movie’s first segment, playing a no-nonsense lawyer called upon to diffuse a hostage situation when her unbalanced client finally slips over the edge. The movie’s second story is the only one that borders on shapeless: Michelle Williams, Reichardt’s muse, travels with her husband, who she knows has been unfaithful to her, to survey a piece of land upon which she hopes to one day build a house. The film’s final chapter is its true knockout. Lily Gladstone and Kristen Stewart respectively play a painfully shy ranch hand and a drifting night school teacher who enter into each other’s orbit, getting painfully close to a kind of earnest romantic connection before cruelly backpedaling away from each other. Unlike many, more purportedly “cinematic” works from this year, the sobering coda of “Certain Women” carries the sting of real, crippling loss.
20. “Neruda,” Pablo Larraín.
Pablo Larraín’s “Neruda” functions on so many different levels — as a dramatically charged psychological portrait of Chilean poet and activist Pablo Neruda, as a meta-noir about the power of authorship, as a black comedy about a delusional police officer — that it can feel like your head is spinning the first time you sit down to watch it. Something tells me that’s exactly what Larraín himself would want. Like the director’s other efforts — “No,” “The Club” and this year’s brilliant “Jackie” — “Neruda” is both an unconventional dramatic exercise as well as being a kind of formalist critique of the very idea of a dramatic exercise. It exists both inside and outside of its story, which can understandably put some viewers at arm’s length. And yet “Neruda” is so playful and strangely funny and alive with bugfuck invention that I suspect you might be able to enjoy it as a simple cinematic experience without having to wrap your head around Larraín’s dense surplus of capital-T themes. While Luis Gnecco embodies Neruda with just the right amount of gravitas, arrogance and showman’s flair, the movie ultimately belongs to Gael Garcia Bernal, playing obtuse would-be dick Oscar Peluchonneau. Bernal twists his classic movie-star good looks into idiotic grimaces that the Coen Brothers would no doubt approve of, and his character turns out to be a victim of the ultimate ironic twist: he’s a fascist and a control freak who can’t wrap his head around the idea that he might be a supporting character in the story of someone else’s life.
19. “Loving,” Jeff Nichols.
I’ve had some discussions with people who claim that Jeff Nichols’ “Loving” is too understated, too low-key: that it doesn’t make a big enough deal of the racism that was present in the South at the time that the story was set, and that it adores its characters to a degree that often gets in the way of the so-called “plot”. This assessment seems, to me, like these folks would rather that Nichols’ fifth film more closely resemble a standard-issue, Academy-approved period weepie like “The Theory of Everything” or some such shit. Personally, I’m glad Nichols stuck to his guns and made the movie the only way he knows how. Nichols has always favored underestimation and quiet dignity over grandstanding displays of emotion. This puts him roughly in the same category as his lead characters, Richard and Mildred Loving: a married biracial couple living in 1950’s Virginia who walk through life bearing a kind of noble remove. Embodied by Australian actor Joel Edgerton and the luminous Ruth Negga, “Loving” is the rare film where you don’t feel like you’re watching high-paid actors step into “roles” that have been custom-tailored for them. For all intents and purposes, Edgerton and Negga simply become the Lovings, and much of the film is spent in their warm, genial presence as they cavort with friends and family, race cars, make dinner and bask in the glow of each other’s undying devotion to each other. To those who claim that this movie should have had more third-act monologues, more declarations of overt xenophobia and subsequent protestations, to those who want the Tom Hooper-directed version of “Loving”: this beautiful little movie is probably lost on you anyway.
18. “Hell or High Water,” David McKenzie.
It’s hard to say whether David Mackenzie’s lean, mean crime drama “Hell or High Water” would have been a box office hit in any other year. But to those who’ve been paying attention to how limited releases have been performing in the latter half of the year, with the exception of “Moonlight,” “Hell or High Water” has been drawing unusually high numbers throughout the fall and early winter seasons. Is it because the movie is a proudly old-fashioned and resolutely well-made thriller, about two no-good Texas brothers (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) who embark on a tear of bank robberies with a gruff, pissed-off lawman (a never-better Jeff Bridges) hot on their tail? Is it because the film wisely re-appropriates the resentment no doubt felt by those in flyover states towards corporate elites and uses it in service of a crackling, Southern-fried neo-noir with shades of both Elmore Leonard and Jim Thompson? It’s hard to say what accounts for the massive popularity of this grizzled, unpretentious and unreasonably enjoyable movie, but all speculations aside, “Hell or High Water” delivers exactly what it promises, and sometimes even more. It’s also a showcase for three of the year’s most unexpectedly fine male performances: Ben Foster gives us one of his most memorable psychos to date (which is really saying something), Chris Pine, the film’s grizzled soul, shows us he’s more than just a pretty face and the great Mr. Bridges shucks off the irritating actorly tics that plagued him in films like “Crazy Heart” and the Coen’s remake of “True Grit” and gives us one of the all-time great screen cowboys. It may be hell in the heartless world this film depicts, but Mackenzie’s film is heaven for movie lovers.
17. “Manchester by the Sea,” Kenneth Lonergan.
Kenneth Lonergan’s “Manchester by the Sea” is the cinematic equivalent of a gut punch: it’s not fun, it knocks the wind out of you and you’ll probably learn something about yourself once it’s all over. More than perhaps any independent filmmaker since John Cassavetes, Lonergan seems determined to depict the messiness of everyday life with pointillist accuracy and a fundamental empathy that many of his contemporaries lack. “Manchester” isn’t a perfect film but its imperfections are what make it thrilling. A typical scene might run on for far too long, but don’t many situations in real life run on for longer than they should? Lonergan’s film is the story of Lee Chandler: a wounded, fundamentally broken man who, upon receiving news of his brother’s untimely death, is thrust into the unenviable position of becoming a father figure to a surly teenage boy. It sounds like a Sundance tearjerker the way I’m describing it, but “Manchester” transcends its formulaic outline to become an honest and absorbing look at how we process pain. Though the movie is stacked with fine supporting turns — including Gretchen Mol as a former alcoholic trying to make sense of her new life and a never-better Kyle Chandler as Lee’s dying brother — the movie ultimately belongs to its star Casey Affleck. Affleck specializes in playing quiet, seething men on the verge of implosion, and Lee Chandler is his most studied, most lived-in performance: a finely studied, if nevertheless galvanic, portrait of grief’s endless cycle.
16. “Nocturnal Animals,” Tom Ford.
“Nocturnal Animals” is one of those movies that contains so many truly incongruous, what-the-fuck moments that I can see a college drinking game being built around it some years down the line. Take a shot when Aaron-Taylor Johnson, oozing genuine menace and charisma for his first time on screen as a homicidal redneck thug named Ray, does a little dance, almost to himself, while sitting naked on a toilet in the sweltering Texas heat. Chug a beer for the film’s bizarro opening credits, which depict fleshy, naked overweight women dancing amidst against a crimson backdrop under clouds of glitter. “Nocturnal Animals,” directed by fashion titan and sometime-filmmaker Tom Ford, is such a rapturous, beautifully directed movie that it could just exist as a string of sexy-creepy, immaculately stylized moments as opposed to, y’know, a movie with a narrative thrust. And yet Ford’s diabolical, duel-pronged meta-noir is one of the most conceptually daring American movies of recent years, and even if there’s no way that the end result could match Ford’s staggering ambition, I say we give him points for even trying. The movie is also stupendously acted from top to bottom, though special mention should go to Jake Gylenhaal, who conveys crippling masculine insecurity in a frightening and recognizable fashion, and Michael Shannon as the meanest man in Marfa, Texas: precisely the kind of hard-edged sumbitch who you don’t want to run into after you’ve just committed a particularly foul crime. From the pulsating nighttime neon jungle of L.A. to the impoverished badlands of the American South, “Nocturnal Animals” spins a hypnotic and lethal yarn about the transgressions of the past as manifested through make-believe. It’s a knockout.
15. “Don’t Think Twice,” Mike Birbiglia.
A gang of privileged, mostly white urban professionals floating through life in a gentrified New York, dabbling in improv comedy when they’re not obsessing over their latest sexual hang-ups or money problems… quick, where’s the door again? Well, hold up a minute, because Mike Birbiglia’s charming and hilarious “Don’t Think Twice” manages to transcend the cruddy limitations of the cinematic subcategory to which it belongs. Perhaps no genre has shown more of its shelf life in the last two years than the “Slackers in New York trying to figure shit out” comedy, but one of Birbiglia’s many canny touches is to keenly acknowledge his character’s glaring emotional blind spots before we have a chance to. In fact, “Don’t Think Twice,” in spite of being a movie about making it up on the go, is anything but baggy: Birbiglia’s second directorial effort is such a brisk, effortlessly funny piece of micro-comic storytelling that it’s possible to underestimate just how tragic it is beneath its bubbly surface. Like Noah Baumbach’s similar “While We’re Young,” “Don’t Think Twice” is a farce about dream-chasing, professional envy and the pitfalls of being a creative in your 20’s that somehow manages to translate the concerns of an extremely narrow milieu into something that feels practically universal. Special notice should go to Keegan-Michael Key and Gillian Jacobs as a couple whose already-shapeless romance begins to fall to pieces when one of them hits the big time.
14. “The Neon Demon,” Nicolas Winding Refn.
All hail Nicolas Winding Refn, the black prince of extreme cinema, whose latest affront to good taste, “The Neon Demon,” was so hypnotizing in its rancid beauty it compelled both walkouts and rounds of enthusiastic applause at the screening where I first saw it. “The Neon Demon,” far from being Mr. Refn’s best movie (that honor still goes to “Drive,” in which a human heartbeat sounds like an 80’s drum machine) is instead a middle finger coated in glitter and pus and aimed squarely at the mainstream moviegoing public. To those who wondered if Mr. Refn would smarten up and embrace narrative structure after the nihilistic noodling of “Only God Forgives”: sorry, but the mad Dane charges even further in the opposite direction here. A tale of fatalistic beauty that’s simultaneously a cocktail of David Lynch’s “Inland Empire,” early Mario Bava and the Countess Bathory myths while also being 100% unfiltered Nic Refn, “The Neon Demon” obliterates the line between junk and art, mirth and malice, ironic love of Sia versus non-ironic love of Sia. Forget boasting the greatest on-screen Keanu Reeves role (sorry, “John Wick”) in over a decade: “The Neon Demon” isn’t content to own that distinction alone, so it goes ahead and gives us the gross-out denouement by which all other denouements in art-house horror movies should be judged. It’s this same unchecked arrogance that makes me love “The Neon Demon” — and Mr. Refn himself, come to think of it.
13. “20th Century Women,” Mike Mills.
I can see how viewers less enamored with the free-floating whimsy of Mike Mills’ “20th Century Women” might find it irritating. Even more than his excellent breakthrough picture “Beginners,” “20th Century Women” is unwound and indulgent: a slice of autobiography that has the power to move us, but is really meant for its writer/director and his family. Alas, this is not “This is 40” and Mike Mills isn’t Judd Apatow. He’s a real-deal American artist whose bracing examination of the many women who raised him also soaks up the hallmarks of the times — the presidency of Jimmy Carter, the rise of punk rock culture, the dawn of neo-liberalism in Southern California — and blends them into a warm, delicious brew that lingers in the mind like a pleasant beach-pop harmony once it’s over. “20th Century Women” is both prickly and loose, hilariously funny and bittersweet while also containing moments of cutting pain. It is anchored by some truly remarkable performances, including Billy Crudup as the cool, pot-smoking uncle surrogate we all wish we had, and Greta Gerwig as the movie’s delicate, beating heart. To say that the movie belongs to Annette Benning — playing Dorothea, a stand-in for Mills’ own mother — is an understatement. With her wise, endlessly benevolent maternal presence, Benning simply owns “20th Century Women”: hers is a powerful ode to strong women the world over, whether they be mothers, daughters or those simply those searching for their place in this big, scary universe we inhabit. “20th Century Women” isn’t a modern classic like “Beginners”, but it’s touching in the depths of its humanity that it reaches, and one suspects it might even help to guide the lost souls of the world in finding their way back home.
12. “13th”, Ava DuVernay.
If it were released at any other point during the year, Ava DuVernay’s searing “13th” would have still cracked my Top 20. But after the countless, thoughtless deaths of unarmed African-Americans at the hands of the police this year, “13th” feels less like a history lesson and more like an urgent wake-up call. It is a film that is incendiary, impassioned and unafraid to be angry, in all the ways that DuVernay’s handsome but stilted Martin Luther King biopic “Selma” was not. As we march fearfully towards an uncertain future, “13th” provides sobering context for America’s ongoing racial divide, though DuVernay herself is not foolish enough to pretend like she, or the film, has all the answers. “13th” warns of nothing less than the modern-day equivalent of slavery — the term that the film often uses is “the New Jim Crow” (the author of the phrase, legal mind Michelle Alexander, is interviewed prominently throughout the film, as is political activist Angela Davis). While some of the year’s best films have undoubtedly provided an escape from the anxieties and fears of our modern world, “13th” is a film that demands that we confront the monsters at our door — by any means necessary.
11. “Christine,” Antonio Campos.
Antonio Campos has been maturing into a fearsomely talented director in the last few years, turning what could be Haneke-aping chillers like “Afterschool” and the truly shocking “Simon Killer” into cinematic Venn Diagrams where the arthouse meets the grindhouse. “Christine” is Campos’ most restrained and emotionally affecting movie to date, though the young writer/director has hardly embraced traditional storytelling techniques. Like his previous two films, “Christine” is a portrait of a diseased mind. In this case, it’s a real story: Christine Chubbuck was a smart (and clinically depressed) Florida news anchor who took her own life on a live television broadcast, without warning and with the cameras still rolling. The tragedy of “Christine” the film is that Campos seems to be suggesting that Christine’s friends and co-workers were aware of her debilitating condition, and yet chose not to get involved. Campos eases up on the widescreen zooms and antiseptic sterility of his earlier films here, though he nails the drab, unassuming period details with the grace of a veteran director. And at the center of all this darkness, there is Christine herself, played in a performance of heart-crushing vulnerability and by the great Rebecca Hall. “Christine” is probably too cold and unpleasant to go over like gangbusters with Academy voters, but it would be a shame if Hall’s magnificent work here were overlooked. She manages to locate this woman’s bruised soul amidst all the rot, and Christine’s crushing battle against herself ultimately becomes ours too.
10. “Midnight Special,” Jeff Nichols.
Netflix’s “Stranger Things” garnered some mighty praise this year for resurrecting the irony-free 80’s spirit of “E.T.” and “The Goonies,” though the show’s apparent virtues often never rose above skilled mimicry. For me, a more assured piece of cultural homage came in the form of Jeff Nichols’ grave and arresting “Midnight Special,” which uses the exoskeleton of pictures like John Carpenter’s “Starman” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” to tell a moving parable about faith and fatherhood. This is Nichols’ M.O. — he likes to dig into the marrow of genre pictures, like Southern-fried crime dramas (“Shotgun Stories”) and rural fairy tales (the Matthew McConaughey-starring “Mud”), where he goes looking for salvation amidst the flotsam. Faith and serendipity have always been two of Nichols’ favorite themes, though he’s wise not to let capital-S storytelling get in the way of what is mostly a rollicking chase movie with Michael Shannon and Joel Edgerton as taciturn men on the run, harboring an extraterrestrial child as their captive. “Midnight Special” underplays the fantastical promises of its story at every turn, resulting in a soulful sci-fi spectacle that’s thrillingly ground-level. And as always, Nichols gets magnificent turns out of his cast, including a soft-spoken Edgerton as a gruff man in search of a family and a wry Adam Driver, channeling Jeff Goldblum in every 90’s disaster movie ever made.
9. “La La Land,” Damien Chazelle.
I was ready to write off Damien Chazelle in the wake of “Whiplash,” the young filmmaker’s energized but massively overpraised and juvenile shrine to the power of toxic, abusive behavior to nurture an artistic identity. Well, all my reservations about “Whiplash” have effectively been cast aside having now seen “La La Land,” a soaring love letter to the city of Los Angeles that effectively cements Chazelle as one of the most important young filmmakers of his generation. This colorful confection of a film is both an indulgence in the past and a critique of it: the film adopts the superficial guise of an old MGM musical (the kind that used to star Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers), and yet at its core, it’s ultimately a deeply modern L.A. love story about the cost of chasing your dreams. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone light up the screen as Seb and Mia: a pair of down-on-their-luck lovebirds who find sweet music in each other’s embrace. Gosling hasn’t been this relaxed and effortlessly charming since “Half Nelson” (which is a weird thing to say) while Stone compensates for a slightly underwritten character with her typically luminous screen presence and her stinging comic chops. From its rip-roaring opening number to its emotionally explosive finale, “La La Land” is so much of what we truly go to the movies for: to see our own hopes and dreams projected on the big screen, but acted out by movie stars whose snazz and grace transports us to a place of heady cinematic bliss.
8. “The Handmaiden,” Park Chan-Wook.
For a film that’s firmly directed with a male gaze, “The Handmaiden” is also a work of art that understands a great deal about the unspoken, intimate bond that only women share with each other. The film explores both platonic and romantic modes of female connection in its crackling, sumptuous tale of treachery and sexual deviancy in Japan-occupied Korea. Park Chan-Wook has clearly had a great time goosing audiences in brazen, provocative works like “Thirst” and “Oldboy” but it’s tough to dispute that “The Handmaiden” feels like his magnum opus: a gorgeous distillation of all his preferred thematic preoccupations, and a lavish, genuinely unhinged descent into pure psychosexual mania. Though the film is fairly restrained (for Park, anyway), it contains some of the most frank and genuinely erotic lovemaking scenes since David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive,” and a spectacularly fucked-up climax that will no doubt appease those demented souls who felt like “Oldboy’s” live-octopus sight gag wasn’t gnarly enough. It’s also, perhaps more importantly, a film that necessitates and even demands the big-screen experience. In an era when hand-wringing kvetchers like Bret Easton Ellis are crying about cinema being dead, “The Handmaiden” makes a furiously persuasive case to the contrary. Chan-Wook’s malevolent vision is defiantly made for the big screen, and despite the movie being broken up into chapters, the thought of this gorgeously contained nightmare being splintered into episodic installments packed to the gills with expository wordvomit is just plain wrong: there’s no other word for it. You may not be able to wrap your head around the randy Gothic brilliance of “The Handmaiden” the first time you see it, but there’s absolutely no forgetting it once you do.
7. “Jackie,” Pablo Larraín.
The surreal limbo where public and private lives collide is clearly what interests director Pablo Larraín. He’s already made one film in 2016 — the dazzling black comedy “Neruda” — about the intersectionality of art, fiction and life’s ugly truths. Clearly, for Mr. Larraín, one was not enough. “Jackie,” Mr. Larraín’s haunting English-language debut, is even more brazenly unusual than “Neruda,” all but destroying the established blueprint of the historical biopic and fashioning something that is more akin to a slow-burning piece of psychological horror by Roman Polanski or Andrei Tarkovsky than any Academy-approved horseshit. The movie’s artifice is front and center, but not in the hollow, airbrushed way of something like Tom Hooper’s “The King Speech”. Larraín means to call our attention to the un-reality of this story: all the better with which to ease us into the violently churning waves of sorrow and fear that washed over former First Lady Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in the days following her husband’s assassination. “Jackie” is fragmented and unnerving, scored to a symphony of atonal majesty concocted by “Under the Skin” composer Mica Levi. It also features some of the best standalone acting of the year: not just Mrs. Portman’s mannered, mournful and finely calibrated embodiment of the onetime President’s wife, but also Peter Sarsgaard as a low-key, empathetic Bobby Kennedy, Greta Gerwig as Mrs. Kennedy’s only genuine friend and John Hurt as an altruistic parishioner who guides Jackie through some of her darkest days. Screw the “Purge” movies: Jackie is the great American Horror Story we’ve all been waiting for.
6. “Silence,” Martin Scorsese.
“Silence” is a film made of ash, rain and mud, a film so elemental in its power that it practically steamrolls the viewer into submission. Which is just as well: among its many other principal thematic concerns, “Silence” is a film about the dangers of submission and the limitations of faith. With this long-in-the-works masterpiece, Scorsese is taking cues from legends of the form like Kurosawa, Bergman and Dreyer: his mosaic of agony and atonement is as solemn and purposeful as “The Wolf of Wall Street” was lovingly unwound and cheerfully offensive. Liam Neeson and Adam Driver anchor the film with their fine, subtle turns — as a Jesuit Padre who has committed apostasy and the younger priest who has set out on a journey to find him, respectively — but the film belongs, somewhat surprisingly, to young actor Andrew Garfield. This is the finest turn of the actor’s already-impressive career, certainly since David Fincher’s “The Social Network,” and his unwavering commitment to spreading the gospel of Christ — even when it results in his torture and imprisonment — is something that links him to other Scorsesean sufferer/saviors like Travis Bickle and Johnny Boy of “Mean Streets”. It’s far from an easy sit, but if you value Scorsese’s artistic voice, large-scale depictions of faith in cinema or just going to the movies in general, this is a patient and demanding work that is very much worth your time.
5. “Green Room,” Jeremy Saulnier.
It’s important to remember that Jeremy Saulnier is only three films into his career. Already, he’s mastered a kind of grab-you-by-the-throat tension that, in films like 2013’s airtight revenge thriller “Blue Ruin,” can suck the oxygen right out of a room. Saulnier’s latest and most successful film, “Green Room,” is an ode to John Carpenter and the D.I.Y. music scene that takes a pair of bloody boxcutters to the Nazi punks of the world and, in the process, re-writes the blueprint of the modern-day standoff movie. The setup is ruthlessly efficient: a hardcore band called the Ain’t Rights, down to their last dollar, take a bottom-of-the-barrel gig at a venue out in rural Oregon that also happens to be owned and operated by a mob of violent skinheads. When one of the band members witnesses the aftermath of a particularly gruesome murder, the remaining members are locked backstage while the venue’s wicked proprietor (played with droll magnetism by Patrick Stewart) plots their demise with sawed-off shotguns, attack dogs and worse. “Green Room,” while hardly the first siege movie to pit inexperienced would-be heroes against homicidal zealots, is perhaps the most blistering and enjoyable audience movie of the year because Saulnier understands the power of cinematic economy and because he gets his terrific cast to commit to the ugly reality of every moment. If you like your popcorn doused in Nazi blood, “Green Room” is the death-metal-growl-to-arms you’ve been waiting for. It’s also a damn fine eulogy for its late star Anton Yelchin, who was a terrific human being and one of the best actors in his age range.
4. “Arrival,” Denis Villeneuve.
Like any great film that is accepted in both independent and mainstream circles, there has already been a minor bit of backlash leveled against Denis Villeneuve’s gorgeous sci-fi parable “Arrival”. Its detractors claim that the film is too hung up on atmospherics, that it dumbs down its dense and intimidating philosophical constructs for multiplex consumption, that the sentimental ending ultimately shortchanges the plight of Amy Adam’s grieving protagonist. To these folks, I say this: this is a non-franchise, non-reboot science fiction picture with no big, city-leveling set pieces, exactly one explosion, and it’s entirely about language. I’m sorry, but what’s not great about that? Villeneuve is such a visually impressive director that some of his critics have claimed that his earlier pictures — “Prisoners,” “Sicario” — were little more than doom and gloom dressed up to look good. “Arrival,” which is Mr. Villeneuve’s most warm and human movie to date, should do well to dispel that claim. If you put aside the movie’s frightening alien lifeforms, its steely, dread-suffused mood and the bizarre, non-regional nature of Forest Whitaker’s accent — a true anomaly in a movie about communication — than it becomes clear that “Arrival” is a heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful story about a mother looking to reconnect with a child she thought to be lost forever. Come for the brain-rattling ambient score and wowza of an ending, stay for the unexpected heart and soul.
3. “One More Time With Feeling,” Andrew Dominik.
Andrew Dominik has had a rough go of it these past few years. The considerably talented New Zealand-born director helmed one of the greatest films of our modern era in the form of his hallucinatory, bracingly poetic anti-Western “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” and his pungent gangster movie “Killing Them Softly” was nearly as good, if a bit more heavy-handed. So who would have guessed that the gloomy auteur would find his greatest praise to date directing a documentary about his friend and occasional collaborator, Goth troubadour Nick Cave? Still, while “One More Time With Feeling” details the recording of Cave’s austere and beautiful new record “Skeleton Tree,” it’s hardly a simple music movie. Instead, it is a devastating docudramatic tableau of loss and artistic reinvention, one that uses a transportive visual style to compliment the hypnotic rumble of Cave’s music. The result is one of the more purely engrossing audio-visual spectacles to be had in a movie theater in recent years. In the film, Cave, in the wake of an unthinkable family tragedy, is burdened with the unappealing task of writing new music, and Dominik is attentive to capture discord between the artist’s bottomless sadness and his ghostlike presence in the recording studio. It is a viewing that truly earns the descriptor of “haunting”. It is a film that sits with you, refusing to leave for days afterward. “One More Time With Feeling” is more than just one of the great live music movies. It’s an unsparing and ultimately hopeful portrait of the artist at the end of the line, and where he must choose to go.
2. “Moonlight,” Barry Jenkins.
2016 has seen a surge in vital, important African-American art in the cinematic realm, including Ava DuVernay’s stunning “13th” and the absorbing eight-hour procedural of race and celebrity that is Ezra Edelman’s “O.J.: Made in America”. It was also a year that saw the popular election of a fascist demagogue whose platform was fueled by vindictive and outwardly xenophobic statements, which is to say nothing of the countless deaths of unarmed black civilians at the hands of American police officers. It was a year of struggle and loss, and next year, the healing will begin. Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight” is a film that is here to help us heal. Late in the film, the main character — a homosexual black man named Chiron who wears his intimidating exterior like a coat of armor, so as to shut out anything conceivably “soft” about his lifestyle — is asked a very simple question: “who is you, man?” Most American films don’t slow down or take enough time to ask simple, meaningful questions such as this, particularly to members of marginalized minority communities. But “Moonlight” is about just exactly who Chiron is: its triptych structures explores, in heartbreaking detail, the various masks he wears throughout his life (frightened and lonely as a boy, awkward and good-natured as a teen, hardened and unemotional as a young man) and what has led him to this place of surrender. How Jenkins produced one of the best American films in a decade after his modest, micro-sized debut “Medicine for Melancholy” is a secret he’s free to keep, but I, for one, am grateful, that the magic of “Moonlight” will continue to live with us for as long as independent films are culturally relevant.
- “Paterson”, Jim Jarmusch.
Perhaps it makes sense that 2016’s greatest film is an ode to an observer. After all, what can we really do after this dispiriting, chaotic year but sit back and watch? The plight of the planet at large may be dismal, but don’t tell that to Jim Jarmusch. Jarmusch’s latest and most emotionally rewarding film “Paterson” is a film that believes in optimism, in the power of patience, in the silent passages of divine serendipity that underline the most ordinary of interactions. It’s a ramshackle character study, a comedy of microscopic coincidences and an earnest, near-perfect portrait of a loving marriage. It is a film that believes in the richness to be derived from simple observation, as is the case with Adam Driver’s characteristically cool Jarmuschian protagonist: a New Jersey bus driver who writes poems in his spare time. “Paterson” is, like so much of the iconic writer/director’s work, a love letter to the forgotten corners of America that also celebrates the notion of art for art’s sake. The film also wonderfully dispels the notion of the ego as an artist’s principal creative fuel, as Paterson the man gets inspiration from simply riding the bus, knocking back a beer or basking in the natural glory of Passaic waterfalls on his work break. “Paterson” is a glorious ode to wayward invention played in an achingly delicate minor key: one that’s almost too hushed to hear at times, but also one that can knock the wind out of you if you catch it at just the right pitch. Like the greatest poems, “Paterson” doesn’t need translation. It simply exists, and is, a beacon of creative purity in a world that doesn’t deserve it.
And now, some Runner-Ups for ya…
Honorable Mention: “A Bigger Splash,” “Everybody Wants Some!,” “Deepwater Horizon,” “City of Gold,” “Zootopia,” “Into The Inferno,” “Wiener-Dog,” “Swiss Army Man,” “O.J.: Made in America,” “The Fits,” “Pete’s Dragon,” “Patriot’s Day,” “The Shallows,” “Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World,” “American Honey,” “Hunt for the Wilderpeople,” “The Witch,” “Love and Friendship,” “Pop Star: Never Stop Never Stopping,” “Toni Erdmann,” “The Wailing,” “A Monster Calls,” “Louder than Bombs,” “Blue Jay,” “Evolution,” “Amanda Knox,” “De Palma,” “Fences,” “Keanu”.
And that’s all, folks! See you in 2017 — NL.
