Top 50 for 2016 Part 1: 50–41
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As always, this is not some kind of attempt at an objective “Best Films of 2016,” these are my personal 50 favorite films of the year. Since it’s my personal favorites list, films in consideration were those that I could have legitimately seen in 2016 in the States (theatrical/festival screening, VOD, cable, DVD/Blu-ray) which received their first official screening or release in the States during 2016 and that I actually watched during the 2016 calendar year. If I didn’t see it between 1 January 2016 and 31 December 2016, it’s not eligible for my list. Them, as the man said, is the rules. For a complete list of films in consideration for my 2016 recap, see this sidebar. And now, on with the show:
50. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (USA, dir. Akiva Schaffer & Jorma Taccone): Amazon, Google, iTunes
The Lonely Island guys have been honing their comedic and musical skills for a long time now, and Popstar is the best showcase of their talents yet. It’s a pitch-perfect parody of the wave of pop “concert documentaries” that have inexplicably made their way to the big screen over the last few years, kicked off by Jon M. Chu’s Justin Bieber: Never Say Never. Andy Samberg stars as Conner (aka Conner4Real), a delusional pop star and former member of a Beastie Boys-style rap group called the Style Boyz. Conner’s solo career begins to fall apart as he tours in support of his hilariously misguided new album that includes a call for “sexual freedom” that is mostly Conner affirming his heterosexuality and a diss track against the Mona Lisa among other disastrous choices. Meanwhile his best friend and fellow former Style Boyz member Owen (Jorma Taccone) is trying to get Conner and Lawrence (Akiva Schaffer), the third member of the Style Boyz, to mend their longtime rift and maybe get the band back together. The relationship between the three old friends is endearing and gives the absurdist humor a surprisingly strong emotional grounding, and the guys go all-out on the songs. They’re great pop songs that are also flat-out hilarious.
It’s worth noting that Popstar has the single funniest deleted scene of 2016: “Fuck Off,” a kid power anthem that includes some impressively obscene suggestions for “grumpasaurus” adults who are cramping kids’ style.
49. The Invisible Guest (Spain, dir. Oriol Paulo)
Adrián Doria (Mario Casas) is running out of time. He woke up in a hotel room with the dead body of his mistress, and all the evidence points the finger directly at him. No other DNA was found at the scene, and there was no sign of anyone else entering or leaving the room. The night before his trial begins, the news has gotten even worse: a witness has come forward and will be talking to the police and prosecutor, giving Adrián’s attorney no time to prepare a defense. Adrián’s only hope is Virginia Goodman (Ana Wagener), a recently retired defense attorney with a near-perfect record and a reputation for ruthlessness who sees winning his case as the ultimate capper on her already legendary career. They only have a few hours to pull off a seemingly impossible task, and as Adrián talks it becomes clear the situation is much more complicated than anyone could have imagined.
Oriol Paulo’s The Invisible Guest is an exceptional locked room mystery tied to a ticking clock. Paulo manages to stay a few steps ahead of the audience at all turns, cleverly using Adrián’s shifting narratives of what happened leading up to that fateful night and Virginia’s relentless questioning to keep viewers off balance. Despite its fractured structure, The Invisible Guest is at heart a pulpy mystery/thriller that just happens to be technically impressive on every level, including Paulo’s expert direction. As my friend Matt Wedge pointed out, this is basically a high-gloss Larry Cohen thriller in the best possible sense. The payoff at the end of the film is both genuinely shocking and hugely satisfying, and anyone interested in seeing it should go out of their way to learn as little about the details of the plot as possible.
48. Ouija: Origin of Evil (USA, dir. Mike Flanagan)
I feel obligated to note right up front that the first Ouija (2014) is awful. It’s the kind of perfectly competent, faceless horror film that disappears from the memory almost immediately. But because it was released in October, in a year with an inexplicable horror drought in that month, it made $100 million. A sequel was guaranteed. When I first learned that Mike Flanagan (Absentia, Oculus) had been hired to direct that inevitable sequel, I had deeply conflicted feelings. Flanagan’s first two features proved he is a smart, talented director doing really interesting genre work, so there was reason to be optimistic. But would he be able to make his own voice heard over the kind of production by committee that must have been used to crank out Ouija? Wouldn’t his time be better spent doing his own original work?
Well, as it turns out, Ouija: Origin of Evil is basically just that: Flanagan doing the kind of fantastic, unique work he’s been doing all along. I’m not sure if there’s ever been a sequel that is such an exponential improvement over its predecessor on every conceivable level. In addition to directing and editing the film, Flanagan co-wrote it with his frequent collaborator Jeff Howard (who co-wrote Oculus and Flanagan’s Before I Wake, still stuck in distribution limbo in the States). Despite being part of an established franchise, this is unquestionably a Mike Flanagan film. Taking place decades before the first Ouija, Origin of Evil focuses on the history of the house in which that film took place. The center of the story is the relationship between widowed Alice Zander (Elizabeth Reaser) and her two young daughters. The girls help Alice with her work as a medium, and the trouble starts when older daughter Lina (Annalise Basso) suggests they get a Ouija board as a prop for Alice’s “readings.” Younger daughter Doris (Lulu Wilson) establishes a connection with an evil force in the house that threatens to destroy the whole family. The acting is uniformly excellent all around (including a great supporting role for Henry Thomas as a concerned priest), and the attention to period detail in the production and costume design is incredible. Origin of Evil gets a little less interesting in its final act as it becomes more of a conventional modern studio horror movie, but it’s still one of the best mainstream American horror films of the year.
47. The Bad Batch (USA, dir. Ana Lily Amirpour)
Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) is marked “Bad Batch” and banished to a vast desert wasteland established for undesirables in Texas by the U.S. government. With only a backpack and a gallon of water, she is quickly caught by cannibals called the Bridge People and loses her right arm and leg before managing to escape and find her way to the comparatively peaceful town of Comfort. Her anger at the Bridge People unexpected leads her to cross paths with Miami Man (Jason Momoa) when he leaves the Bridge village to find his missing daughter. The Bad Batch is writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour’s follow-up to her acclaimed debut feature A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and while it’s obviously a very different beast it still feels like the work of the same imagination. Like her first film, this one follows a disparate set of characters inhabiting a vividly realized world whose paths cross in unexpected ways. Instead of building that world from silent films, horror, and spaghetti western influences, this time around it’s an amalgamation of 80s post-apocalypse and desert films. It’s deliberately paced and quiet, punctuated with an evocative soundtrack that helps enforce the idea that this world exists outside of any specific time period. It’s as odd and confounding as it is beautifully shot and designed, and like Amirpour’s first film it will probably only improve given more time to reflect on and rewatch it.
46. Down Under (Australia, dir. Abe Forsythe)
In December of 2005, race riots broke out in the suburban town of Cronulla near Sydney, Australia. Thousands of white Australians got together in a show of force against Lebanese citizens and immigrants. Down Under takes place during the riots and follows two carloads of characters, one white and one Lebanese. Hassim (Lincoln Younes) wants nothing to do with any of it but reluctantly agrees to join Nick (Rahel Romahn) to go looking for his brother Farouk, who has gone missing. Gentle stoner Shit-Stick (Alexander England) is enlisted by racist Jason (Damon Herriman) to join Jason’s “patrol” because he’s the only guy Jason knows who owns a car. As the day drags on, the two groups of men are unwittingly on a collision course that will have tragic consequences. Down Under is very funny all the way up to its finale, when writer/director Abe Forsythe plays out his characters’ intentions to their logical conclusions. That gear-stripping tonal shift at the end of the film would be tough for anyone to pull off, but Forsythe has given the audience ample time to form sympathies with these characters, and when they actually do things that will ruin their own and others’ lives, it’s positively gutting.
45. Atmo HorroX (Canada, dir. Pat Tremblay)
Director Pat Tremblay’s previous feature, Hellacious Acres: The Case of John Glass, is one of the most perplexing movies I’ve ever seen. It plays out sort of like watching someone LARPing a Fallout game for a couple of hours, with no idea what they’re doing. I was confounded by the film when I first saw it, but the more I’ve thought about it over the years, the more I’ve wanted to revisit it. Tremblay’s new feature, Atmo HorroX, is insane on a totally different level. It makes Hellacious Acres look like an episode of Friends. There’s no decipherable dialogue — characters speak in either unintelligible nonsense syllables or screeching walls of noise — and while eventually something like a narrative emerges from its absurd repetition, it’s almost impossible to say what the “story” here might be from just one viewing. Most audiences are probably going to find this to be unwatchable, but anyone willing to embrace the film’s utterly unique style and Tremblay and his actors’ fearless dedication to such a peculiar vision will find Atmo HorroX to be hilariously absurd and unnerving in equal measure.
44. Kubo and the Two Strings (USA, dir. Travis Knight): Amazon, Google, iTunes
Kubo (Art Parkinson) is a young boy with the magical ability to bring origami figures to life while playing his shamisen. He lives in a cave near a small village where he travels to play the shamisen and tell an epic story, acted out by his origami figures, for the entertainment of the townspeople. One night the village is attacked by The Sisters (Rooney Mara), supernatural beings that are only held off by Kubo’s mother. The resulting conflict knocks Kubo unconscious, and when he wakes he is tasked by Monkey (Charlize Theron) with finding his father Hanzo’s legendary armor so he can stop The Sisters and their father The Moon King (Ralph Fiennes). They are joined in their dangerous quest by Beetle (Matthew McConaughey), and as they progress Kubo learns the truth about his family and his relationship to the Moon King.
From a narrative and character standpoint, Kubo and the Two Strings is admittedly not Laika’s best work. The storyline is a bit thin, and while the characters are charming and often endearing, they’re generally not as interesting or fully-fleshed as those Laika’s previous films. That said, this is absolutely the pinnacle of the stop-motion animation technique in which Laika specializes. It’s an astonishing technical and artistic achievement, made even more impressive by the glimpses of the film’s production during its end credits. Seeing this on the big screen was a truly magical experience that reminded me of what it was like to be amazed by movies when I saw them in theaters as a kid. It’s gorgeous, fun, and unforgettable.
43. Found Footage 3D (USA, dir. Steven DeGennaro)
Producer/actor Derek (Carter Roy) has gathered a small crew and his ex-wife Amy (Alena von Stroheim) to shoot a “found footage” horror movie at a remote house owned by Amy’s family. It’s about a married couple whose relationship is disintegrating who unwittingly go to a haunted house to give their marriage one last shot. This is also basically the same thing that is happening between Derek and Amy in real life, and although it sounds like a fairly standard “found footage” setup, Derek has come up with a gimmick to help them market the movie: it will be the first “found footage” movie shot in 3D. As the days wear on, tensions mount and the line between the film and their circumstances starts to blur. Found Footage 3D is a both a brilliant satire of “found footage” horror movies and one of the best examples of the form itself. Basically, with this film Steven DeGennaro has given “found footage” its equivalent of what Scott Glosserman’s Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon did for slasher movies. The cast is great, it’s very funny and it uses 3D in inventive and innovative ways.
42. The Fits (USA, dir. Anna Rose Holmer): Oscilloscope, Amazon, Google
Toni (Royalty Hightower) is a young girl who helps out her older brother and trains at the boxing gym where they volunteer. One day she looks in on the girls’ dance troupe that practices next door and decides she wants to try out. She befriends a few of the younger girls and practices hard, but as their first competition approaches one of the other girls has some kind of seizure during a practice. Soon other girls fall victim to these “fits,” which become an epidemic sweeping through the ranks. Toni looks on as the other girls have their “fits” while she both dreads them and is strangely excited to experience them for herself.
The Fits is a movie that takes place almost entirely among young black teens and pre-teens, which already places it in a world virtually never seen on-screen. It’s not glamorous, but it also doesn’t dwell on the difficulties of life outside the gym for these kids. But it’s also not as simple as a drama about kids training to box or dance. It’s stylized in intriguing ways, including a score by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans (composers of the score for Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy, among many others) that gives the film a feeling something closer to an arthouse horror film like Under the Skin than Stomp the Yard. Director Anna Rose Holmer’s only previous feature credit is the documentary Twelve Ways to Sunday, and while The Fits does use some hallmarks of documentary technique, it is ultimately something very different. It’s a fascinating film that defies simple categorization and demands thoughtful consideration.
41. Shin Godzilla (Japan, dir. Hideaki Anno & Shinji Higuchi)
On an otherwise uneventful day in Japan, a large creature lurches out of the sea and lays waste to everything it passes as it runs on an erratic path through the nearby city before returning to the water. While the government tries to formulate a response–consulting scientists, passing relief bills for those who were in the creature’s path, holding press conferences to prevent panic–the creature returns, doubled in size, and sets out on a new round of massive destruction. Can the government stop this monster before it completely levels Tokyo? And how much paperwork is going to be left in its aftermath? Godzilla in Shin Godzilla seems to obviously be a metaphor for the 2011 Fukushima disaster, as the focus in the film is squarely on the lumbering machinations of government that have to happen to get anything done in a large-scale crisis. Godzilla is on screen and trashing Tokyo for maybe 20 minutes of the film’s two-hour run time, but the destruction is truly spectacular and the new take on the creature is more creepy and imaginative than it first seems.
The other 100 minutes jump around from conference room to conference room, with large on-screen title cards displayed for every one of the film’s dozens of speaking parts, locations, military vehicles and weapons. If this sounds dry, it’s also slyly funny: one running joke involves nominal protagonist Rando Yaguchi (Hiroki Hasegawa) getting an increasingly lengthy job title every few scenes, and there’s more than a little shade thrown at America’s mercenary response to the creature’s discovery. It’s an interesting approach to take, and it pays off. The final shots of the film hint at a much different and exciting possible direction for a sequel, so hopefully enough fans rally behind Shin Godzilla to make that happen.
2016 Film Round-Up:
Honorable Mentions, Special Recognition, and Favorite Documentaries
