My top 10 films of 2016
These are films that I saw on general release or at a festival screening this year. Some were released at the tail end of 2015; others will be released in 2017.
10. The Measure of a Man
While I, Daniel Blake received a lot of deserved praise this year, there was another lesser-seen but more subtle film about the humiliation of seeking work in a neoliberal bureaucracy. The Measure of a Man also has a male protagonist at not-quite-retirement age whose prospects for work are increasingly dim. Thierry has useless training in jobs that are now automated, and at length gets employed as a security guard — a role that tests his ethical resolve. This story is told in bits and pieces, largely sidestepping Loach’s soapbox moralising for a quieter and more elusive outrage. Indeed, the film’s ambitions are relatively small. The slow momentum built up by moment after moment of small injustices culminates essentially in one single action in the final scene. It is small, and its consequences will not be earth-shattering, but they speak to the meaning of dignity and respect in a tough world.
9. Lovetrue
Alma Har’el’s second documentary feature is a heady, bewildering look at love at the extremities of the USA: a surfer trying to care for his son in Hawaii, a young woman facing barriers to intimacy in Alaska, and a devout musician navigating a treacherous family history in New York City. This triptych of narratives touches on family, honesty, responsibility, sexuality, entrepreneurship, regret, fear, anger, ambition, desire, and love. It’s messy in the best possible way, glancing at the endless possible worlds that exist in our imaginations. The subjects open themselves up to real vulnerability by being on screen, and by following Har’el’s various experimental scenarios for pursuing drama. Some sequences, which combine choreographed dance with genuine testimony, are stunningly beautiful.
8. Room
I was primed to dismiss Room as a bland and manipulative tearjerker — but by the end of the film I was crying too much to really think straight. In fact, it’s a relatively straightforward film with a set of outstanding central performances. Brie Larson is head-spinningly great as a woman raising her son in horrific confinement, and nine-year-old Jacob Tremblay still outshines her. Lenny Abrahamson puts compassion at the heart of his approach, never exploiting the horror but realistically representing the difficulty of trauma. All cynicism vanished and I found myself desperately wanting the characters to succeed in their connections with one another. I applaud any film that can make that happen.
7. The Forbidden Room
Canadian esoterica maven Guy Maddin has developed an obsession with lost films, to the point where he even held public seances in an attempt to summon their spirits. His research led him to the conclusion that if he ever wanted to see these vanished movies, he’d have to make them himself. He was never one to put a cap on ambition, so The Forbidden Room contains dozens of separate stories in a Russian doll structure, each narrative thread taken from a lost film opening up to reveal another. The stories are funny, scary, bizarre, tender, and many. The film moves along at a fierce pace, like some sinister variety show with a demented trickster compere. As you can probably tell from this summary, the film is more or less indescribable. But what a show.
6. The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki
Boxing movies. We have so many of them. Most people have probably seen many more boxing movies than they have boxing matches. After a while, they all tend to blend together into one masculine and vaguely inspirational underdog story. This film, based on a true story like so many others, takes the framework of a boxing movie but approaches it in a fascinatingly unconventional way. The year is 1962, and Olli Mäki is the latest great hope for Finnish boxing. Olli is a small town guy, modest but quietly diligent, with no great passion for boxing but an ambitious manager and a big fight coming up. Olli falls in love with his sweetheart, and the importance of the match seems to fall away. First-time director Juho Kuosmanen shot the film on 16mm black and white stock, which is incredibly grainy and in the hands of DoP Jani-Petteri Passi lends a lovely vintage texture to the images. Like its protagonist, this film is humble, quiet, thoughtful, and hugely likeable.
5. Toni Erdmann
By far the year’s most critically lauded film, Toni Erdmann is essentially a very long, very good episode of an especially nuanced sit-com. Winfried is a music teacher whose lives for humour. He carries comedy props at all times, and rarely has a response to any situation that isn’t some sort of joke. He takes a trip to visit his daughter Ines, whose work in the world of high-powered management consultancy has made her stressed and callous. What follows is a farcical but entirely unpredictable comedy of manners, as Winfried transforms into the fictional business coach Toni Erdmann, a volatile wild card in Ines’ fragile business scene. There is much contained in this film. There are the changes time brings to father-daughter relationships, uncomfortable neo-colonial corporate relations, the sexist vulgarities of masculine business, the necessity of clowning to everyday life, and perhaps even the meaning of life. Aside from all of that, though, Toni Erdmann is very, very, very funny.
4. Green Room
Punk rockers versus neo-Nazis is an irresistible logline, and Green Room fully delivers on its promise. There’s not much more to know: the band get trapped backstage, and need to fight their way out. Jeremy Saulnier knows exactly how to keep the film stripped down in the spirit of punk, yet builds a momentum that doesn’t lose pace for a second throughout the entire film. His representation of violence — of which there is a lot — is striking for its effectiveness. It’s actually refreshing to have a director take screen violence seriously, treating it as a tactile, severely painful thing that should have a visceral impact. Curt, brutal, icky, and fun.
3. Son of Saul
In Extras, Kate Winslet makes the memorably callous claim that Holocaust films are a ‘guaranteed Oscar’ (this would later prove true for her performance in The Reader). Hollywood’s awards culture has put us at risk of normalizing cinematic depictions of the Holocaust, but filmmakers should make more serious investigations into what it means to produce and consume images of atrocity. Lázló Nemes and his team took on this sizeable mission with Son of Saul, which follows a day and a half in the life of a Hungarian Sonderkommando (Géza Röhrig). They deal with the horror on display by rarely ever moving the 40mm lens away from Röhrig’s face, always the picture of vacant disengagement. The massacres that he participates in are put at an eerie remove, out of focus but everywhere in a hellish soundscape. This is emphatically not a story of hope, survival, or even heroism. Son of Saul is a devastating innovation in film driven by committed ethical consideration and awareness.
2. Victoria
When is a gimmick not a gimmick? Sebastian Schipper’s single-take thriller weaves its cinematic conceit into the narrative so seamlessly that it’s somehow not even the most interesting thing in the film. Laia Costa is utterly convincing as a woman newly transplanted to Berlin, whose life of unfulfilled promise has left her hungry for adventure and companionship. She finds both in a group of friends led by the charming Sonne (Frederick Lau, give him all of the awards). Their night descends into nail-biting thriller territory, but not before a long time spent letting the characters develop their relationships and become people we care about. Every part of the film’s construction coheres entirely, so the absence of any film editing only ever feels like a way to serve the story best. It’s hard enough for a 2-hour film to sustain this level of tension; to do it in a single take is almost a miracle.
- Certain Women
The incomparable Kelly Reichardt returns with three stories of Montana women getting through the drama of everyday life. A lawyer deals with a troubled client, a married woman navigates the ethics of independence, and a ranch hand pursues a desire that seems doomed by circumstance. There is very little drama in the traditional sense. When confrontation does appear, it is quiet or quickly extinguished. Instead there is a poetic reflection of quotidia, specific to the experience of women without forming a rigid political argument. Like no one else, Reichardt draws out the musical quality of passing trains and the dramatic melancholy of mountainous horizons. Christopher Blauvelt’s exquisitive 16mm photography infuses each shot with the texture of longing. All the performances are superb, but Lily Gladstone shines brightest as a lonely soul excited by the possibilities that love brings to her life of daily rituals. Certain Women commits to a nuanced and exploratory cinematic construction without betraying the thirsting reach of its literary roots.
