2017, The Piece-of-Shit Year You Might Remember From Your Facebook Feed, in Film

Alright, what happened, guys? What happened? We were so excited for 2017. “The only way,” we said, en masse, “is up.” It didn’t go up. What happened?

Anyway the films were pretty good this year, even though half of all films have been cancelled now. Everything you love can only let you down.

Let’s talk about the films I saw this year, in no order. Here’s to 2018. The only way is up!

Get Out

Jordan Peele’s Get Out is an honest-to-God work of genius, an important landmark in 21st-Century pop culture, and a well-deserved conversation piece for the last twelve months. It’s also a fucking great movie.

I’m a huge fan of the horror genre and I spend my life looking for a Get Out: a mature, character-driven, uncompromising piece of work, an unsettling thing with a great sense of the uncanny and the truly, deeply, psychologically horrifying.

There’s so much about this film that I love; I saw it three or four times since its release and it hasn’t lost its power. There’s also so much about this film that it just isn’t my place to say. Get Out is amazing, but it resonated hard with black audiences; the fact that it exists, a horror movie made specifically not for a young/white/male audience, is astounding.

Any other year, Get Out would be the film of the year. But we’ll get to that.

Colossal

Colossal is a film where Anne Hathaway returns to her shitty hometown, rekindles an old flame, tries to get her life back together, and discovers that every night, if she stands in a particular spot in a particular playground, she can control a giant monster rampaging through Seoul.

I know you didn’t see it. Here’s my question: what is wrong with you?

What about that doesn’t sound amazing? I don’t understand you. I’ll never understand you. This thing between us, it’ll never work.

Just — just go.

The best — or at least the most concise — explanation I’ve heard of Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal and its lukewarm reception is that a) monster movie fans won’t enjoy the low-key indie comedy and b) low-key indie comedy fans won’t enjoy the monsters, which is exactly my slice of the Venn diagram, so I don’t know what whoever-this-was was talking about; it’s objectively good when a film is made specifically for me and maybe my people.

The Handmaiden

I went into The Handmaiden totally blind — I hadn’t even read a plot summary, let alone the original book — so I don’t know what’s a spoiler and what’s not. Go into The Handmaiden knowing as little as possible.

F.A.Q.s:

“So like… they’re gay, I guess?” Yes, this is true. It’s not the whole story.

“It’s three hours long, though.” You feel none of it.

The Handmaiden is an incredible film and I just need you to get over it. It’s thrilling and funny and sexy and gorgeous and sad and brutal all at the same time and it’s easily Park Chan-Wook’s best film since Oldboy. I think it might actually be better than Oldboy, which, yes, I know. I know.

It’s been a really good year in film.

The Disaster Artist

I think about The Room three times a day, minimum. It’s an hour and forty I’m never getting back, but the story around it — who the fuck is Tommy Wiseau? Where did he get all this money? What’s with the accent? Why won’t he answer any of these questions? — is endlessly fascinating to me.

I’m biased, is what I’m getting at.

The story of The Room is a story about failure. The film is the Citizen Kane of bad decisions, both yours and Wiseau’s, but it’s made with an intensity and a sure-footedness that makes it such a fascinating watch. And The Disaster Artist approaches the making of The Room with empathy for its subjects, casting Wiseau in particular as an empathetic villain.

But tonally it’s weird; the script is a tentpole buddy comedy but it’s directed like a naturalistic character portrait, the performances veer between interpretations and caricatures of the real-life characters, and it skips over some of the more distasteful points — like the filming of the sex scenes — for laughs.

It’s weird. It’s a weird one. Honestly, just read the book instead.

I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Any More

Melanie Lynskey and Elijah Wood could both, separately, in two separate stage shows, read a takeaway menu and I’d be down to see it, and I’d probably be driven to applause at the end.

First-time director Macon Blair is a frequent collaborator of Jeremy Saulnier, who made that film about the shitty punk band fighting Nazis last year which changed film criticism forever, and it shows in the brutality and in the low-key naturalism of the performances. That’s kind of all, honestly. It’s a lot of fun, but as a film it’s not entirely cogent.

Sometimes there’s just something missing, just a small thing that would bring the whole thing together, but which your brain kind of skips over because that’s how narrative works. I Don’t Feel at Home doesn’t have “It” but it still has a lot.

Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi

God help me, I love a Star War.

A lot of people didn’t like The Last Jedi. By volume, a lot of those people have good points against it and I’m here for them. Also by volume, some of those people didn’t like it because there’s women and minorities in it, so, what are you going to do? This is what cultural criticism is, now. We’re going to report endlessly on how a Rotten Tomatoes audience score was lower than the critic’s score for whatever superhero film had A Gay in it, like it means anything, and that’s how it’s going to be.

The Last Jedi is a top-tier Star War and a great all-rounder movie. It’s a meditation on hubris and failure, weirdly melancholy and, sure, I get the argument that nothing of consequence happens, but I’d argue that this is the whole point; without going too hard into spoiler territory, the central thesis here is that the Resistance is stronger together, and here in piece-of-shit 2017, The Last Jedi is an argument for its own existence, a much-needed spelling-out of why we even watch movies, of why human beings have told stories around a campfire since we learned how to talk.

We need heroes, but not everybody gets to be Luke Skywalker. Not even Luke Skywalker is Luke Skywalker all of the time. What’s important to you and me, here represented by the foot soldiers and the mechanics and the scared, skittish human beings of the Resistance, the real bottom-rung people, is what Luke Skywalker represents. The Force Awakens made this point, too, but it suffered from JJ Abrams’s mystery-box structure; that reluctance to say what you want to say in case you come off hokey. Rian Johnson goes all-in on the sincerity without sacrificing the adventure and the jokes. We want heroes, but we need hope.

I don’t want to say I came out of it with a new hope, but I do need you to know that I briefly contemplated saying that. The Last Jedi is an amazing film, and to have achieved this in a multi-billion-dollar franchise for children just makes it that much more essential. We might not all have enjoyed The Last Jedi, but here and now, we needed it.

The Robbery

I want to talk about a couple of short films that have stuck in my brain this year. This is my post. I’m in charge here. I get to talk about it.

Jim Cummings won a prize at Sundance last year for Thunder Road, but The Robbery feels like a more tightly focused affair — another ten-minute single-take comedy, sure, but a crime caper told with a startling texture and empathy that sets it apart from the other God-knows-how-many comedy/crime/caper shorts I saw this year.

Curve

Curve came as a recommendation from Outside of a Dream, a podcast I listened to on the way home from a job out in West London, and I had to get off the tube to finish the film while I was still above ground, while I still had data.

Director Tim Egan cites two inspirations: first, his friend’s description of her depression as feeling like she was constantly trying to keep herself from slipping into the void; second, his experience of being hit by a car, sprawling onto the tarmac and waiting for another vehicle to hit him.

My palms are sweaty just thinking about this film.

(While we’re on short films, I want to give a shout-out to 3-Way (Not Calling) by Molly McGlynn, which premiered last year but which I only saw this year. It’s heightened and it’s funny but it’s also incredibly real, and I’m super looking forward to seeing her debut feature Mary Goes Round whenever it gets UK distribution.)

Uncertain

Uncertain, TX is a dying town, and Uncertain the film is one of the best expressions I saw this year of the “who cares?” maxim.

Planet-killer ships dropping out of hyperspace? Leatherface on the loose again? A lake weed is choking the fish in your rivers? Who cares?

Uncertain shows you just who cares, exactly, and gives them the space to tell you why they care in their own words. It’s beautiful, in its way, and a very 2017 film made a couple of years early. (It only got released this year, but it was filmed in 2015).

The Discovery

The Discovery showed me a couple of ideas that it was never really interested in. “Sure,” it said to me, in its siren song, “we could talk about the ramifications of scientifically proving there’s an afterlife, but…” and then it kind of trails off, shrugs, and says, “can I interest you in a half-assed romance?”

The Big Sick

The opposite of a half-assed romance is Kumail Nanjiani’s The Big Sick, based on his real-life whole-assed romance, taking in cultural anxieties on the way. There’s not much to say about The Big Sick, which isn’t a knock against it. It’s actually kind of nice; it’s a solid, solid film. Flawed, but funny enough and human enough to sail through it.

XX

An anthology film is a big ask. You know it’s a mixed bag, and you know that if you’re enjoying one of the films it’s going to be over in a little while, but in the back of your mind you know you’re a few minutes closer to the grave and this is how you spent your time.

Still, the leap of faith pays off. The first half of XX — Jovanka Vuckovic’s The Box and Annie Clark’s The Birthday Party — pays off wonderfully, a pair of twisted stories about motherhood and sacrifice and obligation, but the latter two films slog on ‘till the credits.

Anyway — catch my film the_stranger.mp4 in the anthology Run Hide Tell in festivals next year!

Casting JonBenet

This was a really interesting concept for a documentary — “hey, we’re casting for this documentary about the murder of JonBenet Ramsay, but what do you think happened, random person?” — that could have been a bit meatier. I spend a lot of three-a-m time on unsolved mystery writeups, but that doesn’t give me any special insight, you know?

Still: kudos. Really interesting presentation of the whole thing that kind of turns it back around on you, the viewer, and asks you who the hell you think you are.

Icarus

Another interesting presentation comes in another Netflix doc, where playwright-slash-amateur cyclist Bryan Fogel first pitches a Morgan Spurlock-like stunt-doc in which he’ll see what performance-enhancing drugs do to the human body and, in short order, uncovers a conspiracy that may go literally all the way to the top.

It’s sociologically interesting and horrifying by turns, but it’s also a lot of fun to watch Fogel as he realises he’s unimaginably out of his depth.

Your Name

This year I dug deep and pulled out a little of my inner teenage anime trash — a lot of anime is great and the form is not exclusively for perverts — and I talked about Your Name to more-or-less everyone I met, which it turns out is a pretty effective way of ostracising yourself at parties.

Your Name has been just ludicrously popular, being the fifth-highest-grossing non-English film of all time, which is a weird way to categorise films if you think about it.

It’s a teenage romance, basically, with the trappings of a body-switching plot, but it does a couple of interesting things with that. Its dual protagonists give us a rural-versus-urban thing, a traditionalism-versus-progressivism thing, really, introduces some solid pre-existing conflicts, and then montages through the rest of the body-switching plot.

Like, it introduces the body-switching thing and for the next three-to-five minutes it runs through a body-switching plot as we know it, then it gets to the meatier relationship stuff and twists in a couple of directions I promise you’re not going to see coming, playing with its form to tell its story better. It’s great. It’s so great.

Your Name also recaps its own story two separate times, so, swings and roundabouts.

Rings

The worst part about the new Ring film — and there are a lot to choose from — the worst part is, it’s so easy to modernise the franchise. What if some asshole uploaded Samara’s video to YouTube?

No, we’re going to science this. We’re going to solve the ghost story, we’re going to remove some more of the mystery of why the ghost makes a video and why the things happen, because look: if we explain more of the thing, it’s scarier, right? That’s how horror works.

(It is not. I’m making what the kids call a “joke.”)

Raw

I appreciated Raw more than I liked it, I think. It’s great! It’s gross and horrible and not just because of the cannibalism thing but because of how awful the proverbial mob can be!

It’s slow. There’s no getting around that — it’s tense, but in that Stephen King-at-his-best way, where there’s an inevitability to it, an element of suspense, keeping you on the edge of your chair at the imagined horrors ahead of you.

But whatever else I have to say about Raw, it features one of the all-time best closing scenes in horror cinema. It’s surprising (but, again, inevitable) and it’s structured near-perfect.

La La Land

Hey, if you’re going to make a film about two people who song-and-dance into a relationship with one another, it’s generally a good idea to cast people who can sing and/or dance, but what do I know? La La Land made all the money in the world.

And fair fucks — by all accounts it was really difficult to get this film, this film about two extremely bankable actors falling in love in Hollywood, the most noble and wonderful place on Earth, directed by the Whiplash guy, it was just a real fight to get it made.

Worst film all year.

The Christmas Prince

Like, this half-assed Hallmark film didn’t even come close.

Nathan for You: Finding Frances

Nathan for You was a comedy television show about the character Nathan Fielder, a nondescript and monotone man, helping out businesses by offering the worst advice possible. It finished up this year with Finding Frances, a feature-length episode in which Fielder helps Bill Heath, a Bill Gates impersonator from two seasons previous, reconnect with the love of his life, the titular Frances.

And it’s this sincere, heartfelt, fourth-wall-breaking thing in which Fielder and Heath wind up stuck in a small Arkansas town for weeks, discovering that Heath might not be telling the whole truth about Frances, that he may just be a lonely old man who saw an opportunity to seize the fame he once thought he’d achieve one day, or maybe he just needs a friend to take him seriously, and Fielder, maybe in character, maybe not, falls in love with Missi, an escort, as he questions just why he ever did this stupid show.

It’s not even funny, but that just makes it better, and it’s not even a good standalone film; you need those four seasons of Nathan for You to be able to get to this point, and all of this makes Finding Frances a special, wonderful, heartbreaking, headscratching thing.

The Lego Batman Movie

I don’t know how many times I have to keep saying it before someone believes me, but The Lego Batman Movie has a better sense of the Batman character than any of the live-action films.

The Lego Batman Movie — a film in which Batman, who is a Lego man, fights the Joker, who is also a Lego man, and his friends Voldemort and Sauron from the Phantom Zone, and which fight summons into existence Lego ZAPs and a POWs above Lego Batman and Lego Robin’s heads— features one of the best depictions of loneliness expertly told in one standout sequence via production design, foley work, and tiny Lego lobsters.

Please understand that I’m not kidding around: The Lego Batman Movie is one of the best superhero films ever made.

Logan

I’m also not kidding when I say The Lego Batman Movie and Logan, a colourful exploding kids’ jokefest and a hyperviolent R-rated meditation on heroism and persecution and what a lifetime of fighting does to a man, are fine companion pieces to one another.

This year I felt, more than I have for a while, that there’s been films made for grown-ups. Logan is so simple in its moving parts from the sparse dialogue to the straightforward cinematography, so willing to let a moment land, so surefooted in its approach. I loved it even though the villains were at best surplus to requirements.

We’ve been in franchise hell for a while now, and we’ll be there for a while yet, but Logan finds a place it could only have found after seventeen years of middling-to-awful X-Men films, using the tropes of the superhero genre and your knowledge of it thanks to the genre’s saturation in mainstream media to tell this tight, focused story about a weirdo family finding their place in a world that doesn’t want them.

Kong: Skull Island

I have a very 2017 problem right now. As I was writing this, like, literally writing this paragraph, this happened:

Vogt-Robert’s film Kong: Skull Island was a lot of fun, a throwback to studio adventure movies in a lot of ways, 95% just dumb enough/5% too dumb.

Also: don’t touch someone who doesn’t want you to touch them!

These two things are related now because, I guess, we live in hell.

Manchester by the Sea

Manchester by the Sea is an incredible film and Casey Affleck’s performance is nuanced and sharp and heart-wrenching. It’s amazing.

Don’t touch someone who doesn’t want you to touch them! Don’t talk about touching someone who doesn’t want you to touch them! Quit treating people like they only exist for your boner! Don’t make your set a hostile work environment!

If you’re good at your job it’s still not okay to be a piece of shit! Don’t be a piece of shit!

Creep 2

And then you’ve got Creep 2, which is a sequel to a pretty-good no-budget found-footage horror film that almost nobody asked for, and which is somehow one of the most compelling and human films of the whole year.

Win it All

I like Joe Swanberg as a filmmaker and I know not everybody does. It’s a pretty singular thing, a kind of slightly-more-palpable mumblecore. Generally speaking, you’re in for a good time and you’re in to feel uncomfortable things you didn’t really think about until just now.

Win it All is very much in this vein, all about the messy parts of addiction and recovery, but I’m mostly impressed with Swanberg’s dedication and passion for ~the craft~ that means he can go away and film something like this right after finding a relative smash hit with Easy.

Baby Driver

Wright’s visual flair is present and correct and it really got going towards the end but, man, Baby Driver left just zero impression on me.

Blade Runner 2049

I liked the new Blade Runner. I’m your boyfriend now. I’m everyone’s boyfriend now. Get used to it.

Its relationship with women is odd, and I could have done without the chosen-one storyline, but the world of 2049 is incredibly well-drawn, dipping into dystopia without wallowing in it, spending time with the regular Joes (ha!) of the universe even as they’re wandering through the surreal, radioactive expanse of Art Nouveau Cyberpunk Las Vegas.

Shin Godzilla

Okay, so the new Godzilla film— and every time I mention “the new Godzilla film,” please stop asking me if I mean the 2014 one, which was new in 2014 and if we’re talking in 2014, then sure, I guess I’d need to clarify, but please understand that sometimes films get made overseas— the new Godzilla film is wild.

The presentation is going to take some getting used to, all guy-in-a-suit and miniature models and a soundtrack ripped from classic Godzilla films with no remastering, but me, I’m extremely into all of that. The new design also worked for me — making a radioactive monster look like a giant tumour is a great move — but there’s aspects of the design that aren’t going to work for a lot of people.

But, look: have you ever watched The Thick Of It and wondered to yourself: “what if Godzilla attacked right now?” then you’re the kind of person who’s going to enjoy Shin Godzilla and also, as we established back up there when we were discussing Colossal, we’re going to get along great.

Atomic Blonde

There’s an extended sequence in Atomic Blonde where Sofia Boutella is graphically, writhingly murdered in her lingerie. I hated Atomic Blonde and I can’t understand why you didn’t hate it too.

Life

Life is to Alien as Interstellar is to 2001: A Space Odyssey, in that it’s just about different enough that nobody’s getting sued, but also in that it’s a vastly inferior version of the thing it’s absolutely not trying to be.

Alien: Covenant

And then we also had an actual Alien film, which was both stupid and forgettable. I wish I could quit this fucking franchise.

The Autopsy of Jane Doe

Slow-burn horror veers into crowd-pleasing supernatural bullshit. I can’t keep writing new stuff on these. I’m not a critic. I’m not getting paid for this. There are so many of them.

Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2

Guardians of the Galaxy was a real surprise; it’s a Marvel movie that doesn’t actually feel like one, thanks in large part to the love and care that went into the script. Comedy came from the characters and their interactions with one another and with the story at large, but never in a way that diluted them.

Volume 2 has a lot of 80s jokes and weirdly misogynist jokes and also needs you to forget that Michael Rooker was an abusive kidnapper-slash-mob boss, his hand tight on Peter Quill’s leash by fear and obligation, and never actually a father figure? But, look, you have to forget that otherwise the plot makes no sense. Give it a minute; Drax is going to make a joke about how Mantis is ugly, who absolutely is not in an abusive fucked-up power-dynamic sort of relationship with our villain, we don’t know what that is — oh, hey, Yondu’s Mary Poppins, y’all! Guys! Guys! Yondu —

People will try and tell you that Nicole Perlman didn’t do the heavy lifting on vol. 1, that most of the good work in that film is James Gunn’s doing, and I’m here to tell you that given vol. 2, you shouldn’t believe them.

It Comes At Night

It Comes At Night is a treasure and I will not be talked down from this position. Does anything happen? No, not really. There’s no “It,” really, unless you consider “the things that human beings are capable of in desperate times, for better or worse” as an “It” that can come at night.

Prevenge

See, I’m almost always on board with things like Prevenge ahead of time — you promise me a weirdo film actually made by a weirdo and I’m down — but Prevenge does a very “student comedy” thing where it assumes that because something is audacious, it’s both funny and interesting, and it’s actually neither.

It Stains the Sands Red

On paper, this is a solid zombie film in the vein of It Follows — one woman, one zombie, one yawning expanse of desert — but it takes a couple of really convoluted turns and an unnecessary graphic rape scene to get to a totally different place.

Ingrid Goes West

It’s an interesting one, this one, because it could so easily be your basic morality play but it’s more like a pulpy psycho movie transplanted into the 21st Century, nailed down by a tight script and nuanced performances.

Between Ingrid Goes West and Legion, Aubrey Plaza had a hell of a year breaking out of the Parks & Rec role that’s been following her for the last half-decade. She’s an incredible actor.

Wonder Woman

The middle half of Wonder Woman is incredible. Like The Last Jedi, it gets to the heart of why heroes are even a thing, placing Wonder Woman in the middle of the First World War as a beacon of goodness and hope, and Patty Jenkins’s action is crunchy, physical; you feel every one of those Amazonian blows.

But you’ve got twenty minutes of a child acting against a green screen before you get there, and once Wonder Woman hits the final act it jettisons all its thematic elements and everything it was building towards and just gives you a dull, cut-and-paste superhero fight for another fifteen; dilutes the story by breaking up its characters for the final showdown, completely against the whole point of the story up to know.

I want to know what was in the pre-shooting script, because a lot of this smacks of studio intervention, and given it’s a woman directing a tentpole franchise movie for the first time I don’t think I’m too far off the mark. I know one of you can hook me up with that, so: help a guy out, would you?

The Love Witch

Nyehhhh it’s fine I guess. It’s painstakingly made like a 1960s technicolor horror flick and Anna Biller hits the mark 100%, but I don’t know if it’s actually good or enjoyable or not, nyehhhhhhhh

Hidden Figures

It’s important more than it’s good — Hidden Figures made a shitton of money so it turns out people actually will watch films about black women, who knew — but apart from the subject matter and the performances within it, it’s a boilerplate historical drama. You know what it is. It’s not surprising, but it’s not bad.

The Blackcoat’s Daughter

[SPOILER WARNING]

In order for his film to work Oz Perkins needs you to believe that Emma Roberts is a different person than the character who looks exactly like Emma Roberts, and he might have gotten away with it if Emma Roberts didn’t have a specific look about her in The Blackcoat’s Daughter. The film doesn’t work without the twist; the twist doesn’t work; so the film doesn’t work.

Cinematography is beautiful, though.

The Fits

The Fits got a UK release in February, but I talked about it in last year’s roundup, which, ha ha, whoops

Okja

Okja’s fine but it’s no The Host, you know? Boon Jong-Ho has this way of marrying comedy and adventure that really works for him, which comes from a whole different cultural place, and Okja feels like nobody is making the same thing as he is — Steven Yeun and Jake Gyllenhaal, in particular, are just not in the same film.

It’s a common thing! Especially with American comedy right now, which is fairly improv-heavy to the point where you watch a Judd Apatow thing and you get 20 unedited minutes of the actors bouncing off each other. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it only really works in certain situations. Apatow does it well; Paul Feig doesn’t. Boon Jong-Ho is going for something it feels like nobody on set actually “got.”

Little Evil

To wit: what the hell was Little Evil trying to do?

Logan Lucky

Logan Lucky was the film I saw on my birthday this year and man, I couldn’t have asked for better. I’m a sucker for Soderbergh’s grounded comedies, and Tatum and Driver just kind of “get” the vibe more than, say, Daniel Craig.

Thor: Ragnarok

Much like Okja and Wonder Woman, Taika Waititi’s Marvel movie struggles to marry its director’s sentiments with the demands of a big-budget franchise movie. Waititi’s one of our best living filmmakers right now, but Thor: Ragnarok stops and starts between its Marvel bits and its Waititi bits.

An example: Korg is hilarious, but his appearances stop the film dead for a few minutes every time. It’s like if the Reverend from Hunt for the Wilderpeople was a recurring character; just out-of-place enough to pull you out of the moment.

Still, Ragnarok was a lot of fun, points for making pointed-but-wasted statements about the kind of colonialism Waititi thinks about a lot as a Maori man, points for Cate Blanchett’s drag performance as a villian, points for just letting Chris Hemsworth be Chris Hemsworth, the shot of Tessa Thompson above is the sexiest of 2017 I am aware that I have problems

Voyeur

Let’s get a couple of underwhelming Netflix documentaries out of the way. Voyeur follows Gay Talese of Frank Sinatra Has A Cold fame as he writes and releases Voyeur’s Motel; the book is controversial, Talese feels his star fading, the subject Gerald Foos is an unapologetic pervert couching his voyeurism as research, Talese doesn’t push him on any of it, the film doesn’t push him on any of it, the film also doesn’t push Gay Talese on anything, the story meanders in a totally different direction, and Voyeur ends on Talese congratulating the filmmakers on making such a good film.

Joan Didion: The Centre Will Not Hold

And then we’ve got The Centre Will Not Hold and, look, I love Joan Didion, and I don’t need to be convinced of how good a writer she was and/or is with no analysis or enlightenment, and I definitely don’t need celebrities to read excerpts of her work out loud to me, but this is what the film wants to do so here I am for a couple of hours, I guess.

Murder on the Orient Express

I liked it. I have no skin in the race; I never saw a minute of Poirot. I liked Kenneth Branagh’s moustache and moustache guard. You can stick this on when you visit your parents over Christmas and everyone will be fine with it.

Free Fire

I didn’t like it. It was boring. Armie Hammer was a good time. I like Armie Hammer.

Spider-Man: Homecoming

We categorically did not need a new Spider-Man, but the new Spider-Man is very good. It takes the idea of a naive teenager trying to do good and runs with it, and gives us one of the best villains in the year in the Vulture, played with menace and heart by Michael Keaton, which in turn gives us one of the best scenes of the year, one of the single best showdowns in a superhero film to date, in which not a single punch is thrown.

Happy Death Day

I have two surprisingly great horror movies for you now! Holy shit, right? I spend so much time in these posts bitching about horror movies and I have two that I weirdly liked? Who am I?

Happy Death Day is Halloween by way of Groundhog Day by way of Mean Girls and I had a whole plot summary here but honestly, that should have sold you on it already. It should be terrible, but everybody involved knows what they’re making and they make it with a comedic flair that just makes it work.

Better Watch Out

And now we have a Christmas-themed home invasion “babysitter protects her charges” movie with six or seven huge plot twists, and which is more interested in the mechanics of evil than its bloody results.

Blood Simple

Did you know the Coen brothers’ first film never got a UK release until this year? I didn’t know that. I just re-watched it one night earlier this year and then it got a limited release. I saw it at one of the Best For Film (RIP) movie nights a few years ago. It’s a good film, if a little scrappy; all of the Coens’ fire is in there, albeit in a nascent form.

Boy

Also just getting a limited UK release this year: Taika Waititi’s second feature Boy! Boy is great. Do you know anything about the Maori people in the 21st Century and their perceived vs actual place in modern New Zealand? I didn’t! Boy is a great way to learn a bunch of new things!

An aside: Waititi’s films seem less like awkward comedies as I get to know New Zealand and its people better, and more like sharply observed slice-of-life things.

The Best Film of 2017, According to Jamie Drew

The no-contest best film of the year is this video of neo-Nazi shithead Richard Spencer giving a TV interview in the street and getting punched in the mouth.

Such a simple story, beautifully told. Framed so that the twist is a surprise for the eyes. Tension built over time and released exquisitely. They won’t teach you this in film school. They’ve tried, sure — they’ve tried for years , but this shit can’t be taught. You can’t write it into a script. It’s awesome in the oldest sense of the word; the piece inspires awe.

And it’s free on the internet! I can’t believe this is free. I can’t think of any moment in any other film — and here I’m including Kurt Russell pouring bourbon over the computer that just beat him at chess; I’m including the slow, laborious drive to the Overlook; I’m including the first trip to the Sunken Place—but there’s just no other moment in the history of cinema that I can watch over and over and over again as a low-quality .gif.

Fuck, it’s beautiful. It’s so fucking beautiful.

Happy New Year, everybody.