Best 10 movies of 2016
10. The Lobster
Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’s
first English-language feature is mysterious and melancholy—much like
the relationships depicted in this chilly, but humane, sci-fi tale. Colin Farrell
is dumpy and lovable as a sad sack sent to a hotel where he has 45 days
to find a mate, or else he’ll be turned into an animal. Olivia Colman is perfect as a pinched hotel administrator, while Ben Whishaw, John C. Reilly, Ashley Jensen, and Angeliki Papoulia play fellow hotel guests with a yearning mix of hurt and hope. There’s also Rachel Weisz and Léa Seydoux
rounding out the impressive cast. Lanthimos has made a film that’s
lonely and searching, but also one that feels like a hand reached out
across the void, offering comfort and understanding, if not resolution.
Lanthimos has always been a daring inventor, but with this film he
reveals more of his thumping heart. Muted but tinglingly alive, The Lobster is full of both unique vision and bittersweetly familiar ache.
9. Mountains May Depart
Chinese master Jia Zhangke
illuminates the macro and the micro in this wistful and ultimately
deeply moving film, investigating huge cultural shifts and small
personal evolutions with care and insight. With the marvelous actress Zhao Tao
at the center, Jia traverses past, present, and future, showing us a
generation of Chinese people stuck somewhere in the cracks between an
old nation and a new one. Told in three parts, as China moves from
economic and cultural aloofness to a broader global view, Mountains May Depart
loses its way a bit in the third section. But Jia guides the film back
to something rather profound by the end, staging a closing shot that is
as piercingly affecting as anything I’ve seen this year, or in many
other years. Who knew that a Pet Shop Boys song could break one’s heart
in 2016? But it does, and Mountains May Depart is all the more powerful for it.
8. The Edge of Seventeen
A masterful teen comedy that’s also a sly and thoughtful look at the mechanics of depression, writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig’s first feature is an auspicious debut. Her wise and biting writing is brilliantly embodied by Hailee Steinfeld, who gives one of the best performances of 2016. Steinfeld’s supporting cast is aces, from a wry and prickly Woody Harrelson to Haley Lu Richardson as a believable best friend to Hayden Szeto as an honestly adorable love interest. Hip and flinty, The Edge of Seventeen
tempers its dyspepsia with a careful mixture of humor and empathy, a
relatable jumble that Steinfeld expertly translates through a piquant,
millennial prism. This is a film that deserves to be a cult classic, one
that could actually offer a young person struggling with their own
consuming feelings of anxiety and self-doubt some measure of comfort or
understanding. It’s also very funny and a little romantic. What more
could you want?
7. Jackie
Pablo Larraín’s
swirling and looping opus is way more art film than biopic. In fact,
it’s not a biopic at all. It’s instead a woozy and captivating imagining
of a moment in time, when Jackie Kennedy was mourning her husband’s
murder as a nation reeled. The film is accidentally timely, as many in
this country today grapple with the feeling that something huge has just
been irreparably broken, a grief and desolation that Larraín
prodigiously illustrates. The thrilling composer Mica Levi
has created a keening, evocative, almost threatening score—full of
wailing strings that jolt and jab, like they’re taking a knife to
Jackie’s well-heeled surroundings. Stéphane Fontaine’s camerawork has a wandering grace to match Noah Oppenheim’s elegant script. But, of course, any Jackie Kennedy film lives or dies by who wears the pillbox hat. Keen to that fact, Natalie Portman
takes the role and goes for broke, delivering a performance of
staggering intensity, pitched somewhere between method and camp, between
impersonation and utter becoming. She’s mesmerizing. But her
performance would be insane and outsize in a more straitlaced film.
Lucky, then, that Portman found an ideal collaborator in Larraín.
Together they make something fiercely strange and indelible, a beguiling
and convincing map of a feverish American pathology, rather than rote
history.
6. Manchester by the Sea
Heavy and despondent, Kenneth Lonergan’s
gorgeous drama could easily have been a miserablist slog. But he fills
his film with an abundance of humor and humanity, treating his
characters with a gentleness that gives Manchester a pale and
sorrowful glow. Beautifully rendering—or perhaps simply capturing—the
cold and stony towns north of Boston, Lonergan tells a devastating story
flecked with a simple hope. Casey Affleck, hunched and
saturnine, is riveting while seemingly doing very little. He plays a
man past the quaking heat of grief, now mired in its long and isolating
winter. He’s warmed, just slightly, by the sudden insistence of his
teenage nephew, played by the wonderfully natural Lucas Hedges.
Together they maneuver through a difficult time, negotiating a way to
live, and maybe thrive, in a world laden with loss. In a few brief
scenes, a terrific Michelle Williams shatters the
film’s iciness, her raw, burbling emotion serving as perfectly timed
catharsis. Lonergan has a real command of his film, but his hand is
never forceful. Manchester by the Sea is a delicate and perceptive story about tragedy that, quite miraculously, never becomes one.
5. American Honey
Andrea Arnold’s dazzling arrival on the American continent announces itself early on with Rihanna’s
“We Found Love” blaring in a supermarket. It doesn’t stop hurtling at
that entrancing verve for the next nearly three hours. A road-trip
wonderment about young people living on the fringes of a vibrant,
troubled America, American Honey hums with an ecstatic feeling
of liberation, while showing the messy, upsetting stuff too. Arnold,
working with cinematographer Robbie Ryan, creates
exquisite pictures of both glory and rot, Plains states teeming with
life even as economic despair seizes and strangles. Newcomer Sasha Lane
makes a big splash as the film’s soulful, reckless lead, standing out
among a lively cast of mostly non-professional actors. The two pros in
the film are Shia LaBeouf, doing a dangerous but undeniably alluring swagger, and Riley Keough,
who nearly glides off with the movie as a den mother/pimp. Arnold’s
film is loose and freewheeling, a sensory experience that murmurs and
yells with a beguiling, if occasionally fanciful, sociology. The sublime
car-bound sequence featuring the title song might be my favorite single
scene of the year. Much like the film that houses it, that arresting
scene is a sweet and stirring and unexpected paean to the wildness and
impermanence of forgotten youth.
4. Things to Come
I adore Mia Hansen-Løve’s
movies. They’re so observant and alert, speaking volumes as they unfold
with fluid, rambling ease. Her talents are on immaculate display in Things to Come, a study of aging and womanhood and intellect and politics and, really, what the hell, all of life. Isabelle Huppert changes gears from her scalding work in this year’s Elle
to play a jilted academic charting a new and independent path for
herself. Huppert's still got her wonderfully prickly edges, but there's a
pragmatic and earthy kindness at work here too. There's not a ton of
plot in Hansen-Løve’s film, but it nonetheless encompasses a vast array
of themes and ideas—particularly about the mutability of our designs for
living—that still resonate months after seeing it. Plus there's a
really great cat. With Things to Come, Hansen-Løve asserts
herself as one of the sharpest, most assured filmmakers working today.
And Huppert? Well, she once again proves what we already knew: she’s nonpareil.
3. Fire at Sea
Gianfranco Rosi’s
stunning documentary highlights an international crisis in instructive
and urgent ways, but it is never pedantic. Instead, it’s one of the most
artfully made films of the year—a somber and meditative look at the
Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, home to some hardscrabble Italians
and, increasingly, scores of refugees fleeing war and other horrors in
North Africa and the Middle East. Rosi’s watchful and sympathetic camera
zooms in close to tell us something expansive, documenting a local
Lampedusan family, the rescuers who respond to distress calls from
sinking ships filled with asylum seekers, and the refugees themselves.
It's a mosaic of lives that describes both our interconnectedness and
the distances between us. On a technical level, Fire at Sea is a
work of true beauty, but it does not preen at the expense of its
subjects. Rosi, who was born in Eritrea, shows only intelligence and
compassion, doing the very important work of shedding light on what is,
for many of us living comfortably across the Atlantic, a remote
catastrophe only briefly heard about on the news. In its calm and
probing way, Fire at Sea demands attention and action.
2. Moonlight
What is there to say about Barry Jenkins’s
luminous poem of a film that hasn’t already been said? It’s a dream to
look at, awash in lovely and mournful hues, shot with a sad and
seductive immediacy. It’s tremendously acted, by the three young men
playing the film’s hero and by the actors playing the flawed adults in
his orbit. And there’s the importance of its story, which helps expand
notions of black cinema and gay cinema and the intersectionality between
them, right at a time when we so desperately need these stories told.
It’s a wonder of a film, heaven-sent. But it is also real and tangible,
something of potent texture and feeling that demystifies and enlightens.
Hopefully the sociopolitical importance of Moonlight will not
overshadow what a fine and gripping piece of filmmaking it is. Jenkins
is a major talent who has done something remarkable.
1. The Meddler
Susan Sarandon
may be something of a political pariah at the moment, but in my opinion
there’s no denying that she gave the performance of the year in
writer-director Lorene Scafaria’s just-about-perfect
film. She plays Marnie Minervini, the meddling mother of the film’s
title, with such specificity and detail—funny, poignant, frustrating
detail—that watching her is almost surreal. When was the last time
Sarandon was given enough room to be this good? But The Meddler
is not simply a vehicle for Sarandon’s breathtaking work. Scafaria’s
film is expertly made, with exacting, credible writing and soft
stylistic flair. (The rest of the cast is great too, including Rose Byrne’s depressed daughter and J.K. Simmons’s
sensitive love interest.) The film is partly about grief—the everyday
experience of mourning a loss and trying to move on with positivity and
optimism—and Scafaria mines many understated insights from her subject.
No, The Meddler is not the most audacious or revolutionary film of the year. (That would be The Shallows.) But at the end of a dark and distressing year, with an uncertain future grimly looming before us, I’d take The Meddler—with
its outstanding central performance and gleaming, heartening wit—over
anything else in 2016. It just is, quite simply, my favorite.
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