Top 20 Films of 2017
20. The Florida Project (Sean Baker)
Sean Baker is an immensely empathetic filmmaker and here he creates a story about people living on the edges of society where the characters are allowed to be ragged, joyful and occasionally unsympathetic, but always real. These are people with agency (the adults, anyway) and thus the film pulls at the heartstrings in a way that a standard indie film poverty porn never could.
19. The Lure (Agnieszka Smoczynska)
A Polish musical about man eating mermaids... need I say more? How about that it's an adult riff on the same fairy tale that inspired Disney's The Little Mermaid? Or that it's beautiful to behold, with its pinks and greens? Or that it balances a lurid grotesqueness with real emotional stakes that'll break your heart?
18. Dawson City: Frozen Time (Bill Morrison)
Assembled largely from archival photographs and clips of silent films recovered from underneath an old swimming pool in a small Canadian town, Dawson City is a film about the Klondike gold rush and also a film about film itself; how film was first created and how people relate to these flickering images. Featuring an otherworldly and melancholic score by Sigur Ros collaborator Alex Somers, this is a movie about the power and magic of moving images that manages to be pretty magical itself.
17. Wormwood (Errol Morris)
I can remember reading or hearing, years ago, back in college I think, the vague details of a story about a CIA agent who was secretly dosed with LSD and then went nuts and jumped out a window. Wormwood is about how and why that man went out that window, but also a story about the impossibility of ever really knowing what happened to someone else and how that can nag at the people left behind. It also happens to be a portrait of America's behavior in the Cold War, and how people coped with the profoundly unethical things they may or may not have done in the service of their country.
16. Brawl in Cell Block 99 (S. Craig Zahler)
An unapologetically gnarly crime story that takes its sweet time as the hero slowly descends deeper and deeper into hell. Sharply written and brutally told.
15. Thor: Ragnarok (Taika Waititi)
Though I grew up reading superhero comics and still own boxes and boxes of the fucking things, I've found myself pretty unimpressed generally when the genre moves over into cinema. Marvel's output certainly achieves a baseline level of competency that makes them fairly watchable, but I always find myself thinking that the devotion to servicing a larger storyline and the need to ground the story in something resembling the real world kneecaps many of their films. Thor: Ragnarok, which features a hero who's blissfully disinterested in monologing about what it means to be a hero in whispery close-ups, is one of the only films in this genre that actually gets close to achieving the kind of wild (and wildly silly) galactic pulpiness of a Jack Kirby comic. Which is pretty much the highest praise I can think of.
14. Columbus (Kogonada)
Messy interior lives contrasted against the beautiful precision of modernist architecture. Quiet, empathetic and wonderful. The kind of movie Roger Ebert was talking about when he said that the movies were a machine that created empathy.
13. John Wick: Chapter 2 (Chad Stahelski)
Surpasses the original by leaning hard into the weirdo mythology underpinning John Wick's world and showcasing endless variations in its action scenes. The mirrored museum shoot out (a nod to Lady from Shanghai, no doubt) has John Wick descending into a revenge fueled neon hell of his own making that's beautiful, sad and thrilling all at once.
12. Okja (Bong Joon-ho)
With some heavy lifting from the sunny Italian countryside, Call Me by Your Name manages to perfectly capture the woozy heartrending intensity of first love and first lust.
10. Good Time (Ben Safdie and Joshua Safdie)
There's something about being up and about in the middle of the night that makes you feel like you've slipped into an alternate version of the real world, a distorted mirror image that operates by its own rules and is populated by its own cast of characters. That's the world that Good Time takes place in, where Robert Pattinson's Connie is a low life crook and confidence man who's too dumb to stay out of trouble but just smart enough to stay one step ahead of prison. The thrill of Good Time is in watching to see how long he can keep all of the plates spinning and what'll happen when they finally come crashing down.
09. Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig)
There are lots of things to like about Gerwig's uncommonly good coming of age film, but the moment that won me over came late: Lady Bird is in New York and finds herself feeling adrift. Though she had chafed against her Catholic school upbringing, she steps into a cathedral on a Sunday morning and finds a sense of peace. A small moment for sure, but one that's representative of how Lady Bird the film is so sharply honed in on the specific life of Lady Bird the character.
08. The Work (Jairus McLeary and Gethin Aldous)
This documentary, shot inside Fulsom Prison, depicts a therapy program where convicts get together to talk through their deepest, darkest emotional pain. Twice a year, men from the outside come in and join them for four days, and this film puts us right next to those outsiders for the world's most intense group therapy session. Men who've robbed and killed break down in intense wracking sobs and howl with rage and pain. The Work is a documentary of such searing emotional intensity that it almost feels like something we shouldn't be allowed to see. Paradoxically, the most intense and moving exorcism comes from a slight, bearded guy from outside the prison, recounting a childhood story that doesn't involve child abuse or violence at all, who finds a catharsis with these other men that'll bring tears to your eyes.
07. Sleep Has Her House (Scott Barley)
An experimental film of jagged digital images of a forest at night. The sounds of a storm approach and crash in for what feels like a nightmare conjured by the planet itself. Builds to a crescendo that resulted in one of the most riveting movie watching experiences I had all year.
06. Nocturama (Bertrand Bonello)
Alternate Title: The Kids Are Not All Right. A group of Cool Teens, belonging to some sort of cult, stage a violent terrorist attack and then hole up in a closed shopping mall to hide out from the subsequent man hunt. The fact that the ideology behind the violence is never explained makes the film a deeper, richer portrait of a disaffected generation. Rather than being tethered to one idea, Nocturama suggests that a generation of young people are growing up in a world that's broken and fucked in any number of ways, a world that doesn't want or need them at all.
05. mother! (Darren Aronofsky)
Just about every review of mother! mentioned how glaringly obvious the central metaphor in this story was. The funny thing, though, is that each review then laid out a different interpretation of what that metaphor was. Maybe it's not quite so obvious? Half of what makes mother! so appealing is the way in the which the film doesn't quite adhere to any one strict interpretation; no matter which direction you come at it there are always some stray threads. The other half is that this is a wild fucking roller coaster ride, shot predominantly in close up, as a woman tries to desperately grapple with her world spinning wildly out of control.
04. A Quiet Passion (Terence Davies)
Quivers with the intensity of a stifled inner life and unrecognized creativity. Even when Nixon's Emily Dickinson shuts herself away and lashes out at those around her, you can still feel the passionate intensity that rages inside her.
03. Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson)
An immaculately constructed romance that reveals deeper and deeper levels as it unfolds. Vicky Krieps, who I had never heard of before, steals the show from Day-Lewis, which is no easy task.
02. Song to Song (Terrence Malick)
Rooney Mara seeks happiness through the way of nature (to borrow a phrase from The Tree of Life) in this love story of beautiful people careening into and out of each other's lives in Austin, Texas. She never knew she had a soul, you see, the word embarrassed her.
01. Twin Peaks: The Return (David Lynch)
Some people care deeply about what counts as a television show and what counts as a movie. I am not one of those people (and let's be real, it's all the same art form). So I don't feel any hesitation in saying that Twin Peaks: The Return was the best film I watched in 2017, number one with a bullet. David Lynch, one of the greatest living American filmmakers, was given millions of dollars to create a 17 hour epic that not only continues a TV show that was canceled 25 years ago but also serves as a capstone to an astonishing career. It's terrifying, beautiful, confounding, hilarious, deeply tragic and profound: it's all Lynch all the way, straight into the bloodstream.
Favorite Performances:
Haley Lu Richardson in Columbus
Cynthia Nixon in A Quiet Passion
Jennifer Lawrence in mother!
Daniel Day-Lewis in Phantom Thread
Vicky Krieps in Phantom Thread
Willem Dafoe in The Florida Project
Bria Vinaite in The Florida Project
Armie Hammer in Call Me by Your Name
Timothee Chalamet in Call Me by Your Name
Ana de Armas in Blade Runner 2049
Robert Pattinson in The Lost City of Z & Good Time
Michael Fassbender in Song to Song
Patti Smith in Song to Song
Kyle MacLachlan in Twin Peaks: The Return
Naomi Watts in Twin Peaks: The Return
Laura Dern in Twin Peaks: The Return
Robert Forster in Twin Peaks: The Return
David Lynch in Twin Peaks: The Return
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