The year 2016 may have been considered one of the worst years in recent history in terms of politics and celebrity mortality, but it really was one of the best ones for film since 2011, which I consider the 1939 of my generation (2011 had "Take Shelter," "The Tree of Life," "Shame," "Melancholia," "Hugo," and "Drive," but I digress). Now, I pay for all of my films out of pocket so I couldn't watch every movie that came out last year, but I saw enough to list five runners up, a top 10, a worst of the year, and the honorable mention. I count "released in 2016" as movies that got a wide enough release in 2016 for me to see it. So while some films are listed online as having been released in 2015 due to a festival premiere or limited release, some weren't available wide until 2016. So here we go, first, with the honorable mention.
Honorable Mention — THE NEON DEMON
I'd like to think that I would've put "The Neon Demon" in my top 10 of 2016, the newest schlock-as-high-art by Nicolas Winding Refn, but considering I worked on its crew (cough) I decided to leave it out of the running for my official list, in the interest of fairness. But I've seen it several times and it gets better with each viewing, a subversion of fairy tales that wears its appetite for gore and fetishism shamelessly on its sleeve. It's difficult to explain to its haters why I like it (they usually shoot me down because of my supposed bias), but you either roll with its extremism or you repudiate it. I went with it, and I loved it.
Runners Up (in alphabetical order)
DEADPOOL
I really wanted nothing to do with the film — what appeared to me to be a corporate pitch meeting of "THE HANGOVER meets SPIDER-MAN" — but it's actually really witty, really well-directed, and with a heart. A pleasant surprise.
LA LA LAND
Damien Chazelle's follow-up to WHIPLASH is a splashy musical that takes place in the present but harks back to the Cinemascope musicals of post-war America. It's an impressive technical accomplishment, and if you're a romantic like me, it's hard to dislike it.
THE REVENANT
(Remember, this went wide in early January.) Some called it boring, others called it a masterpiece. I thought it was neither, but I appreciated that it was essentially a really expensive art film that a lot of people were seeing. Could anyone have screamed in the cold like Leo DiCaprio? Probably (damn it, he should've gotten the Oscar for THE WOLF OF WALL STREET, not this). But the effect of THE REVENANT was poetic.
THE WITCH
Comparably impressive in terms of direction to LA LA LAND, Robert Eggers weaves a horror tale into his verisimilitude of 17th century New England that evokes Bergman and Kubrick in effectively creepy ways. It's slow, but that's not a bad thing.
ZOOTOPIA
It's the best film about racism, urban sprawl, and drug addiction this year, and it's an animated film for kids. Remarkably designed and with a deft handling of its metaphors, ZOOTOPIA is more than a movie about funny sloths, although that sequence is by far the best in the film.
Top 10 (in order of quality, number 1 being the best)
10. ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY
It's more heartless and disorganized than last year's THE FORCE AWAKENS, but it's a great addition to the STAR WARS universe, adding new layers to the mythology, promoting multi-racial casts in mainstream cinema, and really just being a gripping action film. It'll be remembered as one of the "good prequels."
9. ARRIVAL
As his previous SICARIO and ENEMY showed, Denis Villenueve has proven himself to be a director with one foot planted firmly in two worlds: mainstream cinema and the arthouse. In this story of a linguist trying to communicate with an odd alien race, we explore the fragility of humanity within the constraints of time and the blind faith we have to have in order to keep surviving. Oh yeah, there's also, like, cool aliens and spaceships and stuff.
8. NERUDA
To say the film is not your usual biopic misses the point. The life of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda is used as the backdrop for what is essentially an existential film about identity and what it means to believe in a cause. It's funny, well-acted, and with beautiful cinematography that is sometimes so odd it's disconcerting, this Chilean film is a great one to push you out of your comfort zone.
7. THE LOBSTER
This high-concept European art film takes the one sentence premise and turns it on its head: what if you were forced to find a sexual partner within 30 days or else you'd be turned into an animal? As weird as that sounds, the surrealism gets pushed further. While it's true the second half isn't as compelling as the first, it's still a genuinely weird and unpretentious film that cleverly asks questions about relationships and living in our consumerist society.
6. JULIETA
Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar proves, once again, why he's the king of European cinema. In this tender story of a mother trying to reconnect with her estranged daughter, Almodóvar examines the nature of silence (the working title of the film had to be changed due to Scorsese's SILENCE) and of familial love. It's also designed beautifully, and I wish my apartment looked half as cool as the ones in the film.
5. PATERSON
Adam Driver plays a bus driver named Paterson who lives in Paterson, New Jersey. He writes poetry he doesn't try to publish. His wife has weird hobbies that change daily. He sips beer and eavesdrops on Paterson's fellow residents for story ideas. Leave it to writer/director Jim Jarmusch to make this into an interesting hour and a half.
4. WEINER
The surrealism of American politics is something that not even Salvador Dalí could've dreamed up. With Anthony Weiner allowing a camera crew to continue filming his mayoral race go up in smoke as a second scandal involving dick pics broke, we witness in this documentary a hilarious examination of ethics as well as the greater philosophical meaning of what it means to film and to be filmed in this increasingly camera-obsessed age.
3. MANCHESTER BY THE SEA
Casey Affleck plays a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders but his legs don't have strength to hold it up. He's then forced, with the death of his brother, to figure out what to do with his nephew in this film about loss, grief, and human resilience (or lack thereof). It's simple, it's effective, and it's a Great American Drama, like something out of the '70s. (And I'm calling it now, Lucas Hedges is getting an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.)
2. THE CHILDHOOD OF A LEADER
For a while, this was poised to be my favorite film of the year as I watched it twice in a row on my first run with it and it's stuck with me for months. First-time feature director Brady Corbet (who starred in one of my favorites of 2013, SIMON KILLER) presents a tale about a boy coming of age in post World War I Europe who will eventually become a dictator. Part sociopolitical thesis, part psychological thriller, it's an eerily depressing film considering our current geopolitical circumstances.
1. BACALAUREAT (aka GRADUATION)
Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu also made my favorite film of 2013, BEYOND THE HILLS, and he tops it with GRADUATION. A damn near perfect film about a man trying to do the right thing but without the fortitude to do so and in a system that deliberately tries to suppress the citizenry, GRADUATION is a powerful and engrossing film.
Worst of the Year
GODS OF EGYPT
I was tempted not to name this as the worst of the year because I actually thought it was so bad it was good and funny, but that would be unfair to the mediocre-but-not-terrible BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE. It's hilariously cheesy and bad, with poor acting, sketchy green screen, and awkward attempts at humor. Also, it's 2016 and the Egyptians are played by white people. Just saying.
