We asked our
contributors to pick their favorite films and performances of the year to date.
Here's how they responded.
SIMON ABRAMS
This year has thus far been pretty terrific. I highly
recommend "April and the
Extraordinary World," a thoroughly winning animated fantasy based on
French illustrator Jacque Tardi's graphic novel. And "The Final Master," dialogue-centric martial arts movie
by the tremendous Chinese filmmaker Xu Haofeng ("The Sword Identity,"
"Judge Archer"). And gosh, "Louder
Than Bombs," a fantastic domestic melodrama (starring Gabriel Byrne,
Jesse Eisenberg, and Isabelle Huppert) about trying to protect people who
refuse to accept it. Tom Tykwer's adaptation of Dave Eggers's
not-quite-science-fiction story "Hologram
for the King" is pretty decent. The Coen brothers' star-studded
Hollywood satire "Hail,
Caesar!" is hysterical, light, and so well put together. And both of
Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul's 2016 releases—"Cemetery of Splendour" and "Mekong Hotel"—are amazing, surreal meditations on ... you
know what, just see those two, they're impossible to reduce to a couple of sentences. And then see "My Golden Days," "The Witch," "The
Mermaid" and "Eisenstein in Guanajuato" too. Also "My Big
Night." And "Kill Zone 2." Don't forget "Triple Nine."
I could go on.
NICK ALLEN
I've seen two four-star quality films in 2016: Jeremy
Saulnier's precise, punk rock mad house "Green
Room," which I felt was going to give me a heart attack even just with its
dialogue between a terrified Anton Yelchin and a dominating Patrick Stewart;
Frida and Lasse Barkfors' "Pervert
Park," which I saw originally at Sundance 2015, but was not wholly amazed
by its presentation of a community of rehabilitating convicted sex offenders
until I reviewed it last month. Both of the films were able to place me square
in the middle of intense personal experiences, fully crafted by wildly
different visions and narrative methods with the same degree of impact even
days later. They're both head-first filmmaking at its best.
In my eyes, it's been a far stronger year for documentaries
than narratives. "Mavis!" "A Beautiful
Planet," and "Trapped" were all
3-1/2 star films that brought a great amount of perceptive and awe to their
various subjects, the latter film by Dawn Porter, about dwindling abortion
clinics in America, having an especially must-see urgency.
With Sundance 2016 in my rear view mirror, I can also say
that the film year is just getting started, with a few more must-see titles to
be released: "Wiener-Dog," "Hunt for the Wilderpeople," "Southside
with You" and "Spa Night." I can't wait to see whether the rest of the
world agrees with me that these are incredible films, that whether for causes
of full entertainment or fascinating perspective, the world needs.
ANGELICA JADE BASTIEN
On Twitter a
few weeks ago, director Amma Assante ("Belle") posed an uncomfortable yet
necessary question, "Is a WOC even "allowed" to be named an ‘auteur'?"
With "Lemonade,"
Beyonce proves the ways a star and a black woman can synthesize her own image
as an auteur. The 100 minute film is at once a moving portrait of matriarchal
inheritance, a political statement on the status of (southern) black women in
American culture, and masterpiece. It
does what every great film should: it gets under your skin, challenges preconceptions,
and fully entertains.
With segments directed by powerhouses like Khalil Joseph and
longtime Beyonce collaborator Melina Matsoukas, the poetry of Warsan Shire that
acts as connective tissue, surprising musical guests including Jack White—Beyonce
proves she's able to shepherd a project of immense scope and audaciousness in
her image.
Her performance uses her impressive physicality to show vulnerability,
anger, and transcendence.
"Lemonade" exists within two important cinematic traditions.
It's another film in the canon of black female filmmakers like "Daughters of
the Dust" and "Eve's Bayou." It's also a sly update of the women's pictures
genre that made auteurs out of actresses like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.
The occult, a powerful emotional arc, lush imagery and the joy that black women
find in communion with each other is the engine for "Lemonade." But more than
that the film is a lyrical, baroque, blistering tone poem that moved me in ways
nothing has come close to this year.
DANNY BOWES
All too often "politically incorrect" is used as a
deflection against bigotry of some sort or other. The term applies not only
benignly to writer/director Shane Black but as a badge of pride. "The Nice Guys" is a calmer Black than his rudest, though still
plenty rough around the edges, delightful in its misbehavior, and just the kind
of meta-neo-screwball-noir that no one else but Black even dares attempt,
let alone master. It's the best thing Ryan Gosling's done in years, and he and
Russell Crowe work beautifully together. I'd watch a dozen more movies with the
two of them running around breaking things while Gosling's daughter (Angourie
Rice, every bit as good as the leads) plays Penny to their collective Inspector
Gadget. "The Nice Guys" was basically custom-made for me, and I certainly
appreciate the effort.
ERIK CHILDRESS
Those who accuse critics of not going to the movies just for
fun may be put back by just how many of them name John Carney's "Sing Street" amongst their favorites
of 2016. The filmmaker's fascination with telling love stories through the
creation of a virtual album is more than just "his thing." The
passage of time that can be marked through our own experience with music (or
film for that matter) can trace our own identities and transform us from the
young minds in step with a snappy beat to adults who truly understand the
lyrics. "Sing Street" is very much like that; a worthy companion piece to
Cameron Crowe's "Almost Famous" in which music becomes an expression of what we
do not always understand but in which we find the hope to do someday. It is a
majestic and funny coming-of-age story complimented with a soundtrack that
demands not only our tapping and clapping but our attention to the part of the
human soul where the words accompanying the beats originated.
OLIVIA COLLETTE
The only film I want to talk about is "The Witch." Not just here and now, but possibly for the rest of
2016. For one, I can't help but admire the incredible risk the filmmakers took
in telling this story with so much restraint. It's the tiny cast of actors; the
stark, pervasively grey landscape and the characters' equally bland earth-tone
garments; Black Philip's whisper; and how the tension gradually closes in on
Thomasin. Of course, that leaves room for the film to blow up in other areas,
especially with the jarring, dissonant soundtrack; Caleb's dramatic death;
every witch scene, and the very witchy ending.
A bit like "The Babadook," "The Witch" is a very female
story about the terrors that are not innate to that gender, but that are
certainly imposed upon it. Thomasin goes from being an innocent child to a
temptress and destroyer, even if she's blameless to the very end. Robert Eggers
really understands the structure of folktales, which gives him the prowess to
deconstruct them. He knows that at their core, they were stories told by and to
women, with their concerns and issues woven into each tale's symbol system.
That it comes across without feeling overbearing makes "The Witch" a great,
entertaining, terrifying movie. If this is how horror works now, more please!
MARK DUJSIK
It only took 25 years (and was worth the wait), but Isao
Takahata's beautifully animated "Only
Yesterday," the empathetic story of a young woman trying to reconcile
the lessons of her childhood with the reality of adulthood, finally received a
theatrical release in the United States. Two Hollywood sequels, "The Conjuring 2" and "Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising,"
surprised me greatly, with the former once again displaying the craftsmanship
necessary to produce a really good scare and with the latter examining double
standards and gender politics without losing its ribald sense of humor. "Weiner," a documentary
about the disgraced politician by Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg, offers an
inside look at a campaign, a man, and, maybe, a marriage falling apart, and
Karyn Kusama's "The
Invitation" explores the effects of grief as a way to transcend the
film's mystery (and, later, thriller) premise. Grief is also at the heart of "Louder Than Bombs," Joachim
Trier's study of a father and two sons attempting to piece together meaning
from a jumble of incomplete memories.
"Krisha,"
the debut feature from writer/director Trey Edward Shults, is a deeply felt
look at a woman struggling with her demons, as well as with the consequences of
them, at a Thanksgiving family get-together. The computer-animated "Zootopia" created a
convincing, thoughtful allegory of social politics through a world populated by
animals (The controversy surrounding the film seems odd to me: Since when did
we start expecting a direct, one-to-one relationship between fable and
reality?). The ferocious, relentless "Green
Room" confirms that writer/director Jeremy Saulnier is in the process
of becoming one of our more effective and considerate filmmakers when it comes
to exploring the repercussions of violence, and "Embrace of the Serpent" plays a haunting game of
call-and-answer, as two scientists meet a native shaman of the Amazon at two
different periods of industry and imperialism. The highlight of the year,
though, is John Carney's "Sing
Street," an equally delightful and insightful look at the pangs and
limitless possibilities of adolescence. The film may only be about "this
kid, a girl, and the future," but that's just a simple way of saying it's
about everything that matters.
STEVEN ERICKSON
My two favorite 2016 releases, Chantal Akerman's "No Home Movie" and Wang
Bing's "'Til Madness Do Us
Part," both enter the void. (The Wang film, made in 2013, opens in New
York on the 8th.) Akerman documented the last few years of her mother's life.
It's not apparent except in retrospect, but she also chronicled the last few
years of her own life; just as "No Home Movie" made the festival
circuit last year, she committed suicide. The images of deserts and empty rooms
that fill her film taken on a deeper, more metaphorical significance. But
Akerman was an artist driven to wanderlust; "'Til Madness Do Us Part"
depicts the patients involuntarily committed to a Chinese mental hospital. Wang
gives the spectator very little context; his closing credit crawl would be a
helpful introduction, but he clearly doesn't want to make things easy. The
hospital looks worse than many prisons; it seems to combine the old Soviet
system of incarcerating the politically unruly in mental institutions with the
contemporary American tendency to allow the mentally ill to commit petty crimes
instead of treating them before their problems become more serious. Yet there's
more hope and resistance in Wang's film than you'll find in "No Home
Movie," taking the surprising form of a pervasive homoeroticism. It ends
with a male couple holding hands. In the inhuman world of "'Til Madness Do
Us Part," that's the closest anyone comes to love.
MATT FAGERHOLM
The best film I've seen so far this year is "Sonita," Rokhsareh
Ghaemmaghami's exhilarating documentary about an Afghan rapper who rebels
against the forced marriages imposed by her culture. My second favorite happens
to be another film about the absurdity of conformity, Yorgos Lanthimos'
brilliant satire, "The
Lobster." Following that would be Tobias Lindholm's shattering study
of moral ambiguity in our modern era, "A
War," which was already nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar but
didn't receive a U.S. theatrical release until this past February. Next is the
spellbinding thriller, "The
Blackcoat's Daughter" (out July 15th), which marks the directorial
debut of Osgood Perkins (son of Anthony) and features a performance from
Kiernan Shipka that is guaranteed to haunt your nightmares. Rounding out my top
five would be "Sunset Song,"
Terence Davies' staggeringly beautiful romantic drama that is sorely deserving
of a Best Cinematography nod during next year's awards season.
Though 2016 doesn't have quite as many highlights as 2015
did during its first six months, there are still enough great films to fill a
top ten list. Number six is Nanfu Wang's courageous documentary, "Hooligan Sparrow," the very
existence of which is miraculous, considering how the footage was in danger of
being confiscated. Byron Howard, Rich Moore and Jared Bush's "Zootopia" also deserves
special mention considering that it's my favorite non-Pixar animated feature
from Disney in two decades, a refreshing antidote to the inflammatory rhetoric
of our current election. I also loved Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow's "De Palma," which has already
motivated me to revisit several of the director's classics. Dylan Gelula
delivers another of the year's finest performances in Karem Sanga's sublime
coming-of-age film, "First Girl I
Loved." And last but not least is Robert Eggers' "The Witch," a gloriously atmospheric meditation on the
horrors of repression.
GLENN KENNY
I can't remember a year in which I've seen so many bad
films. There have been good and maybe one or two great films along the way, but
the ratio has been skewed to crud this year in a way that feels unfortunately
unique. It doesn't say good things that two of the best movies released in the
U.S. in 2016 are Japanese animated films made in 1973 and 1991, those being
"Belladonna of Sadness" and "Only Yesterday."
Beyond that, I'm going to keep my powder dry, save for the
observation that, of the maybe two dozen movies rattling around in my notes as
potential best-of-the-year pictures, the only one that even comes within
SWINGING DISTANCE of having anything to do with "mainstream" is
Linklater's "Everybody Wants
Some!!" In the meantime, I recommend "The Fits."
CHRISTY LEMIRE
I'd heard all the buzz but nothing could quite prepare me
for the awesome oddness of Yorgos Lanthimos' "The Lobster"—not even having seen the director's
Oscar-nominated "Dogtooth," which I loved (and which Ignatiy and I
talked about on "Ebert Presents At the Movies..")
"The Lobster" is peculiar and precise—the Greek
filmmaker is a master of tension and tone, a tricky feat to pull off given the
complex subject matter. But because the world he's created is so austere and
detached, it makes the shocking moments pop that much more, often giving the
film a welcome air of absurd humor. "The Lobster" takes place in a
near future where coupling up is a societal mandate, and where singles must
spend 45 days in a hotel adhering to a strict series of rules to find a mate,
or risk being turned into the animal of their choosing. (Colin Farrell's
character says he'd like to be a lobster—hence the title—and his reasoning is
inspired.) But while Lanthimos' film is strange and startling (and definitely
not for everyone), it ends on a note that's surprisingly romantic and even
vaguely hopeful. Farrell is at his most vulnerable here, and he has great
chemistry with Rachel Weisz and Lea Seydoux as the two strong women who help
determine his fate. Give it a try and dig in.
NELL MINOW
When "Everybody Wants
Some!!" was described as "a spiritual sequel to "Dazed and Confused," I was
expecting a endearing mix-tape movie with party scenes and an impeccable cast
of mostly unknowns playing quirky characters. It has all that but it reminded me more of writer/director Richard
Linklater's more existentially ambitious films like "Waking Life" (still my
favorite he's done so far), the "Before" trilogy, and "Boyhood." Though like "Dazed and Confused" it takes its
title from a song that places us immediately in the year (1980) and setting
(weekend before classes start in an unnamed Texas university), "Everybody Wants
Some!!" (two-exclamation points) starts upending our assumptions right from the
beginning, as the central character, starting his freshman year, shows himself
to be self-aware, confident, and knowing right from the start. Wait, what? Aren't all college movies
supposed to be about freshman who have to achieve that over the course of the
film?
Yes, there are a lot of parties and a lot of sex and
drugs. But the women are not objectified
or exploited by the characters or the camera. And I loved the way the guys had
to keep going back to the house to change their clothes before each outing: a
disco, a "kicker" bar, a punk concert, a party given by the drama majors. The
malleability of the various personas they were trying on as they were discovering
what it was like to be on a team where everyone had pretty much been the star
of every team he'd been on through high school was skillfully portrayed. And the exploration of the competitive
tension between wanting to stand out and knowing that the only way to do that is
to work seamlessly with the team was lightly but thoughtfully explored. I loved the discussion of the possibly
imaginary scout for the majors who could be hiding anywhere. And I love the so
crazy-it-just-might-be-true idea that the character played by Wyatt Russell may
be the same breakthrough role that was played by Matthew McConaughey in "Dazed
and Confused."
OMER MOZAFFAR
Best Superhero Film: "Captain
America: Civil War"
Marvel is far ahead of not only DC, but all of the
"brand" industries, including Disney and Pixar in producing socially
conscious, complex films that manage to still satisfy the appetites for
popcorn. They make everyone else look
like dinosaurs trying to make things bigger without making them better.
SHEILA O'MALLEY
There are other films I have loved, and I could write a
dissertation on "The Nice Guys" and why it's one of my favorites—but choose to
focus on three first features and how amazing they are:
Three of the most impressive and memorable films thus far in
2016, "The Witch,"
"Krisha," and "The
Fits," were first features for the directors, Robert Eggers, Trey
Edward Shults, and Anna Rose Holmer, respectively. Each film was low-budget
(bare bones, in some cases), and all are shining examples of how much one can
do if one has a good idea and the courage and know-how to make the vision
become reality. Each film has a careless disregard for preconceived ideas, and
each fearlessly breaks all kinds of rules. The movies are so fearless, in fact,
that they call into question the concept of "rules" in the first
place. Who makes these rules? Why not break them all, and see what happens?
There are horror elements in each film ("Krisha" is one of the
scariest films of the year), but each slips outside the boundaries of the genre
in startling ways (which, not surprisingly, makes them even more frightening.)
It's common to bemoan the blockbuster focus of the industry, the empty
tentpole-films of the summer season, and all the rest. But surrounding the
bread-and-butter franchises is an entire world of singular and strange little
films, personal and uncompromising. These are thrilling films because they stroll into a landscape of accepted clichés
and re-treads and re-boots and unimaginative plot-twists and say, "Nope. I
won't be participating in that. At all. Let me show you something else."
MICHAL OLESZCZYK
Four wildly different movies impressed me most in 2016 thus
far, each offering its audience a different kind of immersive journey. Here
they are, in order of my preference:
Radu Jude's "Aferim!,"
shot in glorious black-and-white CinemaScope, proved to be a sort of
"Two-Lane Blacktop" of 18th century Wallachia, recreating a world of
feudalism, slavery and historical tumult every inch as frightening as "12
Years a Slave" and even more devoid of and discernible rule of law than
"Game of Thrones." The shocking finale, pitting a real-time
castration of a serf against the previous 90-or-so minutes of florid, highly
stylized talk, left me devastated. Among other things, "Aferim!"
sports the funniest and most idiosyncratic dialogue this side of Rian Johnson's
"Brick."
Ilya Naishuller's "Hardcore
Henry" is the cinematic equivalent of a sugar rush: this non-stop
action extravaganza not only gives Sharlto Copley a glorious opportunity to
goof around in dozen different guises, but flaunts the most innovative use of
p.o.v. cinematography since the days of early Brian De Palma (not to mention
"Lady in the Lake," which is quoted directly). The dingy Moscow
underworld setting, filled with icky night clubs, post-industrial wastelands
and deglamourized big-city streets, adds to the overall freshness and makes one
shudder at any thought of a polished, gentrified, NYC-based remake that's bound
to come up sometime soon.
Luca Guadagnino's "A
Bigger Splash" was a surprise, given how much I disliked "I Am
Love". Just like that film, the new one is ritzy, high-end trash—a cheap
paperback bought out of airport boredom—but there's also a remarkable
attentiveness to emotional and physical detail that becomes almost hypnotic.
Not much happens in the film (until everything happens at once), but the
slow-burning quality Guadagnino achieves (backed by some fine, Nicholas
Roeg-inspired editing) is highly immersive and adds an extra luster to Ralph
Fiennes' performance as an annoying prick suddenly revealed as a gentle,
recoiling, desperate lover.
Many people chided "10
Cloverfield Lane" for its abrupt, last-reel gear-switch, but the more
I think about it, the more I like how gutsy it is. John Goodman should scoop a
Kathy Bathes-shaped Oscar for his supreme role as a psychopathic captor (or is
it fatherly caregiver?) to two young people in the middle of nowhere, and few
films in recent memory can boast such skillful use of suspense as this one.
Given who produced it, it's no surprise you can feel like you just binged on a
season of "Lost" as you leave the theater, but still: no movie scared
me this effectively in 2016.
PETER SOBCZYNSKI
Under normal circumstance, I generally do not do mid-year list of
the best movies I have seen so far—it is difficult enough to work up the
traditional year-end list that I am professionally obligated to supply.
Nevertheless, these are the movies that I have seen so far (excluding festival
fare that is not on the release horizon as of yet and presented in the order
that I saw them) that did give me enough pleasure to help forget enduring such
monstrosities as "13 Hours," "Me Before You" and the loathsome "High Rise."
"Monster Hunt"
"Aferim!"
"Mustang"
"Hail, Caesar!"
"The Witch"
"Nina Forever"
"Knight of Cups" (possibly the best of the year-to-date)
"The Trust"
"A Monster with a Thousand Heads"
"Zootopia"
"The Mermaid"
"Everybody Wants Some!!"
"Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words"
"Only Yesterday"
"10 Cloverfield Lane"
"My Golden Days"
"Pee-Wee's Big Holiday"
"Sunset Song"
"Green Room"
"Midnight Special"
"The Measure of a Man"
"Love & Friendship"
"The Meddler"
"Captain America: Civil War"
"April and the Extraordinary World"
"Sing Street"
"The Nice Guys"
"The Fits"
"The Dresser"
"Weiner"
"Tickled"
"De Palma"
In other words, the first half of 2016 hasn't been that bad and
besides, I also got to see the majesty that is "Krull" in the glory of 70mm to
boot.
BILL STAMETS
Several of my favorite features screened at the Gene Siskel
Film Center: "Aferim!,"
"Cemetery of Splendour," "The Club," "The Paradise Suite" and "Tale of Tales." Elsewhere, I quite liked watching "Eye in the Sky," "Green Room," "Hail,
Caesar!," "The Lobster" and "The Sky
Trembles and The Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes are Not Brothers."
SCOUT TAFOYA
It's been an almost too sad year already and film has only
been able to provide a brief respite from the terrifying state of affairs in
the US. To every silver lining a cloud. A new Terrence Malick is treated like a
bridge too far from America's preeminent poet laureate of the cinema instead
of the heartbreaking work of art it is. "Cosmos" is released only after its mad
genius creator, Andrzej Żuławski, dies. A new Joachim Trier has Jesse Eisenberg
twitching all over it.
But there's no qualifier needed to discuss a new Robert Greene.
I like Robert personally, which makes it all the easier to talk about why his movies
are essential and fascinating, each more beguiling than the last. Robert is
trying to do something in nonfiction filmmaking that the form somehow didn't
have done to itself in the ‘70s. He's trying to be its Ingmar Bergman, its Alejandro
Jodorowsky, its Pasolini. And he's succeeding. He's delivering nonfiction from
the suffocating, imaginary constraints in which it's lately clothed itself (try
to remember a single exciting image or idea from the last ten highly lauded
documentaries you've seen) and grammatically re-introducing the world to the
works of Chris Marker, William Klein and Peter Watkins. "Kate Plays Christine," which has played a number of festivals already
and will play still more before hopefully enjoying a blockbuster arthouse run,
is a fuming consideration of modern performance and what it means to look at
women with a screen protecting us from their humanity. The ever game and always
enthralling Kate Lyn Sheil slowly goes off the rails while preparing to
undertake the role of Christine Chubbuck, the Floridian journalist who shot
herself on live TV. Greene doles out just enough info for you to wonder how
much of her work is performance or a performance of a performance. The grey
area between real and unreal is Greene's home and everyone owes it to
themselves to step inside. He's doing more for nonfiction than any other
American filmmaker.
BRIAN TALLERICO
First and foremost, my 2016 has been a little unusual in
that personal reasons have forced me to miss a large number of the theatrical
releases (including new films by Terence Malick and Richard Linklater that I
plan to catch up on this month when they hit Blu-ray) and several of the best
movies I've seen at fests won't be released until the fall, including Kenneth
Lonergan's stunning "Manchester by the Sea," Robert Greene's masterful "Kate
Plays Christine" and Kelly Reichardt's excellent "Certain Women." As for what
I've seen that's been released or is about to be, I hold new films by Joachim
Trier ("Louder Than Bombs"), Robert Eggers ("The Witch"), Terence Davies
("Sunset Song"), John Carney ("Sing Street"), and the upcoming work by Ira
Sachs ("Little Men") and The Daniels ("Swiss Army Man") in high esteem, but my
top films of 2016 are both examples of talented filmmakers using genre in ways
that both feel reminiscent of the auteurs who influenced them and distinctly
their own.
Take Jeremy Saulnier's searing "Green Room," which combines elements of John Carpenter and Michael
Mann into a perfectly calibrated thrill ride in which violence has a visceral,
notable impact and the way it's used speaks volumes about the iterations of
manhood the film presents. Unlike so many modern action movies, every time violence
erupts in Saulnier's film, the film's trajectory changes. Saulnier is such a
confident director, always staying one step ahead of us and forcing us to
follow him around every bloody corner.
Filmmakers don't get much more confident than Jeff Nichols,
whose "Midnight Special" is still my
favorite film of the year to date (excluding Sundance). On its surface,
Nichols' film is a traditional sci-fi adventure in the vein of John Carpenter's
"Starman." Underneath that surface resonates a study of the bond between father
and son, as well as an examination of faith in the modern age. It's
unforgettable.
Given it only played theatrically at film festivals and most
people will see it on TV, I'm not counting ESPN's "OJ: Made in America," but it's an essential, unbelievable
masterpiece of comprehensive, documentary filmmaking. And if I counted in on a
list for the year in film, it would be #1.
Finally, I find that end-of-year reports often miss great
performances from earlier in the year, so please don't forget the following five acting turns in
six months:
Royalty
Hightower in "The Fits"
Ewan
McGregor in "Last Days in the Desert"
Jack Reynor
in "Sing Street"
Susan
Sarandon in "The Meddler"
Mary
Elizabeth Winstead in "10 Cloverfield Lane"
ALISSA WILKINSON
This year
yielded up an embarrassment of riches on the festival circuit, many of which
will be out later this year. But some of my best in-theater experiences so far
have also been the most eclectic: tense horror in "The Witch" and "Under the
Shadow"; high romantic farce in "The
Lobster" and "Love & Friendship";
deeply moving depictions of girlhood in "The
Fits" and "Sunset Song"; the
wonder and sadness of "Midnight Special";
the hysterical, good-hearted "Hunt for
the Wilderpeople"; and probably the king of them all so far, "Hail, Caesar!" What a time to be
watching movies.
SUSAN WLOSZCZYNA
"A Bigger Splash" — A heaping helping
of sun-drenched surf, steamy sex and sinister mind games Sicilian-style,
performed by a fabulously in-tune and often nude foursome consisting of Tilda
Swinton, Ralph Fiennes, Dakota Johnson and Matthias Schoenaerts—who has
rapidly replaced Michael Fassbender as my favorite male import most likely to
disrobe.
"Sing Street" — As someone who would
gladly watch "The Commitments," "Fame" and "School of Rock" on a continuous
loop and nothing else for a week, this Emerald Isle garage-band fantasia was
like a feast of musical sugar snacks for the
ears.
"Hello, My Name is Doris" — I didn't
just like Sally Field's pixilated and perceptive performance as a 60-ish
marginalized data-entry drone with a taste for vintage wear who crushes on a
much younger co-worker. I loved it to the moon and back with a side trip to
Mars.
"Zootopia" — A Disney toon-noir stuffed
with fur-bearing shenanigans that turns a honey of a bunny into a cop and takes
a stand against stereotyping and intolerance? What's not to like? And whoever
decided that the sloths should run the city's Department of Motor Vehicles
better have gotten a raise.
"Maggie's Plan" — After a recent weepy
streak starring in "Still Alice" and
"Freeheld," Julianne Moore reminds us how fiendishly funny she can be as a
frosty Danish professor who masticates her words with an oddly clipped accent
that out-Shtupps Madeline Kahn's
Lili in "Blazing Saddles."
"Hail, Caesar!" — Speaking of Mel
Brooks, I spent much of this Coen brothers' sour love letter to ‘50s Hollywood
wishing that moviedom's spoof-meister general had taken a crack at it instead.
But much was forgiven after Alden Ehrenreich's darling silver-screen cowpoke
moseyed into view and twirled that strand of spaghetti around like a lariat.
ALAN ZILBERMAN
Two of my
favorite 2016 films are in the same approximate genre, yet they could not be
more different. "The Witch" is an
allegorical spine-chiller that's set in the colonial United States. "Green Room" is a bloody
horror-thriller that's set in a grimy punk rock club. The former has colorful,
mannered dialogue and a classical-tinged music score, while the latter is
filled with profanity and a performance of Dead Kennedys "Nazi Punks F**k Off."
These films may have different goals and styles, but they share some qualities,
too. Directed by Robert Eggers and Jeremy Saulnier, respectively, they unfold
with pitiless logic and an attention to character. They tap into base fears,
creating a specific sense of dread. Neither Eggers nor Saulnier play by the
usual rules of their preferred genre, so their work is both personal and
refreshing.
My favorite
performance of 2016 belongs to Tom Bennett, who played Sir James Martin in Whit
Stillman's "Love and Friendship." Martin is nothing short of an amazing moron,
the sort of dolt who says plainly obvious things with feigned curiosity and
depth. Other characters stand there and take his absurd observations—this is
Victorian England, and decorum gives them no other recourse—so Martin will
never be disabused of his ignorance. Bennett's performance is an absolute joy
since he never, not once lets us think he's in on the joke. I can't decide
whether I'd ever want to meet someone like Martin at a party. Maybe I could ask
him questions, just so I could marvel at his answers, but then again he might
make me want to shatter my ear drums. That speaks to Bennett's unparalleled
performance, and Stillman's willingness to let him go for broke. A man like
Martin could end up on the streets or running the country, and neither outcome
would surprise me.
