Here it is, people… my end-of-the-year movie list! Hopefully you saw a couple of the ones I’ve included here and hopefully you had a great time at the movies this year, even if everything else seemed hopeless. See you in 2018 — NL.
25.) “The Disaster Artist,” James Franco.
Do you know the story of “The Room,” reader? No, I’m not talking about the 2013 tearjerker starring Brie Larson (that would be simply “Room”). I’m talking about Tommy Wiseau’s overheated, now-infamous 2003 melodrama, which, since its initial release, has gone on to inspire countless midnight movie screenings, a surprising degree of in-depth scholarly analysis, and who knows how many memes.The mysteries of the movie are many, though how exactly such an ill-conceived and shoddy-looking product inexplicably cost six million dollars to make is no doubt paramount among them (which is to say nothing of Mr. Wiseau’s dubious national origin and the source of his reputably fabulous wealth). What stands out the most about “The Room” when viewed today is the movie’s poe-faced sincerity. If the cast’s testimony is to be taken at face value, it appears that Mr. Wiseau earnestly believed that he was making a classically tempestuous movie romance in the vein of his hero, Tennessee Williams. If there’s a lesson to be gleaned from “The Room,” it’s that no one deliberately sets out to make a bad movie. This aforementioned point is one that James Franco’s warm-hearted and consistently funny “The Disaster Artist” understands on a satisfyingly intrinsic level. Like Mr. Wiseau, Mr. Franco — a Hollywood pretty boy with the soul of a weirdo character actor and too many multihyphenate tendencies to keep track of — had, until this most recent effort, not directed a good movie. He has a habit of biting off more than he can chew, narratively speaking (should anyone be trying to adapt John Steinbeck’s “In Dubious Battle” for the big screen?), not to mention a penchant for the amateurish. Alas, “The Disaster Artist,” against all odds, proves that Mr. Franco’s hyper-aesthete tendencies and his embrace of the amateurish may yet work to his advantage. It’s also possible that Franco sees a bit of himself in Mr. Wiseau’s strange quest: he plays the aspiring auteur as a moody male diva with long, dramatic black hair, and a vaguely Eastern-European accent that becomes a comical source of confusion for many of the movie’s supporting players. Franco has also cast his energetic younger brother Dave as Greg Sesteros: a naïve, handsome Hollywood hopeful who believed that the deluded Mr. Wiseau was his ticket to Dreamville. As it moves gracefully through a number of uproarious comic set pieces and adoring references to the source material, “The Disaster Artist” becomes a more satisfying, emotionally complex riff on the kind of 21st-century bromance that Franco has often acted in with his pal Seth Rogen (not surprisingly, Mr. Rogen makes a welcome appearance in “The Disaster Artist” as a perpetually beleaguered script supervisor). The bond between Tommy and Greg is the film’s crux, bringing the whole affair back down to earth whenever Mr. Franco’s film threatens to get too wacky (which it often does). More than anything, “The Disaster Artist” is a winsome and unexpectedly delightful ode to chasing your dreams by any means necessary — even if the dreams in question happen to be terrible.
24.) “Loveless,” Andrey Zvyagintsev.
After the unending litany of horrors unspooled in 2017, can anyone blame standard moviegoing audiences for not wanting to immerse themselves in narratives that are primitively depressing? Of course, this preconception operates from what I believe to be a fundamentally misguided notion: that movies exist as a form of junk food, meant to be ingested with hopes of a temporary, fleeting thrill, and nothing more. It disregards the notion of films as medicine, as a healing source that grows with the viewer over time. Misery, as Tom Waits said, may be the river of the world, but it can also be tough to take in 120-minute doses. Andrey Zvyagintsev’s unflinching “Loveless” is perhaps the year’s most singularly desolate motion picture: an eerie and mesmeric mosaic of suffering that unfolds in a modern-day Russian landscape that feels all but forsaken by the larger forces of our world. And yet, I would also posit that “Loveless,” for all its grave moral seriousness, is one of the year’s most rewarding cinematic experiences. A lot of this is has to do with the fact that Zvyagintsev — who made waves with his Oscar-nominated “Leviathan” at 2014’s Cannes Film Festival, before returning to the Croisette with this new film, which won this year’s Grand Jury Prize — refuses to give his audience even an inch of rope. Anyone who has agonized through the ailing final stages of a toxic relationship will see their own struggle reflected in the calamitous disagreements between parents Boris (Aleksey Rozin) and Zhenya (Maryana Spivak). When the movie opens, they are merely trying to keep their union afloat — any thoughts of their romance flourishing are simply beyond the pale (one wonders how metaphorical Boris and Zhenya’s relationship is meant to be for the greater state of Russia itself). More disconcerting, and more central to the movie’s pristine paranoiac narrative, is the case of the couple’s son, Alexey (astonishing newcomer Matvey Novikov). Without spoiling the film’s plot, which occasionally takes the shape of a grim, slow-burning procedural a la Denis Villeneuve’s “Prisoners,” I will say that Alexey vanishes for much of the story, and his absenteeism creates a black abscess in the souls of his parents from which only more hate and poison can arise. I’m making “Loveless” sound like some kind of miserabilist slog, and perhaps it might be, if Zvyagintsev weren’t such a sensationally intuitive stylist. From a medium shot that lingers on two parents struggling to identify what might potentially be the corpse of their firstborn child, to deceptively quixotic, fairy-tale-like introductory images of frozen lakes and imposing trees, there is a transcendence and poetry in the ruin of “Loveless” that is almost impossible to shake. It’s one of the year’s great cinematic gut-punches.
23.) “Thor: Ragnarok,” Taika Waititi.
I know what you’re thinking: what the hell is a Marvel movie doing on this list, next to arthouse-friendly titles from Michael Haneke and Darren Aronofsky? Hear me out, though, because “Thor: Ragnarok” isn’t just one of the year’s most satisfying blockbusters. It’s also a shameless 1980’s-style buddy comedy in “Flash Gordon” clothes, a deadpan laffer played out against psychedelic visual tableaus that suggest the retro-futurist cool of Jack Kirby married with the acid-fried imagination of stoner rock band Hawkwind. That’s all another way of saying that even though this is still a Marvel movie, it’s a very weird one. What’s more is that in addition to being both uncommonly sincere and genuinely thrilling (imagine that), “Thor: Ragnarok” is, for all its winking disposability, easily the funniest movie in the entire MCU canon. The movie’s flagrant displays of eccentricity should come as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with the work of writer/director Taika Waititi, who turned centuries-old vampires into droll housemates in the imminently quotable cult comedy “What We Do In The Shadows” and whose twee, lovable frontier adventure “Hunt for the Wilderpeople” went on to be the highest-grossing film in New Zealand’s history. Marvel has a long history of diluting the visions of the auteurs that sign up to work with them — hell, just look at Edgar Wright’s hasty departure from the otherwise solid “Ant-Man” for evidence of this claim. In spite of the deck being stacked against him, Waititi stubbornly brings his own gentle, idiosyncratic comedic voice to this bombastic superhero yarn. The plot points? It’s a pleasurable jumble wherein the chiseled, hilariously un-self-aware God of Thunder (played by Chris Hemsworth with crackerjack comic timing) must save his home city, Asgard, from his sister Hela, the Goddess of Death (played by Cate Blanchett like a vamping teenage Goth, perfectly in keeping with Waititi’s apparent mission statement that his cast should be having a good time, all the time). Along the margins of the story, Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is still up to his old devious mischief, and the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo, also soulfully playing the big green guy’s human counterpart, Bruce Banner) is a simple-minded brute who has found his purpose as a gladiator-for-hire on a colorful junk planet ruled by a mincing dandy with a purple-blue goatee — and who, of course, is played by Jeff Goldblum in perhaps the most Jeff Goldblum-y performance of this last leg of his career. It’s the kind of movie that makes two; count ’em, two uses of Led Zeppelin’s chugging “Immigrant Song,” and whose climactic melee involves a trip through a interstellar passageway known as “the Devil’s Anus”. If all this sounds juvenile and silly and self-indulgent to you, you’ll probably hate this movie. For the rest of us, time to crank up the 80’s space metal, grab a bowl of sugar cereal, and get ready to embrace your inner 14-year old.
22). “The Square,” Ruben Ostlund.
Is Swedish director Ruben Ostlund the LeBron James of cringe comedy? Ostlund’s masterful 2014 breakthrough picture, “Force Majeure,” was one of the funniest and most painful moves of that year: a scathing indictment of masculinity under siege, played out against the cheerfully banal backdrop of a toney Swiss ski resort. Ostlund’s follow-up to “Force Majeure” is a sprawling, squirmy art-world satire called “The Square” that goes even deeper and darker than his previous movie, pushing a sour, intentionally flat anti-comedy tone to nearly three surreal hours. “The Square” lacks the surgical focus and contained narrative of “Force Majeure,” and there are times when it feels as though the movie is simply one shameful, expertly executed comic set piece after another. And while there’s no denying that while these set pieces are some of the most memorably insane examples of unfiltered cinema from this year in moviegoing, it must also be said that “The Square” finds Ostlund expanding his sociological scope with flair, attacking bourgeoisie hypocrisy, the 21st-century outrage machine, and the cloistered biosphere of the modern art world with the ruthless remove that is quickly becoming his trademark. This director has always enjoyed examining his priggish human specimens as if they existed under the lens of a microscope, but while “The Square” is every bit as icky and hilarious as “Force Majeure,” it’s a full meal where that film was a perfectly prepared appetizer. Danish actor Claes Bang plays the film’s woeful protagonist, Christian, as another one of Ostlund’s case studies in modern, ineffectual masculinity. “The Square” opens with Christian being robbed of his wallet, phone and cufflinks as part of a strange piece of experimental street theater. Sadly (or wonderfully, depending on your point of view), this is only one of the many affronts poor Christian will be forced to endure over the film’s 142-minute runtime. “The Square” isn’t always an easy sit in the moment — I suspect it’s not meant to be — but the highs are undeniably high. “The Wire’s” Dominic West winces through a protracted Q&A that is being interrupted by a man with Tourette’s Syndrome in one memorably twisted passage, while Elisabeth Moss shows up for a few scenes, all coy distance and underhanded smirks, to engage in a spectacularly messy (and literal) sexual tug-of-war with the movie’s hapless hero. The scene you’ve all heard about, however, really is one for the books: it’s a ten-minute tour-de-force of discomfort that watches a ritzy gala party descend into violent chaos when a performance artist (famous mo-cap actor Terry Notary) takes his flawless impersonation of a primate to a lethal extreme. The scene just keeps building and building, growing to an unendurably excruciating crescendo that sends the viewer lumbering out of the theater on a woozy cinematic high.
21.) “mother!,” Darren Aronofsky.
The post-movie debate I had with my friends about Darren Aronofsky’s maddening, profoundly unnerving “mother!” was no doubt one of the most impassioned ones I’ve engaged in during my twenty-nine years on this planet. Some loved the film; others (like myself) were still digesting its many themes and nightmare images, while others appeared to loathe the movie to its very essence. The discussion got loud at more than a few points — to an outsider’s ears, you would have thought we were having a friendly spat. Alas, the incendiary nature of our conversation only speaks to the power of Aronofsky’s deliberately polarizing experiment in punk-rock hate cinema. Though there may have been more cohesive, less belligerent movies to be released this year, was there a single movie that courted as much analysis, reverence and ball-faced scorn as this one? The damning “mother!” can be read any number of ways: a parable for environmental collapse, a heavy-handed and pulverizing metaphor of suffering for one’s art, or simply another one of Aronofsky’s hysterical tales of debasement and salvation. None of these assessments are necessarily off-base, but I stand by the notion that the best way to experience “mother!,” for those who haven’t seen it, is as a sheer, untethered sensory experience. It’s Grand Guginol expressionism by way of Hieronymus Bosch, with no short dosage of “Knife in the Water’s” coy existential cruelty and even traces of “Antichrist’s” darkly hilarious black-metal madness. To give away too much of the plot would be a terrible thing to do, suffice to say that Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem play a couple — a soft-voiced young woman and a cartoonishly cranky scribe, respectively — who live in a gorgeous old house far removed from civilization, and who start to receive an alarming number of unwanted visitors at their doorstep over the course of an increasingly frenzied evening. The last thirty minutes of “mother!” is some of the most harrowing, go-for-broke art cinema I’ve ever seen in my life, and it’s almost ballsy enough for me to forgive the misplaced cornball grandiosity of the movie’s final sequence (Aronofsky is a gifted dramatist, but restraint appears to be a dirty word in his universe). You may love “mother!” while others may hate it — and in many cases, you’d probably find yourself loving something in this film for the precise reason that another, equally qualified viewer might potentially detest it. Yet there is no doubt that when the screen cuts to black and the audience can, at long last, breathe a collective sigh of relief, that Darren Aronofsky has cold-clocked his audience into a state of transcendent atrocity. Come to think of it, “Atrocity Exhibition” may not have been a bad alternate title for this movie.
20.) “Menashe,” Joshua Weinstein.
If you were to break down Joshua Weinstein’s moving Yiddish-American drama “Menashe” to its essential ingredients, it would not be unfair to see that the film isn’t exactly about much — at least not on its surface, anyway. The plot points of Weinstein’s directorial debut concern the quotidian day-to-day routine of a recently widowed Jew named by Menashe, played by a real-life Hasid who also happens to be named Menashe Lustig. Menashe has lost his wife when the movie begins, and he works a thankless job at a gritty bodega in Brooklyn’s Borough Park neighborhood: home to one of the largest concentrations of Orthodox Jews in North America. The dignified Menashe doesn’t have much to smile about, but he proceeds through life with a kind of benevolent, largely silent grace, whether he’s doing his best to raise his ten-year old son Rieven, or attempting to mend years of resentment on the behalf of his churlish brother, Eizik. “Menashe” might be too peripatetic in its pace for your average multiplex moviegoer, but the riches that this film offers are also not easily shaken. By slowing the plot down to a crawl and immersing us in an atmosphere that we haven’t seen depicted on a large screen before (at least not with this degree of sociological detail), Weinstein and his crew are allowing the viewer a portal through which they might examine the folly and tragedy of their own lives. Like last year’s Jim Jarmusch-directed “Paterson,” “Menashe” is a film that takes great delight in depicting the mundane, whether it’s the titular character shooting the shit with his co-workers as he closes the bodega for the night, or his heartbreaking efforts to resurrect a burnt Kugel in time for his wife’s memorial service. If watching a lonely single father attempt to make sense of his life in the wake of an unthinkable misfortune doesn’t sound sexy enough for you, maybe “Daddy’s Home 2” will fill the hole in your heart. For the rest of us, “Menashe” is a radiant celebration of human sympathy, and a poignant reminder how essential it is to examine other cultures outside of our own. Here’s to hoping Joshua Weinstein makes another film soon.
19.) “Free Fire,” Ben Wheatley.
Ben Wheatley doesn’t like to play nice. Whether he’s watching a mentally disturbed couple of newlyweds murder and maim their way through the British countryside in the acridly funny “Sightseers,” or gleefully orchestrating a landslide of civility into disarray in his underrated J.G. Ballard adaptation, “High-Rise,” Mr. Wheatley is an artist who is interested in what happens when folks decide to drop their polite facades and stop being decent to one another. “Free Fire,” Wheatley’s most well-written and conventionally enjoyable film to date, takes this righteously indecent ethos to its grisliest point of conclusion: that is, a physics-defying slapstick gunfight that would occupy about five minutes in any other standard action flick, stretched out to a bleakly absurd hour and a half. The setting is 1970’s Boston, not that it matters much. The cast are a collection of familiar lowlives and scallywags — mouthy junkies, taciturn gun runners, tough Irish lads, and, of course, a deadly femme fatale — all given tremendous life through Wheatley’s deliciously mean script and a series of intensely spirited performances from the likes of Cillian Murphy, Armie Hammer, and “District 9’s” Sharlto Copley. The setup is almost deceptively simple: an exchange of high-caliber firearms set to go down in an abandoned Beantown warehouse falls to pieces on account of aggrieved egos, petty squabbles, and the type of generally repellent behavior that extends to nearly every character in a Ben Wheatley movie. Before you know it, guns are drawn, bodies are hitting the floor, and good manners have all but flown out the fucking window. What makes “Free Fire” more than just a clever exercise in nihilism is both Wheatley’s fearsome directorial ingenuity (he’s only getting better with each new film), and his dogged shamelessness in exploiting any depraved situation for a laugh. The film’s final shot suggests that the director may be sneaking a coda about feminist subtext into this screw-loose tale of male insecurity and chaotic bloodshed, but to read too deeply into this orgy of brutality would be to miss the point. “Free Fire” is a scuzzy hot shot of drive-in movie bliss, as unfathomably fun as it is fundamentally irredeemable.
18.) “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” Martin McDonagh.
Martin McDonagh’s “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” is a movie that’s going to rub quite a few people the wrong way. The film asks us to sympathize with Frances McDormand’s emotionally wounded protagonist (Mrs. McDormand is, among other things, one of our most intrinsically likeable screen performers) before asking the audience to guffaw and cheer as she commits unconscionable acts of brutality against the fellow residents of her small, sleepy All-American town. Likewise, the film’s villains –a cadre of inept and racist police officers, bullies with badges and scary inferiority complexes — are painted with an almost Coenesque degree of grotesquerie. This all transpires before our whip-smart writer/director takes a risky pivot in the third act, suggesting that there may even be a possibility of redemption for these cretinous characters who regularly dole out punishment and humiliation as though they’re ordering up donuts. Then again, is any of this really that surprising? This is Martin McDonagh we’re talking about here. The profane Irish playwright takes an almost irresponsible degree of joy in screwing with our heads. His previous directorial efforts, “In Bruges” and “Seven Psychopaths,” were nasty, glib and cheerfully amoral: all too happy to spit in the face of traditional drama, fashioning warped meta-crime narratives around characters who were far too eloquent to be classified as traditional scumbags, and yet too fundamentally disreputable to be heroes. “Three Billboards” has the same swaggering disrespect for standard screenplay plotting as those earlier movies, as well as an admirable proclivity for zigging when you expect the story to zag. And yet, unlike McDonagh’s other movies — which were mostly snotty post-Tarantino exercises, executed with superb style — “Three Billboards” is a film filled with heart, rage, and despair. It’s also a weirdly prescient film for the #MeToo era, and there’s a kind of vicarious thrill in watching McDormand’s character — a strong willed woman who has been consistently silenced by her male adversaries — violently lash out against her oppressors. The film is also thrillingly acted from top to bottom. McDormand is as note-perfect as we expect her to be, though the great Sam Rockwell nearly walks away with the entire movie playing a hot-tempered and dim-witted thug of a police officer who’s actually not quite as dumb as he first appears to be. Even supporting players, from John Hawkes’ terrifying abusive husband to Peter Dinklage’s sweet-natured suitor, make an impression, adding to the rueful sicko tapestry of McDonagh’s latest black-as-night comedy. This is an angry, morally muddled film for an angry, morally muddled time, and proof that McDonagh has what it takes to join the ranks of today’s great directors.
17.) “Happy End,” Michael Haneke.
So, how about that title? Is Michael Haneke trying to troll us? He does open his venomous, mesmerizing new film “Happy End” with depictions of suburban evil as seen through a Snapchat filter. Still, when has Michael Haneke EVER given us a happy end? His masterworks — “Cache,” “The White Ribbon,” “Amour” — are among the most upsetting and unrelenting works of foreign arthouse cinema to be released during this last half-century. To consider that Haneke has titled his new film “Happy End” is akin to pondering the morbid possibility of a “Funny Games” remake starring David Spade and Kevin James. Alas, reader, I digress: I am not here to wax poetic about the end of the world as we know it, but to tell you instead that Haneke’s “Happy End” is as merciless, unsparing and perfect as anything he’s ever made. The Austrian auteur isn’t particularly making any points here that he hasn’t made before: the bourgeois often act in venal, self-serving ways, life is a futile dirge, and people can be unthinkably inhumane to each other. That said, “Happy End” finds Haneke at his frankest and funniest, fashioning an appalling comedy-of-no-manners from which even the most jaundiced viewer could not possibly look away. Haneke’s newest is, in broad terms, about a supremely fucked-up and selfish family. That family would be the Laurents: affluent French industrialists who spew bile in front of their children and immigrant house servants with the same blasé indifference that extended to the human monsters in Haneke’s earlier anti-morality plays. Teenaged Eve (Fantine Harduin) is a social-media-addicted sociopath who poisons her pet hamster (and then her mother) with dangerous sedatives. Eve’s father Thomas (“La Haine’s” Mathieu Kassovitz) is a cowardly man carrying on an illicit and thoroughly embarrassing carnal affair through text messages. Most depraved of all the Laurents, though, is patriarch Georges, whom Haneke devotees will recognize as the mournful husband of “Amour,” though the character is sketched in a far more malicious shade here (it’s also worth mentioning that the Laurent family in this film share a last name with the hapless male protagonist of “Cache”). “Happy End’s” cheerfully diabolical charade couldn’t be further removed from the grave, reluctantly humanistic melodrama of “Amour”, and Georges’ grisly dedication to ending his own pathetic life gives Haneke’s movie a punchline that tastes distinctly of blood in the water. This is a movie that aims to make you gasp before knocking the wind out of you. Some may find it assaultive or even (shudder) ugly, but those who have been paying attention to the astonishing body of work that Haneke has been patiently building for the past twenty-five years since his disturbing debut “Benny’s Video” will throw their hands up in praise of the dark lord of European art cinema.
16.) “Dunkirk,” Christopher Nolan.
Apart from that gabby raconteur Quentin Tarantino, there may not be a more divisive big-screen auteur than that cool, collected British fellow, Christopher Nolan. It seems as though each of the director’s most ambitious efforts — be it the head-spinning multiple realities of “Inception,” or the staggering space opera of “Interstellar” — are destined to court about as much admiration as outright disdain. For every viewer who finds himself or herself bowled over by Mr. Nolan’s mastery of scale, there’s another who will nitpick about the director’s reliance on dry exposition and his often-impersonal way with actors (Mr. Nolan is many things, but John Cassavetes he is not). “Dunkirk,” Mr. Nolan’s lean, bombastic re-creation of the frenzied military evacuation that has come to be known as Operation Dynamo, was a film that was lavished with near-universal praise upon its release, and yet this pervasive acclaim has bred a certain resistance to the movie from Mr. Nolan’s many critics. They argue that the film is too cold, too mechanical — that it does not spend enough time getting to know the soldiers on the beach, on the water, or in the sky. To spend time poring over these miniscule gripes is to miss the true intention of Mr. Nolan’s most pared-down and breathtaking feature. Mr. Nolan, as ever, is not interested in tiny moments of human interaction. The director’s gaze is that of a God or cosmic puppetmaster, and “Dunkirk” is not only the most technically marvelous of his many impressive efforts, it’s also the most appropriate canvas I’ve seen for the filmmaker’s undeniable conceptual talents since his arresting and underrated magician melodrama “The Prestige”. “Dunkirk” is ruthlessly whittled down to its fundamentals (the script was rumored to be a mere 79 pages) and each blistering moment is designed for maximum visceral impact. It’s not so much a film you watch, as much as one you experience and live with. Of course, the haters will continue to hate, and I myself have reacted with a resounding “eh” to Nolan’s cerebral approach in years past. And yet I must admit that there wasn’t a second of the explosive “Dunkirk” where I wasn’t pinned to my seat. Some call it hot air and hyperbole. I call it faces, water, sand, and sky. I call it the reason we pay to watch movies on a big screen.
15.) “Win It All,” Joe Swanberg.
The lead character of Joe Swanberg’s unreasonably charming micro-budget sleeper “Win It All” is, to put it in terms that our current president might understand, a loser. He’s a schmuck, a joke, and an infuriating, small-time con man that consistently makes the wrong decision in scene after cringe-inducing scene. In theory, it should be a chore to spend time with him. And yet, because Jake Johnson is a fearless comic actor with the timing of a Borsch Belt legend, and because writer/director Swanberg is a deft humanist who seems incapable of casting a punitive gaze at any of his characters, “Win it All” turns out to be quite winning indeed. Swanberg has been quietly honing his modest, un-showy style for years, starting with the scrappy likes of mumblecore experiments like “Hannah takes the Stairs” and “All the Light in the Sky” before graduating to more polished, mature work with his beautifully melancholic marriage-in-crisis comedy “Digging for Fire” and the compulsively watchable Chicago sitcom “Easy”. “Win it All” is the paragon of Swanberg’s unique abilities: it’s as lo-fi as anything he’s ever made, but with dialogue that cuts like a pitchfork through butter, as well as an unassuming but stylish visual sensibility that evokes low-rent 1970’s underdog cinema like Robert Altman’s “California Split” and even Jerry Schatzberg’s immortal “Scarecrow”. Like the heroes of those films, “Win it All’s” Eddie Garret is a two-bit hustler: an impulsive, gregarious, money-drunk hound of a man who can’t make it through one day without drawing catastrophe into his life like a moth to lamplight. If he were to be played by any other actor, there’s a good chance that Eddie would be insufferable. Johnson, though, has quietly forged a sturdy career playing these kind of motor-mouthed confidence men, and he manages to sell Eddie’s more despairing dramatic beats with the grace of a veteran performer. It’s easy for small-scale, Netflix-distributed indies to get lost in the shuffle, especially when there’s so much else out there vying for our time and respective attention spans. And yet, in a year packed with grand, large-scale displays of artistic craft, the lived-in humanity that courses through the nervy comic scenes in “Win It All” is something to be cherished.
14.) “The Beguiled,” Sofia Coppola.
Sofia Coppola has long been one of the more interesting visual artists working in the cinematic medium, but consistency has never been her thing. The muted, hypnotic beauty she brought to her debut “The Virgin Suicides” was overshadowed by pageantry in the lumbering period bauble that was “Marie Antoinette,” just as “Somewhere’s” uncompromising existential howl was so much more compelling than the bratty lifestyle porn of her teen crime movie “The Bling Ring”. So imagine my surprise when I discovered that Coppola’s most impressive film since her startling debut is not only an adaptation, but also an adaptation of a gloomy Southern potboiler once directed by Don Siegel. And yet, somehow, Coppola unquestionably makes “The Beguiled” her own thing: she doesn’t so much re-write the blueprint of the original film as much as bring her own distinct obsessions (female desire, cloistered social ecosystems, adolescence) to the fore. It doesn’t hurt that the film is arguably Coppola’s most aesthetically gorgeous creation, with its soundless tableaus of Southern sprawl punctuated by the boom of far-off cannon fire, all of it gorgeously enhanced by the source material’s palpable sense of lust, suspense, and puritanical repression. The actors are something to witness too, particularly Colin Farrell in low-key horndog mode as a crippled Union soldier, and Kirsten Dunst, whose bruised innocence Coppola knows how to use better than just about anyone. It’s Nicole Kidman, though, as the Mama Lion of the small, conflicted female group at the film’s center, who all but walks away with the entire picture. She also sells her character’s nutty trajectory with aplomb, all while Coppola’s film recklessly barrels past the parameters of good taste, crossing over from the director’s signature soft-hued, ennui-infused drama into a more hysterical register. Not every critic was enamored with the film’s left-field turn from brooding Southern Gothic into gorehound territory, but “The Beguiled’s” eventual swan-dive into madness is ultimately what distinguishes it from the rest of Coppola’s elegant but often manicured filmography. It’s not every director who can manage to helm a remake that bests the original while simultaneously displaying a full understanding what made it work in the first place. Then again, Sofia Coppola is not every director.
13.) “The Lost City of Z,” James Gray.
Is there another movie from 2017 that can match James Gray’s “The Lost City of Z” for old-world, silver-screen splendor and sheer scope? Gray’s weighty and sprawling adventure epic isn’t the greatest film of 2017, but did anyone else see anything even remotely like it all year? Not even Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk,” another smashing widescreen yarn about men at war with the natural world, can match Mr. Gray’s somber sixth feature for its moody, lived-in tone, or the nimble way it plays with ideas about cultural hierarchy and the trials of Victorian society. Like many of Mr. Gray’s finest works, including his brutal New Yawk noir “The Yards,” and 2014’s shimmering jewel, “The Immigrant,” “The Lost City of Z” is a story about class. More to the point, it is the story of a man — Percy Fawcett, embodied in a startling turn full of rage and conviction by “Sons of Anarchy” actor Charlie Hunnam — who becomes obsessed with attaining something unknowable, and ends up driving himself to the edges of the earth in search of it. The film tips its well-worn cap to legends of maverick cinema like Werner Herzog (there’s a nifty “Fitzcarraldo” reference in the film’s first act) and, of course, David Lean. And yet, “The Lost City of Z” also unmistakably addresses the many concerns that have occupied Gray as an artist from the inception of his career, be it the burdens bestowed by fathers to their sons (“We Own The Night”), or the notion of a tortured outsider penetrating a kind of gilded secret society (“The Immigrant”). Hunnam sheds the wooden pretty-boy affectations that have trailed him since “Sons” and gives us a career-redefining portrait of a man consumed by duty, while Sienna Miller gives what is perhaps her best performance to date and Robert Pattinson continues to prove that he is 2017’s most chameleonic actor with his mumbly, withdrawn turn as Fawcett’s chief traveling companion. At one point, Gray was synonymous with the kind of downbeat New York crime films made by his hero Sidney Lumet, but “The Lost City of Z” sees him coming out of the boroughs and into the jungle, and next year’s Brad Pitt-starring “Ad Astra” will see him venturing into the far reaches of outer space. Like Percy Fawcett, he’s a trailblazer you’d be wise to follow.
12.) “Okja,” Bong-Joon Ho.
Korean auteur Bong-Joon Ho has finally, at long last, ascended to the rank of premiere cinematic fantasists occupied by the likes of Terry Gilliam, Wes Anderson and Guillermo Del Toro. Like these aforementioned artists, Bong’s talent lies in his creation of a fully formed alternate reality with each subsequent picture. His films do not look, feel, or proceed like anyone else’s. The only thing uniting them is the director’s playfully bizarre touch: how else does one draw a throughline from the gallows murder-mystery farce of 2009’s “Mother” to the ingenious “Snowpiercer,” which re-imagined humanity as a ruthless caste system trapped aboard a rattling mecha-train that carries its passengers through a kind of new apocalyptic ice age? With this year’s “Okja,” Bong has made his most assured and unclassifiable picture to date: an environmental allegory with the soul of a raucous children’s adventure that nevertheless contains gruesome re-creations of slaughterhouse activity and pays homage not only to Steven Spielberg, but also Hayao Miyazaki. The movie is a kind of whirligig cinematic funhouse that never stops for too long, lest the viewer retain their sense of equilibrium. The discord is intentional: with “Okja,” Bong is in a constant state of surprising and upending his audience. The miracle of this daffy, live-action cartoon epic is that the director succeeds with such flying colors. The film is stacked from top to bottom with tremendous performances, with Ahn Seo-Hyun keeping the film’s heartbeat steady as a wide-eyed young girl whose best friend is the massive, lumbering, genetically engineered “super-pig” of the title. Elsewhere, Jake Gylenhaal and Tilda Swinton vamp it up to a nearly disorienting effect (Bong has never been one for subtlety) as a corporate plutocrat and a demented version of a Steve Irwin-style celebrity zoologist, respectively. In spite of the movie’s innumerable bonafides — the crisp, expressive cinematography of Darius Khondji, the script’s reconciliation of its wackier moments with its more ruthless political ideas — “Okja’s” biggest accomplishment may be the titular beast himself. Watching Okja the pig, the viewer is never aware that we’re watching a CGI creation. For all intents and purposes, this kind-eyed, galumphing gourmand is an achievement of pure make-believe on par with Spielberg’s “E.T.” While other directors may strive for realism above all else, a film like “Okja” demonstrates the merits of taking a leap into untethered, reckless fantasy.
11.) “Get Out,” Jordan Peele.
There was no way anyone could have predicted just how depressingly relevant Jordan Peele’s stinging horror-comedy “Get Out” would eventually become when it exploded like wildfire into multiplexes in the early, quiet moviegoing months of 2017. Even if the film didn’t boast scares, cutting satirical humor and a lovingly loopy tonal language that’s equal parts “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Stepford Wives,” the righteously indignant “Get Out” would have still felt like the ultimate cinematic call-to-arms in the age of Trump. What Peele seems to instinctively understand about this kind of approach hearkens back to the old maxim that one catches more flies with honey than with vinegar. By making “Get Out” a rollicking, conventionally appealing Hollywood horror picture straight off the Blumhouse production slate, Peele is affording himself the liberty to lace his genuinely superb directorial debut with subtext addressing everything from racial profiling to the sexual fetishization of black men by white women. In case you haven’t seen “Get Out” and you think the film exists to generate think pieces, think again. Few audience movies from this year can match Peele’s directorial debut for giggles and stark terror in equal measure. The film is filled with lines and sequences and characters that are destined to be held up to cult status, from Alison Williams’ diabolical white girl (who is never scarier than when she’s eating breakfast cereal with a straw) to the fast-talking, relentlessly resourceful TSA agent played by stand-up comic Lil Rey Howery. “Get Out” is as well-engineered and crazy-fun a work of movie-movie reconstruction as anything from the golden era of John Carpenter (the film would make a neat double bill with Carpenter’s “They Live,” another genre triumph that laces its violent drive-in movie thrills with incendiary liberal subtext). Peele had a writing and producing credit on 2016’s silly, kitty-centric action comedy “Keanu,” which he worked on with “Key and Peele” partner Keegan-Michael Key, but if “Get Out” is any indication, this burgeoning filmmaker is fully ready to make a leap into the big leagues — and I, for one, can’t wait to see what he comes up with.
10.) “The Shape of Water,” Guillermo del Toro.
There is a lot going on in Guillermo Del Toro’s “The Shape of Water”: so much, in fact, that I wouldn’t fault average moviegoers for being overwhelmed or put off by the film’s overflowing abundance of influences and tones. On one hand, Del Toro’s most mature and confidently made picture since his terrifying wartime fairy tale “Pan’s Labyrinth” is a fairly straightforward and thoroughly whimsical love story about a mute, grown-up orphan and the scaly, monstrously beautiful fish-creature-thing whom she comes to develop feelings for. It is also worth noting that this is a film whose supporting characters are a lonely gay painter, a put-upon African-American cleaning lady, and a Russian spy with a wounded heart. The film’s ancillary players are classic, albeit archetypical, rebels and outliers, and the movie’s villain — a square-jawed, All-American fascist named Strickland, played with sadistic zeal by Michael Shannon — embodies the textbook definition of toxic Caucasian masculinity. And yet, while Strickland’s energy is never anything less than malignant, Del Toro’s film is gorgeous, unexpectedly funny, and swooningly romantic. “The Shape of Water” is a splashy, colossally ambitious parable about the ostracized among us seeking peace and acceptance in each other’s company. Granted, Del Toro’s film is also one that simultaneously flirts with noirish Cold War-era paranoia, gory Gothic horror, and even the dewey-eyed ecstasy of midcentury movie musicals. As you could no doubt surmise, Del Toro is playing with quite a few balls in the air with “The Shape of Water,” and one of the many miracles that the film executes is that its considerably imaginative director — whose unrivaled talent for visual world-building can limit him as often as it liberates him — somehow manages to stick the landing and deliver the most emotionally satisfying work of his career to date. “The Shape of Water” isn’t just a full-bore leap into the unreal, though. The actors all work overtime to keep the story grounded, with Richard Jenkins giving a standout performance as a withdrawn but fundamentally decent man who fears that the changing America depicted in the film may leave him behind for good. Sally Hawkins, meanwhile, achieves something rare and truly special: with no lines of dialogue and only sensitive use of facial expressions and sign language, she brings us into the private desires of a character that may only receive a glancing treatment in a more timid mainstream film. “The Shape of Water” is a weirdo Technicolor ghost story with the soul of a romantic tragedy: a consummate masterwork populated by characters that would be objects of scorn or ridicule in the hands of a less empathetic storyteller. It’s a film so filled with love that it practically seeps from the screen.
9.) “A Ghost Story,” David Lowery.
I wasn’t quite sure what to make of rising director David Lowery off the basis of his first two films. I found myself cold towards Lowery’s much-lauded debut “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints,” which often felt like an emotionally overloaded, if technically impressive, imitation of a Terrence Malick murder ballad set in the sepia-toned badlands of an ageless America. Lowery’s follow-up to “Saint’s” — a poignant live-action re-imagining of the children’s classic “Pete’s Dragon” — was more confident and authentic than his mannered debut, just narrowly missing my top twenty-five films of that year. With “A Ghost Story,” Lowery has not only skyrocketed into my top ten, he’s instantly become one of the most exciting new directors in his age group. Dare I say, with his third film, he’s made one of the most radical minimalist independent films of the last decade. “A Ghost Story” is the first effort from Lowery to not feel overly indebted to its cultural influences, even if the final product feels as intimate as a whisper and as timeless as a bedtime story. Simply put, “A Ghost Story” is a cinematic poem in miniature: one that’s undeniably about loss, as well as the inevitable march of time. It’s a film that can enrich your heart, make your life better, and implore you to appreciate the people around you. I don’t say these things with any degree of lightness, but I maintain that what Lowery, his cast, and his crew have accomplished with this film is not easy — even if “A Ghost Story” itself occasionally feels so lived-in that it appears to be organically occurring on-screen as we watch it. Many think pieces and tweets have already been screamed into the void referring to the movie’s now-infamous pie-eating long take, not to mention the deliberately understated performances of lead actors Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck. And yet, I hope that when enough time (there’s that word again) has passed so that we may consider the real legacy of Lowery’s third picture, we remember its enchanting cosmic meditations on interpersonal connection and the power of love. I hope that we are able to appreciate the fact that one of our most in-demand independent filmmakers took time to craft a small, deeply personal audio/visual love letter to the relationships we foster over time. I hope that films this earnest and comprehensively imagined don’t get lost in the unceasing search for new “content”. Not even a groaningly on-the-nose monologue from musician Will Oldham — which, admittedly, sounds like that stoner kid in your philosophy class going off on one of his Hegel rants — can stop this magical film from ascending to the transcendent heights it reaches. There are certainly reference points in the film’s tonal DNA worth making note of (the meditative sleight-of-hand of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the grungy D.I.Y. sensibility of mid-period Gus Van Sant), but “A Ghost Story” really feels like a movie that could have been directed by no one other than David Lowery — and that is truly the best thing I can say about it.
8.) “Call Me By Your Name,” Luca Guadagnino.
In “Call Me By Your Name,” director Luca Guadagnino establishes himself as one of modern cinema’s foremost visual sensualists. In one scene, a shot of a ripe peach dripping with juice becomes a sensational metaphor for suppressed desire. Later, the striking image of a Greco-Roman statue being excavated from the shimmering shores of a beach in Northern Italy draws obvious visual parallels to the movie’s uncommonly statuesque leading man, Armie Hammer. Hammer has no doubt given the performance of his career in this delicate, exquisitely observed postmodern love story, but that’s only one of the many extraordinary things about this picture. “Call Me By Your Name” would still be one of the year’s best films if it were a mere feast of rich aesthetics, but as per usual, the expressive Italian director has more on his mind than sexualized indolence and picaresque European scenery. What gives “Call Me By Your Name” a universal, enduring appeal beyond its status as an instant-classic queer romance is its uncommonly observant portrait of the unspoken tension that defines first love: the kind of destabilizing romantic attraction suffused into memories of unending summer days and tipsy nights spent dancing to the Psychedelic Furs. This is a film of wayward glances, loaded pauses and thrilling erotic release, and I venture that even those who haven’t had to keep their love forbidden will see a bit of themselves in the tale of Oliver (Hammer) and Elio (“Lady Bird” discovery Timothee Chalamet). Oliver and Elio are the sole subjects of “Call Me By Your Name”: two handsome, intelligent young men who are entrenched in an extended game of withholding and discovery over the course of one gloriously lazy summer in 1983. The film is anchored by revelatory supporting turns from the likes of Michael Stuhlbarg (playing Elio’s kind-hearted intellectual father) and Esther Garrel (daughter of filmmaker Philippe Garrel), and yet, it is ultimately Hammer and Chalamet who hold the film’s heart in one piece. Hammer has never been this vulnerable on-screen before, and if there’s any justice in the world, this will be the beginning of a new phase in his already-impressive career. Chalamet, meanwhile, is a real find: as he did in Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird,” the young actor manages to express the awkward but admirably unyielding essence of adolescent lust with something as simple as a glance (the final shot of Guadagnino’s film is a heartbreaker for the ages). With its achingly gorgeous original songs by indie folk maestro Sufjan Stevens and the elegant use of cross-fades and a poppy, hyper-saturated color palate courtesy of cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, “Call me By Your Name” is a film you want to reach out and touch. It’s as stirring and artful as anything to be released by a major studio in 2017. We don’t deserve movies like this — so let’s be grateful for them while they’re still getting distributed.
7.) “The Meyerowitz Stories: New and Selected,” Noah Baumbach.
Early in Noah Baumbach’s tender and quietly remarkable “The Meyerowitz Stories: New and Selected,” a self-regarding artist played by Dustin Hoffman offhandedly remarks “I think I’m doing the most interesting work of my career now… of course, that’s only one man’s opinion.” It’s a typically barbed, revealing line from Baumbach, who has honed his signature sad-screwball patois into a furiously pointed rhythm in his last few films. It’s also meant to illuminate the deep well of neediness and insecurity that exists at the core of bearded former sculptor Harold Meyerowitz, who acts as the nexus of Baumbach’s beautifully observed ensemble comedy. And yet, the line could just as easily apply to the booming quality of this particular writer-director’s more recent work. While “Greenberg” and “The Squid and the Whale” are undeniably masterworks of self-laceration, the filmmaker’s more recent output has been of a wiser, mellower countenance that nevertheless maintains it’s author’s adroit signature ear for the language that intelligent people use to mask hurt feelings. The Meyerowitzes are a clan of neurotic New York Jews that would give any seasoned psychoanalyst homework for weeks. Middle child Danny (a marvelous Adam Sandler, all pouty rage and hangdog charm) is a failed musician who’s reeling from a divorce and tirelessly devoted to his teenaged daughter (a winning Grace Van Patten), while wallflower sister Jean (seasoned scene-stealer Elizabeth Marvel) has to struggle to get a word in edgewise in any family conversation, and youngest child Matthew (Ben Stiller, now in his third collaboration with Baumbach and fluent in the director’s style) is so tightly wound that you fear for his physical safety. There are verbal zingers aplenty, teary hospital scenes, an affecting score by Randy Newman, and even a scrappy fistfight between Sandler and Stiller that seems to exist to appease the “Happy Gilmore” demographic. “The Meyerowitz Stories,” with its careful marriage of unsparing honesty and open-heartedness, sees Baumbach bringing together the painful elements of his early work with the more life-affirming, still devastating wit of his more recent pictures. The Meyerowitzes may occasionally have trouble listening to each other, but if “The Meyerowitz Stories” is any indication, this particular writer-director understands the value of listening only too well.
6.) “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” Yorgos Lanthimos.
Five films into an already fascinating career, and Greek writer/director Yorgos Lanthimos has already cemented his unerring fixation the flimsiness of behavioral structures. In his creepy black comedy “Alps,” an underground syndicate of self-appointed martyrs are paid to impersonate the likenesses of dead loved ones, while the director’s 2015 crossover hit “The Lobster” imagined the modern-day courtship ritual as a sadistic burlesque, no different then beasts rutting in the fields. Those who aren’t hip to Lanthimos’ very peculiar, very mannered style of storytelling are going to have a tough time digesting the unrelentingly savage “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” which makes the deadpan drollery of “The Lobster” look as saccharine as “Notting Hill”. Lanthimos’ latest is a pitiless and brilliant parable about inaction and sacrifice that is practically reptilian in its icy remove, drawing upon the Greek myth of Agamemnon (a cheeky in-joke alluded to in the film’s title) while unmistakably unfolding in the kind of emotionally removed, deep-freeze cinematic sphere that Lanthimos die-hards have come to call their own. Colin Farrell is even better here than he was in “The Lobster” playing Dr. Stephen Murphy: a well-meaning but weak-willed neurosurgeon whose home life is distinguished by bizarre interludes where he puts his wife under “general anesthesia” during foreplay or implores his children to eat their own hair. Steven has also maintained an unorthodox friendship with an alarmingly affectless 16-year old boy named Martin (“Dunkirk” discovery Barry Keoghan), whose true reason for wanting to remain close to the good doctor is eventually revealed in full, frightening detail. Lanthimos walks a tightrope of tones, from poker-faced arthouse absurdity to shockingly cruel body horror, all while never breaking the transfixing spell that his film casts on the viewer. From the film’s cackling opening shot of a beating heart mid-surgery to the near-Biblical doom of its final moments, there is nothing about “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” that is even remotely safe, and that’s only one of the many great things about it. And it should confirm, at least in the eyes of skeptics, that Lanthimos is a genuinely fearless satirist who is capable of fashioning wicked mockery around the dueling dynamisms of transgression and punishment.
5.) “The Florida Project,” Sean Baker.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the innocence of childhood captured with such clarity as it is in “The Florida Project,” a vibrantly compassionate film that tells a fractured fairy-tale narrative set against the grim backdrop of seedy pawn shops, fast food eateries and tourist motels that line the outskirts of Florida’s Disney World. The film has been directed by Sean Baker, who, along with Andrea Arnold and Josh and Benny Safdie, can be credited with bringing hard-edged realism and a focus on marginalized, lower-class Americans back into boutique independent cinema. Baker’s last film was 2015’s miraculous “Tangerine,” a slice of life that depicted the daily hustles of two transgendered sex workers as they ripped and roared up and down the more volatile avenues of central Hollywood. “The Florida Project” is both an expansion of and an improvement upon everything that was transcendent about “Tangerine,” and the film manages to keep Baker’s inimitatable authorial style in place, even as he invites professional actors (Willem Dafoe, who will almost surely win an Oscar for his depiction of a struggling motel manager named Bobby) into his world for the first time. The real star of “The Florida Project,” however, isn’t Dafoe, nor is it Baker. It’s a disarmingly adorable six-year old first-timer named Brooklynn Prince, who gives one of the most unaffected and heartbreaking performances I’ve ever seen from a child as the film’s effective protagonist. Prince plays Moonee: a restless youngster whose days are typically spent scamming tourists for ice cream, spying on other kids, and coming home at night to her hell-raising mother Halley (a phenomenal Bria Vinaite), who is almost as much of a child as her daughter. The unadorned, poverty-blighted environs of “The Florida Project” make the movie sound like a bummer on paper, but what’s so astonishing about Baker’s sixth feature is how much life and color the director manages to inject into this grungy milieu without being disingenuous to the world he’s depicting. There are individual scenes in “The Florida Project” — a tense sequence where Dafoe’s Bobby confronts a potential pedophile near the motel’s gaudy purple pool area, a burping contest that unfolds between Moonee and her mother in a 24-hour diner, a woodsy jaunt with Moonee and her pals that ends with a water buffalo sighting — that will remind you of why we go to the movies in 2017. After the turbulent and frightening year we’ve had, sometimes we need to be reminded that miracles do exist. With “The Florida Project,” Sean Baker, his crew and his actors have given us a big one.
4.) “Phantom Thread,” Paul Thomas Anderson.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s once-kinetic style, which seemed forged from the dueling fires of Altman and Scorsese in freewheeling, tragicomic ensemble works like “Boogie Nights” and “Magnolia,” has only grown more languid with each film since his decade-defining masterwork, “There Will Be Blood”. Some of us are still getting our heads around the incandescent spell cast by “The Master,” while the cornucopia of confusion offered by the director’s stoner noir “Inherent Vice” cemented that Anderson’s enviable knack for depicting disorientation made him perhaps the only candidate fit to adapt famously un-adaptable cult author Thomas Pynchon. This is all another way of saying that those of you hoping that Anderson’s reunion with Daniel Day-Lewis will be a rekindling of the scorched-earth rage that birthed “There Will Be Blood” may very well be left scratching their heads at their most recent collaboration. Anderson’s eighth feature film — a sumptuous period drama called “Phantom Thread” that examines the life of an obsessive fashion designer living in postwar London — is as dreamy and ambiguous as that earlier film was blunt, unsentimental and darkly comic. It’s also the richest and most satisfying film that Anderson has made since his last collaboration with the legendary actor, eclipsing both “The Master” and “Vice” in its dazzling mastery of the form. Here is a film Kanye West will love: a gorgeously indulgent Gothic nightmare about a brilliant, thoroughly difficult man for whom life is inseparable from artistry. Come to think of it, the film’s kinky denouement makes me wonder if the alternate title for Anderson’s most rapturous film to date shouldn’t have been “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy”. Taking his cues from the likes of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” and David Lean’s “Brief Encounter,” Anderson sets most of the film’s slow-simmering action within the lavish confines of a Georgian townhouse in the British countryside. The primary occupant of the house is Day-Lewis’s Reynolds Woodcock: a courtly, curmudgeonly dressmaker to the stars and other members of London’s upper crust. Everything in Woodcock’s life is arranged just so (his home also doubles as a fashion showroom and seamstress’s studio), so it comes as a shock to the reclusive artist, and to us, when he makes the acquaintance of a quiet, strong-willed young waitress named Alma (Vicky Kriepps, giving one of the year’s most potent performances) during one otherwise uneventful afternoon out on the town. Before long, Alma find herself swept up into Mr. Woodcock’s dizzying blur of high society functions and emotional gamesmanship, but the resolute young woman comes to learn that the distance with which her new suitor greets her has a disturbingly deep-seated — one might even say familial — source. Like an elegant update of the director’s “Punch-Drunk Love,” “Phantom Thread” is Paul Thomas Anderson’s gorgeous, disorienting reflection on the power of love to destroy, as well as being perhaps the auteur’s definitive movie about a toxic relationship. Following the example of his lead character, Anderson seems to be sewing all kinds of secrets and riddles into the immaculate package of his new film, and the high-wire act this movie walks is enough to make you gasp. Like every Anderson character from Dirk Diggler to Freddie Quell, Reynolds Woodcock is searching for a love that takes him to a frightening place, and “Phantom Thread” sees its star swinging for the fences on his way out of the building. It’s a thrill, and so is the rest of this movie.
3.) “Lady Bird,” Greta Gerwig.
“Lady Bird,” the spritely and screamingly funny directorial debut of actress Greta Gerwig, is about a woman who is constantly in motion. Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson — the spitfire adolescent protagonist of Gerwig’s instant-classic coming-of-age comedy, embodied with no shortage of flinty resolve and a touch of the fighting Irish spirit by “Brooklyn’s” Saoirse Ronan — is a Catholic schoolgirl destined for community college who nevertheless yearns to attend school on the East Coast, “where writers live in the woods”. Her best friend is a loyal, loving girl played by fabulous newcomer Beanie Feldstein (sister of Jonah Hill), and yet Lady Bird desperately yearns to hang out with the cool kids. While our heroine fantasizes about a sweet life in a big Sacramento house, she fails to realize that her own home life is a shitshow: her father (Tracy Letts) is struggling with depression after losing his job, and her mother (Laurie Metcalf, never better) is even more emotionally turbulent than her trouble-prone daughter. “Lady Bird’s” brutally honest depiction of a young woman who would rather be anywhere than where she currently is will almost certainly draw comparisons to both “Mistress America” and “Frances Ha”; together, the films form a sort of unofficial trilogy about youth and young womanhood in the 21st century. While these films were directed and co-written by Gerwig’s partner Noah Baumbach (they also contain generous traces of his signature misanthropic edge), it is now possible to see traces of Gerwig’s own funky creative personality in these pictures, and watching “Lady Bird,” one suspects that her contributions to these aforementioned works may have been greater than we once thought. “Lady Bird” doesn’t exactly get points for novelty — how many films have we seen from the mid to late 2000’s about smart, flawed young people fumbling their way through modern American life? What makes Gerwig’s breakthrough one of the year’s most unforgettable pictures is its deep well of autobiographical insight. Gerwig and her collaborators get all of life’s little trials and tests just right, whether it’s the clammy emotional buildup to prom night, the fleshy dissatisfaction of awkward teenage sex, or the school’s self-consciously “cool” kid who plays in a band and smokes cigarettes while reading Howard Zinn. Ronan — who is so present in every scene that you forget you’re watching an actress read lines from a script — is bolstered by one of the best ensembles in recent memory, including “Manchester by the Sea’s” Lucas Hedges as Lady Bird’s drama class crush, Stephen McKinley Henderson from “Fences” as a genteel old priest, and Lois Smith as a tough-shit nun who maintains that dancing teenagers must allow “six inches from the holy spirit”. There have been more “cinematic” films to be released in 2017, but when it comes to generosity of spirit, high-velocity laughter and heart, “Lady Bird” will be a tough one to unseat.
2.) “Good Time,” Josh and Benny Safdie.
The illicit thrill once offered by hard-boiled genre movies is mostly a memory at this point, replaced by the comforting familiarity of superhero flicks and the craven, unending nostalgia-addiction of four-quadrant reboots. It’s been a long time since we, as a collective moviegoing audience, have gone to a film that was described as a “thrill ride” that genuinely felt dangerous. Enter “Good Time,” Josh and Benny Safdie’s feverish nocturnal odyssey through the holding cells, bail bonds offices and criminal hideouts of modern-day Queens. The Safdie’s film turns out to be the rarest of things: a genuinely rattling and bracingly artful thriller that earns the oft-misused descriptor “dangerous”. Granted, the Queens-born brothers have been making waves in their own slice of the New York cinematic underground for years before this battering, uncouth new picture. As evidenced by their whiplash-inducing debut “The Pleasure of Being Robbed,” which feels like Bresson’s “Pickpocket” on gnarly methamphetamine, as well as 2014’s shattering junkie-vérité drama “Heaven Knows What,” Josh and Benny Safdie are clearly not content to view their subjects from a polite distance. Instead, they prefer to plunge headfirst into the unstable, often unsavory environments they depict, and “Good Time” is their most intoxicating cocktail yet. Many critics have justly praised Robert Pattinson’s career-best work in the title role, where he plays amoral, possessed outer-borough hustler Constantin “Connie” Nikas. Connie is a hare-brained yet relentlessly determined hood who, in the film’s first ten minutes, manages to spring his mentally challenged brother Nick (co-director Benny Safdie) from a court-appointed therapy session, rope him into a spectacularly ill-conceived bank robbery, and get him locked up at Riker’s Island, where he’s bloodied before the film’s opening titles go up. So much of “Good Time” unfolds in a similarly ferocious psychedelic rush — as we witness Connie relentlessly fucking over any soul unfortunate enough to cross his path — that it can be easy to overlook the film’s mess of unassailable virtues, be it the gritty, textured cinematography of Sean Price Williams, the scene-stealing work of Safdie regular and real-life street icon Buddy Duress, or the dreamy synths composed by electronic musician OneohtrixPoint Never, which sound like a weirdly hyperactive riff on a lost Tangerine Dream score from the 1980’s. More than anything, “Good Time” is, to employ a term the Safdies themselves have used in promoting their film, a genuine piece of termite art. That is to say, “Good Time” is a film that methodically burrows into the marrow of a few time-tested formulas (the romantic outlaw picture, the one-crazy-night crime picture, and socially-minded pulp), only to destroy them all from the inside out and emerge with something fresh, frightening, raw, and new. Racing like a rabid dog through the bowels of Elmhurst hospital through the gauzy fantasia of Long Island’s Adventureland amusement park after dark, “Good Time” is a certifiable, new-school New York classic. Hopefully it’s enough to hold us over until the Safdies release their long-gestating Diamond District drama “Uncut Gems” sometime in the near future.
- ) “Baby Driver,” Edgar Wright.
Why do we go to the movies? Obviously, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. More often than not, we go to escape into a world that is not quite our own; one where we are nevertheless able to see our shared dreams acted out by luminous movie stars and pungent “character” types. We go to the movies to be swept off our feet, to tap our toes to an indelible rhythm. We go to laugh, to be terrified, to be swept up in rip-roaring violent action, to watch the guy get the girl (or the guy get the guy, or the girl get the guy… you know what I mean), etc and so forth. In a word, we go to the movies to dream. Edgar Wright’s pulse-quickening fifth feature “Baby Driver” plays like a particularly blissful explosion at the Big Movie Dream Factory In The Sky. Of course, Wright’s film is one that speed-races with effortless grace through a perfectly curated playlist of everything from Staxx soul tracks to vintage British punk and even Run The Jewels, all while providing more heart, humor, and balls-to-the-wall action than just about any other big-screen experience from this year. In many ways, the hellzapoppin’ “Baby Driver” feels like the logical culmination of every affectionate, hyper-charged cinematic mixtape that Wright has made up until this point. He’s always enjoyed fusing elements of disparate genres together with his own signature British wit, whether it’s the rock-‘em-sock-‘em pub crawl science fiction of “The World’s End” or the marriage of John Woo-style carnage and “The Wicker Man’s” occult creepiness that gives “Hot Fuzz” its brilliant kick. “Baby Driver” borrows some of its immaculate cool and timeless style from the likes of Walter Hill’s “The Driver” and, of course, “Bullitt,” and yet there’s no denying that this is a thoroughly modern and essential work of cinematic renegade art that unmistakably reflects the way we watch movies now. It doesn’t hurt that Wright’s direction is as razor-sharp as it’s ever been, while the film is loaded with instant-classic characters, be it Jamie Foxx’s spectacularly unhinged, trigger-happy thief Bats, or Jon Hamm’s brooding sociopath Buddy, who suggests what Don Draper might look like if he inhabited the lawless, neon-drenched universe of Michael Mann. Colorful, delirious, frenzied, unusually heartfelt, and rapturously engaging from start to finish, “Baby Driver” is the echelon of Wright’s already-staggering body of work to date, and the most purely fun and enjoyable movie of 2017. It’s so perfect that not even the rancid stink of co-star Kevin Spacey (who plays the movie’s appropriately calculating villain) can sully its pleasures.
Honorable Mentions: “Columbus,” “Mudbound,” “Ma,” “Happy Death Day,” “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” “I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore,” “The Lovers,” “The Big Sick,” “Coco,” “Stronger,” “Logan,” “Thoroughbreds,” “War for the Planet of the Apes,” “Logan Lucky,” “John Wick, Pt. II,” “The Untamed,” “Landline,” “T2: Trainspotting,” “Donald Cried,” “Spielberg,” “Tramps”.
