Whew, this is time consuming. Here we go…
#30 – Blue Jay
Both hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure, Blue Jay is a very, very small drama that brings you into its grasp with good-natured jokes and witty dialogue before knocking you for six in a whirlwind third act. It’s mostly a two-hander, with Mark Duplass (also the film’s screenwriter!) and Sarah Paulson starring as exes who bump into each other and end up spending a night drinking, dancing and reminiscing until past demons threaten the break the fabric of the film. What I love about Blue Jay is that it never lets the miniscule budget or simplicity of its story get in the way of its characters, who are as complex and maddening as they come. You are so intrigued by them that you’re begging for everything to work out even though you know the inevitable will occur. It’s on Netflix right now, and I see no reason why you wouldn’t love it as much as I do.
#29 – Nocturnal Animals
Considering this is only his second feature, it’s amazing that Tom Ford has managed to create something as twisty and provocative as Nocturnal Animals. The fact that he’s also a successful fashion designer is enough to make one green with envy, and I’m sure Tom revels in that kind of admiration. His latest film reflects this, too. The cinematic equivalent of black lipstick laced with poison, it’s very clear that Nocturnal Animals is Tom Ford’s effort at being noticed, a shocking, often brutally cruel film that only gets away with it because it’s so goddamn fun at the same time. I’d be lying if I said Ford pulls off some awfully cringey moments here, but there’s enough to combat this that it almost makes the movie more intriguing overall, giving it the feel of a pulpy serial that makes you turn the page no matter how silly it gets. It probably sounds like I’m ripping into the film, but it’s truly something special, a slinky, Lynchian tale with no reprieve from the brutal atmosphere it creates.
#28 – Elle
Speaking of provocative, there’s probably no film more problematic and dangerous in 2016 than Elle, Paul Verhoeven’s ridiculously complicated look at the repercussions of sexual assault – in the format of a thriller/comedy hybrid. Yeah, it sounds bad, I know, but by giving agency to the victim and letting the film explore the deep recesses of her mind, Verhoeven weaves a complex image of a woman inflicted by trauma and struggling to keep her own impulses at bay. Isabelle Huppert shines, delivering a performance that never fails to lean into the murky, mysterious depths of Elle, and the full effect of the psychodramatic terror that unfolds onscreen is as much a product of Huppert’s performance as the writing and directing. I certainly don’t think this film is for everyone, many might be turned off by the premise, but it’s a risk worth taking. I even recommended this film to my parents and they loved it, but were understandably unsure as to why I told them to watch it. There’s so much going on here, I can imagine countless books being written about this one.
As you can tell, we are getting to the point in this list where I practically gush about everything. 2016 was a very, very strong year.
#27 – Neruda
It’s not often I have two movies by the same director on a yearly list, but Neruda is the first of two Pablo Larrain films here, this one probably being a little lesser known because it takes place in his home country of Chile. Neruda examines a completely fictional chase of the real-life Chilean poet Pablo Neruda by the not-real detective Peluchonneau. This is most definitely no ordinary detective chase movie, in fact it could be Pablo Larrain’s craziest film yet. Mid-conversation, characters will completely change location as the discussion continues uninterrupted. Peluchnneau discovers a book in which his own story is being written for him, placing him in a pit of existential dread. The line between reality and fiction becomes blurred and the rules are thrown out the window, replaced by a sense for the loony and the extraordinary. Often hilarious but more often just plain brilliant, Neruda is like nothing else you’ll ever see.
#26 – Hell or High Water
Sometimes it’s good to get away from these complicated arthouse dramas and turn to something simpler on narrative, but just as profound. Hell or High Water is the kind of movie that really scratches an itch, that itch we all get for thrills and escapism, and does so in a way remarkably similar to the best work of the Coen Brothers. In a classic setup, two brothers are robbing banks across the state in an act of revenge against the structures that ruined their family and took everything away from them. Toby’s the straight shooter, and his brother Tanner is a wild card just waiting to be pulled. From the very first scene, there’s a palpable dynamic between the two that carries a powerful emotional current under all of the chasing and shooting they get up to. What begins as a well-directed neo-western turns into a film about economic malaise, brotherhood, and brutal anger towards the system, culminating in one of my favourite third acts this year. Shoutout to Jeff Bridges, too.
#25 – The Edge of Seventeen
One of two fantastic coming-of-age films in 2016, The Edge of Seventeen is widely loved, so much so that I couldn’t really believe the hype. I’ve fell into this trap before with other movies of this type, but I’m glad to say that this particular one is far away from problems that infect the worst of the bunch. The Edge of Seventeen finds itself often compared to John Hughes but I see much more in common with someone like Richard Linklater, who will make his own appearance further up the list. The story is simple, a girl’s life falls apart, and eventually finds the right mix of courage and help from others to pull it all back together again, but the real charm of the movie is in the genuine writing, the moments where it all feels so natural and lived in. Hailee Steinfeld’s performance will likely skyrocket her into the best that Hollywood has to offer, but I’d love to see in more low-budget comedies like this. She’s quite a presence.
#24 – Kate Plays Christine
In a somewhat unexpected turn of events, I ended up liking Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine a lot more than Antonio Campos’ Christine, also from this year. Antonio, one of my favourite directors, made a film about the same subject that gets more disappointing the more I think about it. This film is the opposite. It stars Kate Lyn Sheil as herself in a pseudo-documentary, trying to get into character to play the role of Christine Chubbuck, a TV reporter who killed herself on air in 1974. The movie plays out like a documentary but is clearly fictional to a point, with much of the dialogue focusing on Sheil’s reluctance to get inside the head of Chubbuck in fear of exploiting the situation. You could argue that Kate Plays Christine is in the same headspace, and through this conflict comes a film that seems to be constantly arguing with itself. There’s a lot to unpack here – questions of what is and isn’t okay to fictionalize and dramatise, and what acting and performance entails when you’re playing someone who actually lived. Challenging stuff.
#23 – The Happiest Day In the Life of Olli Maki
Boxing, black and white, failing romance. Yes, it certainly sounds like a Raging Bull knock-off, but excluding the black and white conceit, it’s hard to imagine a boxing film that could be further removed from Scorsese’s. Nice and lean at 92 minutes, this Finnish boxing drama burst out of nowhere to win the Un Certain Regard award at Cannes and it’s easy to see where the unanimous love came from. It’s as sweet and straightforward as any other sports movie, but filmed and acted in a way that garners a perfect mix of uplifting and depressing. It’s an emotional journey but only in the slightest manner, letting the subtleties of Olli Maki’s situation sink in over the short running time. It doesn’t have the same kind of impact as something like Rocky, but it shouldn’t. The movie is as humble and sweet as the characters within it.
#22 – The Wailing
Similar to Nocturnal Animals, Na Hong-Jin’s gruesome, sprawling horror The Wailing is all about throwing everything you can at the wall and hoping that it sticks. What separates the two is that The Wailing is not a flawed-but-great film like the former, but a truly insane masterpiece, where every single ridiculous idea works, resulting in an explosive two and a half hours. The movie begins as a comedy, as bumbling police officer Jong-goo struggles to stay on his own two feet, let alone solve a series of deaths that are plaguing his village. Enter a strange man living up in the hills and some extreme incidents of violence, and everything starts to darken, further and further until nobody is laughing anymore. The plot is tangled in a web of zombie thrills and the mysticism of a shaman, and it all comes to head in a shocking final 30 minutes that will leave you speechless. I haven’t seen the film pop up on many best of the year lists, and I wonder if it’s been forgotten amidst the awards race. Seek it out.
#21 – Personal Shopper
Olivier Assayas is one of the most confusing directors in the game. Like many of my favourite filmmakers, he’s a chameleon, delivering films that are consistently fantastic but don’t have any sort of stylistic throughline with eachother. There’s always a stamp of Assayas there, especially in his dramas focusing on women with shifting identities, but the directing style is constantly in flux. The same sort of mood pervades the narrative of Personal Shopper, in which Kristen Stewart’s Maureen faces a world where nothing remains in place. She is a personal shopper for international celebrity Kira, and is trying to contact her dead brother through her skills as a medium. The narrative takes a series of unpredictable turns, with a marvelous centrepiece that is told through an increasingly creepy series of texts with an unknown contact. This is a movie that does not wish to make much sense, but instead invade your comfort zone with a fatal injection of weird. As soon as you think Assayas might be done, he adds another layer to this story that can’t keep still. Fantastic filmmaking.
#20 – The Neon Demon
In direct contrast to the previous director, Nicolas Winding Refn’s style is consistently pressing towards a sharpened point, refining itself with each film he makes. Drive definitely played with bright colours, and Only God Forgives showed Refn’s fascination with neon lights, but The Neon Demon is the purest version of Refn’s visual style yet, a series of striking monochromatic compositions enhanced by a lack – rather than a balance – of colour diversity. There’s something completely otherworldly about seeing scenes take place in rooms bathed in pink light, where nothing operates outside a specific shade. Cinematography obsessiveness aside, there’s a fascinating directness to the story that doesn’t leave much to interpretation in the way that his last few films have, and it results in a crazy ride, where the level of vulgarity reaches an astonishing peak but still keeps going, reaching places you never thought anyone would be brave enough to explore in a movie with this kind of star power. It’s hard to find a modern director more wiling to push the boundaries.
#19 – Everybody Wants Some!!
Thankfully Richard Linklater hasn’t wasted time basking in the afterglow of Boyhood, a movie that keeps losing love the further we get away from the hype. Here, he’s back with an 80’s set quasi-sequel to Dazed and Confused that may just well be better than the original. As with his best work, the characters here are at the heart of the matter, and you’ll get to know each one as a fully formed person with their own ridiculous quirks. Nobody escapes the microscope, and you kind of laugh along with everyone while also mocking them behind their backs. There’s scene after scene of good times, of things that just make you wish you could be in the company of these people, and watch them unfold in unpredictable ways. Typical scenes of college parties gone wild and cheesy romance are abound, but nobody does it like Linklater. This is true feel-good cinema.
#18 – Things To Come
Sometimes you just want to watch something that washes over you in waves. That sounds pretentious, yes, but it’s also true of Things To Come, a movie that places emotional thunderstorms in between lengthy scenes of philosophical dialogue and moral debate. Isabelle Huppert firmly roots the film in her performance, and it couldn’t exist without her. She plays a philosophy teacher who’s life is freed from its bounds through a series of circumstances that are both heartbreaking and full of possibilities for the future. Everything changes for her at an age many perceive as too late, and this forms the emotional crux of the film, taking you on a trip through her emotional state and her reaction to her life changing around her. Huppert channels likeability and intelligence, and the film does a great job of creating a three-dimensional portrait of each character. It is simple in plot, but the spaces in between are full of things to discuss.
#17 – A Bigger Splash
If you’re looking for something a little less quiet, look no further than A Bigger Splash from Luca Guadagnino, a director who never fails to make films dripping with intrigue and the clear voice of a director who knows how to play with your senses. There’s something unbelievable about the way his camera moves so audaciously, how his editing creates tension beyond the Hitchcockian. The amount of subtlety in the eye contact between actors here is integral to the way you interpret situations, raising the stakes in incremental ways that are tiny but hard to miss. Tilda Swinton, Ralph Fiennes, Matthias Schoenaerts and Dakota Johnson (surprisingly) all deliver performances that stick, but Fiennes as the disgruntled ex-husband might be my favourite of the bunch. He brings sublime energy to a film that is already bursting with the desire to keep your eyes glued. Gorgeous, unmissable sexiness from Luca Guadagnino.
#16 – After the Storm
Now I understand that a small foreign language family drama may not be the most exciting prospect, especially when the overall effect is more of a calm contentment rather than tear-jerking anguish, but there’s so much to love in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s newest (and possibly his best) film, After the Storm. Here, we follow a father searching for a connection with his son, who he sees some weekends when he’s not struggling to pay child support. The subject matter could be handled like an intense misery fest, but there’s so much restraint here that it transforms into something different, a lighthearted comedy-drama that has the filmmaking perfection of an old master. It’s hard to find films like this being made anywhere outside Japan as of late, and Kore-eda is carrying on in Ozu’ footsteps. It’s hard to find a fault with anything, including the cinematography, showing Kore-eda’s traditionalist, but beautiful, framing.
#15 – Fire at Sea
It’s genuinely pretty hard for documentaries to crack my lists, but the first of two in my top 20 is Fire at Sea, a film that is staggering not only in emotional heft but in form and cinematography. Gianfranco Rosi’s style is purely observational, following two strands of storytelling, both with a great sense of importance and place. The first is on the Italian island of Lampedusa, a small, peaceful place that is also a stop on the way to the mainland for many North African refugees. A young boy in the town acts as our guide in some ways as we watch him go about his day, a life filled with boredom and using tree branches as guns. The other thread is on a refugee ship, where people are starving, shivering, and cramped. Many lose their lives off the coast of the island, and Rosi shows such compassion in the way he treats the subject. This isn’t an exploitative art piece, but a study of human life, and how while we live in peace, there is a raging storm just beyond our doorstep.
#14 – Hacksaw Ridge
Of course there’s also Hacksaw Ridge, a movie that doesn’t just show you the horrors of our world, but immerses you into them. Mel Gibson’s latest film is so ridiculously underrated that I struggle to see just how so many people didn’t feel what I felt watching this film. Yes, the first 45 minutes are beyond cheesy, but there’s a method to the madness. The film’s first half plays like any historical drama, with smiles, romance, and old-school lighting, before our characters are transported to Okinawa and we see soldiers carried off with thousand-yard stares. A dead man hangs off the side of a truck, a gigantic cliff looms overhead. It turns into a horror movie. Gibson’s battle scenes have something of Saving Private Ryan in them but ultimately they find their own niche as they produce huge scares and the feeling of imminent death. In the middle of this is Desmond Doss, a man with no means of protection. It all contributes to the atmosphere of overwhelming despair, punctuated by classic, memorable movie moments. I was scared out of my wits.
#13 – Manchester By the Sea
There’s not much worse than knowing that something isn’t going to get better for a long time, and knowing there’s really nothing you can do about that. Manchester By the Sea, Kenneth Lonergan’s most disciplined and well-written film yet, shows horrible realities of picking up the pieces after unexpected tragedy. Mostly set in the small town that shares the name of the film’s title, the story follows Lee (Casey Affleck), and his efforts to move on from the shadow of his past mistakes and grievances, some of which are simply too horrible to even talk about. What’s strange though is how little Lonergan feels the need to be didactic or impulsive in a story that could easily turn to sap. Even in some of the harshest moments, the movie is unflinching, showing us moments of strange awkwardness during tragedy that people don’t like to talk about. Lee can’t hold himself in and seems even annoyed when his brother dies at the beginning of the film, later his nephew finding raw chicken in the fridge triggers an anxiety attack because it reminds him of his father. There’s so much in here that just feels genuine.
#12 – Indignation
While the film as a whole is still worthy of this high a placing, I will admit that there’s one scene that blows me away. Everything else is handsome, gorgeously photographed and amazingly written and acted, but there’s a centrepiece scene here that should have earned a nomination, nay, a win for Best Screenplay at every awards ceremony of the year. An argument between main character Marcus Messner and his principal over Marcus’s atheism is a masterclass in dialogue, a scene punctuated so perfectly by simple editing and impossibly exact framing, that it justifies a place on this list anywhere, even if the rest of the movie was garbage. Thankfully that’s not the case, as the rest of it is teeming with existential humour and a romance with such playful character dynamics that the film feels truly magical. It’s hard to find movies like this anymore, where the characters are fleshed out and consistently believable, behaving in ways that are consistent with their character even at their most unexpected. It’s also just a budding cinematographer’s dream. We’re getting close to perfect now.
#11 – The Salesman
This movie’s uptick in fame is mostly due to the nature of its Best Foreign Language Film win at the Oscars, where director Asghar Farhadi refused to attend in protest of Donald Trump’s proposed Muslim ban, but Farhadi has been a master in the arthouse scene for years, with A Separation in 2011 earning him legendary status. It surprises me that many critics consider The Salesman to be a lesser work, because to me it rings with signals that Farhadi is attempting to address something major. In the film, a woman is assaulted in her apartment by an unknown assailant, leading her husband to embark on a search for the perpetrator while crossing all forms of moral lines. That the two main characters are also actors in a production of Death of a Salesman is not lost on Farhadi, and he incorporates this thread so subtly I completely missed it the first time. It’s actually quite meta. As actors, these characters explore societal and issues of masculinity through their play, whilst Farhadi examines these issues in modern day Iran through this film, using actors to play archetypes that fit within the point he is making. It’s crazy stuff, but Farhadi grounds it in a gripping, tense drama that asks as many questions as it answers.
The Screen House 