Despite a mostly dreadful summer for big-budget blockbusters, 2016 proved to be a strong year at the cinema. Far away from CGI-fests, actresses over 60 had a fantastic year, headlining four of the below 20 films. Exceptional talents like Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) and Anna Rose Holmer (The Fits) broke out as exciting filmmakers, intermittent masters like Kenneth Lonergan (Manchester By the Sea) and Paul Verhoeven (Elle) reemerged to great success, and productive stalwarts Richard Linklater (Everybody Wants Some!!), Park Chan-wook (The Handmaiden), and Martin Scorsese (Silence) stuck to what they're great at, namely the casual, the weird, and the grueling. Who needs $200 million cash sucks when Robert Eggers (The Witch) can transport the viewer hundreds of years in the past for a measly $3 million? For those that know where to look, the state of cinema is strong.
20 | Hello, My Name is Doris Sally Field shines in this charming romance that recasts the millenial dorky type (think Greta Gerwig) as an eccentric older woman whose knitting hobby, thrift store shopping, and specific style has come all the way back into fashion. Michael Showalter's film delights all the way through, staying light while relying on Field's more-than-capable chops to nail the heavier scenes. |
Silence Martin Scorsese's long gestating religious epic has something for the lapsed Catholic susceptible to long-ignored ritual (me) and the anti-Catholic disgusted with the church's arrogant legacy (also me). Adapted from Shusaku Endo's novel, Scorsese and co-writer Jay Cocks get a little repetitive in the misery inflicted upon the illegal Japanese Christians and their Portuguese missionaries, but the renowned director, always one to interrogate his heritage, has made an achingly passionate film about faith and martyrdom. | 19 |
18 | Jackie Natalie Portman breathes graceful life into the iconic first lady in Pablo Larrain's Jackie. Taking place shortly after JFK's assassination, Larrain jumps back and forth among Jackie's most famous moments and private moments when she reveals herself to be far more than a hostess. Gifted with the art of public manipulation, Larrain makes the case for Jackie being solely responsible for the Kennedy family legacy, and Portman makes her case as one of the best actors working today. |
Popstar: Never Stop Never Stoppin' The Lonely Island comedy musical trio of Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer have made a modern-day Spinal Tap with the tale of the Style Boyz and Connor4Real. This faintly autobiographical tale of childhood friends broken apart by the success of their most charismatic member grasps the absurdity of pop music and turns the dial to 11. With a genuinely catchy soundtrack, over-earnest talking heads, and a script with the joke density of a Tina Fey sitcom, the uproarious Popstar, unlike the Mona Lisa, is not an overrated piece of shit. | 17 |
16 | Captain America: Civil War The Marvel Cinematic Universe is turning back to its origins in some arenas, with a handful of origin stories on its horizon. This is made more disappointing by the cumulative power of Civil War, in which a dozen superheroes face off against each other. The best example yet of the MCU working like a TV series, Civil War layers in the long-term ramifications of their antics while blowing apart old relationships. At the center is Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) desperately trying to redeem the man (Sebastian Stan) who likely saved his life, successfully uniting the epic with the personal. |
Louder Than Bombs An intimate family drama about a father and his two sons trying to reconcile their mother's death, Joachim Trier's finely tuned film is packed with fully sketched characters. Gabriel Byrne gives his best performance since In Treatment, Isabelle Huppert is perfect as the mother, and Devin Druid is painfully real as the sullen baby of the family. Inventively filmed with flashbacks, dream sequences, and ethereal montages, Trier's film cuts deep. | 15 |
14 | Being 17 Half coming of age film and half gay romance, Andres Techine's film works best as a plaintive depiction of an adopted boy trying to find a place where his outsider status isn't so pronounced. A star-making turn for Cornetin Fila as an Algerian- French farm boy unable to voice his isolation and self-hatred to anyone rests at the center of Being 17. He and Kacey Mottet Klein (who's graduated from an expressive and mature child actor to an expressive and mature adult actor) circle each other like angry bears whose first impulse is bullying and violence instead of honesty. |
Things to Come Mia Hansen-Love switches from making films about young people to following a middle-aged woman through a rough period in her life, and the result is far more impressive than her usual output. Things to Come gives Isabelle Huppert the opportunity to play a myriad of emotions as she reckons with a divorce. Hansen-Love allows her film to accumulate a whole life's details, culminating in a picturesque and wholly earned final scene of familial warmth that would be worthy of whatever the French equivalent of Americana is. | 13 |
12 | The Meddler Another showcase for a middle-aged actress, Susan Sarandon is a ball of unrepressed energy in Lorene Scafaria's The Meddler. Starting with stereotypes of the, um, meddling mother and her uptight professional daughter (Rose Byrne), Scafaria breaks the expected down until the viewer is watching real people. Sarandon's character is throwing herself into a new life after her husband's death, staying too busy to grieve. Ostensibly a fluffy comedy that becomes an intimate character study, Sarandon shines as a charming woman too manic to give in to depression |
Hidden Figures An enragingly undertold story gets its due in Ted Melfi's Hidden Figures, an old-fashioned crowd pleaser that benefits from maximal flair and minimal corn. The central three black women, integral players at NASA during the space race, managed to thrive beneath the strictures of segregation, bumping into artificial ceilings both formal and informal. Taraji P. Henson leads in the workplace and at home, where she has a tender romance with Mahershala Ali, and is deeply affecting in both. Deserving of its commercial and critical success, Hidden Figures is a welcome throwback to four quadrant hits. | 11 |
10 | I Am Not Your Negro Thorough and indicting, Raoul Peck's documentary blends the words of James Baldwin with the imagery of hundreds of years of American racial injustice. Adapted from one of Baldwin's unfinished novels about the slayings of Medger Evers, Malcolm X, and MLK, Peck blends what Baldwin, who had a personal relationship with all these men, lost with what humanity lost, or maybe didn't deserve in the first place. No dog whistles here, just average citizens standing around in public, carrying signs advocating for a racial holocaust, or out for a Sunday picnic by the body of a lynched black man. |
The Handmaiden Any film by Korean director and out-there genius Park Chan-wook is occasion for celebration, and The Handmaiden is no exception. Simultaneously a psychosexual mindfuck and a heist film, the acts of Park's latest work as a retelling of the same story from different perspectives, as all principals try to get the inheritance of a Japanese heiress. Allegiances shift, masks fall off, and true villains are revealed. Gorgeous to look at, The Handmaiden is an S&M costume drama of unrestrained daring that also manages to be Park's most wholesome romance, not exactly a high bar to climb after Oldboy. | 9 |
8 | The Witch Spoken in the vernacular and beliefs of Puritan New England, Robert Eggers' immersive, chilling debut stuns with its commitment to detail. Taking his characters' fears at face value, Eggers turns their nightmares into reality, crafting a malevolent wilderness of rabbits who stare and goats who gore. Behind it all is Satan himself, working through his feminine adherents. Subtly feminist in the only way a 17th century woman could be, The Witch haunts with its imagery, working as much as an anthropological document as a horror flick. |
Elle Paul Verhoeven's most talked about film in decades shows that the mind behind Robocop and Starship Troopers has lost none of its transgressive instincts. In Elle, Isabelle Huppert completes her phenomenal year as the titular character. Raped by an intruder in the opening frames, she goes about her business after its over, leaving the viewer to puzzle at her intentions. Huppert and Verhoeven craft an enigmatic character of cutting wit and internalized guilt increasingly annoyed at being stuck in a world of emotionally fragile men. | 7 |
6 | Kubo and the Two Strings Laika chief Travis Knight steps behind the camera for the first time in Kubo and the Two Strings, and the boss has some chops. The most action-oriented of Laika's affecting stop-motion animated films yet, Kubo is a marvel to look at from its opening frames. The technical achievement cloaks what begins as a straightforward fetch quest, but the film slowly morphs into a transfixing meditation on legacy and memory. |
The Fits Anna Rose Holmer's 72-minute debut barely has time for a story, but The Fits is more about metaphor than plot. Ostensibly about an outbreak of seizures in a rec center, beneath what miniscule incident there is rests an allegory for rites of passage and finding one's people. Royalty Hightower's Toni starts the film as the only girl in a boxing gym, and finds herself pulled into the dance troupe across the hall. As she merges her worlds, her morose nature gives way to an irrepressible and infectious enthusiasm. When coupled with the year's best score, The Fits emerges as the most entrancing film of the year. | 5 |
4 | Everybody Wants Some!! The exclamation points in this film's title are as dramatic as Richard Linklater's latest masterpiece gets. A hang-out comedy about 1980's college baseball players a few days before school starts, Linklater is dialed into the subculture of hypercompetitive, but fundamentally good-natured, young men, having been a college athlete himself. As the newly arrived freshmen attempt to navigate this new environment, the wily upperclassmen school them in pranks, bars, and girls. Never as simple as a bundle of types, and lacking a mean-spirited bone in its body, this tissue-thin film is secretly made of steel, resilient in its approach to the beauty of the everyday that Linklater seems to now be exclusively focusing on. |
Moonlight The story of fifteen years of a life, Moonlight stuffs multitudes into its runtime. The tale of Chiron as a child, a teenager, and an adult dwells on manhood, affection, loneliness, and betrayal before finding something like hope by its end. Mahershala Ali and Andre Holland are superb as two pivotal figures in Chiron's life, and the cinematography by James Laxton is doing incredible things with light. Director Barry Jenkins lovingly crafts scene after scene of tender empathy for characters who are not accustomed to expressing themselves. | 3 |
2 | Manchester By the Sea The greatest accomplishment in Kenneth Lonergan's masterpiece is that he finds ways to make it funny. In this devastating, raw film about deadening loss and regret and grief, Lonergan remembers what the best TV dramas remember, which is that life is funny and therefore representations of it should be as well. The Manchester By the Sea viewer is taken on a roller coaster by Lonergan, first traveling down into the blackest of scenarios and then rising out of them with a solid gag that makes this nigh-unrecommendable film significantly more palatable. Casey Affleck fulfills the potential demonstrated by his work in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford with an exacting performance, holding every emotion of his wrung-out character in check, lest the entire dam break loose. Manchester By the Sea is a film worthy of his stellar achievement in making the small look huge. |
The Lobster The best film of the year doesn't have the truth of Manchester By the Sea or the beauty of Moonlight, but it engendered my favorite response to movies; joy. Joy at finding out where director Yorgos Lanthimos would take his romantic dystopia next, joy after taking in another immaculately crafted scene, joy in watching such a singular mind spin a tale of revolution and counter-revolution. The world of The Lobster dictates that all adults must be paired off or be turned into animals, while the opponents to the established order, hiding in the woods, demand platonic relationships only. Evenly split between the two worlds, protagonist Colin Farrell finds he can't fit in anywhere, lamenting his inability to find a mate in the lawful world and stop himself from falling in love in the outlaw world. So many wrinkles are included in that structure that anthologies would be necessary to fully explore everything, anthologies I would happily devour if only to spend more time with the best film in years. | 1 |