The below performances, 5 male, 5 female, and one actor of the year, have not been nominated for an Academy award, despite all being quite deserving. Some performances that have (Mahershala Ali in Moonlight, Natalie Portman in Jackie) would certainly have made this list, but it's better to shine the low-wattage light of the MMC onto less celebrated films.
By Jon Kissel
The below performances, 5 male, 5 female, and one actor of the year, have not been nominated for an Academy award, despite all being quite deserving. Some performances that have (Mahershala Ali in Moonlight, Natalie Portman in Jackie) would certainly have made this list, but it's better to shine the low-wattage light of the MMC onto less celebrated films.
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By Jon Kissel
The following are unranked and in alphabetical order. When the actual scene can be found online, links are provided. Some spoilers are possible but if you're the kind of person who cares about that, you're being silly. Just kidding, we love you. By Jon Kissel
The best of TV in 2016 had plenty of room for new shows. Several of TV's best dramas either ended their run (Hannibal, Mad Men, Justified) in 2015 or didn't air new episodes in 2016 (Fargo, The Knick). However, with no shortage of new series on new networks/websites that are increasingly willing to give carte blanche to previously underserved kinds of showrunners, there will always be plenty of content to take the place of what leaves the airwaves. For those who knew where to look, 2016 keeps up the pace of greatness that has characterized the medium for years. TV unquestionably qualifies as the vast wasteland, but in between those vast expanses of ghost hunting nonsense and reality TV dreck, the Golden Age continues to thrive. American auteur Richard Linklater has made himself into a great chronicler of the ordinary. Upon the uninitiated's hearing such a description, they might think they're in for the kind of dreary, plotless slog that gives indie movies a bad name. However, while Linklater's films are often plotless, they are also dense with intelligent dialogue, well-observed with the strange byways of life, and often profound in how he's able to translate the mundane into the transcendent. What are his beatific Before films other than two people talking to each other, but that kind of reductive classification is insulting to the layered and knowing portrayal of a relationship contained therein. Nothing happens in Boyhood, but there are few depictions of memory and the passage of time that can rival the powerful experience of watching it. In Everybody Wants Some!!, Linklater's latest, he's superficially at his most frivolous as he follows a team of college baseball players before the start of a new school year. Even here, in a film dedicated to finding something true in the mischiefs, rivalries, and grab-assery of care-free jocks, Linklater is true to form, making yet another irrepressibly alive, effortlessly entertaining masterpiece.
Stop-motion studio Laika cements their place as one of the top creators of animation with Kubo and the Two Strings, their fourth and most visually impressive film thus far. Though they release at a slower rate than Pixar, their only rival at this point, they have perfected the same universal, all-ages appeal while having a stronger overall batting average. With Kubo, Laika goes for spectacle without sacrificing emotional impact, making this a technical and creative achievement on par with any other 2016 release, animated or otherwise.
Joachim Trier's English-language debut begins with the most elemental of images: a newborn grasping his father's finger. Trier's camera lovingly captures this moment, and then he coldly follows the father out the hall as he runs into an old flame and lies about the reason for his being in the hospital. This is one parental relationship of several in the intimate Louder Than Bombs, all in various states of disrepair. Trier paints an elaborate and painful picture of fraying bonds without resorting to melodrama or histrionics, keeping his film at a level of affecting emotional truth.
Modern Westerns like No Country For Old Men meets a rural, low-key version of Heat in David Mackenzie's Hell or High Water. With its Texas setting and its equal time given to the crooks and the cops that are chasing them, Mackenzie's film, written by the increasingly impressive Taylor Sheridan, is buoyed along its fairly familiar path by a top-notch cast and a resonant backdrop of scheming bankers and post-industrial blight. A perfect fit for 2016, the film gives a voice to those who want to punch the powerful in the nose by any self-destructive means necessary.
Colombian director Ciro Guerra isn't going down a commercial route with his film Embrace of the Serpent. Filmed in black and white with dreamy, intersecting narratives that don't reveal themselves well into the story, Guerra is keeping the casual viewer at arm's length. Any initial wariness should be set aside, because Embrace of the Serpent is a rich, complex, and rewarding film that is absolutely worth enduring its surface-level difficulty.
The films of eccentric visionary Yorgos Lanthimos take universal emotions and then find ways for their characters to go extremes to avoid them. The parents of Dogtooth don't want to fear for their three kids, and are therefore forced to come up with increasingly batty methods to constrain their now adult children's world. In Alps, the relatives of the dead don't want to live in grief, instead going to absurd lengths to keep some version of the departed in their lives. The Lobster, Lanthimos' English language debut, follows the same thematic pattern, except on a grander, societal scale. No one in this civilization wants to feel loneliness, so the whole edifice of the state is built with companionship as its organizing principle. Somehow even more bonkers and intriguing and well-crafted than the perfect Dogtooth, The Lobster is a constant surprise, full of left turns and reversals until the viewer is only left with the surreal genius of Greece's premier auteur.
It's continuously frustrating how some great movies become commercial flops while hacky, recycled movies rake it in. During a summer that saw Angry Birds make it past $100 million, the superb pop satire Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping made less than a measly tenth of that haul. For whatever reason, films featuring the Lonely Island trio (Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer) in front of or behind the camera all seem to struggle or fail to make their budget back, but thankfully, executives keep giving them money. If not for their generosity, the world might never have known Connor4Real (Samberg) and his ouevre of pitch perfect pieces, parodying both the Top 40 playlist and the artists themselves.
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