The Best Films Of 2016.

A popular line of thinking at the moment is that 2016 has been a poor year for new cinema. Rather than standing in agreement with that appraisal I’d suggest that it has been a subtle year. There have been few behemoths in the vein of a Tree Of Life, or a The Master, with instead the best cinem being the smaller movies.

My favourite film of 2016 is Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things To Come. Hansen follows in tradition of Pialat and Rozier, her camera focussed on the drama of the everyday. Aesthetic flourish is kept to a minimum, with the focus instead on character and happenings. Hansen-Løve, a great cinephile, fills Things To Come with the book, the written word, just as Eden, this picture’s immediate predecessor was filled with electronic dance music. She resists the temptation to let homage override, as is the case with other critics-turned-filmmakers in the Nouvelle Vague or her immediate contemporaries like Olivier Assayas.

Cinephilia does prevail, however, in De Palma, from Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow, and The Hateful Eight, Quentin Tarantino’s ode to the physical fabric of film itself. Terence Malick’s Knight Of Cups offered up what is perhaps the first insight into what cinephilia means to that particular filmmaker too, with a contemporary tale set within the Hollywood machine.

The eccentric nuances of The United States Of America 2016 (the year’s great blockbuster?) are charted in Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester By The Sea, Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson and Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, while Austen’s England was seen through the lens of a quintessential American filmmaker with Love And Friendship. What it means to be British, and what it means to be an American are two of the overwhelming narratives of real world 2016, so these pictures seem timely. The immigrant experience is examined in all of its unglory in Jacques Audiard’s unpopular Palme d’Or winning Dheepan, a film which melds Loach with Scorsese, while Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Creepy is a straightforward ghost house of a movie, and a whole heap of fun.

1. Things To Come (Mia Hansen-Løve, FRA)
2. The Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino, US)
3. Manchester By The Sea (Kenneth Lonergan, US)
4. American Honey (Andrea Arnold, UK)
5. Paterson (Jim Jarmusch, US)
6. De Palma (Noah Baumbach, Jake Paltrow, US)
7. Love And Friendship (Whit Stillman, US)
8. Dheepan (Jacques Audiard, FRA)
9. Creepy (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, JAPAN)
10. Knight Of Cups (Terrence Malick, US)